A Sermon for Pentecost (31/05/20): Pentecost - A Day of Miracles

Pentecost – A Day of Miracles

Acts 2:1-21 

The day of Pentecost is a day of miracles! The Holy Spirit creates a disturbance. The first most obvious miracle. The one we're most likely to notice, the one we tend to pay most attention to, is the disturbance which the Holy Spirit creates. 

Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 

This looks and sounds and feels like our idea of a miracle. It is spectacular. It is dramatic. And it changes the lives of those involved in ways that are outside of the normal run of cause and effect. 

The analogy of breath or wind is always the first one we reach for when trying to describe the Holy Spirit. Most obviously because like the wind, the Holy Spirit is invisible, it might be audible, but is generally only recognised by its effects. Those effects can be delicate like the rippling of leaves on a tree as a breeze passes by. Or they can be devastating like the destruction wrought by tornadoes and hurricanes. Whether the effect is great of small, the Holy Spirit always creates a disturbance. Though its disturbance may not always be immediately obvious. A wind blowing in the middle of an ocean creates waves. But even a very large wave in very deep water may not be easily visible. It may only be a slight rise and fall in the surface of otherwise quite smooth and level water, which with nothing to compare it against would leave it almost undetectable. Only as the wave comes close to the coast and the water becomes shallow does the wave build in height as the water piles up and eventually the wave breaks releasing its power onto the shore. 

Wherever the Holy Spirit is active there is disturbance. And disturbance makes us nervous. Reading acts 2 can make us feel quite unsettled. For many Christians, and non-Christians who are at least entertaining the notion that they might join us, the prospect of such a miracle actually taking place fills them with dismay. Quite some time ago, I read a book about the Holy Spirit in preaching. And one particular phrase and idea of the author has always stuck in my mind. He said that for the most part the Church now is “Spirit shy.” He said that a significant part of the Church is so terrified of what the Spirit might do, that they won't allow the Spirit to do anything at all. The prospect of an event, a miracle, like that of the day of Pentecost, so disturbs them that they fail to recognise the gentle blowing of the Spirit, like a breeze, that would create a delicate transformation of their lives. But the author goes on that they are not the only ones who are Spirit shy. He says there is another group who are so determined that they want the Holy Spirit to blow through their lives like a hurricane or a tornado that they overlook the fact the Holy Spirit is already at work in them transforming them in ways they are refusing to acknowledge. There are people in Church who will only accept an event like the day of Pentecost as being the kind of miracle that they want, and miss out on almost everything miraculous which the Spirit is doing all the time and all around them 

Very quickly the Holy Spirit gathers a crowd. If the first miracle of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost strikes us with dismay. The second can only fill us with longing and regret: 

At this sound the crowd gathered. 

Pentecost was already a festival. It is the early Harvest Festival that takes place 50 days after Passover. It is the festival which also celebrates the giving of the Law. Jerusalem is full. Pilgrims from every nation under the sun are crammed into the city. And as the Holy Spirit miraculously works its disturbance among the disciples, it also miraculously gathers a crowd to witness what is going on. To which I suspect we would be tempted to say: “If only!” We look at this part of the story wistfully, “would that it were so, here and now.”  We recognise that the great challenge for God's people here and now is getting a hearing. We are conscious that whilst the Church in this place and time is not persecuted, it is pretty comprehensively ignored. There is less and less public space where we can make our views heard. Less and less opportunity to show people who we are and what the Spirit can do. In the market place of ideas and opportunities, the sound of a rushing wind is increasingly drowned out by the clamour of other offers. The Church is so diminished in numbers, and in power and prestige, that we imagine that it would take a miracle to get people to listen to us. Perhaps what we fail to recognise is that it was ever thus. On the day of Pentecost the community of believers might have been little more than twenty people. Luke names 11 disciples, and there were a couple of more to choose from to replace Judas. There were “certain women”, Jesus' mother and brothers. And, even if we account for some that Luke has failed to mention, that won't take us far past 20. Certainly as a group they had neither numbers, nor power, nor prestige, nothing that could draw attention to themselves and give them a hearing in a crowded city where everyone was focused on something else. We imagine it would take a miracle to gather a significant number of people to hear what we have to say. And the truth is we're right. It does take a miracle! But that is precisely the kind of miracle, precisely the kind of disturbance, which is on offer from the Holy Spirit.

But even if that miracle did happen. Even if we did have someone to address our message to, and lets face it we are surrounded by people who we could deliver the good news to. Even if the Holy Spirit gave us the miraculous opportunity to speak. Would we do anything about it? If the Holy Spirit causing a disturbance fills us with dismay. And seeing the Holy Spirit gather a crowd fills us with longing, with regret. What the Holy Spirit does next seems to fill us with dread:

And all of them began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. . . speaking about God's deed of power 

The Holy Spirit prompts the believers' speech. There are some things in the life of the church which I would call “simple-but-impossible.” One in particular I mention quite often: We could double our congregation at a stroke, it's quite simple. Everyone brings someone new with them, but impossible! We can come up with no end of reasons why it is that that can't happen. Or even if we could bring ourselves to do that, why it wouldn't work. It would take a miracle! This is very similar, indeed very closely related to the way which we feel about talking to others about our faith. It's simple: all of us have some experinece of the love of God. All of us have some knowledge of the story of Jesus Christ to frame that experience. All of us have the Holy Spirit to help and to guide us. What could be simpler than sharing that with someone we know. We're not suggesting that we should talk to strangers, though that might actually be easier. What could be simpler than sharing what we believe, what makes us who we are, with someone who we know and trust. We're not being asked to speak up in front of a great crowd drawn together by the Holy Spirit, just to one person who is right beside us. Simple-but-impossible! Because for the most part we don't do it. It terrifies us. We imagine a whole list of “what ifs” that might be the consequence. It reminds me of a series of adverts “Dr. Pepper” ran a few years ago, based on the idea that most people have never tried that fizzy drink. A whole range of comic catastrophes befalls people who take their first sip of Dr. Pepper. These catastrophes were followed by the tag line: “what's the worst that could happen?” I suspect we imagine a similar range of outrageous consequences that would come to us if we ever dared to try and share our faith. Simple-but-impossible. It would take a miracle to get us to do that. Yet, guess what? Once again that is precisely the kind of miracle, precisely the kind of disturbance, that is on offer from the Holy Spirit.

Though even if we were willing to speak I wonder if something else doesn't make us reluctant We worry that we couldn't speak clearly enough, that our words would carry enough weight, that we couldn't be persuasive enough, or convincing enough That even if we had someone to speak to, even if we dared to speak, that it still wouldn't work because we would be inadequate to the task. 

I think the most important miracle that takes place on the day of Pentecost is often the most overlooked We simply don't spot the miracle that has actually taken place Members of the crowd testify to the miracle: 

In our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power. 

It is not just the Apostles speech which is miraculous. The Holy Spirit enables the listeners' hearing . It is the listeners hearing that is miraculous as well.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how preaching works. Not least I have spent two sabbaticals, one researching, one trying to right up, on that question. When you get to the end of all that you could observe of the preaching event, there always seems to be a gap. There is a distance between what the preacher has said and what the listeners hear and how they respond. Also, preaching so often seems to be "successful" in spite of what a preacher did, rather than because of what the preacher did. There is something illusive and indefinable about the preaching event. The preached word hangs in the air between the preacher and the congregation, it is there for a moment but cannot be captured or recorded. Only its effects can be observed afterwards. The truth is that every time the gospel is heard there has been a miracle. A miracle of the Spirit. And it is a miracle of hearing. It is not human cleverness, or elegant language that makes sermons work. It is not our ability to speak well of our faith to anyone who will listen that makes the real difference. It is always the Holy Spirit that brings about a hearing. That doesn't excuse human effort. No preacher should imagine they can get away without preparation and have the Holy Spirit condone and compensate their idleness. And we all should take every opportunity to deepen our understanding of the hope and faith that is in us, in order that we could put it into words or actions when the opportunity arises. No Christian can get away without simple acts of faithfulness. But the outcome of our speech or of our actions is not down to our effort. It is the Holy Spirit that makes them work. Which perhaps points us to a miracle which might be very important for us. This miracle is the one that lifts the burden of anxiety from us and sets us free to witness by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Miracles are easy to dismiss. There are always alternative explanations for what God does by the Holy Spirit. At least some of the crowd who gather around the Apostles are highly sceptical of what they are seeing and hearing:

But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” 

The explanations need not be as unkind as the accusation of drunkenness, though believers are always open to and subject to ridicule. Especially when they taken hold of by the Holy Spirit to act in ways that are outside of the convention. Even when that is something as modest and unspectacular as talking to people about what we believe. But more broadly there are always other explanations available. Perhaps if Pentecost occurred now we might dismiss it as an event of contagious mass hysteria. The Apostles and the crowd were caught up in a moment of heighten emotion. the Apostles passed their excited state onto a crowd, who were susceptible because of the heightened mood they were in, on pilgrimage, in a crowded city. There will always be alternative explanations, psychology or sociology or ideology. And that is as God intends it! The Holy Spirit performs miracles. But miracles do not destroy human freedom, or human responsibility. God leaves us human. Even at its most visible and most dramatic, like tongues of fire resting on the head of each person in a room, even at its most remarkable, God's action leaves us with a choice. Do we respond, believe and act accordingly. Or do we walk away 

After all the alternative explanations had been offered perhaps some of the crowd drifted away. “Nothing to see her, just some drunk men. Move on!” But evidently some remain. Perhaps that is yet another miracle. The Holy Spirit overcomes people's prejudices and keeps them listening just long enough to hear the explanation. Keeps them listening just long enough to hear the announcement like Peter's: 

This is what was spoken of. . . 

This is the time when God acts among his people. Right now is the time when God will be actively present and all manner of ways. God will be present and available to all. Now is the time in human history, and equally the moment in each human life, when God offers the opportunity to respond. So that the last and greatest miracle of all can take place: Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Amen.

Pentecost - A Day of Miracles by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Sunday in Ascensiontide (24/05/20): Not Doing Nothing - Waiting

Not doing nothing – Waiting 

Acts 1:6-14 

“Men of Galilee why stand there looking up into the sky? This Jesus who was taken from you up to heaven will come again in the same way as you have seen him go.”  

There’s an odd pause in the Church year. We reach the climax (which we don’t actually celebrate because it happens on a Thursday) of the Easter season, Ascension. The 40 days of the risen Christ with his disciples is completed with the final underlining of who Jesus is as he is lifted up and hidden in a cloud. This is the final sign that death has no more power over Jesus. And it is the conclusive declaration of his status alongside God. Then at Pentecost the disciples are filled the Holy Spirit and launched into the world as the Church. In between there are ten days including this Sunday, an odd pause

Our approach to life is very much one of wanting to get on with things. We approve of people who get stuck right in. In many professions, not least in ministry, there is no end of advice about time management. There are endless instructions and plans and schemes to enable us to make best use of every moment, how not to leave any “odd pauses”. But I’m reminded of a story  I was told about a group of Jamaican builders. They had just laid the concrete of the floor to the new church building at Steer Town on the north coast of the island. And they were stood and sat around the site as the concrete set and cured. It was was at this moment that the American pastor of the Church who had paid for the concrete arrived. He saw them apparently idle and asked why it was that they were doing nothing. The builders replied “We’re not doing nothing, Parson - we’re waiting.” 

The disciples themselves in the immediate aftermath of the Resurrection at first seemed to have expected instant results: 

“Lord will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 

"The Messiah has come God has intervened in a decisive way. God has acted in the way we always knew he would. So why isn’t the world the way we expect it to be?" This is no less an acute question for us as it was for the disciples. If what we know to be true about Jesus and God is true, then why hasn’t the world “got it”? And why are war, and famine, and poverty, and catastrophe, and pandemic, and suffering, and empty churches allowed to continue? When we look out on the world and see that it isn’t the way God intended, or rather the way we’d like it,  the real temptation is to rush out an try and deal with it.  “Something must be done.” The history of the world is a sorry catalogue of people rightly recognising that the world isn’t and then setting about “fixing” In the Church we look at our empty pews and set off in repeated desperate attempts, schemes and projects to fill them again. “We’re not doing nothing – we’re doing something anything!” 

Of course we’re not so powerful or so confident now to think we can change the world. Or even fix the Church. “Is this the time?” the disciples ask. Or some other time? When can we expect it? This year or next year, in this generation or the next? After so much time, we are actually more likely to give up trying and worry instead. We count our members obsessively. We add up how many have turned up to worship, how many bums are on our seats. We examine our decline in minutest detail. And can predict the final demise of our churches and of our church when our numbers reach zero. We foresee a moment  in ten, or fifteen or however many years when there will be nobody left to count. Or we can cling to the faint glimmers of hope. We reassure ourselves that here and there there are some growing churches. Or take a little comfort that the slope of the declining graph is shallowing. Some might even look at the world and read the signs of the times. Some see those wars and hear the rumours of war, the famines and the tribulation, even a pandemic, and declare as some in every generation of Christians have – “In this generation. . . . . . ” “We’re not doing nothing – we’re speculating – idly.” 

But the disciples have seen Jesus taken into heaven. The cloud, the drama, the nearness of God. And not for the first time they cannot leave the scene of their religious experience. They wanted to remain captivated by and captive to it for ever. My principle in theological college told what amounted to a tragic story. Very early in his ministry, in one of his first pastoral visits, he called on one of the most longstanding members of his congregation. While he was there the elderly gentleman was instructed by his wife, “Why don’t you get your ‘experience’ out to show the minister?” The family Bible was retrieved and from it was taken a yellowing folded piece of paper It was an account of a religious experience the man had had more than forty years earlier. A description of that experience had been committed to paper and ever since remained folded away,  safely out of sight, between the pages of the family Bible. If ever we do get to the mountain top or to the the scene of some as dramatic as the ascension, the dreadful temptation is to try and stay there. “We’re not doing nothing – we’re day-dreaming.” 

There is a layer in the geological record of the earth's crust. It is a very narrow band of rocks called the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. It is the record of the moment when the age of dinosaurs came to an end, and the age which eventually includes us began. This reading from Acts is similarly the deposit of a very brief moment between ages. When the age of Revelation came to an end and the age of Witness began.

Concrete of course needs time to set. The chemicals present in the concrete need time to react to make concrete concrete. It needs, a relatively narrow band of time, to cure.  The disciples returned to their upper room. In a moment of uncertainty between the ages, they needed one another more than ever: 

All of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer. . .

God will not be held to anybody’s timetable – God is God and not accountable Christ will return – as indeed he left – but that will be at a time of God’s choosing The world will be restored, not according to our preferences, but according to the fullness of God’s justice and love. And the whole of creation will be filled with the praise of God, more than could fill any and every Church. That is the Good News and that and noting else is what we will be given the means to witness to. Accepting our human limitations, that we cannot fix the world, we cannot hold onto the reality of God is at the same time accepting our human calling, to patiently make God known in the world. “We’re not doing nothing – we’re waiting – on God.” 

Amen. 

Thanks once again to Sylvia Fairbrass, this time for the photograph of her arrangement for  the Ascension which is at the start of this post. She says it includes Solomon seal, lily of the valley and hawthorn and, "This is also my tribute to all the Covid 19  victims and their families who could not hold a church service.  May they also enter into Gods eternal rest."

Not Doing Nothing - Waiting by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for Sixth Sunday of Easter (17/05/20): Making the Unknown God Known

Making the Unknown God Known

Acts 17:17-31

Athens is the most challenging place Paul has ever preached. He has been brought here, having left Thessalonica in a hurry. There his preaching had found considerable success in the synagogue and among those Greeks who were already attracted to the God of Israel. But his success had provoked the jealousy of the synagogue’s leaders. So Paul’s friends have spirited him away. And now he is in Athens. If Rome is the seat of power in the Empire, then Athens (along with Alexandria) is its intellectual engine. Athens is the capital of the mind. Athens had been the home of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It is the home of the schools that they and other great philosophers had founded. Every new idea is tested and discussed among these intellectuals and the population at large. It is a place of curiosity and learning and debate. If Paul and his message can make it here, he and the gospel can make it anywhere. If Paul can convince the Athenians it will become a springboard for the gospel, today Athens, tomorrow the world!

Paul’s first encounter with the Athenians has not been promising. He has been out every day, debating in the marketplace. At best he has provoked a puzzled curiosity among the city’s philosophers:

“What does this babbler want to say” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.”

Nonetheless he has piqued their interest, and Paul is taken to the Areopagus. The “Hill of Ares” is a rocky outcrop to the northwest of the Acropolis. It was where the great and the good of the city gathered for discussion. This was a kind of cross between a law court, the city council and a debating society. Paul has his opportunity to preach to the most influential people in Athens. He carefully tailors his message to his hearers. He adopts a classical rhetorical strategy. He starts by flattering his listeners:

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

The first thing Paul had done when he had come to town was take a tour of the city’s sights. What catches his eye is that Athens is full of temples and statues. He is impressed, even if with his Jewish monotheistic heritage it has turned his stomach. Setting his prejudice aside, he sees this as the opening that he needs to convince his listeners. Idolaters they may be, but at least they are searching. Their impulse to worship is right, even if the objects of their worship are completely wrong. Paul takes the view that their religious yearning is the inarticulate and uninformed yearning of the pagans for the true and living God. There is a God shaped hole in all of their lives and Paul has what he knows can satisfy their longing.

One thing we would almost certainly not say of people and of the world now, is that our times are “very religious in every way.” We wouldn’t say that, and perhaps therefore we would fail to recognise the similarities between the Athenians and people around us. The objects of desire and worship have changed but the impulse remains the same. Human beings are animals who want to make sense of things. Something drives us to try and understand. We want to understand the world around us. And more importantly we want to understand our place in that world. What we use to make this meaning has changed over time. But the same impulse is still there, we are meaning seeking and making creatures.

The Athenians found their meaning in philosophy and/or pagan religion. Whilst the parallels are not perfect, perhaps it could be said now that people find or make their meaning out of science and popular culture. We live in an age that has an essentially scientific view of the world. It is possible to observe how the world works, at the grandest scale and the tiniest detail. From the universe and the movements of planets, stars and galaxies to the inner working of the tiniest atoms that make up everything. From the movement of whole nations and societies to the smallest functions of an individual’s mind. Science provides at least some explanation of everything we could observe. But most of us also engage in the culture that surrounds us, the language we speak, the stories we tell and listen to and about ourselves in books and on television, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, all of it shapes us, or we use it to shape ourselves. Of course everyone is different, the forces of science and popular culture influence us differently. We all take different things from what surrounds us to shape our understanding of ourselves and of the world. For some this plays out as a rigorously logical view of a world driven by laws and the inevitability of history. For others it might be pastiche, a ragbag of superstitions, conspiracy theory and fancifulness. Perhaps for most it's not that self-aware, simply going with the flow, being carried where life is taking them.

But with all this there often goes a sense of unease. There is for many, even most, a sense of dissatisfaction. Something is missing. Those explanations of the world, that way of constructing ourselves in the world, promises much but always delivers less than it promises. For many people there is a longing, which our society tries to satisfy with ever more objects and ever more distractions none of which in the end removes that sense of longing. As we are beginning to find, in this world, too much is never enough. There is a thirst, which for the Athenians was a thirst for knowledge, and which for our contemporaries is harder to identify, which is not quenched. A little later than Paul, St. Augustine said: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you..” When we share Paul’s rhetorical strategy in announcing the gospel we tell ourselves that we need to start where people are. Where people are, for the most part is living lives shaped by popular culture, backed up to a greater or less degree by a scientific understanding of the way the world works.

Paul begins to try and build a ramp between where his Athenian listeners are and the faith in God he wants to share with them. Paul offers to the Athenians something that comes very close to what is called Natural Theology. That is, he starts with what is known or observable about the world and tries to work back from there to an understanding of God. It is an argument that perhaps we find ourselves accepting or even making. We look at the world and tell ourselves there must be some reason behind it. There must be a first cause that begins the sequence of events that leads to where we all are. We see the beauty and order of everything that surrounds it and conclude some mind must lie behind it. It is the human response to the longing for God which already exists in every human heart, which was placed there by God:

So that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him - though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

This is the ramp that leads us up to God. Paul sees that the Athenians have been on this journey as well. He identifies this as the source of their great religiosity. But he also identifies that this argument is fundamentally flawed, it will never lead anyone to the true and living God. He also observes that his Athenian listeners probably already sense that this is the case. No one is foolish enough to believe that statues are really gods or that a real god could actually live inside a temple:

The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth does not live in shrines made by human hands . . . we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.  

The movement from what we can see and know cannot take us all the way to God. As high as that ramp might take us there is always going to be a gap at the top between ourselves and God. Perhaps some of the Athenians had already sensed this. Perhaps this was what lay behind one of the things Paul had seen in his tour around Athens:

I found an altar with inscription, “To an unknown God”

There is something fundamentally unknowable about God. Human beings cannot find God by infinitely reaching up and out from what they already know. We have a hymn: "Can we by searching find out God?" The short answer to that question is “No.”

Eventually revelation must be invoked and the scandal of faith to reason and experience made plain. Paul cannot convert pagan Athenians, or anyone else for that matter, by appealing to what they already know and reasoning them into faith from there. Natural Theology, or examining where people are and what they already believe is hardly more than a preliminary exercise. Revelation must take us where Natural Theology cannot go. Paul mentions the Resurrection as a fact, a fact which is contrary to observation of the way the world works, it stands outside of science or even of culture. Paul concludes his speech to the Athenians by saying:

While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

The truth is Natural Theology doesn’t work. The truth is we cannot build a ramp from ourselves to God. The truth is that the ramp has already been built in the opposite direction, from God to us.

Jesus Christ is the one appointed by God to give us knowledge of God. In Paul’s argument the Resurrection is our absolute assurance of this. Only God can make God known. And this is what God has done in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There is no other true source of knowledge about God. Without God’s gracious action, an altar to an unknown god is the place where the human search for God always ends up. That God-shaped hole in the Athenian’s lives and in our lives and those of our neighbours can only be filled by what God shows us in Jesus.

Paul’s preaching in Athens had relatively limited to success. To the Greeks his message of the Resurrection seemed foolishness, even whilst it prompted curiosity among some others:

Some scoffed; but others said “We will hear you again about this.”

Christian proclamation should never be judged solely by its success in persuading all of those who hear it. Wherever the message of the Resurrection is faithfully preached some will believe but some will mock. Even the rhetorical skill of someone like Paul cannot remove the scandal of the gospel. Indeed skilful preaching can only draw attention to the gap between human knowing and what God reveals of himself. After Athens Paul moves swiftly on, in Corinth he finds a very different place and decides on a rather different rhetorical strategy. Since we cannot build the ramp from ourselves to God, Paul concludes, it is better to start as God does from the other end.

Looking back on his ministry in Corinth he recalled: For I decided to know nothing among you [the Corinthians] except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2) That is the way that an unknown and unknowable God makes himself known.

Amen.

Making the Unknown God Known by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (10/05/20): Speaking Truth to Power from Powerlessness

Speaking Truth to Power from Powerlessness

Acts 7:55-60

The first Christians very quickly discover that Jesus wasn’t exaggerating when he told them that to follow him meant taking up a cross and dying. They find out that if you are doing Christianity right it is liable to get you killed. Stephen is the first of the long list of Christian martyrs.

Stephen was one of the seven who were chosen by the Apostles to deal with the practical business of caring. He was one of those, who the Church has later called deacons, charged with making sure widows and others in need were looked after. But Stephen was also full of grace and power as Luke tells us. He, like the Apostles themselves, was capable of performing wonders and speaking great wisdom in the power of the Spirit. Unsurprisingly he provoked the anger and jealousy of some, who, in an echo of the conspiracy against Jesus:

Secretly instigated some men to say, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.”

So Stephen is hauled before the same council who had tried Jesus as well as Peter and John before him. For Stephen this is just another opportunity to preach the Good News. He takes them through the whole of the history that he and his judges share, and demonstrates that that history has reached its fulfilment in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. Not unnaturally the council are not impressed by what they hear:

When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. 

And at this moment Stephen is given a vision of heaven:

But filled with the Holy Spirit he [Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right of God.

Stephen is given a vision of the whole truth about Jesus. This is who Jesus is. Jesus is now, as he always was, the exalted Lord. He is the long awaited and exalted Messiah. He is the one who must be acknowledged and obeyed or rejected at the peril of rejecting God himself. This is a truth so compelling that against prudence Stephen has to declare it:

“Look” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

This seals Stephen fate. This pushes the council over the edge, they become an angry mob and haul Stephen out of the council chamber and out of the city and they stand him up against a wall. The council does not want to hear what Stephen has to say, and they want him silenced once and for all. In their minds what Stephen is saying is blasphemous. It places a human being in near equality to the glory and authority of God. And in fact it would be blasphemy were it not true. But worse than blasphemy, as far as the council is concerned, it further convicts them of having acted wrongly with respect to Jesus. When they rejected Jesus, and conspired with Pilate to have Jesus killed they were acting on the conviction that God was not on Jesus’ side, and Jesus was not on God’s side. The resurrection has vindicated Jesus. And now this vision further asserts that the council were absolutely wrong in their conviction. Jesus was and is on God’s side. There is no clearer vision of God, no other access to the truth about God, than through Jesus. Their authority is denied and their power undermined.

What happens in the world however is that truth is determined by those who have the power to assert it. Might makes right. And the council uses the power at its disposal, the power of this world, which is as ever the power of death.

They dragged him [Stephen] out of the city and began to stone him.

The council have declared that Stephen is their enemy, and the enemy of their understanding of God. The world deals with enemies in only one way, it seeks to destroy them. But above all Stephen demonstrates that Christians have a different way of dealing with their enemies. He doesn’t resist what is being done to him. Indeed his  focus remains elsewhere, on the vision of heaven that has been given to him. Stephen shows that Jesus’ followers die like Jesus died. Stephen dies with two of the same prayers which Jesus prayed at Calvary on his lips. The first is the simple children’s goodnight prayer:

Lord Jesus receive my Spirit.

Stephen dies in childlike trust in God for his well being. His prayer though is slightly revised to recognise that his relationship with God comes through Jesus. In this last extreme moment of his life Stephen demonstrates the quality that all of Christian living should possess at every moment, trust in God. Stephen also utters the same prayer that Jesus offered for the soldiers who were crucifying him:

Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

This is the prayer which demonstrates the real difference between Christianity and the power of this world, whoever it happens to be that is wielding it. Those with power have the option to try and destroy their enemies. This option is not not available to the powerless, like Stephen, nor is it desired by God or by any of the followers of Jesus. Jesus’ followers have a different way of dealing with their enemies. Following Jesus’ explicit commandment Stephen loves his enemies. He does the only thing available to him at that moment to demonstrate that love, he prays for his killers even as they are taking up rocks and throwing them at him.

Martyrdom has always been an important part of Christian testimony. Deaths like Stephen’s throw into the sharpest relief what qualities all of Christian living should possess. Stephen has an unwavering commitment to the truth of the Gospel. The claims we make about Jesus have to do with the truth. What the gospel says about Jesus is true. It doesn’t stop being true even if the ones who are making those claims are killed. And indeed it is the kind of truth that you can’t stop testifying to, even as you are being killed. But it also shows that faith is simple trust. Even in the face of death, God in Jesus Christ is to be relied upon for our security and well being. And above it shows that Christians have a different way of dealing with the enemies we make by testifying to the truth. We love them and pray for them even at the cost of our own lives. That is the truth which Stephen’s death speaks.

Stephen has done what the Church and Christians are often called to do, he spoke truth to power. The Church and Christians time and again find that we must speak all the truth that God has shown us in Jesus Christ. And we must do so in the face of threats and actual violence from those in power. The Church and Christians cannot and should not deny the truth even when it would be expedient to do so in the face of the denials of those in power. However power is a problem for Christians. Power corrupts, we know it, we say it, but we struggle to actually believe it. Power is corrupting. Powerless Christians die like Stephen. They have little choice because they know the truth and it is a truth that compels them to testify. Jesus is Lord is a truth that is true, even when it is going to get you killed for saying it. But with power Christians have proved themselves too willing to persecute those whom they deemed to be the enemies of God, based on exactly the same vision of God that was given to Stephen. When a martyr says, “Jesus is Lord” we can be sure that it is true. In those circumstances it is entirely trustworthy testimony. When “Jesus is Lord” is spoken from a position of power it tends to mean something like: “We’re in charge, and we’re using Jesus to legitimate our power.” In those circumstances we have grounds for skepticism.

Imagine if in that scene from Acts the roles had been reversed. Those who testified that Jesus stands at the right hand of God were sitting in judgement over those who denied it. And those who resist that truth claim were powerless before them. I suspect the scene would have played out in virtually the same way. The judges would have stopped their ears. They would have been enraged by the denial of their certainty. The weak helpless ones would have been dragged out and stoned, or burnt at the stake, or received some other terrible fate or some denial of their dignity or their humanity. The tragedy of the Church in power is that scene has actually played out countless times through Christian history. Power corrupts. Power makes us unwilling to love our neighbours and be forgiving towards those who are our enemies. Power makes us reluctant to place a childlike trust in God for our well being in the face of death. With power we tell ourselves that testifying to the truth doesn’t have to cost us our lives. With power we would be able to avoid martyrdom. It is uncomfortable to recognise and difficult to accept but powerlessness is the only appropriate position from which to conduct Christian mission. It worked that way for Stephen, but it cost him his life. It worked that way, of course, for Jesus! But we tell ourselves it doesn’t have to work that way for us. We can’t imagine how anything could be accomplished without power. We tell ourselves that is just the way the world is. And with power we imagine we could do so much good. Much of what the Church does comes down to seeking power; more people, more money, more influence. The effort is sincere but misguided. The reality is that power undermines our ability to speak the truth. And it is only with access to that truth that we can do any good at all.

The assertion of truth which Stephen makes:

I see the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. 

Is the assertion of the truth which the Church must make. But it can only be made from a position of powerlessness. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed: “Some things are true when whispered but false when shouted.” The example he was thinking of was the phrase: “I love you.” When whispered into the ear of a beloved one, it perhaps can be relied upon. When bellowed it takes on a different meaning. It probably means something like: “I love me, I want to control and use you.” The truth of the Gospel has something of the same quality. When asserted from a position of power it takes on a different meaning. It becomes an attempt to control and manage the lives of others and shape them to Christians’ wishes. The gospel is true, but any attempt to impose its truth falsifies its claim to the truth. The Lordship of Christ cannot be imposed on others from a position of power. The claim to that truth, that Jesus is Lord, can only safely be made from a position of powerlessness. A position which gives those who hear it the clearest opportunity to accept or reject the truth which is declared to them. That is why the truth of the gospel is clearest and most convincing when it is found on the lips of a dying martyr.

Amen.

Speaking Truth to Power from Powerlessness by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (03/05/20): The Radical Response to the Resurrection

The Radical Response to the Resurrection

Acts 2:42-47

The task which Luke gives himself in writing the Acts of the Apostles is to show us what happens when the message of the resurrection is preached. On Easter morning and the days that follow, one after another Jesus’ friends have discovered that he is not dead but alive. And he is not just alive but really present to them. He is available to them as he ever was. Jesus has given them the task which has remained the task of the Church ever since, to announce the good news of the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth until the end of time. On the day of Pentecost the Apostles are given the means to fulfil the mission of the Church, they are filled with the Spirit. And Peter begins the announcement which has gone on ever since. Luke in Acts shows us what happens next.

Put most simplistically, the Church is what happened next. Which perhaps just at the moment makes the book of Acts a difficult read. We are living through difficult times, in which for good reasons, we are cut off from one another. The book of Acts shows us something which we might remember, or might aspire to, but which for the moment we can’t experience. The Church as we have known it has ceased to function.  Typically we look for ways to articulate, to describe what this experience is like. Shut into our homes for weeks on end, isolated from normal human contact, perhaps feels like being entombed. The range of our movements, the range of our human contacts has been reduced almost to zero, like being buried. Perhaps the connection with Jesus’ experience between the end of Good Friday and the early hours of Easter Day is a little overblown. But we could see in our current experience an echo of Jesus' time in the tomb. Which of course would make what we are presently going through potentially hopeful. Because Jesus’ time in the tomb was followed by a glorious reemergence, the Resurrection. This time of restriction, this time entombed for the most part in our own homes, will come to an end. On the other side of the current circumstances, when churches are closed, and we are prevented from gathering, something will emerge. I think we are beginning to realise that what will emerge will not be the same as what went before. I think we recognise that restrictions are likely to remain. How we interact socially with one another, how we can be present to each other, will change forever. The current crisis is perhaps also the final blow against some parts of what we were doing. It is not as if our churches were at their greatest strength before all of this happened. This crisis will have been the last straw for some. Some parts of the church simply will not return, they will be lost. But there will be a reemergence, weeks or months from now, it will happen. And into that reemergence the message of the resurrection will be preached:

Jesus who was crucified now lives.

What was dead can be alive.

After what we are going through, that message will perhaps feel fresher, more exciting, more relevant than sometimes we have felt it to be. And in response to that message something will emerge. The books of Acts, and especially Acts chapter 2, gives us a picture of what that something might look like.

Of course what emerges is likely to be somewhat similar to what existed before. For all its variety of expression the Church has some features that are universal. What comes next will have some continuity with what went before. Though this continuity will be experienced with a clearer appreciation of the importance of those universals of the Church. Luke describes what the very first church did:

They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and to the breaking of bread and the prayers

When the first Christians did those things they were fresh, dynamic and exciting. But that verse in fact describes the routine of Church life. It describes a pattern of Christian discipleship which at its beginning and through much of its history Methodism understood and appreciated. That verse shows us that the very first church engaged itself in Bible study, Communion and fellowship, and prayer. Perhaps recently we have not been as enthusiastic about that routine of Church life. But we could argue that they are essential to the life of the Church, and whatever emerges in response to the preaching of the Resurrection, it must be built on this foundation.

At the beginning the only Bible which the first Christians had was what we have come to call the Old Testament. But what makes the Church Christian is that it receives those scriptures viewed through what happened in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The first Christians had the eyewitnesses to those things to guide them into a fresh understanding of God and their place in the world. What Luke calls the “Apostles’ teaching” was not written down at that point. Luke himself was one of those giving it written form. At the heart of what the Church does, and it is shockingly easy for us to forget this, is the shared practice of earnest study of the Scriptures, both the New Testament, and the Old Testament viewed through what God has done in Jesus.

What we are acutely aware of in the present moment is that we are prevented from meeting. What we long for is the restoration, the reemergence of collective worship. Luke’s words “the breaking of bread” point us to Holy Communion. The Church has from its first moments called to mind Jesus’ ministry in a shared symbolic meal. The Lord’s Supper, historically has been more important to Methodists than we sometimes consciously recognise. Methodism began as much as a Eucharistic revival as it did as an Evangelical revival. That is, we began by seeing the importance of the “breaking of bread” as much as we did in our renewed devotion to the “Apostles’ teaching.” Methodists have always valued what we call the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Methodists know the value of sacrament, but we also understand the sacramentality of shared life, of fellowship. We traditionally have not restricted our understanding of the “breaking of bread” just to a particular action in some Sunday Services. We (at least subconsciously) understand that the whole of our lives together, every time we share food or fellowship, brings us some experience of the real presence of the risen Christ. Whether we have recognised it or not, this is why “church socials” are so important to Methodists. What perhaps will emerge from our current deprivation will be a fresh appreciation of that fundamental aspect of Methodist church life.

Something that used to be a feature of every Methodist church was a regular prayer meeting. One of my favourite images from my family’s storytelling is the description that my grandfather gave of his grandfather. My granddad recalled that when he was a small boy growing up in a Primitive Methodist Chapel near Hull, his grandfather in his navy blue Sunday  suit would take the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and spread it on the pew in chapel, so that he could kneel on it back-to-front with his elbows on the back of the pew. This was the attitude all the members of that little chapel assumed at the end of Sunday evening’s service, which was the beginning of their weekly prayer meeting. Often earlier Methodists responded to the message of the resurrection in the same way as the first Christians. Luke recalls that the first church devoted themselves not just to the Apostles’ teaching and the breaking of bread, but also devoted themselves to the “prayers.” Perhaps what some of us are realising in this time of isolation is the value of a shared discipline of praying together. Perhaps what could emerge as we are released from the current restrictions is the recovery of regular prayer meetings that were so vital to the first Christians and to earlier generations of Methodists.

So far, so familiar. But the first response to the announcement of the resurrection was significantly more radical:

All who believed were together and had all things in common, they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all as any had needs.

The response of the first believers to the message of the resurrection was a transformation of their social and economic relationships. The change they experienced was to say the least revolutionary. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, since it is an idea that seems shocking: The first Christians were communists. Among themselves they practiced a primitive form of communism. After all, the abolition of private property and the reordering of social and economic life within a society to meet all its members’ needs is the very definition of communism in the proper sense.  Their reasons for ordering their lives together this way were theological rather than political. (Though in truth theology always demands a political expression, and politics always expresses an implicit theology.)

The message of the resurrection brought into much clearer focus God and God’s kingdom  for the first Christians. They saw themselves as a redeemed people. Everything they were and had was because God had given it back to them. They recognised in particular that their possessions were not for themselves alone but were intended by God to serve a wider purpose. If they had means or ability they were given to meet the needs of the whole community, who like them were precious to God. The message of the resurrection calls for a radical revaluation of values which in turn produces a revolutionary response.

One of the things that the crisis brought on by the pandemic and the restrictions that have been imposed on us because of it, has been a calling into question by our society at large of the direction we are going and the values that are driving us. We have recognised that those most important for the well-being of society have been up to now those least valued. It turns out who we really need are distribution workers and delivery drivers, cleaners and shelf-stackers, to say nothing of nurses and care-workers. As the economy has ground to a halt it has caused us to question what purpose all this activity was serving, and whether it was really creating well-being for everyone. As the roads have become quiet and the skies free of planes we have been reminded of the impact that human activity has on the environment and on the planet that is home to us all. Some at least are wondering whether this crisis is not an opportunity to press a reset button on what the human race does, so that when thing begin again we might do things a little better.

What the Church does can be called “prefiguration politics.” That is, the Church tries to live in the present the future that we hope will be the reality for everyone. We attempt to live among ourselves the life that will become the reality for all when  God’s kingdom is fully established. Indeed the church is meant to be a kind of living parable of the kingdom. We are meant to be the change we want to see. The mission and the ministry of the Church are the same thing, we are meant to embody the reality of God’s reign, here and now. As we emerge from lock-down and the crisis which the corona virus has created there is an opportunity for Christians to offer the world a vision of what the world might be. That vision is the radically transformed social and economic relationships which Luke describes as the response the first Christians made to the preaching of the resurrection. This is not the first time that the world and the church, or part of it has endured a crisis which changed the way things are running. It is not the first time Christians have the opportunity to demonstrate the radical possibility of transformed life which the resurrection offers. A previous pandemic, the Black Death, led to the Bohemian Reformation, where Christians in what is now the Czech Republic established radical forms of discipleship based on the model Luke shows us in Acts chapter 2. During the 16th Century in the disruption created by the wars of religion that wracked that century, again some Christians turned to the same vision of radical discipleship and formed groups which their enemies called Anabaptist. Likewise in the turmoil of the English Civil War also produced a radical response among some, groups like the Levellers and the Diggers. Even Methodism itself, a radicalisation of commitment to the gospel, was in part a response to the social and economic disruption brought about by the beginnings of the industrial revolution. In the 20th Century, the depression of the 1930’s led Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to found the Catholic Worker movement, with its rejection of property and wealth and its commitment to radical hospitality and sharing. Perhaps when we can again gather and here the message of the resurrection:

Christ who was crucified is alive.

What was dead can be alive.

Our response to that Good News can be just a radical.

Amen.

The Radical Response to the Resurrection by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.