Numbers 11:24-30
In the spring of 1994, a woman named
Alma Snyder announced to the Administrative Council of Salem United Methodist
Church in Allentown that she would not accept nomination to that body for the
coming year. Her father, the Rev. I.F.
Bergstresser, had been pastor there just before World War I, and she was
approaching her 92nd birthday.
She felt she could no longer safely assume that she would be able to
complete a three-year term. (As it
turned out, she did go on to glory eight years later.) The Administrative Council then created the
position of Member Emerita for her.
(They made sure it was “Emerita” and not “Emeritus” because she had
taught Latin.) That way she could attend
whenever she felt up to it. The reason
they gave was that Alma was someone whose prayer life was deep and who really
knew how to hear what God was saying.
That was when Alma spoke out in a really, really prophetic way.
It’s
why they wanted her around, but it didn’t mean they wanted to hear what she
said.
“Now
I understand,” she said, “why the Lord has put it on my heart that now is the
time to step down. You’re trusting me to
listen for us all, and not listening enough yourselves.” She thanked them for the special opportunity
to serve that they had created, and for their respect and love, but she urged
them in a way that only she could have done to respect and love the Lord even
more.
This is Pentecost, folks. Today is our yearly reminder that the Spirit
of the Lord is not just given to the leaders of God’s people, but to everyone
together, to the Body of Christ as a whole.
There
are the formally acknowledged leaders, like Moses and the seventy elders that
he asked to help him, and there are the informally acknowledged leaders like
Alma who gain authority through their wisdom and visible faith. Thank the Lord for all of them. Both through study and experience, and
through the sharing of wisdom from their predecessors and mentors, they are
trained to put to use the gifts that God has placed within them and to do it
with a sense of grace that comes from making enough mistakes to have learned
that they will never know everything.
Then there are the Medads and the
Eldads, the folks who know a little bit but are, for whatever reason, not
always part of the formal structure, to whom the Spirit is also given and who
should also be heard and honored. There
they were, back in the camp while Moses and the elders where gathered in the
place of worship. Medad and Eldad were
no strangers to the presence of God, but when they began to express their joy
in the Lord right where they were, it made the future leader, Joshua, uneasy and
his instinct was to shut them down.
“And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his
chosen men, said, ‘My lord Moses,
stop them!’ But Moses said to
him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would
put his spirit on them!’” [Numbers 11:28-29]
Moses knew when not to get in the way. He was the leader, but God was in charge.
Fifty years
ago, a Quaker named Elton Trueblood wrote a book for the Church at large called
The Incendiary Fellowship, where he
lifted up both the worthiness and the danger of professionalism, a quality that
North Americans tend to value highly. He
said,
“It always
means defeat if we allow religion to be a professional job of a few experts,
with the rank and file relieved of all responsibility. Though it is unreasonable to expect
[everyone] to be a qualified engineer, it is not unreasonable to expect each
church member to learn to pray and also to learn to tell others of how the love
of Christ has reached his life. Neither
prayer nor witness is easy or quickly learned, but both are, by their very
nature, part of the vocation of every lay Christian.”[1]
He continued,
“The universality
of Christian vocation means that, over and over, God chooses what is weak to
shame the strong and that He can use those who have no professional religious
skills. This is how it was in the
glorious early days of the Christian Movement, and it must always be so again
if renewal is to be genuine.”[2]
One of the best preachers I have
ever known was a man named Robert Watts Thornburgh. At one point in his life, though, he was a
twelve-year-old named Bobby whose grandfather regularly dragged him and his
twin brother to Wednesday night prayer meeting and one week, sometime after the
second or third hymn, announced to the congregation, “Please bow your heads as
Bobby now leads us in a word of prayer.”
That was it right then. Sink or
swim. No warning. I imagine Alma Snyder would have admired that
move.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to do that to anyone – today. But
“would
that all God’s people were prophets!” [Numbers 11:29]
What
would happen, do you think, if when you saw somebody write on Facebook
something like “Prayers, please, for my brother-in-law who is going through a
hard time,” or “Please pray for a co-worker diagnosed with cancer,” instead of
just typing, “Praying,” and after a second or two of reflection and scrolling
on, you got on the phone with whoever wrote that and said, “I just saw your
post and wondered whether we could pray together about it”? Sure, they’d be surprised. But if it was really a prayer request and not
just a disguised form of gossip, I suspect that it would really be appreciated
and not just by that person on the phone but also by the Lord.
Folks like Medad and Eldad were not
the great speakers and poets who came later.
They were not Isaiah and Micah and Jeremiah thundering, “Thus says the
Lord!” They were normal, everyday
believers who paid attention. James
Sanders calls them “prophets of the spirit”, writing that
“They spoke of
themselves, or were spoken of, as so moved by or filled with the spirit that
they were able to say and do things they would not otherwise have done. One thinks of the memorable wish of Moses
expressed in Numbers 11:29; ‘O, that all the Lord’s people were prophets that
he might pour his spirit upon them!’”[3]
What
happened to Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost, and what has happened repeatedly in
different ways ever since, was that God did exactly that. All of God’s people were given words they
didn’t know were in them to share with people whose ways were totally alien to
them.
All
of God’s people felt the wind of the Spirit blowing through the room where they
had gathered, a gale that would propel some of them to all corners of the known
world and beyond. Tradition, although
not scripture, holds that from their base in Jerusalem Mary Magdalene went on
to what is now southern France and that James traveled to Spain while Thomas
died in India and there’s pretty good archaeological evidence that Peter was
martyred in Rome. From their sharing of,
as another of them, John, put it:
“what
we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched
with our hands, concerning the word of life” [I John 1:1]
others
also came to faith and came to have a living relationship with the Almighty
through Jesus and to trust the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Not to put down the professionals,
but Trueblood again puts it well when he says that
“Perhaps the most
striking feature, from our contemporary point of view, is that all of the early Christians were
missionaries. They did not leave the
evangelistic task either to professional evangelists or to pastors to whom they
paid salaries, for these did not exist.
As we read in the truly exciting story of the early Church, persevering
as it did in the face of incredible odds, we sense the difference between the
task of merely supporting
missionaries and of being missionaries. The early Church did not have a missionary arm; it was
a missionary movement.”[4]
The
clergy, the administrative structures, the Sunday School, the choirs, the
summer camps, the staff – we’re all here to help everyone do their part. And what we cannot do, rest assured that the
Holy Spirit can, and will.
A joyous and blessed Pentecost to
all of you Medads and Eldads, Moseses and Joshuas, to the young people with
visions and the old people with dreams, and to everybody in between.
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