You can access the audio for my sermon, recorded during worship, by clicking on this link:
http://www.box.net/shared/11vtg0l9ye
The manuscript I worked from follows below:
The Seventh Sunday of Easter; May 16, 2010
Park Avenue Presbyterian Church; Des Moines, Iowa
Texts: Acts 16: 16-34 *
Psalm 97
Revelation 22: 12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17: 20-26
“No One Suspects the Christian Influence”
--} I was doing some reading online this past week and came across some new poll numbers. “Striking” and “rather surprising” were how the findings of NBC and the Wall Street Journal found this particular slice of Americana:
- Despite all the attention the [Gulf] oil spill has received, 60% support offshore drilling and 53% believe drilling's economic benefits outweigh its environmental risks.
- Nearly two-thirds of the public (64%) back Arizona's immigration law, as another two-thirds (66%) believe it will lead to the discrimination of Latino immigrants who are in the country legally.
- A majority of Americans (52%) say they are willing to give up personal freedoms and civil liberties to prevent another terrorist attack, and another majority (51%) approve of using racial or ethnic profiling to combat terrorism.
Perhaps none of this is terribly surprising—UNLESS—you also make the claim that the United States is inherently a “Christian nation,” with values that are predominantly “Christian”—that is based on the life and teachings of Jesus and where the Bible is taken as a rule-book for living.
Three presidential elections ago, William Willimon—a popular leader and preacher in the United Methodist denomination, noted the wide concern among many Americans that as a Jew—then vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, had presumably taken a religious vow “not to do work on the Sabbath,” and there was some question among voters about the need for the United States to go to war on a Saturday and Lieberman would have to wait until Sunday. Willimon suggested that instead of being concerned with Lieberman’s particular religious preferences, voters might want to consider that Al Gore was a Baptist, Lieberman a Jew, and George Bush a Methodist—all religious traditions that took serious issue with going to war in the first place—but about that, no one seemed particularly concerned.
I want to “pull a Willimon” this morning and suggest to you that one of the problems we face as modern “Christians” is that very few people in our nation and culture seem to suspect or take seriously that those of us called to the radical life called “Christianity” are particularly invited to have pretty non-typical reactions to all kinds of things that would seem “normal” to people of the world. There’s something particularly instructive about Paul and Silas ending up before an angry mob of business-people and city leaders and being beaten and thrown into prison because they upset the “business practices” that exploited a fortune-teller. The values of Jesus Christ don’t mesh very well with national, cultural, or other values of looking out for number one or of “getting rich”!
- It’s safe to say that the gospels portray Jesus as one who never took up a weapon of any kind; whose most violent act would have been that act of cleansing the Temple in Jerusalem—in which we should note, no one died.
- Jesus always welcomed the outsider, the stranger, the one in need.
- Jesus not only laid down his life, but prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
- Jesus advocated for the least and the lost; promised good things for those who had little or nothing or less than nothing, and held out the possibility that those who were rich by comparison still had work to do.
- Jesus elevated a whole set of standards for caring for one’s neighbor that precluded selfishness on our part.
Yet few people ever seem to suspect that a radical commitment to Jesus and his ministry on our part, calls us to a very different way of living and being in the world—a way that may even call into question the values of those living around us.
Just think of this for a moment. If we take the familiar Ten Commandments and lift them up as values we expect our culture to uphold, what does it say about us as a culture and a nation when we know these other things are true:
- Most people in our country don’t attend church or other religious services weekly.
- Nightly television and other forms of entertainment are built around story lines that include stealing, affairs, and killing; sit-coms are filled with sexual innuendo, scenes of crimes are often violent and brutal.
- News stories often double as entertainment—at least reality more and more mirrors entertainment, or vice versa; there’s a lot of disturbing things going on.
In truth, I’m not sure that our culture is a lot different from first-century Philippi—where Paul and Silas got into trouble. They had their fair share of violence and intrigue—it just wasn’t all on television, a lot of it was real life. But what happens to Paul and Silas shouldn’t have been totally unexpected. What’s instructive about today’s lesson from Acts is that it reminds us that a serious commitment on our part to Christianity definitely puts us at odds with the world’s values.
In the middle of today’s story is verse 25: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.” If you ever wanted to know, THIS, is what the reign of God looks like. Having been beaten severely, the scripture tells us “with rods,” that Paul and Silas were in fact wounded (remember that story some years ago about the young American who was to be caned as a punishment in some far Eastern country); the first question is “how” Paul and Silas were able to sing—assuming they’d been beaten and punched in the face and so forth. Not only that, but withstanding blows to the body with rods—then, as if adding insult to injury—being placed in the stocks in the innermost part of the prison! Imagine what religious hymns they might have been singing? [Which ones would you be singing!]
Not only were they singing hymns and praying under trying circumstances, but then something extraordinary happens. As if divinely inspired, an earthquake strikes, one that blows open the doors and breaks the fetters that bound all the prisoners and essentially sets everyone free. This is at least the third time in Acts that there’s been a divinely inspired “prison break”! But instead of bolting, Paul and Silas, presumably encouraged ALL the prisoners to remain. And doesn’t this become a resurrection story?—because the Jailor is all set to kill himself when Paul and Silas cry out for him not to do so—that the prisoners were all accounted for. The Jailor for all intents and purposes was dead, but now, suddenly and unexpectedly, he gets a new chance at life. Now, seriously, who in their right mind, under these circumstances, would be thinking about the salvation possibilities of a lowly Roman Jailor?—who no doubt had participated in the wrongful justice undertaken against Paul and Silas.
As crazy as it sounds, this is the voice of the early Christian community attempting to share what it means to take on the radical commitment of being a believer and follower of Jesus Christ. It is to do the unthinkable. It is to declare the unknowable. It is to live radically by a different set of principles—principles that are set forth by the Kingdom of God rather than the desires of human beings.
And what is remarkable about this story to me is that Paul and Silas don’t take on all of Roman culture. For example, they don’t declare the Roman way of life to be corrupt or immoral; instead they act in a manner that values all of human life. They don’t proclaim that the Emperor is the devil incarnate, and that to participate in the Roman way of life that worshiped the emperor as God was forbidden; instead they value the way of life that God values, and they demonstrate it. They don’t expect to lead an open revolt against Rome, they change hearts and minds by their witness to the life and work of Jesus—a life they emulate, sharing the values of God’s kingdom. And one person, one family at a time, they begin to make a difference.
This is the last Sunday of Easter. Resurrection means Jesus got a new life, Paul got a new life, the Jailor in today’s story gets a new life—WE get a new life, right? And what I think is important is for us to “re-think” what it means for us to be radical followers of Jesus. We DON’T have to go along with everything in our culture, or even what a majority of people in our country “think” is right. Now more than ever is a time for us to know our Bible, to be confident in God’s love in Jesus, and for us to make OUR voice heard. Not because we think we alone are right, but because we have a witness to make.
We know:
- Killing is wrong;
- False accusation, false imprisonment, racial profiling—are wrong;
- Discrimination against and exploitation of other human beings is wrong;
- Stealing—or forcing others to steal—is wrong.
And while it’s true our country our culture our nation and our world have difficult problems that are hard to solve, it’s not fair to “solve them” always at the expense of others or ourselves. More importantly, as Christians, we believe we have to do the right things. Unfortunately, few of us expect that our Christian values should influence us in ways that are so radically different from our neighbors.
--+ Christ is risen! It is an opportunity to say goodbye to an old way of life, and to live into a radically new way of being a Christian—indeed! AMEN.
As always, thanks for checking this out!
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