Reader participation time. Has anything like this ever happened to you?
It’s Sunday morning. The house is quiet, you’ve had coffee and a shower, and you’re sitting down for a few minutes with your Bible before heading off to the Lord’s Supper.
Your church is a little unusual these days in that it hosts a weekly worship meeting with no designated speaker and no fixed order of proceedings. Nobody but the couple doing the greeting has any preordained role. The husband on the door will generally opt to start the meeting with a welcome, a hymn and/or a prayer. After that, the elders encourage an hour of vocal participation in the meeting by what high churches sometimes call the “laity”, Christian men who are not religious professionals. All men, great and small, young and old, are free to give out a hymn, lead the congregation in prayer, or even open the Bible to do a little reading and commentary.
Do you remember when Jesus read from the scroll in a synagogue in Nazareth, then briefly commented to the effect that he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy right in front of them? It’s a bit like that, except you’re not the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Not that you know about anyway.
A Feeble Attempt to Worship
As one of the older men in your local church, you feel a responsibility to take advantage of the opportunity to share the scripture with the congregation. Some men don’t, but many do. So you’re looking for a passage to encourage your fellow believers to think worshipful thoughts of Christ. At the end of it all, you’re all going to remember him in breaking bread and passing the cup from hand to hand, as he commanded.
Since Jesus is the primary subject of the Bible, you find a passage in Genesis you believe fits the moment without great difficulty, and you meditate on it prayerfully for a while. Your choice is just a little bit obscure in that it concerns a minor OT character, but the point his story makes about the magnitude of Christ’s grace to us is worth it, you think.
So you close your Bible, fill the cat’s dish and head out to church, where, at an appropriate moment between hymns, you get up, maybe a little shaky at the responsibility, read the scripture and share your reflections about the Lord. You make your feeble attempt to worship Jesus and give him his due. You thank the Father for the gift of his Son. Then you sit down and carry on listening to the thoughts, prayers and hymns offered up by others. The meeting goes pleasantly and you head downstairs for a coffee and a few conversations prior to the sermon at 11:15 from a visiting Bible teacher.
The Other Half of the Puzzle
This particular speaker has flown in from halfway across the world. You’ve never met him; don’t even know his last name. He has prepared two messages for the day, both on lessons from the life of that very same obscure character you randomly decided to mention in the Lord’s Supper. What he has to say about him is entirely in harmony with the thoughts you brought to share.
He didn’t elect to speak on that story because he heard you mention the character, and you didn’t decide to mention the character because you had the slightest idea he intended to speak about him. The two choices happened entirely independently of one another. His took place days ago in another time zone. His Powerpoint slides have been prepared for a week.
What are the odds of that? If you had name-checked David, Abraham or Moses, probably pretty fair. But this was not that. Not at all. When you looked it up later, the character you chose to speak about was even more obscure than you thought. The writers of the Bible mention his story in a grand total of 72 verses of scripture from a possible 31,000+ across 66 books, of which his name appears in only five. The chances of randomly encountering anything about this guy in your Bible on any given Sunday morning are microscopic, something in the order of one in 432, around two-tenths of one percent.
Still, if that happened once, you’d shrug it off. Serendipity, right? Occasionally, even very long odds actually pay off. People who can’t do math might even buy a lottery ticket with a one-in-432 chance of winning, and one of those 432 actually would. But you don’t expect extremely low-percentage coincidences to keep happening like clockwork week after week. That would not be serendipity. That would be something else entirely, something quite inexplicable.
Proof Without Proof
Yes, of course this really happened to Yours Truly. I couldn’t be so specific if it hadn’t. Happy accidents just like it have happened not once, not twice, but maybe a dozen times in the past year and a half, and believe me, it’s not because I’m super-spiritual. I’ve talked to others who’ve had the same experience more than once. I’ve calculated rough odds for this particular “coincidence”, but most of the time you wouldn’t bother. No matter what the numbers are, you couldn’t use them to stringently prove anything to a skeptic. It’s not science, but there is an observable pattern I can’t ignore.
Still, there’s nothing remotely spectacular about the experience. There are no fireworks. I don’t feel any particular sense of having had some great spiritual insight. I don’t hear voices or feel like I’ve had an epiphany. I could not claim, “God told me” this or that. I just had a thought and another Christian had a complementary thought independently. The two thoughts dovetailed like pieces of a puzzle, completely absent any human intentionality beyond that of two or more believers acting in simple obedience to our Lord’s instruction: “Remember me.”
It’s almost like the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
I don’t anyway.
No comments :
Post a Comment