Pentecost | It Happened in a Meeting

Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and

suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a

violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were

sitting. Divided tongues as a fire

appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak

in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living

in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd

gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them

speaking in the native language of each.

Amazed and astonished they asked, Are not all these who are

speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each

of us in our own native language?

Parthians, Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea

and Cappadocia, Pontius and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,

Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and

visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and

Arabs. In our own language we hear them

speaking about God's deeds of power.

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does

this mean? But others sneered and said they

are filled with new wine. This is the word of the Lord.

All right. Good morning, friends.

Really happy to be here this morning.

So today is an important day. Some of you may have been aware

walking in the room they look forward to.

I think a lot of it is what's required of you in that room.

Some of it has to do with the people that you'll be with,

whether you trust them or you're curious about them, whether

there's something alive between you in the relationship that you

have to the people in the meeting.

And some of it is the hope that you carry into that space.

So an all office meeting for Dunder Mifflin generally isn't a

particularly hopeful place, but my hope is that meetings like

the one that we're sitting in now, we could call this a

meeting, would be hopeful would be spaces where we're curious

about what's going on in the room and in each other's lives.

The story that we're reading this morning, the the story that

Thomas just read to us, begins with a meeting, actually a

series of meetings, sequential meetings for days on end, where

people are gathering together in the same place to do more or

less a similar thing each time they're together.

And the meeting that is at the center of the story that we're

reading today turns out to be one of the most consequential

meetings in the story of Scripture and in the story of

human history. The theologian Willie James

Jennings says this throughout the book of Acts.

The one thing you know about the coming of the Spirit is somebody

has been asked to do what they don't want to do.

What is it that the Spirit wants you to do?

He wants you to be with those who you prefer not to be with.

It's an interesting perspective on meetings, isn't it?

So the next time you're called into a meeting full of people

that you prefer not to be with, whether it's this one or another

one, think about the words of the theologian Willie James

Jennings. This is the work that the Spirit

is doing in the world today. Obviously this is a little bit

tongue in cheek, but friends, we're being called together with

people who aren't like us for a grander purpose than any of our

singular lives in and of themselves.

That's what the book of Acts is doing in just a few sentences.

And it starts here in a room with a group of people who had

no idea what was about to happen to them.

So the passage opens when the day of Pentecost had come, they

were all together in one place. And I want you to notice what

Luke does not do at the beginning of the story.

He does not open with the wind. He does not open with the

spiritual phenomena. He does not open with the

miraculous spectacular thing that takes place in this

meeting. He doesn't open with fire.

He intentionally opens with this room full of people who have

been gathering together one day after the next.

If you go back 1 chapter, Acts chapter one verse 13 tells us

that after Jesus ascended, they went up to the upper room and

stayed there. And so this was a habitual

assembly. And Acts 114 describes what

those 10 days looked like. It says all these were

constantly devoting themselves to prayer together.

And that word together is instructive in this passage and

really throughout the rest of the New Testament.

The Greek word appears 11 times in the book of Acts, and it

carries a sense of unified purpose, which is obvious.

We we think that when we think of the word together, but it

also has a musical dimension to it.

In the ancient world, this would be the same word that's used to

describe musical harmony. So different voices, different

parts that come together and create something that none of

them could have produced on their own.

And that's what's happening in the Upper Room.

For 10 days before Jesus ascended, he told these

disciples to wait in Jerusalem. And so they they waited and they

prayed. And they were likely recounting

the stories of what it was like to be with Jesus and thinking to

themselves, Gee, isn't it strange that our good friend was

just, you know, disappeared into the clouds in front of our very

eyes? What is it that we do at this

point? They were grieving because they

found themselves in a strange circumstance that they probably

didn't have a lot of clear answers for.

But they were hoping in the same breath because their teacher,

their rabbi, this Messiah whom they had come to trust and know

as the visible image of the invisible God, told them to

wait. So that's what they did. 120 men

and women who had followed Jesus from Galilee.

This included his mother and his brothers.

Ordinary people who had seen extraordinary things throughout

Jesus ministry and they didn't entirely know what to do next.

And so they were there because he told them to be there day

after day, and they just knew to keep meeting.

They didn't know what to anticipate.

Of course, we know what comes next because we just read the

next part of the story. But into that room, those people

and those prayers, those unfinished stories told and

retold, the miracle of God's presence by the Spirit arrives.

And so this community was creating the conditions for what

was to happen next. They were actually making

possible this feeling that happens.

They were creating the container for the presence and the love of

God to come into their midst. And so there's something that

would have been obvious to every Jewish person in that room that

morning that we almost entirely miss because of our situation in

time and space. Pentecost was not a new holiday.

This was not a thing that they were coming up with on this day

that the Spirit came and and filled them.

It was a ancient Jewish festival, a feast known as

Shavuot, the the Feast of Weeks, one of the three great

pilgrimage festivals on the Jewish calendar.

And so 50 days after Passover, the people would gather in

Jerusalem to celebrate the wheat harvest and to remember

something important from their history, the giving of the Torah

at Sinai. So this was the festival that

sort of marked the remembrance of Moses ascending Sinai and

receiving the law from God that would instruct the people of

Israel, you know, how how to become a people, this covenant,

this gift that would make Israel who they were supposed to be.

And so when Luke opens with when the day of Pentecost had come,

he's placing this moment on a very specific point in the

devotional life of the people, the way that they sort of marked

the time. So think about, I don't know,

it's Memorial Day weekend. And so we have these secular

holidays that sort of mark the time and that might invoke some

particular memories for some of you.

I know for me there were things from childhood, you know,

cookouts or camp outs or whatever that when I hear

Memorial Day, I just think, Oh yeah, that stuff.

And so this is that's the work that this is doing in the, in

the, the people who are gathered, they're together and

Oh yeah, it's the feast of weeks.

And so it sparked some particular thoughts for them.

This is the day that we remember Moses on the mountain.

So even in the simple way that this is situated in our story,

it's beginning to actually make a claim about the kind of thing

that's happening. Because Luke doesn't just name

Pentecost to mark the time. He's also, he's invoking this,

this festival, this feast to sort of flag that something is

happening that sort of rhymes with that thing that the people

were already familiar with. And so then in verse 2, suddenly

from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,

and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

In verse 3, divided tongues of fire appeared among them, and a

tongue rested on each of them. And the wind and the fire are

specifically Sinai imagery. When God meets Moses on the

mountain, there was smoke and fire and loud sounds and the

mountain trembled. So what Luke is doing and

telling the story is he's he's sort of signaling this is

happening again. It's happening again in a new

way with a new group of people. And God is doing something that

rhymes with an earlier part of the story.

So, you know, when we when we learn to read the story of the

Scriptures as one unit, as one grand story, you can start to

see the ways that these things sort of repeat themselves and

rhyme with earlier parts of the story.

God is showing up in the way that God showed up at Sinai.

So when you read that story from Exodus and you see all of these

things that are sort of similar, at Sinai, God gave the law to

one man who carried it down the mountain to the people.

And at this point, fire doesn't land on each individual person.

Moses, one person has a radical encounter with this powerful

presence of God. And verse 3 in our text is

careful about that. It says a tongue rested on each

of them, so it rhymes, but it's not the same because we can see

that something a little bit different is happening.

Every person in the room is touched with the kind of

phenomena that one person, Moses, the leader, experienced

thousands of years before. The presence of God is enormous

and impersonal and far away. In the first story that we read

at Sinai, even for Moses, it's actually not quite close enough

to touch. I want to show you 2 paintings

side by side for a moment. The first one is from the, the,

the 17th century, a painter named Jerome.

And we see Moses. We, we actually don't see Moses,

We see God. There's a far away sort of giant

figure on top of a mountain. And you see the masses of people

sort of gathered around the base of the mountain.

And this thing you see visually is sort of, you know, God's

giving the law. And I don't know if there's like

lasers coming out of his eyes or what's happening, but you know,

it's like there's something, there's something going on up

there on the mountain, right? I mean, that's, that's what

that's what I would title this piece.

And so when you look at this, you can see the this this kind

of experience that would be recounted that people would have

read in the scriptures and would be called to mind by this moment

that, you know, way far away. One person who we kind of knew a

little bit, who was one of our leaders had a crazy encounter

with God out there on the mountain and we all kind of

followed suit. Now look at the next one.

This is Titian, and it's interesting because it's a

similar composition. There's there's light descending

from the top of the frame and figures are looking up.

But the way that artists have represented this moment over

time is with a kind of intimacy that's lacking from artistic

representations of Sinai. No longer do you have masses of

people looking at the far away thing that's happening way up

over on the mountain to one person, but you have an intimate

gathering of folks who are sort of looking to the presence of

God coming into the room. And it's it's impacting it's

affecting each individual person and it's impacting their their

gathered assembly. The distance from what's

happening is completely different.

And So what Sinai kept at arm's length in the story of the

Scriptures, this powerful, intimate, loving presence of

God, Pentecost brings all the way in.

And these people had the most personal kind of encounter

possible. And then in verse 4, all of them

were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other

languages as the Spirit gave them ability.

And look at who's in the room to experience this.

Luke gives us this list in verses 9 through 11, which

Thomas read beautifully, by the way.

I love including long lists of names and places and things for

for the liturgist to have to pronounce in the teaching

Scripture. But I left it in on purpose

because people from every corner of the world as they knew it

were gathered in Jerusalem for this festival.

It's important that it was a pilgrimage festival because

people from everywhere were coming to, to to celebrate

together. Different regions, different

dialects, different food traditions, different financial

realities, different ways of of reading Torah, of reading the

law, and almost certainly different political instincts

toward Israel, toward the Roman Empire that oppressed the people

at the time. You know, this list might feel a

little bit over the top if we don't know what we're looking

at. Sometimes Scripture can be a

little bit that way when we read long lists of names or

genealogies or different things. But baked into the inclusion of

that long list of people from different places is a point that

the author's trying to make that this impacts everyone.

No one is left behind by the personal transformative presence

of God that comes in this meeting.

Jennings again describes what God's doing with that list as

nothing less than a revolution around the people, the way that

the people thought about how God was at work in the world.

He calls it the revolution of the intimate, and he writes that

it's it's the revolution of creating a life together that

breaks boundary and border. My people's story is taken up

into the story of God, and other people's story is taken up, and

our stories are woven together toward a new future.

Isn't that a beautiful thought? I mean, you know, when I think

about the ways that each person has come to be in this room week

in and week out, and the ways that our stories are so

different one from another, you know, that can become a barrier

in our ability to relate to one another.

But it can also be a beautiful representation of the kind of

thing that God wants to do. And and hear this, it's not

assimilation of stories together.

It's not all of these things losing their distinct importance

when they come together in a group.

It's each person from each place being named individually in this

list. You know, Luke doesn't take this

list of places and say all these people from all these different

places, they came together. They received the gift of the

Spirit, and then they became the same.

That's not the point. The point is that that their

distinct differences remain intact as they're drawn together

and their stories are woven together into the story of the

family of God. And so when Peter stands up to

address the crowd in verse 14, his first move is to reach for

the prophet Joel. And he essentially says this is

that that what the prophet is describing when he wrote that

God would pour out his spirit on all people, sons and daughters,

young and old, slave and free. Peter recognizes the moment

because he knows the story that he's living in and he can

recognize the pattern. He's so familiar with the story

of his people. He's so familiar with the great

stories that have informed the way that he lives his life and

understands himself in the world that he can't help but notice

that this thing is repeating itself again.

This festival that commemorated the law given to one man on the

mountain has become the day that the Spirit is available to

everyone in the room across every single category that would

have been, that would have previously determined who had

access to the presence of God and who didn't, who was allowed

in and who had to wait outside. And what happens in this moment

is that the presence of God is universalized.

It's democratized. Every person suddenly has access

to the filling of the Spirit. That's the kind of gathering

that God chose for this moment. It was a room that was wide

enough to hold the whole list that that Luke just gave to us

and open enough that God could do something completely new

inside of it. And so before we move on from

this passage, I want to further place this moment in the big

story of the Scriptures because obviously Pentecost it it

doesn't come out of nowhere. In Numbers 11, Moses is

exhausted and the people are complaining again and he's

basically completely at the end of his rope.

And, you know, he's saying things like, God, I don't know

what to do with these people. They're so stubborn and they're

so difficult. And God tells him to gather 70

elders, and the spirit that rests on Moses is going to be

spread around among them so that he doesn't have to carry the

whole thing by himself. And it works.

So the 70 elders, they received the spirit and they start

prophesying in this story. But then there are these two

other jokers, Eldad and me dad, who aren't in the meeting for

some reason. So they skipped the meeting.

They heard, you know, all, all company meeting and they were

like, no, so they're still back at the camp and the Spirit

filled them anyway. So they start prophesying right

there in the middle of everybody.

And the reaction from the people who go to the meeting is like,

hey, guys, this was like just for the meeting.

So what are you doing out here? Moses stop them.

And Moses says would that all the Lord's people were prophets

and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.

And so the moment that people begin to think in this earlier

story that we're making reference to, oh, this is just

for the people in the meeting. We we have that that thesis kind

of thwarted immediately. You you sort of see God go.

These guys get the spirit. But I'm going to put a little

spirit on these guys over here too.

Who who skipped the meeting and so long before this passage that

we're reading this morning. We hear this longing that

there's this this man, this leader who's been carrying

something heavy for a long time, and he looks out at his people,

just wanting everyone to have this kind of interface with God

that he just experienced on the mountain.

And he was asking for Pentecost. His, his longing, his prayer

sort of points to this thing that happens a long time after.

And his cry gets woven into the longest, most patient story

imaginable. Because in the beginning, God

walks with humanity in the garden in the cool of the day,

in what's what's unmediated face to face interaction with God.

And then comes the fall and the humans create distance.

And this is an important part of the story for us to get right.

So just hear that it might, it might be something for another

time. But the humans create distance

between themselves and God. We often get this wrong.

We read the story like God is, is sort of holding people at

arm's length and pushing people out of way and you've messed up.

The humans fall. And so God says, I want nothing

to do with you. But the humans create distance.

And then at every point throughout the story, we see God

doing everything that God can do to try to to to get situated in

front of the humans again to say, let me help you, Let's talk

about this. And the humans continue to sort

of say, we're not so sure about that.

And so we have the Tabernacle, and God agrees to travel with

the people through the wilderness, with God's presence

contained in a tent, which might be kind of strange for God.

And then in the temple, the presence of God is located in a

building in Jerusalem, behind a curtain accessible only to

priests at a certain time of year.

And then in the incarnation, in the coming of Jesus, God's

presence fills a human body, walking around in Galilee,

touchable and interruptable, and eating with his friends.

And each moment in this grand story that the writers of

Scripture are weaving together, God comes a little bit closer to

the people. Despite sometimes the best

efforts of the humans to keep God at arm's length, God keeps

coming a little bit closer. And this whole arc bends toward

this movement where there is no longer a veil, no longer a

curtain, no more designated few standing in the presence where

everyone else waits outside. And all of that brings us to

this passage today. All of them were filled with the

Holy Spirit. The tongue of fire in verse 3

rested on each person. The spirit that rested on Moses

alone was distributed to the 70 elders as an emergency measure.

And it comes on judges and priests and prophets and kings

for specific tasks and specific seasons.

But the longing of the entire story that we see throughout is

that that the people of God, each one to a person, would have

this experience of the loving kindness of God.

And Peter's point is simple in the sermon that he preaches

after our text, This is that happening that's coming into the

world right now for the first time.

And the longing of the entire story of the people, of the

Hebrew Scriptures is fulfilled in this moment.

And the Spirit doesn't come from an empty sky.

Peter is clear about this. And the sermon the spirits

poured out from the throne. You know, it was fun.

A couple weeks ago, I got to teach the kids about the

ascension, which I think I think Thomas and I doubled up on

back-to-back to back weeks. And the questions that came in

that room were were so much fun, you know, because it's like,

well, Jesus did what? And it's like, well, yeah.

You know, that's that's what it says.

And we talked it through. It was great.

But you know, this doesn't come from nowhere.

And and one, one of the kids nailed it.

I love this. You know, why, why, why at the

ascension did the angels tell the disciples to quit staring up

into the sky and and kind of get on with it?

And she said because there was more to do.

God wasn't done. And it's like, what a beautiful,

concise summary of this sort of Arc of the story.

This is Jesus raised from the dead, exalted to the right hand

of the Father, pouring out the Spirit from the throne.

This is his first act as ascended Lord to give the gift

of the Spirit is the announcement that the crucified

1 is alive and reigning and not forgotten to his people, but in

fact has made his presence available to all in a way that

wouldn't have even been possible walking on the earth.

What a beautiful thing. And so this meeting is the new

temple. And this meeting becomes the the

archetype. This is now the new temple going

forward. The story arrives at the thing

that it was building toward. And, you know, I want to say

something directly to some of us who come from sort of

charismatic traditions because I think we're susceptible to a

particular misreading of this moment, you know, in in churches

and rooms where we love the operation of the Spirit and we

love the gifts and we love what God wants to do for each of us.

That's yes, yes, absolutely. And we can make Pentecost about

something that it is not necessarily about.

We can make it about the phenomena, the wind and the fire

and the tongues, as if the point of what's happening in this room

were the experience itself. And, you know, I don't need a

show of hands or anything, but I've been in rooms where we've

done that. I've actually LED rooms where

we've done that. And I just, I just want to say

that this is not about trying to drum something up because of the

story that we're reading. What Luke is writing about is a

community that that, as I've heard NT Wright say before, it

gets blown out of the upper room and into the streets to speak

the truth about Jesus with a boldness that has nothing to do

with their own courage. And it has everything to do with

whose presence they are now carrying with them when they go

out of that room. I think about this a lot because

I think it's, it's very important to pay attention to

today. I, I worry that much of what

gets called revival or renewal in America today is simply the

public broadcasting of what NT Wright would call a private

hobby. More enthusiasm, more phenomena,

more experience, but nobody getting blown out into the

streets on behalf of the poor and the stranger and the outcast

and the immigrant and people we would prefer not to be with, to

refer back to Jennings. That is decidedly not what

happens in this room. Because when we read the rest of

the book of Acts from this point forward, we see a whole bunch of

people who get blown out of that room and onto the streets for

the for the common good of people who have been overlooked

and thought less of people blown out onto the streets for the

purpose of bringing the truth about the person of Jesus into

the world in a way that's not just not just polemic, but it's

it's actionable. There is real skin in the game

from this point forward. And so the whole story of

Scripture bends toward this empowering presence that is the

basis for all of the work that Jesus is compelling us to do in

the world. And it happened in a meeting.

And so I just would want to maybe encourage us to, to

question the attitude that we sometimes have about meetings to

sort of bring this full circle. You know, I listen, there are

meetings that I don't like. I get it.

But when when we're in a meeting with other people, what we've

done is we've effectively created a container for God's

Spirit to come and fill and blow us out of the building for the

common good of the people that God is inviting us to love.

And So what does it look like to be the kind of people who show

up to a room like that? In church, we sometimes talk

about this idea of expectation. You know, we sometimes talk

about it like it's something that we have to generate a

feeling that we have to work up or an intensity that we have to

sustain. I don't know if you've ever been

in environments like that where you've kind of left feeling

like, yeah, I'm going to do the thing that the preacher assigned

or I'm going to like, you know, be a different person from this

moment forward. I'm going to start this new

practice and I'm going to do it. And then you don't, or maybe you

do for like 48 hours, but I don't.

I don't know about you. I just am not that reliable.

The commitments that I make to myself, I can't keep them.

You know, I just, I and, and I think a lot of us have a similar

experience where we're just not the most dependable.

And so listen, this isn't about that.

These ones in this story, we're not trying harder and harder to

feel ready for the spirit. They were not working themselves

up into some kind of froth to be able to go out and do the things

that they did. Following from this moment.

It was the genuine empowerment of the presence of God, the love

of God filling them that compelled them to go and do the

things that they did. They were training their

attention in this meeting. And this is kind of the last

thing that I wanted to speak about for for a moment. 10 days

of prayer and showing up together, being together, paying

attention. There's a there's a difference

between trying and training. If I went out this afternoon and

tried to run a marathon, somebody would be coming to to

help to help me. But if I trained, you know, I

mean it might take me a long time, but if I trained my body

and my attention and my aptitudes and all of those

things toward, you know, unto that thing, I, I think it would

be possible, Mary Oliver wrote, Attention is the beginning of

devotion. And I think this is precisely

the kind of thing that Mary Oliver and, and the poets are

speaking about when, when we talk about training our

attention toward a particular thing.

This meeting that these people are in creates the conditions

for their attentiveness to God and attentiveness is the door

that the Spirit walks through in our lives.

Attentiveness. I really believe this.

It's not this, it's, it's not, it's not desire.

It's not longing. It's not, you know, sometimes

those things come to some end. But I really believe that paying

attention to what God is doing is the thing that that creates

opportunities for this kind of filling.

It's, it's the posture of the people who have arranged their

lives and they're gathering around the possibility that God

might show up and do something new for them.

There's a passage in The Lord of the Rings where Sam and Frodo

are in Mordor and things are difficult and the Ring is

getting heavier and they've still got a long way to go, and

Sam starts reminding Frodo about the great stories.

Do you guys remember this part? I might cry actually, thinking

about it. So about all the people who

found themselves in in dark and desperate places, up against

impossible odds, in the middle of something much larger than

themselves, he says, in moments as hard as the one that we're in

now. And then he turns to Frodo and

he says, do you suppose we might be in a story, Mr. Frodo?

I love that question because if you're if you're a reader and a

character in a story suddenly asks whether they might be in a

story, you kind of have to ask the same thing about yourself.

At least that's the way that my mind works.

I don't know about you, but, you know, when I hear Sam ask that

question, I go, do you suppose I might be in some kind of a

story? As a kid, that question was the

most alive thing in the world to me.

I, I wanted to be part of the stories that captivated me.

You know, it's, it's why I love literature and film and all

these things, you know, The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or

Treasure Island or Robinson Caruso or whatever.

And something in those stories calls to something in US.

And, and here's what I want to say to you this, this Pentecost

Sunday, God has been telling a story from the first word of the

world, from the first flicker of light that came into existence,

creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, renewal.

Moses was part of that story. The prophets were part of that

story. The 120 who were gathered in

this room were part of that story.

And so are you. And one of the most powerful

things about the story of Pentecost to me is the

continuity of the story that God's telling in the world and

the way that it invites it beckons each of us to join in

and become part of the story that God is still writing.

This is a story that you and I get to live.

Pentecost is the declaration that God desires to pour out the

Spirit on each one of us. The presence behind the veil,

the presence that walked in the garden, the presence that Moses

met on the mountain, the presence that the people could

only see from a distance, the presence that came for the first

time to each one on the day of Pentecost is now the presence

that dwells in you, us in Christ, and Christ in US.

And so when I think about even that passage, we're participants

in Jesus story in Christ. We're caught up into this

beautiful thing, this beautiful story that God's telling.

And so when we pray, come Holy Spirit, we're not trying to do

something new and we're not trying to retrieve something

old. It's actually neither of those

things. We're joining something that is

ancient and unstoppable. The greatest, truest story

that's ever been told, that's still being told through

ordinary people in ordinary rooms like this one who just

keep showing up. And so maybe when you think

about coming to church again, you have the you have the Jim

Halpert face a little bit, give us Jim.

That's fine, he can go. Now we're talking about a

different kind of story than The Office, as much as I love it.

So if you're here this morning and you feel like you've fallen

out of any good story that there ever was no connection, no

meaning, just random pieces of stuff happening to you and it's

like confusing and strange and you're not sure how to hold all

of it together. I just want to say that the word

of the Lord to you this morning might be that there is a story

for you to be a part of. And by being here in this

gathering, it's it's a great way to sort of take a step, take a

step toward that story. If you only knew, if you only

knew how caught up in this thing you already are.

If you only knew that the same spirit who filled that room in

Jerusalem is present in this room right now, that your life

is not a series of disconnected events, but a little part of a

story, a little side quest in the story that God has been

offering since long before you were born.

It could change the way that you think about everything.

And So what I want to do is invite you to stand, if you're

able, with me. And we're going to have the kids

come back in a moment. So parents actually stay where

you're at for for just a second and we're going to pray and

we're just going to ask for God to, to.