That night Paul had a vision.
A vision a dream, a shy whisper in the heart, a flash of intuition, a moment of awakening.
We gather here today to worship and we gather to break bread and we gather to baptise. This much we know.
This much we are prepared to acknowledge.
What else brings each of us here?

A vision a dream, a shy whisper in the heart, a flash of intuition, a moment of awakening.Maybe, maybe not? People enter into sacred space for many different reasons
And, as we know, most people are entering into institutional sacred space
less and less often.
Institutional sacred space. Funny combination of words.

Certainly, for many Australians,
the idea of belonging to an ‘institutional’ form of spirituality feels uncomfortable, restrictive, conservative and even alien.
It’s certainly not hip or groovy or even, for many, culturally acceptable.
But this doesn’t mean that Australians as a whole are anti spirituality,
its more that ‘religion’,
in the way that it is commonly understood, is seen as an anathema to the:
Vision, the dream, the shy whisper in the heart, the flash of intuition, the moment of awakening.
And so while many of us are happy to define ourselves as being ‘spiritual’ and are happy to connect loosely with others who are on similar ‘spiritual’ journeys
far fewer of us are prepared to imagine that we can find anything of value insides the walls of the church.
According to sociologist Garry Bouma in his new book ‘Australian Soul’,
Australians are generally no longer seeking direction and orthodoxy (or right teaching)
from an external hierarchy
but are instead,
seeking to find the ultimate source of authority in our own
experiences, senses and feelings.
Such a search is not new.

For centuries Christian’s have ‘listened to the still, small voice of the soul
and have recognised that the ‘kingdom of God’ (according to Christ anyway)
is to be found within. What Christians through the ages have also recognised though
is that once this small voice has been discovered,
most of us need some form of community
in which we can live out the teachings of this voice
and in which our spiritual reality can be made tangible
in the fruits of kindness and justice and love.
So the challenge for contemporary progressive Christianity
 is to find ways of breaking down
the barriers of prejudice and preconception
which assume that anything organised must be bad
and that anything ‘religious’ is devoid of a spiritual heart.
As someone born into the messy middle of Generation X,
I am constantly asked by my peers about what I do and why I do it.

When informed that I am a minister, people often then ask:
Does that mean your religious?
And then: Does that mean you believe in God?
I am always quick to answer questions with questions.
Not out of any attempt to avoid the issues but more to establish a definition of terms.
If religion means, as it does etymologically, that thing which connects:
connects us to the other and  connects us to the Spirit then
‘Yes, I am religious.’

And if God doesn’t mean an interventionist old man who sits in the sky
smiting and smoking and sending down sermons
but instead describes an ever expanding, indwelling, light of love
a love which can and has been experienced in a personal form,
then
‘Yes. I believe in God’.

In the story that we read today from the book of Acts we are given an insight
into the ancient beginnings of what has become a massive international institution.
We are given an insight, in other words into the beginnings of the church.
And it’s not a story about doctrines or rule books or who’s in our who’s out.
It’s a story about a woman whose theological conviction tells her that God’s powerful love transcends and dismantles the social barriers which humans construct.

It’s a story about a woman converted and baptised
not because she wants to belong to an institution
but because she has had a vision, a dream, a shy whisper in the heart, a flash of intuition, a moment of awakening…
which has led her to seek out a deeper meaning in her humble human everyday life. 
Maybe this ‘seeking’ is why we are all here?
What do you think?
What do you feel?
Maybe this seeking is why Clare and Ninian have come forward today
with their wee boy Charlie.

Maybe they, like Lydia and Paul, have listened to that whisper,
the one that comes from the spirit, spiritus, spiritual hungering soul
and they have answered that hunger by coming along to the place of religion,
the place which is called to connect.

And maybe this connecting place, this church universal,
fraught with cultural baggage though it is,
maybe
it can be a place wherein the spirit hunger can begin to be fed
and where the perennial human need for meaning, can be explored.
What do you think?
What do you feel?

A vision, a dream, a shy whisper in the heart, a flash of intuition, a moment of awakening…?
When was the last time you had such a moment?
And what did you do with it?

Ignore it? Deny it? Embrace it? Delight in it? Were you shocked or frightened?
Were you comforted? Or appalled?
God is calling us, through the spirit, into religion, into connection, everyday.
Its up to us, just as it was up to Lydia and  Paul and Ninian and Clare,
what happens next.