That's What It's All About

[HKHaugan]

Epi.30 That’s What It’s All About

Several years ago we were in Slovenia. Slovenia was the southernmost province in the old Yugoslavia. We traveled to an incredibly beautiful little town at the end of a valley surrounded on three sides by the Alps, Lake Bohinj (Bokin). While we were there we were told that a chamber music recital was taking place one evening at a church up in the valley. It was raining and storming fairly heavily but we went anyway. But this was not just a concert in a small church in a valley. This was like stepping back several centuries into a Thomas Kincade-like setting. The moment we entered the church we were captivated by the beauty of its elegantly crafted Baroque structure. How could they have built such a magnificent little church in this remote area of the southern Alps some three centuries before, maybe even earlier? It was as well a preserved building as you could find anywhere. The detail in its reredos, its altar, its pulpit and pews, was amazing. Each piece a carefully styled segment that contributed to its unified beauty. Admiring each part, you just knew that a work of art like this gave an internal impression that the Holy Spirit had intended it to be a place of worship in the Spirit. It spoke to the unity of faith the architect, and workers that built it, had put into it. I hope you get the feeling I’m driving at here. Because the experience was beyond words. What followed was one spot above majestic.

The chamber ensemble, four concert dressed musicians, took their seats at the entrance to the chancel just outside the altar rail. They were related and professors of music at the national university in Ljubljana. Now, here we are in this distant gorgeous old church in an Alpine valley on a stormy night with but about 30 others besides us and covered with the canopy of history all about us, an intimate setting. The music of violins and cello began and we were carried into another dimension of harmony blended by the skills and obvious passion of the performers. They were playing with passion, not performing for a crowd. They loved what they were doing, what they were born to do. The number of people there made no difference to them. You can always tell that. I have no idea how long the concert was, but nothing I have heard before or since could rival that evening in that place at that time with that music and that sense of timeless passion. What a gift we were given. It was one of those blessings unexpected, serendipitous and spiritual and only 32 of us in that moment of experience. When it was over the storm had subsided and we went back to our weathered and old sturdy valley hotel. We had an indelible memory etched into our very being.

What has this experiential mural got to do with anything but having had a great time one evening? Well, it’s the little things, the unexpected things, the small gathering where we could all look at one another and realize we’d had a genuine personal experience. That is the grit and substance of how we experience the Lord of the entire universe. It may be in a group prayer session, a coffee conversation with an unbeliever who comes to see what we’re about, a healing when two or three are gathered together, an insight that enables a turn of events, the moment a life is changed and shared. Big things seem greater; enormous rallies and huge congregations with immense choirs and orchestras, tear stained faces of scores responding to a great sermon. But isn’t it the moment of that personal one-on-one exchange where the deepest sense of the Spirit seems to prevail?

When we see Jesus feeding thousands on a mountain side, where were they at the Cross and after the Resurrection? The real experience was a woman forgiven in a market place, a son healed in a distance, a blind man receiving sight, a lifelong cripple able to stand. Then after the Resurrection, in a room with eleven disciples when the risen Jesus appeared and brought forgiveness to them. Then the moments on the beach when the risen Jesus ate breakfast with them. Think of His scattered appearances and their intimacy. Think about Saul who became Paul after a personal encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. As we read the different accounts of Paul’s missionary journeys and his letters to the scattered groups in house churches. It was the daily interpersonal encounters that caused the tremendous surge in the numbers of those groupings. The little things are the great things.

As you read the two letters of Peter and the one of James, there is that deep personal realization of a loving relational Lord. We’ve got to remember that the Lord God chose a small insignificant people to bear the Messiah, the world’s Savior, to live in a physical human body and pick twelve everyday men to follow Him. He poured His life into those men and taught them the Word and how it was to be lived in everyday life. He localized what the world tries desperately to gain by its emphasis on size and physical power. For Rome and the Greeks, the dominant civilizations of that time, it was the stadiums, the crowds, the large armies and huge public spectacles that impressed the masses. For those who don’t know God, they are frantic for the gigantic; it’s the dress to impress. Whereas the God of the real gigantic, the entire seemingly unending and monstrous universe, what did He do? He chose to embody Himself in a single lonely despised ethnic human body to be a one-on-one relational heart to change the world one person at a time. Is there nothing more inconceivable in a world crazed with size, power and control?

Yet here we are two millennia later conditioned by the same distractive concerns with size, power and control. But we also are seeing the presence of the risen Lord still claiming the hearts of everyday people from the claws of fascination with size and dominance. It’s the one-on-one dynamic the Holy Spirit uses so effectively. We’re made that way. It’s in our spiritual DNA.

The ‘Jesus’ dynamic is spiritual, personal, relational and local to a people personally born to be reborn personally in the Spirit. People are born individually in a family of two parents. People work in a local context with other persons who have to walk, talk and do it in a singular time and place. Each of us is gravity controlled and move limitedly. People are not produced robotically but individually. Each has their time to grow, mature and meet the Lord. Our task is to help that introduction and help in the maturing process.

A stormy night in a picturesque Alpine valley church is just a taste of what awaits those who share and those who receive the spiritual blessings of riches in Christ. It’s who you are with, where you are and the openness to the Lord in any conscious moment, giving you those unexpected opportunities to reach out and be His disciple in the Spirit. The beauty of those moments will overwhelm your ability to describe them. But that’s what it’s all about.