Acts 1:15-26 page 1
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Acts 1:15-26 page 1 |
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'... too often our churches have become human warehouses, where people are
gathered and stored so that they can be delivered after death to heaven with
minimum loss, spoilage, rust, rot or breakage. These air-conditioned warehouses
are equipped with every comfort - from padded seats to a kind of religious muzak
- so that those who enter will be happy and never want to leave until they are
shipped to their final destination.' We have sometimes limited the Christian faith to answering the question, 'How may I get to heaven?' We have created a sacred-secular divide, where we are only concerned with overtly religious questions. As a result, the Bible simply becomes some kind of religious and church rule-book (I'm not sure 'rule-book' is that helpful anyway in understanding the Bible) and miss the fact that the Bible is a book for the whole of life. And it's in that spirit - the Bible as a book for the whole of life - that I want to approach this strange reading. It fits today - the Sunday after Ascension - because it details an incident in between the Ascension of Christ and Pentecost. But it's not a passage people would easily gravitate to preaching on, unless it were in the Lectionary (as it is). And we would all too readily read this story as just some unusual - perhaps archaic - account of church decision-making. But what if this were for the whole of life? What if this story gave us some clues to the way we make decisions in every part of our lives - not just church, but family, work, leisure, the lot? Of course we may not go about the process of making a decision so overtly in some circumstances, and I'm not talking about getting hyper-spiritual: I did once hear the story of a Christian woman who, when she woke up each morning prayed to know whether the Lord wanted her to get up. (I have a version of that prayer, but it's more, "O Lord, do I really have to get up?") Then, if she felt God led her to get up, she would seek guidance about every item of clothing she was to wear. I have come to realise that when Charles Wesley wrote his hymn 'Captain of Israel's host and guide' and included the lines, 'We shall not full direction need nor miss our providential way' there was great wisdom behind it. Sometimes we need line-by-line guidance, but at other times God says he has given us the resources already in order to decide what needs to be done. Nevertheless, making decisions is an important part of our lives, and our faith has vital things to say about it. So where might we pick up some signs for wise decision-making from the apostles?
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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration. |
