Pentecost Prayer

This devotional is written by Kate and Eliot Jones.

The Fellowship of the Believers
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Well, we feel this verse may have been picked for the two of us for a reason! It’s true we love food, but more than that we really love what happens when people come together and share food and choose to be together. There’s an intimacy that comes with facing your hunger communally. Hunger makes us human. It can easily be a mindless task or it can be a deliberate chosen ritual.

We find it so profound that alongside the signs and wonders and multitudes being added to the following of Jesus that the act of breaking bread was equally noted and recorded.

We love that this verse describes first, meeting together daily in the temple followed by gathering in homes to share food. This suggests that these acts are connected and feed into each other, part of the same sacred ritual, that is the experience of God and belonging to Him and His church.

Corporate prayer and worship focus our attention upwards and in exchange we are filled with God's presence and met with love and often in our experience; changed, both individually and as a whole. We don’t know about you but these experiences of God can sometimes feel foreign, and strange and something that words can’t always describe.

Gathering after church with others quite simply grounds that experience, unites that very real change with the very real, placing it the context of the world and people who believe and share in its truth.

Discussing and sharing the miraculous and sometimes puzzling and foreign ways of God while partaking in the everyday and very human act of eating, can be the heaven on earth something that is prize and promise of God.

Obviously the elephant in the room with this verse and discussion is the reality that in this present climate we cannot be in each other’s homes. What do we do with this need to commune, to ground our spiritual experience of church and community, to celebrate and grieve together round a table, choosing to be present and open? How does that work when discussion and prayer and celebration and discipleship can’t happen in intimate earnest ways in homes? I’m sure like us most of you are aching for hugs and meals with friends.

Well there’s zoom.

But in all seriousness I think this need drives us to intention and earnest pursuit of each other. In the same way that meals can become routine and ordinary, relationship and check in texts and messages could equally become as mundane. I think the challenge here for us and you if you’d like, is to position ourselves to deliberate openness and earnestness in our communication with others during this time. Sharing needs and confusions and losses and the wonders of walking with a true and faithful God.