So,
The first questions from Thursday Night’s Bible & Brew was a doozy.
Yes, we have a Bible & Brew Bible Study. And yes, it is fun. And yes, it gets more fun as the evening goes on, just saying!
The Brew part is always interesting.
This past week among the members, we had sweet tea, wine, mead, and beer. We should have also had hard cider, but I left my glass of Awestruck, Pears and Apple,s on the counter and had to settle for sweet tea, which was good, but not apple cider good.
In any case, we usually follow the inductive bible study pattern of asking a particular passage from the bible a series of questions.
This week the passage was Luke 8:1-18 and yes, they are studying the Sunday morning preaching passages a few weeks in advance. Then we followed the normal pattern of questions: observation questions (what does the passage actually say), interpretation questions (what do you think that means) and then application questions (what do you think you or we should do about what we just discovered).
It turns out to be a great way to study scripture, plus when people get into it, you can have a lot of fun as people reveal all kinds of crazy ideas!
In some of the study guides I get for us, there is often a starter question for group discussion, to kind of prime the pump. (Go online and find out what priming a pump is, we’ll wait!)
This week it was, “What one or two factors initially influenced your first response to the Christian faith?”
I know, it sounds complex, but really all it is asking is “how did you become a disciple of Jesus”?
For some of us that was a good long jog down memory lane!
I mentioned my father and his insistence on going to church and living one’s faith.
On some Sunday mornings I remember him headed out to warm up the car when I was a teenager, and him coming back in the house and announcing that he was leaving for church and we had two minutes to get in the car or he was leaving without us!
To him, the fellowship, the worship, and the learning about our Christian faith was essential. You didn’t miss, because you wanted to grow and become more like Jesus!
Others in the group had different stories including Sheila and Barry Moore. Ask them sometime about working with folks who turned out to be practicing disciples and also about El Paso, Texas and a baptism.
The key to it all, though, is that faith, when we find it, is often unexpected, and extraordinary. And sometimes strange.
Not so much because it is odd in itself. But because when we see encounter it, we are surprised.
Just like in this story from Acts chapter 2. It is a story of strange faith, that gets stranger the more we hear about it and compare it to the background faith from which it emerges.
Consider…
The disciples and all the followers of Jesus have gathered in an upper room (and what a huge room it must have been) praying and waiting to see what God is going to do.
They have already seen the resurrected Jesus, all of his miracles, spent quality time with him, eaten with him, and then seen him ascending through the mist of God’s Glory cloud into God’s Eternal presence.
They had no words. He was just gone!
But now they are ready for whatever comes next and I assume they must have wondered what could possibly be more than what they had already been through.
They knew the Holy Spirit was coming, but what did that mean?
They knew they were to go to the whole world with the good news of the gospel, but how was that going to happen?
They had no words, no ideas, only hopes and aspirations as Bill Noha used to say.
What did happen was strange! What came to them was strange faith!
The Holy Spirit came not like a dove as it did to Jesus, but as a rushing wind, much like the Genesis story of creation. And what followed it was fire much like a reverse of Elijah’s being carried off into heaven.
They now sat around the room, filled and on fire, and instead of stopping, dropping and rolling, they did exactly what you are not supposed to do and ran!
Filled to bursting with joy, nf fire such that they were burning with energy like the sun, they ran into the street of Jerusalem swollen with the Pentecost celebration, 50 days after Passover, of the wheat harvest and all that went with it.
And then they began to tell folks in their own native languages all about Jesus, and all about who Jesus was and what Jesus had done and about why they were on fire!
I’m telling you this is strange faith! This is not Saturday going to synagogue or Dad’s going to leave in the car without you faith!
This is not, oh, we have to drop our tithes and offerings off at the Temple, so Chuck Krogslund can pick it up and use it to pay the electric bill faith!
This is not the Pharisees rules, or the Sadducees smaller list of rules, or the priest’s sacrifices, or the scribes jots and tittles (the dot above the small letter “I” is a jot, the slash across a “t” is a tittle). Sigh!
This was power, this was change, this was renewal, this was grace, this was passion – and this was God present in the lives of his people!
And folks…
That power…
That change…
That renewal…
That grace…
That passion…
Is…
In…
Us…
Strange faith! Amen.
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