“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom
the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of
all that I have said to you.” (John
14:26)
Some months back I stopped at a local gas station[i]. I had an errand to run for my wife and I was scheduled to officiate a funeral later that morning. There was a car ahead of me at the pump, so I shifted into park to wait. As I did so, my engine stopped dead like someone shot it through the heart. The polite foreign gentleman who pumps the gas[ii] motioned me to pull up, but my car wasn’t going anywhere on its own. It was obvious to me that my battery had given up the ghost.
I called my wife, who told me to call the insurance company for a free jump. The insurance company’s number was answered by a recorded female voice informing me that, because of COVID, there was a shortage of tow-truck drivers and I’d have to leave a message and wait. The polite foreign gentleman, whose grasp of English seemed tenuous at best, was still polite but appeared to be as useful as a Band-Aid on an avulsion. I began to worry that, being stuck where I was, I would soon be leaving a funeral home full of mourners without someone to eulogize their deceased loved one.
Just as the first maledictions were leaving my lips, another car pulled up for gas. It was driven by a gentleman who adroitly analyzed my situation and produced one of those portable batteries which are the size of a paperback novel but, apparently, contain enough electrical power to light the Burj Khalifa. He had me on my way within minutes.[iii]
Sometimes God puts just the right people in our path.
In the First Lesson assigned in the RCL for Easter 6, Year C (Acts 16:9-15), St. Paul meets just the right person. Poor Paul isn’t getting anywhere in Asia Minor. He’s wandering all around, but just isn’t getting the vibe he needs to do his preaching. He winds up in the seaport town of Troas and has a dream in which he sees a guy from Macedonia pleading with him to cross the Aegean Sea and help his community. Ever the obedient apostle, Paul gathers his posse and crosses over to Philippi. As far as we know, he never meets the guy he saw in his vision. Instead—and I’ll bet he was pretty surprised by this—he meets a bunch of Greek women. One lady is named Lydia. She worships Yahweh, runs a thriving business, and has her own home. She really digs Paul’s message, and she and her entire household get baptized. She then volunteers her home for Paul and his bunch to stay, thereby making her the founder of the first Christian community on the European continent. She was in the right place at the right time, and God worked through her.
I find the way Luke tells this story interesting. Paul’s inability to preach in Asia Minor is said to be the working of the Holy Spirit. It says he was “forbidden by the Holy Spirit” to speak the word in Phrygia and Galatia, and the Spirit of Jesus “did not allow them” to enter Mysia.[iv] It’s hard for me to imagine that the Holy Spirit would ever forbid anyone to preach the love of Christ, so I’m thinking this attribution to the Ghost must’ve come in hindsight. Maybe Paul just wasn’t getting any traction in Turkey and got the inspiration to skip across the water to find a more receptive audience. When this worked out, he thought to himself, “Ya think this was what God wanted all along..?”
Maybe what seemed to be Paul’s intuition was really the Holy Spirit at work, teaching him what God wanted. Just as his own missionary plans seemed frustrated, God showed up and put him on the path to meet a person who would change his mind and start something new—in this case, a whole new ministry to a whole new culture which ultimately changed the course of Western history. Pretty cool, huh?
In our gospel reding for Easter 6 (John 14:23-29), Jesus comforts his disciples who, we can only assume, aren’t exactly in the jolliest of emotional places knowing he’s very likely about to be crucified. They’re all probably thinking, “Whoa! If our friend gets killed, what are we going to do without him?!” Jesus lets them know that when he’s not around the Spirit will still be there for them, and this Spirit will open their eyes to see how God is at work.
Maybe you can think of a time when God dropped someone right in your path at an unexpected moment when things didn’t seem to be working out the way you’d hoped. You might’ve made a plan, but someone showed you that God could use your thwarted agenda in another way. When I pray with the families of the recently bereaved, I always pray that God will put into their lives the people who need to be there, who will be understanding and supportive during a time of transition, loss, or tragedy.
This past week I’ve been grateful to God for the presence of my buddy Lee Miller, the Bishop of the Upstate New York Synod. Lee and his family (including his adopted African American son) live just outside Buffalo. The words shock, horror, numbness, anger or whatever are insufficient to express the emotions the act of racially motivated violence perpetrated in that city last weekend caused. I’m convinced, however, that if ever a man was anointed by God to minister and comfort a community so traumatized, it is Lee Miller.
The best way, I think, for God’s work to be made known to us is through other people. Let’s always pray for the Spirit to teach us to recognize God’s work. Some folks may cross our path for specific reasons and for only a short time. May God’s Spirit teach us to let them go when the time comes. But, most of all, may we be taught the wisdom to know when we ourselves are being used to deliver a jolt of power to someone who sees themselves stalled out in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment