Waiting on Tables, Waiting on the Word
This summer we've been walking through Acts, exploring the Spirit nudging a little community of outsiders out into a new kind of community—a community where all things were held in common, where diversity was welcome, and where the power of One raised from the dead in the Spirit challenged systems of domination. This week we turn to a passage that many communities of faith struggle with, the balance of waiting on tables and waiting on the Word: Acts 6:1-7.
The movement of Jesus, in Acts, is growing, and so are its growing pains. Greek-speaking widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. It's a real problem, and the apostles don't dismiss it. But they also know they can't do everything. So, they ask the community to choose seven people, "full of the Spirit and of wisdom," to take on this work. One of them is Stephen, who we'll meet again soon as the church's first martyr.
What strikes me is the honesty of the moment. Even the apostles, the ones who walked with Jesus, couldn't hold word and service together without help. They needed to say, plainly, "We will not neglect the word of God to wait on tables." Not because tables don't matter. They do. But because a community that only serves, without staying rooted in the word, eventually forgets why it's serving at all.
I think we feel that tension too. It's easy, in our noisy, task-saturated lives, to let service crowd out silence, and prayer and waiting on God’s address in the word, get pushed to "later." Acts 6 doesn't resolve that tension, it organizes around it by building it into the church's very structure. Word and table, together. Neither one optional. They mutually inform one another.
I have come to imagine the balance through a book I was recently introduced to, Inviting the Mystic, Supporting the Prophet: An Introduction to Spiritual Direction. In defining spiritual and direction both words are considered, and recognized as too narrowly understood. Spiritual does not fully embrace the task of accompanying others because it is just as much about the material life as the spiritual, internal life, i.e. word and service, spirit and bodies. The word direction is also misleading, they argue. This is because the ‘director’ cannot be understood as the one to tell others what to do or how to do it. Rather, they write, “to the extent that there is a director in one’s life of faith, that director is always and everywhere the Holy Spirit.”
This Sunday, we explore this more closely considering what we even mean by the word, how it is that the Holy Spirit relates to us through it, and how it informs our life of service. Hint: the word cannot be reduced to a mere to-do list, or moral exemplar, giving us a template for how to live an ethical life; this would be to make Jesus into a principle, instrumentalizing Jesus as another Moses. We might also wonder, why Jesus and not buddha or any other model for us to follow? Somehow, this Jesus, and his movement the Spirit, is fostering something quite different, and that difference begs a little more curiosity.
See you Sunday,
Pastor David
The movement of Jesus, in Acts, is growing, and so are its growing pains. Greek-speaking widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. It's a real problem, and the apostles don't dismiss it. But they also know they can't do everything. So, they ask the community to choose seven people, "full of the Spirit and of wisdom," to take on this work. One of them is Stephen, who we'll meet again soon as the church's first martyr.
What strikes me is the honesty of the moment. Even the apostles, the ones who walked with Jesus, couldn't hold word and service together without help. They needed to say, plainly, "We will not neglect the word of God to wait on tables." Not because tables don't matter. They do. But because a community that only serves, without staying rooted in the word, eventually forgets why it's serving at all.
I think we feel that tension too. It's easy, in our noisy, task-saturated lives, to let service crowd out silence, and prayer and waiting on God’s address in the word, get pushed to "later." Acts 6 doesn't resolve that tension, it organizes around it by building it into the church's very structure. Word and table, together. Neither one optional. They mutually inform one another.
I have come to imagine the balance through a book I was recently introduced to, Inviting the Mystic, Supporting the Prophet: An Introduction to Spiritual Direction. In defining spiritual and direction both words are considered, and recognized as too narrowly understood. Spiritual does not fully embrace the task of accompanying others because it is just as much about the material life as the spiritual, internal life, i.e. word and service, spirit and bodies. The word direction is also misleading, they argue. This is because the ‘director’ cannot be understood as the one to tell others what to do or how to do it. Rather, they write, “to the extent that there is a director in one’s life of faith, that director is always and everywhere the Holy Spirit.”
This Sunday, we explore this more closely considering what we even mean by the word, how it is that the Holy Spirit relates to us through it, and how it informs our life of service. Hint: the word cannot be reduced to a mere to-do list, or moral exemplar, giving us a template for how to live an ethical life; this would be to make Jesus into a principle, instrumentalizing Jesus as another Moses. We might also wonder, why Jesus and not buddha or any other model for us to follow? Somehow, this Jesus, and his movement the Spirit, is fostering something quite different, and that difference begs a little more curiosity.
See you Sunday,
Pastor David
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