God's Vision

Acts 2:1-12

May 20, 2018

Pentecost

We’ve been reading the later chapters

in Acts this Easter Season,

but today we flip back to the second chapter

and see how it all began. Pentecost.

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The first day of the church as we know it.

Now we might think that it was a festive occasion.

But really, the whole thing must have been terrifying.

Wind, flames, speaking and understanding different languages.

Besides the strange occurrence of this day,

the future must have been pretty scary too.

I mean we have 2 thousand years of church

to work with, rebel against, return to later.

But the disciples didn’t have anything to go on,

They had no hymnal to 

refer to no instructions book,

no mission statement or constitution. 

No years of tradition.

This was the first time for the disciples.

And this moment made it obvious that this was

going to be nothing like what they

were used to in the synagogue.

And their confusion was obvious.

Now these disciples had been with Jesus,

heard him talk, spent time with him,

eaten with him, had their feet washed by him.

They had seen him arrested and killed,

and raised from the dead.

Jesus had told them that he would eventually go away

and that he would send the Holy Spirit to them

  

And for 40 days since the resurrection,

Jesus had been roaming around with them

I’m sure, visiting them and encouraging them and

getting them ready for that moment.

But still, even in their last second with Jesus on earth

Right before this day of Pentecost,

they didn’t seem like they

completely understood the arrangement.

In chapter 1, right before he ascends, they say to Jesus:

“Lord, is this the time when YOU

will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Even at this last minute,

they wanted Jesus to continue to do all the work.

How will YOU wow us in these last days, Lord?

No, no, no, Jesus tells them, you’ve got it wrong.

MY job is done. He tells them:

“YOU will receive power now

The Holy Spirit will come upon YOU.
YOU will be my witnesses in Jerusalem

and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”
YOU will be the ones to carry on my church,

YOU will finish the work that I’ve begun.

This is YOUR job now.

And just to make sure that they understood

that it was THEIR work now,

Jesus ascended up, into the clouds

and left them. Alone.

How could Jesus do that?

How could Jesus leave the church in the hands

of these people with no instructions or guide book,

with no leadership seminar, no seminary class?

And these 11 people ?! -

- Their assumed leader was, Peter,

the same one who had denied Jesus in fear.

- James and John the ones who were jockeying

for position arguing over which one was the greatest.

- There was Thomas who wouldn’t believe that Christ had risen.

- And Paul who started as a persecutor of Christians.

- Jesus left the church in the hands of the 

same ones who didn’t believe that Jesus could feed the people in the field,

- The ones who tried to push the children away from Jesus.

- The ones who accused Mary after she anointed Jesus.

On that day, God gave Jesus ministry to people like that.

To people like us.

People who are confused, egotistical, insecure, cynical, tired,

burnt out, who tried too hard, and didn’t try hard enough

God gave the church to regular people like us

and for better or worse,

they made something that we are still part of today.

It would be impressive enough if you just noticed the

length of time that it’s lasted.
But we are still reading scripture, praying, 

being moved and inspired by the same stories. 

We are still surprised, lit on fire,

motivated to baptize and make disciples

help strangers and to work for justice in our communities.

Still after all this time.

On that day, God declares,

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your 

sons and daughters will prophesy, 

and your young men will see visions, 

and your old men will dream dreams

Maybe on that day of Pentecost, on that

wonderful and scary day when they were wearing

the tongues of fire over their heads, maybe one of those

disciples had us in mind that day.

Maybe they envisioned us:

a group of people that follows, teaches about, and worships Jesus

in a big city, but not too big, behind a Tim Horton’s.

A place that welcomes everyone, that cares for children,

that has a ministry in Swahili and a food pantry.

And does all sorts of other things in Jesus name.

That dream would seem impossible then.

Where would we get the energy, the motivation,

the people, the money, who is Tim Horton? But here we are.

That’s how dreams are. One day they’re just in

your head, then someone else can see it, then it’s a reality.

So what dreams are we dreaming?

What visions are we envisioning.

What can we see the church being and doing and becoming?

Whatever our dreams for the future of the church is

We just pray just like those first disciples,

for God to fill us with the Spirit, to convert and transform us,

and to give us the courage to press on through adversity

and make those dreams a reality.

God still expects great things out of us.

God has chosen this church, in this time and place

God has chosen us to get that job done that Jesus started.

This is not just Jesus’s work anymore. This is our work too.

And we can have confidence in the Spirit 

that has brought us to this place. 

We can be sure that God is working through us.

Look at us.

This is the church that Jesus imagined and is still imagining.

This is the church that the Peter and Paul and all the Mary’s

and Phillip and Silas and Priscilla and Lydia and all the rest

struggled, and suffered, and worked to create.

This is God’s vision, still in progress and not yet done.

It is good to be this church.
It is good to be the risen body of Christ.

Paul and Idols: Distressed or Excited?

Acts 17: 22-31
May 13, 2018

 Pr. Wiese and Gethsemane people share a devotion
at the Aeropagus around 1997,
in Athens, Greece
where Paul's speech was delivered .

You can’t be around church much without

hearing how much things have changed.

Even the casual church goer can see that

there are fewer people attending

to church than there 

was even 15 years ago.

Even to someone who’s 

never set foot in a church

can see that church going 

isn’t as prevalent as it was 50 years ago.

In this climate of a changing church

we often hear about the Nones –  the  ones who claim “none” or no denomination or religion on forms or the “spiritual  but not religious” who who have a spiritual center, but don’t find the answer in a particular practice.

And the biggest change across our lifetime,

is probably the fact that we all have many people

in our lives who don’t worship regularly or at all,

some in our immediate families.

We certainly have many people in this category

among our friends, acquaintances, in the work place

and in our community.

And a common response to this reality for Christians

is to see all of these people with a combination of pity and angst, 

we wring our hands and clutch our pearls.

We are annoyed and offended, and we

wonder what has gone wrong with them,

and why can’t they be more like us.

In short we feel distressed at the thought that everyone isn’t

going to church like they did in the old days.

The result of this is that Christians have, in a way, set up a

confrontational relationship between Christians and non-Christians,

or Non practices or Spiritual but not religious.

Them  and us. There’s an animosity that can be

felt by outsiders whether its overt or covert.

And I wonder if this is 1.) useful, and

2.) if it’s in line with what we find in scripture.

It may seem obvious, but it’s good to remind ourselves

that In the time of Acts, there was 

no “old days” of the church to go back to.

They had no old times to reminisce about and

feel defeated that they’re not living up to yet.
The world had not yet met Jesus.

Christianity was not the norm in society,

Everyone they met was doing something else.

Maybe we should model ourselves more like them

than we were just a few decades ago.

In this part of Acts,

Paul and Silas are making their way around the coast of Greece from

Philippi where they were imprisoned in the
chapter before this to Thessalonica, Beroea and now to Athens.

While in Athens, at the beginning of chapter 17,

in our translation, it says that Paul was “distressed”

to see that the city was full of idols.

Other more liberal translations say that he was

 “angry”  at the prevalence of the idols.

Lots of Christians have used this line of scripture

to justify their “distress” and anger and condemnation of “Idol” worship,

lumping everything into that category from Buddhism

and paganism, and other religions, to those who have no religion,

to the Nones and the spiritual but not religious

even to calling other Christians idol worshippers.

(I know this because I found lots of this when I looked this up this week)

They use this line to further deepen

that confrontational relationship between Them and Us.

I rarely use Greek, so if you enjoy it, soak it in now:

The phrase that is translated as “distressed” in the NRSV

is parōx-y-neto to pneuma en auto

which literally translated means,

“his spirit was stirred in him”

pneuma is spirit and paroxyneto is stirred,

or sharpened or heightened.

Now I think “distressed” seems a far stretch from

“a stirred or heightened spirit”

I think the translators took some liberties here

that they didn’t need to take.

(and sure enough, the King James Version

translates it as “his spirit was stirred within him”)

So I’m thinking, at seeing all these idols around Athens,

maybe Paul was not so much distressed or angry

as much as excited and motivated.

Maybe Paul didn’t see a place that he needed to condemn

for their choice of religious practices,

as much as a fertile ground of spiritual activity.

A place where people are tuned into the divine

and are searching for something larger than themselves.

Maybe Paul didn’t see Athens as a bunch of “them”

as much as more of “us”.

And when I read the speech Paul gives today,

I don’t think I’m on shaky ground with this.

It says that the people of Athens were into debating

others and always looking for a new theory or philosophy.

As Paul was going around in the synagogues and

in the market places and preaching and teaching about

Jesus resurrection, they were intrigued and so they

bring him to the Areopagus, or literally, Mars Hill,

it also referred to the council that would meet there.

So this speech was kind of a public hearing of sorts.

And he starts his speech like this,

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way”

He sees that their minds and hearts are focused

on the spiritual and the divine. He doesn’t say he’s distressed.

He mentions that he saw an altar

with the inscription “to an unknown god”.

And he tells them that they might not know who this God is,

but he knows who this God is . It is the creator of everything,

He goes on to this, what I think is a beautiful and inclusive speech:

“From one ancestor (or blood) he made us all nations

to inhabit the whole earth, and he limited their time

on earth and set them in certain places

so that they would search for him,

even grope for him, because he is not far from any of us.”

“God is not far from any of us.”

And then he quotes their own poetry

which he probably read while touring around:

“In him we live and move and have our being,

for we too are his offspring”

This could have been lifted from the gospel of John.

The poetry of these pagan idol worshippers

says that we all are “children of God”.

Paul admires the similarities between

the search for truth between the

worshippers of Athens and his own

search for spiritual truth.

As Paul goes onto say, that the truth has been revealed

to him in the form of Christ Jesus who was raised from the dead.

And he invites them to join him in that truth.

The truth has been revealed to us in Jesus,

who was crucified by those who held the

survival of their religious institution above

 the presence of God that was right in front of them.

The truth has been revealed to us in Jesus

who broke down the barriers between sacred and unsacred.

Who removed the line between them and us.

So that we can look past our religious labels and see

that we all “live and move and have our being in the same spirit,

and that we are all offspring of the same God too.”

Because of Jesus,

Paul saw these people as spiritual equals.

He appealed to their understanding

he respected their poets and words,

he found common ground and was stirred in his spirit

to share the truth that he knew.

Instead us being distressed and mourning

the changes that have happened in our institution

and being hung up on how we miss the way things

used to be, what if we take a moment and,

like I said last week,

see what God is doing here with this situation.

Maybe the shrinking of our churches

is a sign of God’s presence, not absence.

Maybe God is shaking us up, forcing us to think a different way,

or doing something even more creative here

that we’ll only find out later.

Maybe God is using the seeker, the Nones,

the spiritual but not religious,

the agnostic, atheist, the secular humanist,

and all of the above, to further the kingdom of God.

God created and loves everything

And the Spirit will go and do what it wants when it wants.

God is already at work in the world,

in so many different and new ways,

and we are just here to look for those places,

and join in when we can.

  

I hope we can see the world as Paul saw it,

not a place to be threatened and distressed by,

but a place that stirs our spirit.

A place where we see spiritual longing everywhere

a world full of people who are groping for God,

because God is not far from any of us.

As the Church, we are called to see beyond our

own boundaries and prejudices and hang ups

and learn deep spiritual truths from everyone around us,

religious or not religious

and rejoice in the Spirit that doesn’t know

any boundaries and goes where it will.

We are the Church.

God’s vision of the kingdom is our agenda.
The grace of Christ feeds us.

The Spirit  is our enabler.

We are called to reach out and invite in.

We are the Church.

It is as faulty as the people who make it,

and yet God has entrusted us with the

vision of the kingdom in this world.

We are the Church.

It is good to be the Church.

It is good to be the risen body of Christ.

Reaching Out, Inviting In and Getting Arrested

Acts 16

May 6, 2018

This is a great story and I could have picked up on bunches

of different themes, but I wanted to get you

out of here before Bob Evans runs out of biscuits,

so I had to narrow it down to a few.

So just to remind everyone,

our theme is Reaching Out and Inviting In.

We’re looking at these stories and talking

about how we’re called to the same things

that the first Church was called to.

Now, usually, when we think of reaching out

as a church, or evangelism, most of the time we think of

people knocking on doors and asking strangers,

“Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior”

and having the door slammed in our face not an inviting prospect.

And I think that Lutherans are very uncomfortable

with this prospect because it doesn’t seem genuine,

and I have to agree. But then we opt for not doing anything

which isn’t a good answer either.

But as far as ringing doorbells, Paul and Silas and the others in Acts

don’t do that kind of reaching out,

nary a door was knocked on,

what they do much different than  that.

There’s a lot more to it. (You might want to knock on doors after this)

First thing I noticed is that in the process of

their work, Paul and Silas get arrested.

Not that I’m suggesting that,

but it’s not out of the question either.

Now, if you look at it, they don’t get

arrested for being Christian or for preaching –

those things weren’t against the law.

They were arrested because the

message of Jesus itself was disruptive

to the narrative of the world.

The message of Jesus, just by

its very nature, rocked the boat of society,

challenged unjust systems –

like the enslavement of this girl.

And it made people uncomfortable and angry.

Paul and Silas had basically shut off the

income stream of the people

who had enslaved her,

that makes people mad and they had them arrested.

So when some people say that Christians

should just be praying and worshipping

and doing acts of mercy and kindness ,

and not be involved in issues of justice, or politics,

or shouldn’t be rocking  boats in the real world,

or confronting the powers of the world,

I give you this story, and many others from Acts,

and other places.

Now that’s a plug for the Nehemiah Action

tomorrow, but it’s certainly true.

Just by sharing Jesus message of equality

and liberation and justice  were doing

something radical and controversial.

Paul and Peter and a lot of the other

characters in Acts spend a lot of time

on the wrong side of the law,

on the wrong side of political power,

and a lot of time in prison

for much of this whole book.

Again, not because preaching was against

the law, but because the content of their

message was disruptive.

And this boat rocking doesn’t end

for Paul and Silas after they’re in jail.

It just keeps on going.

So Paul and Silas have made the wrong people angry

and now they’re in prison

and while they’re there, they prayed and sang -

I could go off on a tangent on how

they prayed and sang and comforted

the prisoners they were being held with,

how that in itself is reaching out,

but there’s more impressive stuff to come

and I want to get to it.

As they prayed and sang,

the very unexpected happened:

There was an earthquake and shook

everything and all the prison doors were opened.

Now they could have just taken this opportunity

and ran away and left the jailer

and the other prisoners there, but they did not.

For them every situation is a

an opportunity to reach out.

Paul and Silas put their freedom

and their comforts second and

saw that the most important part was

their connection with the people

that God has put in front of them.

They reached out with God’s love.

The jailer was ready to off himself,

because he knew he would probably

have been jailed himself for letting

everyone leave, but Paul and Silas

and the rest of the prisoners, they stayed.

They told him not to kill himself because

they were all going to stay with him.

This was impressive, the jailer was touched

and knew that this was not just some smart

idea, there was a larger work at hand here,

and when the jailer asked them how to

get in on this whole thing, they told him: Jesus.

Paul and Silas didn’t make this situation happen,

God was already at work in the world,

and they were just looking for where

God was at work and where they could

live out the way that Jesus had shown them.

Many of us will not find ourselves in this kind of

situation in our lives -- we will not be held as political prisoners

and have an earthquake jar our cell doors open.

But God is still at work in our world every day.

Jesus is  doing great things right before our eyes

our job of evangelism is to recognize

Jesus’s work in this world,

be a part of it if we can and let people know its Jesus.

Here’s an example just this week in the news

You heard about the two men who

were arrested in Philadelphia because

they were in a Starbucks meeting someone

for a business deal and they hadn’t bought anything

and the worker got suspicious and the manager called the cops

and oh yeah, they were black.

They spent 8 hours in jail.

Just for waiting in a Starbucks which we all have done.

This was terrible and unjust and infuriating

and everyone could have doubled down on this

and been defensive and outraged and gotten a piece for themselves

out of this outrageous injustice.

Now, even though this was terrible and outrageous,

right from the beginning, lots of good things were happening:

It was great to see the 

other white people in the store

standing up for these 

men who were being arrested.

It was great that someone else videotaped,

and released the video for all to see.

It was great that Starbucks 

didn’t just blame the manager,

And fire her and think 

that they solved the problem,

but they have taken some great action,

even to the point of promising to close all their stores

for one day to have training on unconscious racial bias by their workers.

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson:
Jesus Way at Work in the World

But the best thing happened this week,

the two men who were the targets of Starbucks

and the Philadelphia police, who could have rightfully leveraged

this event into a personal windfall for themselves,

This week decided to settle with the City of Philadelphia

for $1 for themselves, plus a $200 thousand dollar grant

for high school entrepreneurs, a grant that they will help manage.

And I say to you, this is has got Jesus written all over it.

Were all these people Christian? I don’t know

But like Paul and Silas, they took Jesus way and path.

They took the door that was opened for them

and they used it for other people,

they didn’t just run out, they didn’t just forget about the others.

They got  justice, not just for them but for more.

They reached out with the freak opportunity that came their way.

That is God working through them.

Jesus Way working in this world.

Now If I was in Philadelphia, I would give money to that fund.
I would support it, I would want to get involved in what they were doing, right?

Well, we have our own stuff here where God is working every day.

We have food pantries, Justice Actions, children’s programs, school programs,

Juvenile Justice Circles, care packages, houses being built,

there’s an endless list that doesn’t ever make the news.

God is working all around us, sometimes it’s clearer when its far away.

We live in world of captives literally and figuratively.

A world where doors are being shut all the time.

And most of us here have freedoms –

freedoms created by our privilege, our incomes, our status in society,

Our citizenship in this country, we have freedoms,

and as Christians we have  freedom that we have gained from Christ,

from knowing we’re loved and that death doesn’t have a hold on us.

  

Those prison doors have been opened for us,

not by our own doing, but by some crazy occurrence,

and the question that we have as Christians,

As followers of Jesus and the body of Christ

is what do we do with these freedoms?

Do we just run out of the prison and just claim our own freedom?

Do we escape with whatever we can get for ourselves?

Or do we wonder what God is doing here?

What project is Jesus working on? How can I get involved?

How can I reach out with God’s love , share our freedom

with others, and invite them in to what Jesus is doing?

Christian freedom is not about taking it for yourself

and making laws that give you more privileges and protections,

it’s about giving it away for others.

Being part of God’s plan for the world.

This is the way of the cross, the way of Paul

and Silas, the way of Peter, this is the Way of Jesus.

That is real power. Being a part of the project which is the Kingdom of God

The short story is that Evangelism is this:

Jesus is at work in the world, and we want to be a part of it:

We welcome the outcast, love our enemies,

talk to strangers , we stay awake to the world around us.

We join in God’s work  and we follow the teachings of Jesus in

all the disruptiveness that comes

that comes naturally in Jesus message and Way,

and when we get the opportunity

have the courage to tell people, “That was Jesus.”

Not ringing door bells not just saying Jesus, but doing Jesus.

Being a part of God’s grand project.

Opening doors in a world that has them closing everywhere,

Disrupting the narrative of the world

disrupting politics as usual in Christ’s name, and giving God the glory.

This is what the Church is called to do.

It’s not easy work, but it is great work, the best work, it is blessed work.

It is good to be the Church,

It is good to be the risen body of Christ.