Once there were three churches. They were modest churches that were formed by modest people living in modest communities. Each of these modest churches had modest councils who were made up of modestly faithful men and women who oversaw the modest ministries like the modest Sunday School, the modest music program, the modest property surrounding the modest church, and the maintenance of the modest cemetery.
One Sunday, the modest pastors of these modest churches stood up in the modest pulpits to preach modest sermons. Now no one knew it, but the Holy Spirit, which is anything but modest, had been imprisoned in the beautiful but modest hand-tooled, leather-covered, gilt-edged Bibles. When the modest pastors opened the modest Bibles that Sunday, the Holy Spirit was set free. The Spirit entered into these three modest pastors, and then these three modest pastors said something quite immodest.
“God loves you!” they shouted to the modest people sitting in their modest pews. And every modest person jumped.
“God loves you so much that while you have been living your modest lives, sleeping in your modest homes, God extravagantly gave gifts of excellence from the Holy Spirit to each and every one of you. God did this because, after five thousand years, God is tired of hearing all the complaining and grumbling and discontent about the work that God is doing. So, God has decided to take a vacation and has left you in charge of God’s kingdom!
“Don’t panic! God has arranged for the Holy Spirit to continue to support and lead you in these coming days, so that you can learn to use the amazing gifts God has given you for the life and ministry of God’s world.
“I am told that the Holy Spirit laughed for joy when God unveiled the plan and said, ‘Okay! This should be fun because giving gifts away only makes more gifts!’
“So, I come to you today telling you that you now have all of the gifts that you need to thrive. What do you think of that?”
Then, the modest pastors immodestly sat down. Each of these modest pastors looked a little confused or dazed, not quite sure of what had just happened.
In the first church, people started talking to their neighbors quietly and then more loudly as they prepared to leave worship that day. Someone stood up and said, “I think we need to discover what gifts we have so that we might consider what we are best suited to do.”
And they did. They discovered that their greatest gift was a gift of generosity. They decided to give God’s kingdom away. And so, they gathered everything they had and prepared to give it away—they even mortgaged the modest church building and the modest property.
But then, they were challenged to find the best way to give God’s kingdom away. So, they went out into the community, and they met people at the bus stops and in the cafés. They asked them what they needed because they were giving God’s kingdom away.
They built playground equipment in the parks and gave their time away cleaning up the messy parts of town. They gave food away at potlucks, and they opened their building as a shelter for people who were abused and forgotten. Each week they gathered together and talked about how they could give more of God’s kingdom away to the modest community in which they lived.
In the second church, people started talking to their neighbors quietly and then more loudly as they prepared to leave worship that day. Someone stood up and said, “I think we need to think about what we have just heard and each come back with an idea for how we should respond to this message.”
The following week they gathered in small groups and discussed some of their ideas. They discovered that each idea involved singing. They were a little surprised to discover that they loved singing so much. So, they decided that they needed to do something about making sure that anyone who loved music and who loved to sing should feel welcome in their church. They told their council to find a way to help them get more people who liked to sing.
And so, they advertised in the papers, and they talked with their friends. They organized musical performances of stories from the Bible. They invited people to come and share their musical gifts, or to simply come and enjoy the music and the stories. They gathered people who played guitars and saxophones on the street corners, and they sang hymns and songs and celebrated life.
In the third church, people started talking to their neighbors quietly and then more loudly as they prepared to leave worship that day. Someone stood up and sarcastically said, “Well, that was something.”
Shamed, and in fear, the other people in the congregation modestly looked down at the floor, then guiltily at one another, and went home. During the following week people met each other in stores and shops. They called each other on the telephone. They talked about how shocking the Sunday message had been.
One person was overheard to say, “I am really afraid that the message was not from God at all. I think that the pastor should be ashamed for trying to hoodwink us like that. We need to call the council to do something about it. The sermons need to be the way they’ve always been. God gave me this modest life, and I like my modest life in my modest home in our modest community. Who does the pastor think she is? What she is proposing sounds good, but it could also destroy us.”
On vacation, God talked with people at the bus stops and ate in cafés where the people from the first church were gathered. God played on the slides and swings, acted like a monkey on the monkey bars, and laughed with the children. God laughed most of all at the thought of trying to give the kingdom away.
God sang with the guitar and saxophone players as people gathered in harmony with one another in the second church. Indeed, God had a great time at the parties, singing the old songs and the new, and they drank wine together and shared their life stories.
But in the third church God wept and quietly walked among them in sadness. God gathered the people into God’s arms and blessed them and forgave them because, they could not find a way to use the amazing gifts of the Spirit God gave them. In their fear, their anger and their shame, they felt abandoned, like they were cast into the outer darkness. They ground their teeth and angrily and fearfully looked at the sinful world around them and withdrew further and further until they finally just disappeared.
© June 2007 (rev. Nov. 2017), Peter Heide. All rights reserved.
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