Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
How many times has someone said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this.” Usually it’s a joke, but sometimes it’s a story. We all know people who tell the same story or set of stories nearly every time we see them. Reruns are fine up to a certain point, but just how many times can a person watch an episode of “I Love Lucy” or “Cheers”? It’s the same with scripture. Do we have to read that psalm again? How many times have I heard this parable? I know it by heart.
Or do we? There is the story of the new preacher who arrived and preached her first sermon. Everyone said how good it was. The next Sunday she preached the same sermon. Most everyone cut her some slack, saying that she’d been too busy getting settled to write a new sermon. On the third Sunday she preached the same sermon. The chair of the pastor nominating committee decided that he ought to check into this. “You’ve preached the same sermon three weeks running. Is there a problem?” “No,” she said, “when you
hear what I’m saying in this first sermon, I’ll preach my second sermon.”
We think we know most everything about a certain passage of scripture and that there’s nothing more to be gained from it. Scripture isn’t that simple. You remember the story of the four blind people who encountered an elephant. One felt the trunk and thought it was a big snake. Another felt the tail and thought it was a rope. The third felt a leg and thought it was a tree and the fourth felt the side and thought it was a barn. We are all sightless individuals when it comes to meeting up with scripture and we all encounter it differently. There is more to scripture than meets the eye or ear.
The story of Cornelius in today’s reading from Acts is a familiar story. Luke has this habit of telling things several times in order to get a point across. Peter’s vision is first told in Acts 10. Peter was praying on the roof of his house in Joppa and had his visionary experience. Just then the messenger from the Italian Company centurion, Cornelius, delivered the invitation to go to Caesarea, meet with Cornelius and his household, and tell the Good News of Jesus. Peter went to the Gentile home and realized that God had purposefully sent him there not only to preach the gospel of the risen Christ, but to expand Peter’s understanding of what is supposed to be done with the Good News.
Of course the leaders of the Christ community in Jerusalem get word of what Peter did and they were more than a little upset with Peter. “Good old Peter, you never know what he is going to do.”
So the next time Peter came to Jerusalem they demanded an explanation from him. That’s when Luke repeats all the salient details from the original telling. The telling irony is that the criticism by the Jerusalem leaders was the very same disbelief and hesitancy that Peter expressed when he received his vision. He had to see the vision three times before he began to get its drift. And it was only after he got to Cornelius’ house that it dawned on him what it was all about.
We can’t dismiss out of hand the response of the church leaders in Jerusalem. They began their faith journeys as traditional Jews. Every Jew knew that it was not permitted to eat with non-Jews. Their deepest anxiety was that they would become like the Gentiles if they had table fellowship with them. The only way to ease their fears was for Gentiles to be circumcised and to go through all the ritual purification rites.
Now the issue has become deeper. It is more than rubbing shoulders with Gentiles or eating out of the same bowls. The issue is whether the Christians of Jewish heritage can share the Holy Spirit with Gentiles. Most Jewish believers thought that God offered salvation only to the Jews because God had given his law to them. A group in Jerusalem believed that Gentiles could be saved, but only if they followed all the Jewish laws and traditions—in essence, if they became Jews before they became Christians.
The meeting between the Jerusalem leaders and Peter didn’t put and end to this internal debate. It would be the topic of discussion at the Jerusalem council which Luke will detail in chapter 15. Both groups were mistaken. God chose the Jews and taught them his laws so they could bring the message of salvation to the whole world. God had told Abram that all families of earth would be blessed because of him (Genesis 12:3). Isaiah’s second song had God saying, “I will also appoint you [my servant] as light to the nations so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
As is often the case, the critics criticized first and gathered their information later. Before Peter arrived back in Jerusalem, the news reached the apostles and other believers in Judea that the Gentiles had received the word of God. Instead of rejoicing, some of the Jewish believers criticized him. The criticism of Peter was not that he had gone to Caesarea or that he had preached to Gentiles but rather that he had eaten with them.
Thankfully, Peter didn’t let his temper run away with him. He patiently explained step by step what had happened to him, how he had reacted, how he had responded to the invitation to tell the Good News, and what God accomplished through Peter’s acceptance of a new dimension in ministry. Peter’s careful retelling of the story wiped out many of the Jerusalem leaders’ misconceptions about what he had done and filled in the gaps in their knowledge. It was like having instant replay and the referees saw that the call had to be reversed. Peter hadn’t fouled. He had done right.
The leaders in Jerusalem had been too busy keeping tabs on who Peter ate with and not paying a lot of attention to what he was accomplishing. We love to keep score, don’t we? “I did better than you did.” “That’s an error, you lose.”
Church growth maven Bill Easum writes that churches are always keeping score. How many people did we have in worship? Did we meet the budget? Were the chairs and tables left they way they were found? Jesus said nothing about things like that. He gave the believers only one metric for scoring the church’s work: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).
While attendance and income are important, Easum suggests some different measures:
- How many new disciples do we have this year?
- How many of our people are being mentored for ministry in their neighborhoods?
- How many of our people are we sending out to connect with lost people? It doesn’t matter what you send them out to do as long as it results in four things: (1) blesses those being served; (2) blesses those serving; (3) creates visibility for the church; and (4) grows the Kingdom of God.(1)
Easum continues:
“The primary mission of the local church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. If I believe that, then everything my church does should be pointed toward that goal. If I believe that, then I must also believe that making disciples doesn’t begin inside the church, it begins out in the community with non-Christians.”(2)
After Peter’s meeting in Jerusalem, Luke reports that believers who had fled from Jerusalem after Stephen’s martyrdom went to a variety of places, including Antioch, where large numbers of people became believers. Easum argues that the Jerusalem church tried hard to keep the movement within the Jewish race. And when the Jerusalem church finally, reluctantly allowed the Gospel to go to the Gentiles, it hunkered down and was comfortable merely taking care of itself to the point that Paul had to raise money to keep the church afloat. Not a very good example for us today.
In contrast, the Antioch church is the mother of most, if not all, the Gentile churches in the world today. It was the Antioch church that caught the spirit of Matthew 28:18-19 where Jesus instructed us to “make disciples of all nations [people groups].” It was the Antioch church that sent church-planter missionaries out to the far corners of the known world. The Antioch Church is the example for us today.
When we talk about the New Testament church we usually think of the Holy Spirit coming on believers in Jerusalem. But if it had been left to that Jerusalem church, would any of us be Christians today?
Shall we be the Jerusalem Church or the Antioch Church? It was the Antioch church that, like Peter, dared to be obedient to God and reach beyond itself. That’s what this table is all about. We receive in spirit the bread and juice remembering Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t just for us, but for the world – past, present, and future. As we often say at the end of the Great Thanksgiving at this table, “As this bread is Christ’s body for us, send us out to be the body of Christ in the world.”
Be fed at this table. Be food for the neighborhood and the world. Be an Antioch church and reach out.
(1) Bill Easum, https://exponential.org/new-scorecard/
(2) Bill Easum, http://churchgrowtharticles.com/why-i-prefer-antioch-over-jerusalem-church/
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Acts 9:1-20; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
I imagine that most of you don’t think of yourselves as artists. Some of you are good photographers, fine cooks, capable writers, skilled wood workers, and devoted musicians. The rest of us make no claim to being very good at anything. If you are good at something, I apologize and mean no disrespect. But for the rest of us, it may be that in our humbleness we don’t think that we can do anything special. Or in an honest evaluation of ourselves, we don’t think we have a chance to do something important because we have burned too many bridges behind us and gone down too many rabbit trails to qualify as useful to God. Let me assure us that God’s grace is far bigger than all our misspent youth and disappointing mid-life. God may yet have a skill, a talent, a calling for us. We are unlikely artisans whom God may yet call.
Some of the greatest Christian art has been produced by really rotten Christians. Here are a few examples of how God uses unlikely artisans to advance the gospel.
Check out “The Calling of St. Matthew” by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The apostle is in a dark and dirty Roman tavern, surrounded by lowlifes. That’s because Caravaggio spent plenty of time in these pubs himself, drinking and brawling. In 1606, this hot-tempered artist killed a Roman thug in a fight following a tennis match.
Here’s Rembrandt’s 1633 etching “The Good Samaritan” It’s so down to earth that it has a dog relieving itself in the foreground. Members of the Dutch Reformed Church loved Rembrandt’s realistic artwork but didn’t appreciate his relationships with women. He painted his wife, Saskia, as a prostitute in a tavern, sitting in the lap of one of Jesus’ well-known characters, the prodigal son. After Saskia died, he became lovers with his housekeeper and then left her for another servant, causing his housekeeper to take him to court. Messy, messy, messy. Rembrandt lost the support of church members because of his behavior and died in poverty in 1669 — but not before he painted “Return of the Prodigal Son.” Like the sinful son in the parable, Rembrandt knew he needed forgiveness.
Salvador Dali created “The Sacrament of the Last Supper.” Although born to devout
Catholic parents in Spain, he was an atheist who indulged every outlandish whim, including the throwing of orgies that he called “erotic masses.” Dali returned to his Catholic roots after moving to the United States, but some people questioned his sincerity. Dali may have been motivated more by money than by spirituality, bragging that postcards of his Last Supper sold more copies than all of the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael combined.
Great Christian art was produced by not-so-great Christian artists — if indeed “Christian” at all.
God has been dealing with unlikely artisans for a long time. Abram wasn’t all that honest, passing his wife Sarai off to Pharaoh as his sister in order to save his skin. Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and blessing and out-tricked his father-in-law Laban through selective sheep breeding. Moses killed an Egyptian foreman and then went into hiding. Jonah was a poor sport, Jeremiah a complainer, and Matthew a hated tax-collector. By our standards, God was a lousy human resources manager, choosing the most unlikely artisans to do important work.
The Pharisee named Saul certainly qualifies as an unlikely candidate. He is clearly no saint, “spewing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples” as he went to Damascus to round up believers. But Christ called him and used him to do great things. Jesus says, “[H]e is the agent I have chosen to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites.” Saul is “a personal representative” (Eugene Peterson’s rendering) and Jesus employs him for a defined embassy. Just as Jesus used Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Dali. Just as he uses us. (Not that the apostle Paul was a Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Dali — or one of us for that matter.)
There are two unlikely artisans in today’s reading from Acts. First there is Saul, soon to be re-purposed from persecutor to proponent of the “Way” of Christ and renamed Paul. He knew all the arguments against Christ, so with the proverbial flip of a switch he knew all the arguments for Christ. The evangelical history in Acts and the bounty of Paul’s letters bear that out.
The second unlikely artisan in the story is Ananias. After Saul’s companions took him to Damascus where he spent three days unable to see, the Lord spoke to a Christian named Ananias, instructing him to go to Saul and lay hands on him so he might regain his sight. But Ananias was understandably unenthusiastic about this assignment. We can understand that. If we knew Saul’s reputation as Ananias and others did, we wouldn’t want to welcome him into the fellowship of believers, let alone go anywhere near him. Ananias responded to Jesus’s word, saying, “Lord, I have heard many reports about this man. People say he has done horrible things to your holy people in Jerusalem. He’s here with authority from the chief priests to arrest everyone who calls on your name.”
Ananias knew that Saul was bent on wiping out the early church. Saul couldn’t possibly be of any use to Jesus or the church. He couldn’t possibly create a thing of beauty for the glory of God in Christ. But just as Jesus saw potential in Saul and called him to be an apostle, so Jesus also saw potential in Ananias to be an unlikely artisan to release Saul from his blindness and introduce him to the reality of the risen Christ.
Ananias wasn’t being asked to give up his lifelong career as Jesus had asked Peter, Andrew, James, and John to give up fishing. Jesus simply said to Ananias, “I have one thing I need you to do for me. Go to Judas’ house on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul. He is praying. In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias enter and put his hands on him to restore his sight.” When Ananias went as directed, he laid his hands on Saul. The apostle-to-be regained his sight and was filled with the Holy Spirit. Within days, Saul was preaching in the synagogues proclaiming that Jesus is the Son of God. He went on to become the apostle Paul — the one who spread the gospel throughout the Mediterranean region.
Paul is a saintly sinner, an unlikely artisan, a man who admitted to the Corinthians, “I’m the least important of the apostles. I don’t deserve to be called an apostle, because I harassed God’s church. I am what I am by God’s grace, and God’s grace hasn’t been for nothing. In fact, I have worked harder than all the others—that is, it wasn’t me but the grace of God that is with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:9-10).
One of the most amazing things about God’s grace is that it works through sinful human beings like Paul and through ordinary people – unlikely artisans – like Ananias, like us. We are both saints and sinners at the same time. Martin Luther described us as simul justus et peccator — simultaneously righteous and sinful. This means we don’t have to achieve some kind of moral perfection before the Lord begins to work through us. Instead, God’s grace is doing great things while we are still struggling with sin. And as ordinary individuals we are unlikely artisans, called to special service at unexpected times and often in ordinary circumstances.
Jesus isn’t asking us to give up our career as retirees to do some monumental work like Paul did. We don’t have to be perfect before God will use us. Yes, it’s important for us to repent of our sins and strive to live a Christlike life, but God will work the divine purposes out — regardless of how righteous we are. After all, God is in charge, not weak human beings.
It’s okay to be an unlikely artisan.
Michele Hershberger, a Mennonite in Oregon, discovered this in a personal way when she was praying one day and heard God say, “Go buy Vonda some groceries.” Now Vonda was a difficult person — a woman who owed Michele $500 and who always had a chip on her shoulder. Michele came up with a thousand reasons not to respond to God’s call, but in the end she bought two bags of groceries and left them anonymously on Vonda’s porch.
Michele forgot about Vonda, except to bemoan her lost money. But then, six months later, God nudged her to visit Vonda. Michele drove to Vonda’s home, went inside and then — for the very first time — Vonda began to tell her story. She told of times of hardship and abuse at the hands of her husband and spoke of a particular Friday night when she was facing another weekend without food. She borrowed a gun from a friend and decided she would shoot her children and then herself. On the way home, she prayed, “If I ever needed a miracle, it’s now.”
When Vonda pulled into her driveway, she saw two bags of groceries. “An angel sent them,” she said. And Michele, who had been so reluctant to help Vonda on that Friday night, never told her otherwise.(1)
God creates blessed lives with unlikely artisans. We have been blessed from time to time by the work of unlikely artisans. We have been used by God as unlikely artisans, whether we knew it or not. Obedient to God’s call, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus can still use us, unlikely artisans that we are. And he will. Maybe even yet today.
General Resource: “Saintly Sinners,” Homiletics, April 18, 2010.
(1) Hershberger, Michele. A Christian View of Hospitality: Expecting Surprises (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1999) by above.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Acts 5:17-42; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31
Here we are, the Sunday after Easter, which is really the second of seven Sundays of Easter. This is a lot like the disciples and women being holed up wherever it was. There aren’t as many of us as there were last week. We are exhausted after the hectic, 40-day, Lenten wilderness journey. There was the thought of foot-washing and the baffling action of Jesus breaking bread, passing it around with a cup of wine, and calling them his body and blood. Then there was the drowsy nighttime trek to pray in the garden which was interrupted by armed temple guards, the running away in the overnight cold, the dawn trial, and the high noon crucifixion.
The introverts among us have been overwhelmed by having to meet all the faces at the cross. Even for extroverts that was an emotionally draining experience. We were done in by the 7 a.m. first service of Easter. We overdosed on hard-boiled eggs and chocolate rabbits. We made ourselves hoarse shouting “Alleluias” at the mid-morning worship and the evening vespers. And now we don’t know what to think. We are as foggy and dazed and put out as Thomas. And now, after getting to his “My Lord and my God,” we find out we have got to celebrate another six weeks. We can’t live at this pace. Is this eternal life worth all this?
Martin Luther claimed that for every church that God built, the devil built a chapel along side. The reality is that since the first God-focused church was built, the devil’s chapel has grown so large and tall that has been able send its choir on the road so that his siren song is sung everywhere. It is not a song of “alleluias” or “glorias” or “hosannas.” The tune the devil loves to hear is the discordant sound of a million voices all singing their own song – no harmony, no melody, no chorus – only a din of solos.
This “song” which the devil so loves to hear has only one rule of composition: The first person singular is all there is. There is no first person plural (“we”) in the devil’s chorus, no third person singular (“she” or “he”) to be concerned with, no third person plural (“they”) to consider. Everything and everyone is intently focused on “I,” to the exclusion of all else.
Ulysses S. Grant once admitted, “I only know two tunes – one is “Yankee Doodle,” and the other isn’t.” Increasingly in our country (and the world as well), we know only two tunes – one is "The ‘I’ Song,” and the other isn’t.
Everyone who is busily belting out this song of self-love, this “I” song doesn’t have the other song – God’s song. For them God doesn’t exist, at least not in the way that Jesus wants us to know God. Rather it seems that there is no God except the exalted “I,” nothing higher than oneself, nothing but oneself. The Earl of Gurney, in Peter Barnes’ play The Ruling Class, when asked how he knew he was God, replied, “Simple. When I pray to him, I find I’m talking to myself.” (1) The existence of some higher authority outside the self is seen to be meaningless because the world of the self is wholly self-contained. We live “The World According to Me.” No one else enters it, no one else leaves it. “Others” are perceived as bothersome, burdensome or in-the-way baggage. Just like when someone photo-bombs a picture a person is trying to take, just like on live television sports when the crowd behind the commentators’ desk hold up signs and waves to get attention.
The “I” song is being sung louder than ever. Just listen to the current political rhetoric of every candidate running for office at any level: “‘I’ this,” and “‘I’ that”; “‘I’ will this,” and “‘I’ won’t that.” And the voters all ask, “What is in it for me? Who’s got the best deal.”
The reality of Easter is that there is no “I” in it. Easter requires a community. Jesus told Mary, “Go and tell the disciples.” The disciples stick together in the hours, days, and weeks after the crucifixion and resurrection. In today’s gospel reading, they are all assembled except for Thomas. He comes the next time around. In next week’s reading, they are fishing on the lake shore. The disciples are a “they,” not an “I.”
Peter makes that very clear in his response to the flabbergasted, frustrated, and enraged temple leaders.
“We must obey God rather than humans! The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God has exalted Jesus to his right side as leader and savior so that he could enable Israel to change its heart and life and to find forgiveness for sins. We are witnesses of such things, as is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Emphasis added.)
We like Peter putting the pompous religious authorities in their place. But there is also great discomfort. Each of us “I”s like to be right, like to sing our “I” song, like not to be challenged, countered, or shown up to be wrong.
Peter made no claim of self-motivation; he presented no personal agenda. He and the apostles were not working outside the bounds of authority. They were working for the sake of the one absolute authority – God. The whole of the biblical witness is this: We are not our own. God is God, and we are not. God is the Absolute of all absolutes, the Absolute that makes relative all other absolutes. Especially all the “I”s.
Peter and the apostles were bold together. They were bold because they were empowered. They were bold because they were the church, brought together by the Holy Spirit and based on the singular good news that God had raised Christ from death. They were bold because they were witnesses to the before and to the after of God’s saving work. They were bold.
Most of us today are less than bold. The boldness the apostles displayed had nothing to do with physical strength or consistent energy levels. Their boldness had to do with spiritual strength. If they had sung the “I” song, they would have turned tail and run quickly away. But they didn’t. They sang God’s song and so they rejoiced because “they had been regarded as worthy to suffer disgrace for the sake of the name.” That is why they continued to teach and proclaim in both the temple and in private homes the good news that Jesus was the Christ.
Most of us were raised in the age when we went to places to get things. And that included going “to” church. We went to church to get God, to get inoculated against sin, to get a patina of respectability. The apostles didn’t go “to” church. They were the church. Wherever they were, the good news was present and was proclaimed. That’s the story of the Book of Acts – the apostles and Paul, Silas, Barnabas and others living out the good news of the resurrection of Christ wherever they were. And they were privileged to be abused because of it.
When we were baptized the name of Christ was added to our name. That is because we were baptized – changed through the experience of water – into the death and into the resurrection of Christ. Therefore, we don’t go to get the gospel. We are the gospel – we the community of believers in this time and place as well as in every time and every place.
Our message is simple: Jesus Christ is Lord. He is the Lord of the whole world. He sings God’s song. There is no “I” in Easter. Easter is about all of us together boldly living the gospel that transforms the world one person at a time, whether they are native or immigrant, male or female, young or old, widowed, orphaned, single, married, red, white, yellow, black, green or purple, rich or poor, saintly appearing or overtly sinning. Easter is about every “they” we can imagine and not about our “I.”
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
General Resource: “The Devil’s I,” Homiletics, April 23, 1995; http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=2433.
(1) Barnes, Plays: One (London: Methuen Drama, 1989), 26.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
