Sometimes when you’re a kid, things seem normal to you just because you don’t know any better. It’s only later you find out that something everyone else seemed to accept wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. For example, I had an aunt when I was growing up who once stayed in her room for six years. You could visit her there, if you wanted to, and we did when we came over. People in my family said she just needed a “breather.” But it was only years later that thinking back, I could realize how depressed and unhappy she must have been to lock herself up like that, and how much she needed someone to help her get out of her confinement.
I can’t hear these stories about the disciples in the locked room without thinking of that image of my aunt. Because these today’s two readings, with the disciples gathered together, first in Acts, then in the gospel reading, these readings take us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples, not as these energetic, almost miraculous leaders, but locked in a room, not waiting, exactly, but definitely hiding, lacking direction, afraid that what Jesus promised them wasn’t real after all.
They should look very familiar to us. There is a closed-in-ness that is an inevitable movement in human life, especially as we get older, especially as life kicks us around with age and illness and disappointment. It isn’t so much that we get tired as that we forget who we are, we forget, like these disciples forgot, we forget that we once had a vision of the kind of people we wanted to be.
If we don’t lock ourselves into rooms we lock ourselves up just as efficiently. We think, or at least I know I do, that the world or the church or our country is too resistant to change and indifferent to us to give way before anything we might say or do. We think that relationships once they are damaged can’t be put back together. We think people are the way they are and you can’t change that. We think that the way we’ve turned out here in middle age or whatever age, is inevitable. We define ourselves by the way things seem to have turned out not by what we imagine God has actually intended for us.
The point is not that we need to believe in some kind of gospel of self-fulfillment, that God wants us to be able to do anything, learn anything, reach any summit. It is not about being able to do anything, but being able to trust that with the Spirit we can do what we were called to do. These disciples were nothing if not ordinary people. They weren’t called to be something they were not — but today, on Pentecost, they were given the power to remember what they were called to do, what they were meant to do..
When Jesus died they were filled with a sense not only of danger, but of their own inferiority, they seemed to lack the power to do what Jesus asked of them But how could they feel any differently? At least one of them had betrayed Jesus, with no chance even to reconcile with Jesus before he died. If anyone could have felt justified for locking himself in a room it was Peter, or all those other disciples who probably felt like they’d failed at everything, never understood, never really got that power that Jesus promised them.
The hardest thing for us to know as Christians is to realize that we can trust, that the Spirit will be with us when we set out to do what we are meant to do. It’s easier to believe in the resurrection, in miracles, in anything than it is in the idea that the Spirit is with us, urging us on to be who we are called to be. It’s hard to believe that you can trust, that you can leave the room and find just as much safety outside it as you do inside it. But trust is all there is.
We all fight risk. Our institutions fight it, even our church fights it. We think moving out of the room into something new can only bring decline and loss and uncertainty, loss of whatever feeling of safety we have put together over the years. Sometimes you have to get pushed, like the disciples did in today’s first reading, literally blown out the door, and at other times you just have to listen to someone when they ask you. Ordinary Christians do amazing things, they bring peace, they change institutions, they reconcile long-standing enemies, they reform criminals, they bring families back together. But they don’t do it from inside a room that is getting smaller and smaller. The fire and wind of Pentecost are here to burn down walls, make rooms larger, as large as the whole world, and maybe to remind us that God does come to us inside our rooms but only to bring us out into the light.