Saturday, May 22, 2010
May 16, 2010 - Easter 7
Well, today is the 7th Sunday of Easter. Next week is Pentecost, & we'll hear the story of how the Spirit descended on the disciples in Jerusalem. But all through these weeks since Jesus' resurrection, we've been looking at what happened after Pentecost, hearing the stories of how the Spirit inspired and enabled those early apostles to carry out God's work. Mostly what we've seen them doing is sharing the good news, witnessing to what God has done, reaching out across social and cultural boundaries to different kinds of people, telling the story of their faith in Jesus & doing some amazing things themselves while they're at it, despite the challenges and obstacles they faced.
And today is no exception. Once again we turn to the book of Acts and hear this story of Paul and Silas. We pick up where we left off last week, with Paul & his companions in the Roman colony of Philippi, continuing their mission to spread the gospel everywhere they went.
Now, Paul has a way of getting himself in trouble wherever he goes. He was not a subtle man. Just by being who he was, he made his presence known. Buy here they are, not trying to draw attention to themselves, but this psychic slave girl won't leave them alone, following them around & calling out after them wherever they went. So finally Paul's had it, and he casts out the spirit that had possessed her, which opens a whole new can of worms. Because her owners don't much appreciate losing a steady source of income, and they come gunning for Paul & Silas, dragging them into the marketplace, accusing them of causing a disturbance. The crowd gets in on it too, and before you know it, the men in charge have Paul & Silas stripped and beaten and locked up securely – in the innermost cell, with their feet in shackles so there would be no chance of escape.
It's kind of enough to make your head spin, it all happens so fast. And if it were any of us, we'd be bemoaning the injustice of it all, or worrying and afraid of what will happen next. But not Paul & Silas. Somehow, someway, their faith in this same God they have been teaching & preaching about kicks in, and come midnight, they are praying and singing to God – and all of their fellow prisoners were listening to them, probably amazed that anyone could sing and pray in such a desperate time & place.
This story got me to thinking about a more contemporary disciple I once knew. Her name was Tanya. I met her when I was on internship. And while she probably never would have compared herself with Paul, I think she had an awful lot in common with him, in this story at least. You see, by the time I met her, Tanya was deep in the grips of MS – multiple sclerosis. She was still pretty young, maybe in her 40s, with a husband and 2 kids in middle school. Her battle with MS was particularly severe; it had taken over her body very quickly. At that point, Tanya was basically a prisoner in her own body. She was confined to a big motorized wheelchair, but she didn't even have enough control in her hands to operate it herself. She had to be fed by others, food that didn't take too much effort to chew and swallow. Even her speech was affected. It was sad, a modern tragedy. And most people in the same situation would be angry or depressed, lamenting and accusing God, or maybe losing faith altogether. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Tanya went through anger and doubts and questions and sadness. She was human after all. But when I would go to her house to visit her, what always struck me was the depth of her faith. Everywhere you looked, hung on the walls, were handmade pages with Tanya's favorite Bible verses, psalms rejoicing in God's goodness, passages of praise and trust. Tanya loved music, loved to sing, and once organized a gathering of folks from the church to come for a hymn-sing at her house, where together we sang hymns and songs of faith and courage and hope. Tanya wasn't a preachy woman, but her whole life was a testimony to God's love, to God's presence in the midst of her darkest days, to the power of God to lift her up and give her that peace that passes all understanding. Whether she knew it or not, whether she meant to be or not, Tanya was a witness to all of us who were prisoners in our own ways – prisoners of fear and anxiety over our own health issues or financial struggles or families that were falling apart. Tanya became a light for us in our own darkness, just as Paul and Silas were for their fellow prisoners, and even for the jailer responsible for keeping them locked up.
What I take away from Tanya's example and the story of Paul and Silas singing in prison is that even when people are held captive, even when we feel trapped, God has the power to set us free – free from whatever holds us down, free to see God at work even in the most disastrous of circumstances, free to sing and to share the good news of God's love with those around us.
And I know that we don't always feel this kind of faith. When we're in the middle of the muck and the mire and hurts of life, when we're feeling imprisoned by our circumstances, we may not feel like singing and praying. We may have a hard time seeing the good news of what God has done and is doing and will do, let alone think about sharing that good news with others. But let me tell you, even if you don't feel like you have it on your own, you're part of it just by showing up here on Sunday morning – even when you're not sure your faith is strong enough, even when you're not sure what you believe anymore, even if you come here not knowing why, hardly daring to hope – just showing up is a witness to someone. As we gather to sing and pray and praise, bringing our questions and our doubts and our fears along with our hopes and our joys, we are witnesses to each other and to the world, witnesses to the Spirit of God who somehow draws us here, who sings to us in the darkness of our souls, reminding us that in our captivity, there is One with the power to set us free – Jesus, who promises never to leave us or forsake us. Jesus, who meets us each week in this holy meal, who feeds us with his very self in the gift of bread and wine, who speaks to us through the words of the Bible and each other. Jesus, who died on a cross and rose again, so that we might know that there is no prison, no power that can hold him down – and that in him, there is nothing that can hold us down forever either. He is the one who stands with us in the darkness of our prisons; he is the good news we bring, and he is the one who inspires us to sing. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
May 9, 2010 - Easter 6
I want you to think for a minute of a time you got good news. I mean really good news. Maybe it was when you got that acceptance letter from the college you always wanted to go to and that you got a scholarship too! Maybe it was that big promotion at work or when you closed on your house. Maybe it was finding out that the cancer was in remission. Whatever it was, think about that – and how you felt – and what you did next.
I know that for me, and probably for most of you, when I get good news, when something good happens, one of the 1st things I want to do is tell somebody. When Andy & I met and started dating, pretty soon after that, I was calling up family and friends. It was good news – and I wanted to share it! And the day that we got engaged, we were burning up the phone lines with that news too. When we were nearing the end of seminary and found out, generally anyway, where we would be going for our 1st calls, e-mails and phone calls went out to just about everyone we knew. And when we found out recently that we're going to have a child – well, that was good news too, and we had to share it. Because good news is for sharing. You can't help yourself! And usually, it has nothing to do with convincing anybody about it. You just want the people who matter to you to be involved. You want them to be a part of your excitement and joy and anticipation of what is to come.
And yet, when it comes to sharing the gospel, another word for good news, most of us aren't nearly so eager to tell the world. Sharing the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus gets us all tied up in knots; instead of excited, we get nervous. Maybe it's because we think we won't know what to say. Maybe you've had some experiences with people who were a little bit pushy & confrontational in their desire to share their faith – and you don't want to ever be like that. Or maybe it just seems too risky and you don't want to get tagged as one of those freaky Jesus-y people or get into an argument with someone who has different beliefs that you do. Whatever the reason, most of us tend to keep this good news about what God has done and is doing to ourselves. We hear these stories of the early disciples going from town to town and country to country and we think, “well, better them than me! Good for you, Paul! Keep up the good work, and keep me out of it!”
But good news is for sharing! It's part of what God calls all followers of Jesus to do. People of a resurrection faith have eyes that are open to see what God is up to in the world, in our communities, in our own lives. People of a resurrection faith are constantly on the look-out for the good things God is doing – whether it's through individuals or congregations or volunteer organizations or governments, or even through those things we call coincidences, the times when things happen that have no natural or logical explanation, and yet there they are. People of resurrection faith are aware of how God is at work – and then tell those stories!
That's what Paul was so good at: at telling the story, at looking for those ways and places where God might already be at work and then going into those places and seeking out people to tell the good news to. That's what we see in this story from Acts today. Paul, who saw a vision and was convinced that God was calling him and his companions, Silas and Timothy and Luke (yep, Luke, the author of the gospel and of the book of Acts), to go to Macedonia, to proclaim the good news there. They arrive in Philippi and stay there for some days, and when the Sabbath comes around, they head out of town. They go down by the river, where “they supposed there was a place of prayer.” There they find a group of women, including Lydia, this rather unusual woman, at least in her day. She's far from her home of Thyatira, having sailed across that same sea, perhaps coming to Philippi on business. She sounds like she runs her own business, dealing in purple cloth, which was a luxury cloth, only affordable by the wealthy. But for whatever reason, Paul and Lydia find themselves together that morning. Lydia is a worshiper of God, Luke tells us, which most likely means that she was interested in and attracted to the God of the Jewish faith, but hadn't converted to Judaism.
And so Paul and company sit down with these women and he begins to tell them about what this God has been doing in the world, how God sent Jesus to live on earth, to teach people about God's love for them, to give his life that they might experience that love, and how on the 3rd day, God raised Jesus from the dead! And the Lord, who was already at work in that place long before Paul ever showed up, opened Lydia's heart to “listen eagerly” to what Paul had to say. Sometimes we think of evangelism as some kind of burden, as a whole lot of pressure to say the right things and convince people to believe – but Paul knew it wasn't about him, and that what happened wasn't all up to him. His job wasn't to convince Lydia or anyone else that he was right; his job was just to share his good news – because good news is for sharing, and just like the rest of us, when Paul had good news, he wanted others to be a part of it. He wanted them to experience it for themselves, to feel his joy, to be comforted with that same peace, to experience the same amazing grace in their lives that knowing Jesus had brought to his.
God was at work in Lydia's heart that day. God opened her up to hear what Paul had to say, to be changed by it – and she was changed! Good news happens to her that day – and she does what anyone does when they have good news – she goes and tells somebody. Because good news is for sharing! We know that she shares it, because Luke tells us that she and her household were baptized – which to mean sounds like she went and gathered up any family she had, her servants, the people she was connected to, and told them what Paul had said that day, what God had done in her life down by the river – and they all are baptized. They become followers of Jesus. And then she jumps in, joining them in this mission to share the good news the best way she knows how... she invites Paul and the other men to come and stay at her house. She puts her house and all of her resources at their disposal. She gives them a home while they are in Philippi, a place to go out from as they work in the city. She becomes a partner with them in sharing the good news.
You see, you don't have to be like Paul to tell the story - he's a pretty intimidating model, with all his missionary traveling and church planting and writing that huge chunk of the New Testament - but all of us can follow the example of Lydia, sharing the good news with those we know and love and diving in to offer ourselves and what we have to God's work in the world. Because all around us are people who weighed down by bad news, by health problems, by addictions, by money issues, by family turmoil... The world is filled with bad news. But we have good news! We know the One who gives peace in the midst of trouble, who promises never to leave us, who brings the hope of new life. That he loves us and cares for us is certainly good news – and good news is for sharing! So get out there and tell somebody, would ya?
Amen.
Friday, May 7, 2010
May 2, 2010 - Easter 5
God's Lunch Table is Open to Everyone
Easter 5 – May 2, 2010
Who you socialize with, who you sit down and eat with is a big deal. It was true in Jesus' day, and it's true about our world too. Maybe the place I remember experiencing this most of all was in the high school cafeteria come lunch time. You'd come out of the lunch line into that room and there at all of those long tables with their little round, attached seats, you'd see the social hierarchy of the school laid out for the world to see: who sat together, who got the best seats (the ones along the far wall with the windows to the town's main street), all of the little cliques and groups organized in neat little rows.
And in my school, once that pattern was set at the beginning of the semester, there wasn't much you could do to change it. We joke about how church folks like to sit in their pews, but high school kids are pretty much the same way. And so we all stayed with pretty much the same group, in the same spot, day after day, people who we were friends with, who we had something in common with, people we liked and who we knew would accept us.
Of course, it's not just like that in high school. You see it wherever there are people, especially when food is involved. Think about all the agony and angst wedding couples can go through as they try to arrange the seating for their wedding receptions – who should sit next to who – who shouldn't sit next to who. Or go to an ecumenical worship here in Lynbrook or our church conference gathering or synod assembly and see what happens when it's time for coffee hour or meal-time. We tend to conglomerate with the people we already know, the ones who look like us. We want to sit with the people we figure we'll have something in common with, something to talk about. And it's hard to cross those invisible boundaries, to dare to go to another table filled with strangers, to the ones who seem somehow not like you – because they wear different clothes, or speak with a different accent, or have a different color of skin.
It's hard to bridge that gap, but that's what we hear about Peter doing in the lesson from Acts today. Last we saw Peter, he was in Joppa. He just brought Tabitha back to life, and is staying with a Simon, a tanner. And while he's there, he goes up on the roof one day to pray, and he gets hungry, and while he waits for lunch to be brought up, he goes into a trance and has this vision about all sorts of animals being lowered down from heaven – unclean animals – and a voice comes from heaven telling him to kill and eat. Peter protests - “I've never eaten anything profane in my life!” But the voice comes back – “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” And so when the men from Caesarea come looking for him, Peter understands that God is behind this. He realizes that God wants him to go with them, to carry the story of Jesus beyond the normal borders, that God wants him to switch lunch tables and go with a completely different crowd.
And so Peter does. And what an amazing experience he has when he gets there. There is Cornelius the centurion, waiting for him with all of his relatives and close friends, waiting to hear what Peter has to say. Peter starts to lay it all out, what God has done in Jesus, and barely has he started to speak when the Holy Spirit comes on them and they start speaking in tongues and praising God – and they are baptized. Everyone is amazed at what God has done, how God has moved in new ways, in new places, with new people, who before were outside the scope of what God was doing. It is a day for rejoicing!
Meanwhile, back in Judea, the apostles and believers catch wind of what has happened, and they are not so happy. They get all in an uproar about Peter and what he has done, which is not so surprising if you've ever tried to switch lunch tables. Bad enough to try to open yourself up to a new group, but the old group usually isn't thrilled by the idea. It's not a pretty site – there are feelings of hurt and betrayal and rejection; words of recrimination and criticism... Those people are not like us. They are not a part of our group. How dare you go to them and eat with them?! It's as though by accepting a new group of people you are dumping the old. At least that's how it seems in high school. For Peter and the believers back in Judea, it had more to do with following the religious purity laws, about staying true to their religion by hanging out with their own kind. After all, they got themselves into some pretty serious trouble in the past when they didn't. They found themselves going down the wrong path, following other gods, falling away – and it ended in exile. They don't want to see that happening again. Not knowing what Peter knows, they are afraid he's going to lead them right back into trouble.
But the thing is, God is the one leading this whole new thing. That's what Peter had to learn – God had to give him this vision not once, but three times before he started to get a clue. It's what Peter had to explain to the other apostles and believers in Judea, step by step, as it says in verse 4. Because all the time, God is doing new things – it's just that God's people are often pretty slow to realize it. We like our lunch table arrangements just the way they are – but in this story, God sends the Holy Spirit to show Peter and the others that now there's no more assigned seating. No one is kept out of the cafeteria. God's lunch table is open to everyone! Everyone has a place there!
That's often hard for us to live into. We're creatures of habit, people of custom. It's human nature for us to want to be with people like us, who act and think and believe in similar ways to how we do. Our socially-conceived boundaries and borders make us feel safe. The only problem with that is that by sticking to our own kind, we miss all sorts of opportunities to share the Good News and to see what God is already doing in those places we were so late to go to.
But God is not constrained by our boundaries. It's just the opposite, really – in Jesus, God threw open the boundaries for all people to come in! The way to God is not patrolled by the border police, there are no walls to keep people out. Jesus constantly crossed the social and ethnic and cultural borders of his time, going to people others would have rejected, reaching out to them, eating with them, healing them, praying with them, teaching them, dying for them. Jesus died for all to show that God's love is for all, without exception! We see it and taste it and experience it here at this meal Jesus gave us to share, the meal that takes place at God's lunch table where there is a seat for everyone – for you, for me, for the stranger we meet in the street. It's an open invitation – who will you invite?
Amen.
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