The Spirit Has a Guest List Problem
It's Thursday, May 28th — deep in the week following Pentecost — and the question I keep circling is this: what does the Spirit actually look like when it moves through ordinary people in ordinary situations?
Not in the upper room. Not at the tent. Out in the camp. In a California schoolyard. In a research lab. On a piece of asphalt in New York City.
This week's episode picks up where Tuesday left off and goes deeper into three stories that each answer that question from a completely different angle.
Eldad, Medad, and the Kids Who Weren't Invited
Numbers 11 is one of my favorite stories in the whole lectionary cycle because it's so human and so surprising at the same time.
Moses is exhausted. God tells him to gather seventy elders around the tent — the official sacred space — so the Spirit can be distributed and Moses doesn't have to hold everything alone. It works. But then two men, Eldad and Medad, who weren't at the tent, start prophesying out in the camp among the people. No credentials. No invitation. Just the Spirit resting on them right where they were.
Joshua panics. He runs to Moses: stop them. And Moses says something I've been turning over for days: "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets."
Moses didn't manage the Spirit. He celebrated it.
That story came alive for me this week when I read about a group of elementary school students in California who found out a local bald eagle habitat was about to be sold to a housing developer. Nobody asked them to get involved. They didn't have a committee seat or an official title. They were kids — the Eldads and Medads of their school — and they got to work anyway.
They organized. They wrote letters. They raised awareness with the kind of tireless, slightly-annoying-to-adults persistence that only children can sustain because they haven't yet learned to be cynical about whether it's worth trying.
This week it was announced that those students helped raise ten million dollars. The eagles are staying.
Peter quotes Joel in Acts 2: "Your sons and daughters shall prophesy." No age limit on that.
The question it leaves me with is personal: who is the Eldad or Medad in your life right now? Who's the voice prophesying from outside the tent that you've been trying to manage or quiet down because they didn't come through the right channels? Because the Spirit doesn't care about channels. It never has.
Rivers of Living Water — and a Teabag That Changes Everything
The Gospel reading this week is John 7, where Jesus stands in the middle of a crowded festival and raises his voice: "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me. Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water."
John tells us he said this about the Spirit. And the key word for me is flow — not fill, not store, not keep. Flow. The Spirit doesn't pool up inside a person and stay there. It moves through them into the world, into the places and people that are genuinely thirsty for something real.
I thought about that image all week in light of a story that came out of a research lab: scientists have developed a new water filter — low-cost, simple, accessible — that's roughly the size of a teabag. You drop it into a well or a container of contaminated water and it pulls out the arsenic. No electricity. No treatment plant. No government program required. It just works, where the water is, among the people who need it.
A teabag that purifies the source.
Psalm 104 says all creatures look to God to give them what they need in due season — we are creatures of absolute dependence on life-giving resources. And when the Spirit flows through us, that's what it can look like: something small and precisely placed, doing quiet work that nobody makes a speech about. The water that comes out on the other side is something people can actually drink.
I found myself sitting with this as a metaphor for what it means to be a person of faith in ordinary life. You don't always get to be the cathedral. Sometimes you get to be the teabag.
Are You Moses or Joshua?
Before I close, I want to pull all three threads together because I think they're asking the same question from different angles.
Numbers 11 asks: are you Moses or Joshua? When the Spirit shows up in someone younger, someone less credentialed, someone outside the tent — do you celebrate it or do you try to contain it?
The eagle-scout kids ask: when did you last do something because it was right, even though nobody invited you to the table? They weren't given permission to care about those eagles. They just cared. And something changed.
And the teabag asks: are you letting the living water flow through you, or are you treating your faith like something to keep stored and private?
There are contaminated situations in your life right now. Places where something toxic has been building for a long time. What would it mean to be placed precisely in that situation — quietly, without fanfare — and just do the purifying work that the Spirit makes possible in you?
The Spirit didn't have a guest list at Pentecost. It still doesn't. You don't need the right title, the right credentials, or the right meeting. You just have to be willing to let the water flow.
Listen to the full episode of Monday to Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.