God Beyond Distinctions

“And afterward,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your old men will dream dreams,
    your young men will see visions.”
Joel 2:28 (NIV)

“Teacher,” asked the student, “I have been reading the prophets and I have many questions.”

“Rightly so,” answered the Teacher. “Many look to the prophets for answers when often the greatest treasure found in their words is the discovery of the right questions.”

“Is the prophet writing about a time that was, or is it about a time that is, or is it about a time that yet will be?” asked the student.

“Yes,” answered the teacher, softly.

“I don’t understand,” said the student. “Which is it?”

“Of course you don’t understand,” said the teacher. “Your confusion is rooted, my child, not in the words of the prophets but in your understanding of God who revealed to them their message. In your mind, you’ve confined God inside of time. But, time is a construct of creation and God existed before creation. Therefore, God exists outside of creation and is not confined by the construct we call time. Thus, you must consider that those marvelous things God reveals to the prophets may, like God himself, be at once about what was, what is, and what will be.”

The prophetic message of Joel reverberates with the words of the teacher. Today’s chapter is at once about what was happening in Judah, what would happen on the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts, and what has yet to happen.

It was verses 28-32 of today’s chapter that Peter quoted on the miraculous day in Jerusalem recorded in Acts 2. Jesus’ followers, male and female, young and old, were gathered together when the Holy Spirit came upon all of them like a rushing wind and they all began to speak in all of the various languages of the throng of Jewish pilgrims crowded into Jerusalem for the Pentecost feast.

One of the things that strikes me about both the words of the prophet and the event on Pentecost is the loss of delineation between nations, gender, and age. The pouring out of Holy Spirit on and into the followers of Jesus was not discriminatory, neither was the manifestation of the Spirit in the proclamations being made in various languages of the world.

The further I get in my spiritual journey, the more I have come to embrace the understanding that the gifts and callings of God’s Spirit are not discriminatory in any way. Just as the teacher revealed to the student a God who is not confined by time, so Joel’s prophesy and the events of Pentecost reveal a God’s whose indwelling Holy Spirit, the spiritual gifts Holy Spirit gives, and ministry to which Holy Spirit calls individuals are not confined by human distinctions of race, gender, age, education, nationality, political world-view, or socio-economic status.

It is only we human beings and the institutional church that we humans built that has chosen to pick-up those distinctions that God blew away and discarded on the Day of Pentecost and set them back in place within our religion.

In the quiet this morning, I’m reminded that the Great Story reveals God to be exceeding, abundantly beyond all that I could ask or even imagine. Like the student, my problem is so often rooted, not in my understanding of the Story God is authoring, but in my very understanding of who God has, is, and will reveal Himself to be.