By The Rev. J.C. Austin
Over the past week or so I’ve been listening to the audiobook of the recently-released memoirs of Dave Grohl, the rock musician. Grohl founded the Foo Fighters, one of the biggest rock bands in the world for the last 25 years or so, and that after having been the renowned drummer for Nirvana, the seminal alternative rock band of the early 1990s.
I’ve always admired and even envied Grohl’s single-minded pursuit of his musical dreams. That drive runs like a throughline in the story of his musical success, which can make the major developments of his career seem like a tight sequential narrative on the surface.
But what the book helps you appreciate is that each of those major developments actually came not as a plan not as a seamless transition, but rather when Grohl found himself at what appeared to be a complete dead-end. He was a terrible high school student who neither cared about nor exceled at anything but music, and he saw that if he followed a conventional path, his best-case scenario was graduating high school and eking out a living as a day laborer.
When he managed to get invited into an experienced underground band called Scream, he dropped out of high school at 17, it was a lifeboat for him, but it also sank his already rocky relationship with his father, who disowned him on the spot.
Four years later, it looked like his best possible shot at making it as a musician was over, as Scream ran aground at the end of a West Coast tour with a key bandmate disappearing, which left him without even enough money to get back home to Virginia. He languished there for a long time, scraping together odd jobs and sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house with barely enough to eat and no clear idea of what might come next, until an old friend told him that Nirvana was looking for a new drummer.
Nirvana exploded into mainstream success a year or so later, and he was suddenly in the biggest band in the world for several years until Kurt Cobain, the band’s gifted but troubled singer and main songwriter, died by suicide, leaving him personally and professionally bereft, to the point that for the first time in his life, he wanted nothing to do with music and actively contemplated retirement at the age of 25, with no clear vision of what going on as a musician would mean.
After a year of grieving, though, he began to think about making music again, but the question still was how. He was startlingly offered the job of being the drummer for Tom Petty, one of the biggest rock stars around at the time. It would have been comfortable, lucrative, and another career-defining opportunity. But he ultimately turned it down, choosing instead to write his own songs and step out from behind his drum kit to sing them.
That was an enormous, almost foolhardy leap of faith for someone who was renowned as one of the best drummers of his generation but who had never publicly played guitar or sung a single song he had written. But he created a demo tape that ultimately became the first album of the Foo Fighters, a band that has gone on to sell over 30 million albums and win twelve Grammys, including four Best Rock Album awards.
The real insight of his memoirs is not actually about his single-minded pursuit of his dreams, and of that propelling him over adversity. That’s a story that we dearly, dearly love in U.S. culture: that if you believe and work hard enough, you can achieve anything and realize all your dreams. And so we tell versions of that story over and over again, of people who started in difficult, even seemingly impossible circumstances, but through their sheer grit and talent were able to achieve extraordinary things.
And, of course, there is truth in that story: talent does open doors of opportunity, and talent without vision and determination is often not enough. But the problem with that narrative is that it seems both linear and inevitable, like a mathematical equation: talent multiplied by drive equals success.
But that equation is missing a key variable: the dead-end. We don’t usually think about dead-ends as something good or generative; just the name, dead-end, sums it all up. When the way we are following dead-ends, it disappears, comes to an end, and we are left wondering where to go.
By definition, we can’t keep going in the direction that we were taking, because that has come to some kind of end. So the question then is, are we lost, or is there a new direction to take us on our way? It’s important to answer that, because the answer tells us everything about how we are to respond.
If you become lost in the wilderness, the general wisdom is to stay where you are, to let others find you rather than find your way out. That’s because if you keep moving, you’re not only likely to stay lost, you will make it harder for rescuers to find you because you will get further and further away from where you’re supposed to be. But if you’re not lost, and there really is a way forward that you just hadn’t seen yet, then that is an opportunity to be on your way even when you’re going in a new and unexpected direction.
That’s what this short little story in the book of Acts reminds us about. Apollos is a Jewish man from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, renowned in the ancient world as the center of knowledge and learning because of the Great Library which was still very much there in the first century, albeit in a state of slow decline.
Apollos seems to be a child of that city, impressive in both his eloquence and knowledge of the Scriptures. And, as the narrator tells us, “he had been instructed in the Way of the Lord.” As I mentioned in my newsletter article this week, “the Way” is how Christianity was known in its earliest stages before it was ever called Christianity. Christian faith was called “the Way of the Lord,” the Way of Jesus Christ.
It’s extraordinary how much depth and power is packed into that short simple word. In English, the word “way” can simply mean a general direction, but the Greek word hodos means a way in the sense of a road or a path. A road or a path is something that has been intentionally made to lead you on a journey towards a destination; it is something you follow, not something you find; following Jesus, by definition, is going where he has already gone rather than just where we think he might want us to go.
And “going” is at the very heart of it; the Way of Jesus Christ is a journey rather than a destination or a mere set of ideas. You can study the depths of Scripture and theology, as Apollos apparently did with great success, but if you learn about the Way of the Lord without following it, it would be like trying to appreciate the full culture of another country by simply reading the maps of it. And as a journey, it is something that is always in motion and unfolding, rather than something we arrive at and settle down into, no longer needing to move forward again.
You can see that in the short story of Apollos right here. He comes to Ephesus with great faith and learning and accomplishment, already an apostle with a powerful ministry, already proclaiming the gospel passionately and, as the narrator says, “accurately.” And yet even he doesn’t have it all figured out; even he doesn’t have the full story.
The narrator tells us that he “knew only the baptism of John,” meaning the baptism of repentance that John the Baptist preached as a means of preparing for the coming of Christ. That means he didn’t know baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, which brings with it the gift of the Holy Spirit as Christ promised and as we see in multiple stories earlier in the book of Acts.
And that baptism in the Spirit is a huge deal; it’s often said that the book of Acts should be understood not as “the Acts of the Apostles” but “the Acts of the Holy Spirit,” which in many ways is the main character of the whole book, driving both the story and the action forward.
What happens next is almost a nonstory, which is ironically a pretty big story. Priscilla and Aquila, it says, “took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately.” What they’re explaining is that he’s missing an important part of the story, the fact that Jesus brought a baptism in the Holy Spirit that is not simply repentance of sin, but a blessing of God’s presence and power and guidance in and through the Spirit both to us as individuals in Christ and together as Christ’s Church.
And Apollos simply accepts this teaching and incorporates it into his work, moving on into Greece (called Achaia in the text) with their encouragement and help through letters of introduction to the disciples to whom he was going. There is no sign that Apollos was defensive, or resistant, or competitive when they took him aside.
He simply realizes that what he thought was the end of the story was simply leading to a new and more important chapter, and what he thought was the end of his journey of faith was actually a place to take a new direction and a clearer path forward. And it is Priscilla and Aquila who help him do that, who become the Church Incarnate for him in this time of need.
There are a lot of metaphors and images of what the Church is supposed to be. Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent 19th century preacher and outspoken abolitionist, once said, “the Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.” A similar old saying, variously attributed, says “the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
The church as a sanctuary is one of the most common, of course, a place to seek safety from the dangers and distractions of the world. But I think the best one, and the one that I think we are best positioned and most fully called to be, is the church as a waystation. A waystation is a place that you stop while you’re on a journey, but it’s much more than just that.
I remember traveling in Chile in November 2001. I was teetering on the edge of burnout after two straight months of nonstop and emotionally devastating work in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City, where I had just begun my pastoral ministry less than a year before. I finally took a week or so of vacation around the Thanksgiving holiday and found a cheap flight to Chile, so that’s where I went.
One of the highlights was hiking in the spectacular Torres de Paine National Park in Patagonia. There’s a long loop trail around the massive rock towers that give the park its name, which takes days to complete, and you spend the night in waystations, which they call refugios: small simple lodges with bunk beds and a dining room. I remember on Thanksgiving itself they gave us a hearty breakfast, told us about a secret trail with a breathtaking view that we could take that day, and gave us packed lunches to take with us.
When we came back that night, we put our names down for dinner. The woman at the desk said, “You are American, yes?” I said that I was, and she smiled but didn’t say anything more. I thought it was a little random, but I smiled back and got cleaned up.
But when I came back and sat down for dinner, she set a plate down in front of me that had turkey, gravy, creamed corn, and sweet potatoes on it. I looked up at her in surprise, and she laughed. “It is the day to give thanks, yes?” she said.
And I looked down at the plate and back up at her again, marveling at the extraordinarily thoughtful and gracious hospitality, and how much effort she and her team must have gone to in getting and preparing roast turkey hundreds of miles from any town in the heart of Patagonia to make a few Americans feel at home on Thanksgiving. And for the first time in more than two months, I think, I smiled. “Yes,” I said; “it is the day to give thanks. So thank you.”
Being on the Way of Jesus as an individual is an enormous gift in itself, to live out a faith that is a journey rather than a destination or an achievement, and a journey that takes place on a path that has already been blazed for us by Jesus. But being a waystation or refugio on the Way of Jesus for each other and for every traveler we meet is the blessing and the calling for the Christian Church; it is the gift and calling of this church.
All of our worship services, all of our education and formation ministries, all of our service and justice work, all that we do is in the service of being Christ’s waystation for everyone on the journey: those who are walking with purpose and strength; those who can barely put one foot in front of the other anymore; those who thought they knew where they were going and why but seem to have come to an unexpected dead-end.
It is our blessing and calling to welcome each and all of them: sometimes inviting them to take a seat at the table and serve them with the sustenance of Christ for body, mind, and spirit; and sometimes going out to meet them where they are on the road, to bring them sustenance and walk with them on the way.
And when we do so, then every day is truly “the day to give thanks,” because every gift of our hands and our hearts and our resources and our presence and our prayers is an act of thanks to God for making the way of Christ, meeting us on it, and guiding us home.