Spiritual Redirection

After saying that loving him means obeying his teachings, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to the disciples. What they have known in Jesus, and fear losing in Jesus’ impending absence, they will always know in the promise of this other Companion- the Advocate, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit. This is a beautiful promise! And the disciples need to hear it because they do indeed love Jesus. He has been their master, their teacher. He has been their Companion, walking beside them every day for nearly three years. 

We then get to see the Spirit at work as one who leads and guides. Throughout Acts, the Spirit leads Paul, Peter and others to specific places to preach the Good News of Christ. In the beginning of the passage from chapter 16, we hear how the Spirit is leading them by turning them away from certain places. Don’t go there; it’s not time yet. Sometimes, to guide us to the right place, the Spirit first leads us to say no to something else, or even closes that opportunity altogether.

Have you ever had a door close or had to say No to something before the Spirit revealed the path forward? In my last semester of college, I knew that I wanted to do a year of AmeriCorps before going to seminary. So I applied to multiple places including a food pantry in Cincinnati, and Habitat for Humanity on Long Island, NY. I interviewed with both places, and Cincinnati offered me the position. I had nothing else lined up. Long Island hadn’t gotten back to me yet, and I was nervous that they would hire someone else instead. So I prayed. I wrote in my diary. I talked to friends and my parents. And I prayed for guidance- was this where I belonged? I would be going on a Choir tour, and I needed to give my answer before I left. So, paying attention to what I believe was the Spirit’s guidance, I turned it down and trusted that something else would come. I ended up getting the job on Long Island, which was where I needed to be at that time.

Told not to go to Bithynia, Paul continues. In Troas, a more specific location comes through the vision Paul has in the night. And they’re off to Macedonia where they find a group of women, including Lydia, and talk with them, presumably sharing the good news of Christ in the conversation. And God works again, enabling Lydia to embrace Paul’s message.

The Holy Spirit is leading Paul to the right places, and moving hearts to believe. But the Holy Spirit is also changing those who hear the Good News. Lydia, who deals in purple cloth that only the rich could afford, implores Paul and his companions to stay with her, opening her home to them while they are in the city. This becomes an important place- by the end of the chapter, it sounds like Lydia’s house has become a house church: Paul and his companions return there at the end of the chapter to encourage the brothers and sisters there before heading to the next part of their journey. This is the Holy Spirit at work.

In the book Take This Bread, reporter Sara Miles tells of how the Lord’s Supper and a growing Food Pantry ministry in California changes her and others. When she first enters a specific church, this unbelieving reporter who considered all of Christianity mere superstition- is moved to tears and writes “Jesus happened to me.” She yearned to continue going to church, even as her uninterested family stayed home and read the paper. She “went to church, heart pounding, and tried to figure out why.” Sara Miles ends up working with the Food Pantry and helping it expand, and in the Food Pantry a young man named Teddy encounters Christ in a different way, and it changes him. Miles writes,

“I remembered when Teddy had first started helping out at the pantry: He’d been trying to get his life back together, after his father, his boyfriend, and his dog had all died and he hit bottom with drugs. He was eager to serve, determined to take control, and scraped raw by sobriety.… 

“[T]he experience of being bread [changed him]. Teddy still had relapses and fights and weeks of almost unmanageable anxiety, but being one of the people in charge at the pantry had become what he called ‘a kind of spiritual practice.’ He’d looked at me earnestly. ‘It’s very easy for me to try to control people,’ he said. ‘But when I’m not sarcastic or arrogant or egotistical, I see that the qualities in other people that frustrate me are really about me. It’s not just about feeding people who come to the pantry with food. It’s about nourishing them with my love.’”

Sara was changed by encountering Christ. Teddy experienced Christ as he was able to “be bread” for others- able to find a community in this church-based food pantry, and able to feed others with more than food- with love. He calls it his own love, but I’d say it’s Christ’s love that was being extended.

We know this Good News that Sara and Teddy experienced as they shared bread with others in Christ’s name. We know this Good News that Paul preached: that Jesus, God’s only Son, chose to come to earth as a helpless child, fully human. He lived out the Good News and reconciled us to God: teaching, eating with sinners and outcasts, confronting the religious establishment, and healing. And when the time came, he succumbed to the cross and died a criminal’s death, innocent though he was. We know death did not have the last say; God raised Jesus from the dead, overcoming evil, and sin, and death. And Christ sent the Holy Spirit- guiding us, empowering us, and changing us. 

There are days we need to be reminded that Christ sent us the Holy Spirit. When the future looks uncertain, or scary. When questions and worries keep us awake. The good news is that just as the disciples had this promise, we do as well- the Spirit came then, and the Spirit continues to walk beside us, guiding us to where we need to be, which includes closing doors that we’re not meant to enter through. This Spirit changes people. This Spirit is changing us as well: to deepen our relationship with Christ, to be in relationship with others, to share the Good News.

Thanks be to God. Alleluia! Amen.

*Resources for this sermon include:

Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition)

Research and sermon on Acts 16 from October 13 2019 

Research and sermon “Kept in Our Hearts” from May 22 2022