Watching for the wind

Every time I walk into church and see the shiny gold serving trays stacked prominently on the little table at the front of the church, I can't help but think:  Short sermon today.
It's a hold-over from when I was a kid. We celebrated "the Lord's Supper" or "communion'' - the act of symbolically eating Christ's body broken for me and drinking Christ's blood shed for my sins - once a quarter, I think it was. And because our church was pretty strict about the service not going much past noon (couldn't let the Methodists and Presbyterians get the jump in line at Morrison's), it meant the pastor would cut his sermon short.
It wasn't like Baptism. That was always done after the church service, so it meant you had to hang around a little longer - although for some reason I didn't really mind, even as a kid.  Maybe it was because we didn't really go to Morrison's for Sunday lunch anyway, so we didn't worry about getting caught at the end of a long line.
Recently, while on vacation, we visited the church my brother-in-law attends. We actually enjoy attending new churches while on vacation, to see what the music is like or the preacher. This particular Sunday, however, was both Baptism and Communion Sunday, which was disappointing because when you're just visiting a church, you want to hear the preacher to see what he's like and compare him to yours.

It struck me, on this particular Sunday, how Protestant (we are Protestant) church services can be so different. We went to a church in Daphne where the band was rocking, with a bass player who literally hopped around all over the stage while he was playing to the point of (for us as newcomers) being a distraction. We went to a church in the mountains of North Carolina where everyone showed up in jeans and shirts, very mountain casual, and the service reflected that kind of mountain, homespun, bluegrass attitude.
We've been to "high" churches with robed choirs and pipe organs and liturgies, and "low" churches that used videos and special lighting and props to enhance the service.
The church my sister-in-law attends in Memphis has a huge stage, with a kind of combo band on one side, a small orchestra on the far opposite side, a choir behind the orchestra, a small group of casually dressed singers in front of the band, and a casually dressed worship leader in the middle, with video screens above it all, and all of it going on at the same time. I know it sounds like chaos, but it actually worked.
And yet when it comes to something like Baptism or The Lord's Supper, all these churches tend to become the same. Whatever the attitude had been - casual and hand clapping or formal and stand-offish - when the pastor brings someone down into the water and says "I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit'' or those shiny plates are distributed and everyone takes a piece of wafer or cracker and the preacher says, "This is the bread, broken as a symbol  ..." everyone seems to automatically hush into silence at the sacredness of the moment.
I've never known anyone who dozes off during a Baptism or during the Lord's Supper. I'm not saying everyone who participates is fully focused on what is going on, that everyone inherently finds deep meaning in the action, but even small kids who normally squirm and draw in the margins of the order of worship and dig through their mother's purses for a mint tend to sit up and get caught up in what is going on.

I don't want to make too much out of this. I realize anything that's out of the ordinary will catch your attention, and because we don't do Baptism and Communion every Sunday it becomes out of the ordinary and maybe that's all there is to the attention we give it.
But I wonder if there isn't more.
You don't see the Spirit of God when it passes, any more than you see the wind when it blows through the trees. You know how it is - you're standing there and suddenly see the tops of the trees start to sway and you don't say "what's going on?" You say, "Ah, the wind."
You see a boat out on the water, going nowhere. And then suddenly the sails stretch out and the boat starts to move and you don't say, "How'd he do that?" You say, "It's the wind."
You walk along a street and your hat suddenly jumps off the back of you head. You don't ask if your head or had suddenly changed sizes; you think "Wow! The wind ..."

You don't see the wind. How do you know it came through? You just do. You see the result of the winds' passing.
It  see that with people, too. You've known them for years, going about their lives, acting the way they've always acted, and then suddenly one day they're different. It's like they found a purpose, or a goal. You don't know what happened or why or why now and not six months ago or six months from now; you just know it happened.
Maybe it doesn't stick. Maybe it comes and goes or maybe it is only there for a little while and then the person gets beat down and loses whatever it was.
But when I sit and watch someone up there with their arm on the preacher's forearm and he asks why they are their and they say they want to make a public identification with the life of Jesus, or when I watch people silently take that small piece of cracker and cup of liquid and treat it with such sacredness, bringing a moment of solemnity to lives that are soon right back to catching up on the latest gossip or worrying about paying bills or fighting with their kids or going to work ... I can't help but notice.
Maybe it's because those are visible acts that are the result of our faith.
And maybe anytime we actually see someone acting out what they believe, we realize it's special and we have to stop and watch because - unfortunately - it seems all to rare that get the chance to witness that.

Remember your baptism. Remember that moment of tasting.
If you're like me, you'll forget from time to time, maybe more often than you'd  like.
But on those Sundays when you walk in and see those shiny gold serving trays stacked so neatly down front, or the lights go down and you hear the swish of water as the pastor steps into the baptistery, you remember.
Just like the wind.