All Together

They were all together in one place. – Acts 2:1b (NRSV) 

After Jesus’s resurrection, the disciples gathered together often, trying to make sense of life without him. Sometimes they gathered behind locked doors in fear. Sometimes they met in familiar places, like their fishing boats, with a longing to return to that elusive state called “normal.” Sometimes they came together to observe the rhythms of religious life: the holy days and the prayers and the commemorations. 

“Together” was important to them. 

Together is often where we find God. When we’re struggling to find God, together is how we hold on. Together is a practice through which we make meaning. 

Together is also a place where we can become stuck: 

Together can become sufficient, providing comfort without challenge, adequacy but not abundance. Together can become safe for the sake of staying in, to the neglect of going out. Together can become authoritative: a condition of “them versus us,” a preservation and indoctrination of meaning, a closed community into which nothing new is invited or imagined. 

In those early days of their post-resurrection faith, Jesus’s disciples stuck together… 

…until, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit divided their stuck-togetherness with a rush of winds and multiplied new togethers like flames of fire. Those new togethers, in turn, multiplied new dreams. New possibilities. New gatherings. New expressions of God’s presence. 

Together is not only the place to which we come. 

Together is the place from which we are sent. 

Because “all together” is the Spirit’s call, not simply Her comfort. 

Prayer
Whether we are going out or coming in, joining together or parting ways, O God of all, you envision us together. Release us where we are stuck. Disrupt us where we cling to the familiar. Divide and multiply us by your Spirit, we pray.