Acts 2:1-21           Joel 2:27-29         Luke 11:5-13

 

Some people crave money; others, fame; others, power. The desire for power, everyone knows, is greater than the desire for fame or for money. Power is a narcotic to which people become addicted even as their craving for it visits suffering upon those nearest and dearest them.

In the book of Acts we learn of Simon Magnus, a man who trafficked in occult power. Simon Magus noticed the unusual effectiveness of apostles like Peter. He concluded that he should have whatever power they had, for such power would magnify his manipulation of the occult. He approached Peter, flashed his money and attempted to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostle. Peter was outraged at his crassness and blasphemy. “Away with your and your money, thinking you can buy God’s gift with cash!” the text says with undisguised vehemence and disgust. The truth is, we can’t buy God’s gift with money. We can’t grab it and hoard it and then use it for whatever self-serving end we have in mind. We can’t co-opt God in our pursuit of power; we can’t harness his power to our schemes. We can, however, find ourselves infused with the unique power that is God’s Spirit. Pentecost is the festival of the Spirit, the acknowledgement of God’s singular effectiveness in and with his own people. Let’s think for the next few minutes of how God’s people before us, centuries before us, were moved to speak of the Spirit.

 

They spoke of the Spirit as breath. “Breath” in Hebrew denotes creativity. The breath of God that God breathes into his own people is that movement of God upon us and within us which enlivens our creativity and frees it for service in God’s kingdom. We mustn’t think of creativity here in the sense in which this overworked word is used every day: the creative person is the one with rare talent as writer or painter or composer or dancer. Where the Spirit is concerned, creativity has nothing to do with extraordinary artistic talent. The creativity of the Spirit, rather, is simply the freeing, the freeing up, the magnification and multiplied usefulness of any gift we have in order that this talent might now be sued for God’s purposes among those near and far.

One of my friends was employed as a chemist all his working life. Having become weary of the “grind,” he decided to retire early. At the conclusion of several of those twists and turns in the road of life that we can make sense of looking backward but can never see looking ahead, he ended up teaching mathematics to high school dropouts who were serving prison sentences. Until he began this work no one knew he could teach mathematics. He didn’t know this himself, for the simple reason that he had never taught anything. More important, no one (including himself) was aware that he could relate to convicts. (Not everyone can.) He looks upon his work with these sufferers (he has come to see them not merely as offenders but as men who have usually sustained extraordinary childhood wounds) as kingdom-service the likes of which he has never known in his life.

There’s something about Spirit-creativity we must take to heart. The Spirit, or breath, of God fosters and frees up such creativity as and only as we first decide to do something. I don’t think the best approach in congregational life is to draw up a list of talents in the congregation and then conclude that we can attempt only those things for which we have demonstrable talent. It’s just the opposite. Suffused with the gospel, our hearts pierced by the suffering around us that the gospel frees us to stop denying, we see what has to be done and therefore what we must do, since there’s no one else to do it. Then, as we resolve to do it, even in fear and trembling, the Spirit breathes upon us and whatever is needed always turns up. (By now we should have stopped saying “somehow turns up.”)

A year after I arrived in the Mississauga congregation I last served the congregation decided to assist a refugee family from Viet Nam . We discovered talents and gifts among us that we never guessed existed. We discovered that lifelong office workers could teach English to Asian people who had no familiarity with a western language. Whenever we decided something less dramatic – something as apparently mundane as making improvements to the physical plant or building a new sidewalk or rearranging plumbing – we turned up talent we should otherwise never have heard of.

Whenever we’ve wanted to do anything little or much out of the ordinary at worship here in Schomberg, we’ve found people here who can write, act, dance, arrange music, handle lighting, sing, blow, encourage the timid, and pray down God’s blessings. It’s never a congregation’s responsibility to sleuth out what it thinks people can do and then tell God that this is the range of his Spirit’s breath. It’s always our responsibility to discern what the king and his kingdom require, and resolve to do it. For only the, but certainly then, the Spirit will breathe life, vitality, creativity, as gifts come for that not even their possessors are aware of. The Spirit is breath.

 

Our Hebrew foreparents in faith also spoke of the Spirit as oil. Oil was used for anointing. Moses anointed Aaron. Samuel anointed David. Anointing was the sign of being equipped. The Spirit equips those whom the Spirit has appointed to a specific task. Such anointing is necessary just because our “doing” will have to last longer than ten minutes; it has to last past discouragement and setback.

The one bible verse that everyone can recite is from Psalm 23: “Thou anointest my head with oil.” We frequently overlook, however, the one thing that the psalmist wants us to remember: we are anointed precisely at that table which is prepared for us in the presence of our enemies. To be anointed with oil doesn’t mean we’ve been supplied with a cosmetic like suntan oil; it doesn’t even mean that we’ve been supplied with a safeguard like sunscreen. To be anointed with oil in the presence of one’s foes is to be nerved; it’s to be fortified; it’s to be comforted in the Renaissance English sense of “comfort.” In Renaissance English “comfort” is formed from two Latin words, con and fortis: “with strength.” Profoundly to be comforted isn’t to be pampered or even consoled. It’s to be strengthened. There’s an old tapestry of William the Conqueror hanging in an English museum. The artwork is titled, William Comforts His Soldiers. It depicts William himself standing behind his men with the point of his sword one millimetre away from their posteriors.

The old Molson’s Brewery advertisement said, “You’ve got to have heart, miles and miles of heart.” It’s true. We’ve got to have heart. But beer won’t give it to us. Oil will, specifically the oil of anointing, the Spirit, God’s effectual presence and power.

Our enemies are many. Often we are our own enemy, even our own worst enemy. For instance, we tell ourselves we’re past the immaturity of not needing to be congratulated for what we do; we tell ourselves we’re past being tempted to quit the project when it doesn’t go exactly our way; we tell ourselves we’re grown-ups now and therefore the indifference of others to what we hold dear and hold dear just because it’s true and right and good; the indifference here can’t chill us or deflect us or discourage us. We tell ourselves. We keep on telling ourselves in the attempt at nerving ourselves, but it doesn’t work. We need to be oiled.

We all have “those days,” days when we are tired out, done in, fed up, broken down. Out, in, up, down. On these days we say, “I’m getting it from all directions.” What next: capitulation? Quitting? vindictiveness? a shrivelled heart and a sour disposition? We can only fall on our face before God and plead for oiling.

The Good Shepherd who provides us (in his own way and his own time) with green pastures is also the Good Oiler who anoints us, nerves us, in the presence of everything that threatens to deflect us from the course we are to pursue until our life’s end.

 

Our Hebrew foreparents also spoke of the Spirit as dove. Romantics like us associate the dove with romance. Doves appear to be lovebirds who sit side-by-side and coo to each other, oblivious of everything else. In scripture, however, doves are something else. In scripture the dove is associated with the Holy Spirit coming upon someone at a specific time for a specific task, and associated as well with the sacrifice that faithful worshippers offer to God as the sign and seal and vehicle of their self-sacrifice, their self-renunciation. Where the Spirit is concerned, then, the dove speaks of God’s suffusing us with himself so as to summon from us that sacrifice which is nothing less than our self, given back to him who gave us our self in the first place and then gave himself, all of himself, for us.

Having been a parent of teenagers myself I appreciate the concern parents have to get their youngsters through the minefields of the teenage world; specifically to get them through school undrugged, unpregnant and unsavaged. I’m not making light of any of this. At the same time I’m aware that our efforts in this regard, doubled and redoubled and redoubled again, all the while rendering our youngster the focus of everything we parents have and are aspire after; our efforts here can get through the undrugged, unpregnant and unsavaged to be sure, but also render them narcissistic. In ensuring that our youngsters aren’t under-attended we can easily leave them with the impression that the world exists for them; nothing matters except them; no one is as important as they, and they can do no wrong even though others without end can do wrong to them.

While it’s important to get our young people through the minefield, such a victory is hollow if they emerge on the other side of it uncaring, uncompassionate, as unwilling as most in our society to sacrifice any comfort for the sake of the wounded people who have never known the silver spoon privilege of this congregation’s youth. What have we gained if, in keeping all the members of our smaller and larger family “on the rails” we render ourselves self-preoccupied, concerned only with our own ease? What will we have accomplished if we confirm each other as those who are decent, sophisticated, able to move around in drawing rooms and city hall receptions and political backrooms but don’t have in it us to share ourselves with people whose lives would be enriched immeasurably, if not transmogrified, by even the slightest, self-renouncing generosity?

In Jerusalem of old some people took a lamb to the temple service when they joined others in worship. Those who couldn’t afford a lamb took two doves. A week after the birth of Jesus, Mary and Joseph took their son to the temple “to present him to the Lord,” the text tells us. (Luke 2:22) They were offering back to God the one who was dear to them above all else, their child. They took two doves with them. They sacrificed the doves at the same time as they offered back their child to God. In accord with Hebrew understanding, at the moment of the doves’ being slain, Mary and Joseph put their hand on the birds as a sign that they identified themselves with the life that was being offered up to God. At the same time, of course, that they identified themselves with the life in the doves that was being offered up to God, they were declaring that they would never do anything or be anything that impeded their son and his self-renunciation for the sake of others.

Surely we want nothing less for our children; surely we want nothing less for ourselves. Then the Spirit as dove must alight upon us as surely as the Spirit-dove alighted upon our Lord at the commencement of his public ministry.

 

Our Hebrew foreparents spoke of the Spirit as fire. Fire warms. Fire thaws cold hearts and limbers up cold hands. Fire brightens surroundings, enabling us to see what there is to be seen, even as fire brightens moods. (We know that fire brightens moods. For what other reason would people whose homes have central heating spend thousands of dollars on fireplaces?) As fire the Spirit must ignite us if we are to bring real warmth and brightness to people whose situations are colder, darker, bleaker than ours. And whatever we do on their behalf we must do cheerfully, or else our doing is an insult that begins by demeaning them and ends by having them resent us.

Most of you know me well, and therefore you know how concerned I am with the cerebral dimension of faith. I’m concerned – rightly concerned, I’m convinced – with having people understand the truth of God and the purpose of God and the way of God. Unless people understand something their deity is an idol, their worship is superstition, and their discipleship (so-called) is cult-following. At the same time, in the maturer years of my pulpit ministry, I’ve come to see as never before that while understanding is necessary it’s never sufficient. Correct understanding alone leaves people sitting in an armchair, and leaves them sitting their while regarding as inferior those whose understanding is less sophisticated. In addition to be brought to understand, people have to be warmed and brightened; they have to be lit. Then the fire of Pentecost has to ignite us as surely as it ignited disciples in a Jerusalem room two millennia ago and has continued to ignite men and women ever since.

 

Throughout my ministry I’ve found that church folk usually have a more-or-less adequate idea of Christmas (the saviour of the world was born,) of Good Friday (they know that Jesus died for us in some sense) and of Easter (resurrection is an even tin world-occurrence that can never be overturned.) When it comes to Pentecost, however, I’ve found that most church folk apprehend little, if anything. Then we must grasp the simple truth that the Holy Spirit is God’s effectual presence and power.

Today, on Pentecost Sunday, let’s think of the Spirit in terms of biblical symbols connected with the Spirit: breath, oil, dove, fire. For then we shall know that the Spirit is the effectual presence and power of God, whereby our gifts are made fruitful in his kingdom (breath;) we ourselves are anointed for service and nerved in the face of opposition (oil;) self-renouncing sacrifice is required of God’s people everywhere (dove;) and all of this is to warm and brighten others as we, “lit” already, are the occasion of his igniting others (fire.)

 

                                                                                               Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                  
 Pentecost 2004

 

 Acts 3-4.

 

I: — When they walk up the back stairs, sit in my office and ask for money, they always tell me what the money is for. It’s for milk for their children and disposable diapers for their infant, as well as prescription medicine for them. (You must have noticed that people with high-paying jobs who can therefore afford to pay for their own drugs also have drug plans through their employer, while those with low-paying jobs who can’t afford to pay for their own drugs also don’t have drug plans.) These people have come asking for help — “alms” is the older-fashioned word — and I am glad enough to be able to supply them with a few alms.

At the same time that I’m glad enough to furnish a little financial help I often feel bad about it. You see, I know that their deepest need isn’t for paper diapers. Their deepest need is for our Lord himself; for faith in him — for trust and love and obedience and its concomitant contentment — all of which together add up to that throbbing, pulsating, world-altering difference he makes to all who cling to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not singling out the poor (the materially poor, that is) as alone spiritually needy. Neither am I singling out the poor as unusually spiritually needy. Neither am I singling out the poor as needy with a different kind of spiritual need. The spiritual condition of the resident of Jane-Finch is the same as that of the resident of Forest Hill. (The ground at the foot of the cross has always been level.)

Peter and John are on their way to a church-service in Jerusalem when they come upon a man who has been lame from birth. (No doubt he has had his physical disability from birth. At the same time, you Streetsvillians have been schooled for a long time now in the different layers of meaning in scripture. Therefore you grasp immediately that “lame from birth” in Acts 3 has precisely the same force as “blind from birth” in John 9; namely, a graphic reminder of the root spiritual condition of humankind.) The man wants money; he needs alms. (After all, how else does a lame man eat?) No doubt Peter and John would have given him money if they had had any with them. On this occasion, however, they had none.

The man is calling out for alms, charity, to anyone who happens by. He isn’t looking at anyone in particular. “Can you spare a quarter, mister? Can you spare a quarter?” mumbled a thousand times a day. Peter and John, not having a quarter, have no reason to stop before the man.

Not true! They have every reason to stop. What they are about to set before the fellow is beyond price. “Look at us”, Peter calls out, “look at us! We have no silver or gold, but what we can give you we shall: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!”

We should pause for a minute and note what it is to walk. At one level the man who is told to walk and made able to walk is simply to transport himself, move his body, put one foot in front of the other. But “walk”, in scripture, is also the shortest shorthand for expressing every aspect of the Christian life. Paul writes to the congregation in Corinth, “If we are alive in the Spirit, then let us walk by the Spirit.” In other words, if the Spirit of God has made us alive unto God, then everything we do is to reflect this vitality. Throughout their epistles the apostles tell us that Christians are to walk worthy of the Lord, walk worthy of their calling, walk as children of light. We are to walk in newness of life. We are to walk in honesty, in love, in truth. John tells us to walk in the commandments of Jesus. And according to Luke, Jesus gives his followers authority to walk on serpents and scorpions; that is, Christians are to tread down evil knowing they are safeguarded against the very evil they trample. All of this is gathered up and pressed on the lame fellow when Peter and John look at him and say, “Now you look at us. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, start walking.”

What did the man do? He walked! — into the temple, to worship. (The first indication that someone has been made alive unto God is that this person worships.) The man leapt as well; his cavorting attested his new-found freedom and his effervescent joy. And he praised God.

 

II: — Peter and John insist that they haven’t healed the man; they aren’t to be congratulated or thanked or revered. “Why do you stare at us”, they remark to onlookers, “as though our power or piety had made him walk? Christ’s name, faith in his name, has made strong this man whom you see and know.” Name, in scripture, always entails the presence, power and purpose of the person whose name is named. To impute effectiveness to Christ’s name therefore is simply to say that the living Lord Jesus Christ himself is present in his purpose and power and he, by means of faith in him, has made this man walk.

The attitude of the apostles is the exact opposite of the attitude which religious stars exude in our day. The stars of the religious media say less about their Lord and more about themselves. Their crude financial pressure is in marked contrast to the two apostles who don’t traffic in megabucks. Contemporary religious stars feed the cult of the hero, the cult of the wonder-worker, the cult of the glitzy personality — all of which adds up quickly to the cult of someone who is equal parts entertainer and exploiter. Little wonder that the programming “hypes” the star as the feature of the event.

Not so Peter and John. “Not through our power”, they insist; “we aren’t religious gurus, we aren’t possessed of semi-magical substance or powers of suggestion which we can turn on when the crowd is ripe.” “Not through our piety either.” They mean that of themselves they aren’t spiritual super-achievers who have advanced beyond the lower levels of religious amateurism. If Peter and John don’t traffic in unusual power or piety, then how did the enfeebled man come to walk, leap and praise God? “We give you what we have”, they had said to him, “we give you what we have: in the name (presence, power and purpose of a person) of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

By the name of Jesus Christ, by faith in his name (to quote the apostles) my grandfather Robert Shepherd was lifted out of a life of degradation. He had been to prison many times; he was a disgrace to himself, an embarrassment to his family, a burden to many others, a wastrel. Subsequently he became a bricklayer. Decades ago bricklayers were out of work four or five months each year, especially in inclement weather. My grandfather eked out a living by working in a livery stable. A livery stable, in those days, was considered an ultra-masculine place, macho to the core. Milquetoasts and pantywaists didn’t last a minute. Neither did phoneys. My grandfather was a small man; small in stature, but large in energy and feistiness. Following his deliverance by the name of Jesus Christ, by faith in his name, Robert Shepherd would write a scripture verse on the livery stable blackboard, and then sign his name beneath it. Can you imagine it? Then he waited. He never had to wait long. Now don’t think he did this in order to cause trouble; he wasn’t out to provoke a fight. On the contrary, he wanted to provoke discussion, debate, about what mattered to him above all else. My grandfather, like the apostles of old, never spoke of his own “power or piety”; but he did have an experience of his Lord in his heart and a recommendation of his Lord upon his lips, and this he was unashamed to put before the toughest dude in the livery stable. He lived and died without silver or gold. But what he had to give he never failed to give. What other business are we in?

When church authorities question Peter and John, the two apostles don’t mumble apologetically for what has occurred; neither do they try to excuse their place in it. As the authorities become angrier and angrier the two men don’t back away from their insistence on the efficacy of Jesus Christ. Instead they declare it even more starkly. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Contrast this with developments elsewhere. When plans were underway for Voices United, the United Church’s newest hymnbook, it was announced that the Christmas carols would have to be rewritten if they were to be included in the new hymnbook. All references to our Lord’s incarnation, atonement, and resurrection were deemed an embarrassment and would have to be bleached out. These rewritten Christmas carols would retain all of the sentiment associated with the tunes but none of the substance. Jesus Christ has become an embarrassment. And an embarrassment he remains to our current moderator, Rev. Wm. Phipps, and to the numerous church authorities who have defended Phipps repeatedly with utmost zeal.

Not so for the apostles; not so for my grandfather; not so for me; not so for anyone who knows that to speak of the name of Jesus Christ is to say that he embodies fully definitively, the presence, power and purpose of God.

There is one item in the story we are pondering together that always makes me chuckle. When the authorities oppose Peter and John, rail against them, even imprison them eventually, the authorities still don’t win their case! Luke tells us, “But seeing the man who had been healed standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition.” The authorities, unable to refute Peter and John, are reduced to becoming abusive.

A living demonstration of the truth and reality, power and purpose of Jesus Christ is rather hard to refute, isn’t it! Such irrefutable demonstration occurs over and over again in the gospel-incidents. In the gospel of John the man born blind is made to see through the touch of Jesus. Conflict boils up. Opponents of our Lord want to discredit him. They interrogate the parents of the man who has been granted sight. The parents are afraid of church-authorities who will also ostracise them from the community. Nervously they tell the interrogators that their son is an adult and can speak for himself. “Then what do you say?”, the authorities jab at him. The fellow, now set upon, doesn’t attempt to out-finesse his attackers, doesn’t try to get “cute” with them in any way. With that child-like simplicity and transparency which is irrefutable just because it’s so manifestly unembroidered, uncontrived, real, the man says with quiet deliberateness, “I know one thing: I was blind, and now I can see.” Irrefutable. When the deranged fellow who raged in the Gadarene hills is found seated, clothed and in his right mind, the townspeople don’t rejoice with him. For now the townspeople are afraid: on account of the presence and power, the touch, of Jesus something has happened in their midst that they can neither control nor refute, neither deny nor disregard.

When I went off to university to study philosophy people in my home congregation were alarmed. “He’s going to study philosophy? He will certainly end up an atheist! Why doesn’t he do as his cousin did and study medicine? No one ever lost his faith studying medicine.” Why did those dear people fear for me? I didn’t fear for myself. Then why did they fear for me? Were they themselves so slightly persuaded of God, was their faith so unsecured, that they assumed it would take as little to dismantle mine as it would to dismantle theirs? Luke writes simply, “But seeing the man who had been healed standing beside them, the man’s detractors had nothing to say in opposition.”

 

III: — The last point we should note today is the apostles’ inner compulsion to speak of Jesus. When the authorities tell Peter and John that it’s time for them to shut up and remain silent lest something nasty befall them, Peter and John reply calmly, “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” What they have “seen and heard”, of course, is the ministry of their Lord as that ministry altered men and women forever. “We cannot but speak” means “it’s impossible for us to remain silent.”

At one point in the earthly ministry of Jesus his disciples extolled him exuberantly. One of his detractors sharply admonished him, “Rebuke your disciples.” Jesus replied, “I tell you, if these men were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:40) The glorious truth of Jesus cannot be suppressed; if human lips do not confess it, then even the stones in the roadbed will find a voice.

The Sunday School teachers whose influence I shall never be without and whom I remember so very fondly were those, whether clever or not, who spoke from a full heart. The ministers who have impressed me were those, whether festooned with postgraduate degrees or not, who ministered from a full heart. Let’s be sure we understand one thing: no one is fooled for long. If opponents of Peter and John, men whose hearts are shrivelled, nevertheless recognize the two apostles as “having been with Jesus”, how much greater is the discernment of those who themselves keep company with the master and have done so for years! No one is fooled for long. A rich experience of our Lord is certainly necessary if we are to have anything to say on his behalf; at the same time, an experience of our Lord which is this rich impels testimony, for today it remains true that “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

 

It will always be the case that those who have been with Jesus, whether possessing silver and gold or not, will have the one thing to give to those who are newly apprised of their deepest need: “We gladly give you what we have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

And then someone whose Spirit-quickened faith is as irrefutable as the shining of the sun will indeed walk; walk worthy of her calling, walk as a child of light, walk in the commandments of Jesus, walk in honesty, truth and love, walk in that newness of life which is made new every morning.

And not only walk, but also leap. And even praise God.

 

                                                                       Victor Shepherd

August 1999

              Acts 2:42 -47       Ezekiel 37:15-23

 

I: — For years now I’ve been haunted by that old hymn we all learned to sing as children; you know, the one about Christian soldiers. It’s so very deep in us we’ll never forget it:

Like a fleeing army

Moves the Church of God ;

Brother treads on brother,

Grinds him in the sod.

 

We are not united,

Lots of bodies we:

One lacks faith, another hope,

And all lack charity.

 

Backward, Christian soldiers,

Waging fruitless wars,

Breaking out in schisms

That our God deplores.

 

Tonight we have gathered at a service of prayer for Christian unity. The prayer is understandable. After all, disunity and its dreadful aftermath stare us in the face.  Think of the Wars of Religion, 1618-1648: thirty years of bloodshed as Protestant slew Roman Catholic and Roman Catholic slew Protestant until the death rate reached 80% in many European towns and cities. In the wake of this religious bloodbath Enlightenment thinkers were either agnostics or deists: either they were indifferent to God’s existence or they believed in a remote deity that had nothing to do with Jesus Christ, since belligerent zeal in the name of Jesus had left many European communities with only 20% of their people.

We aren’t about to kill each other.  But don’t we suspect each other?  Don’t we even reject each other, in many respects?  After all, we represent umpteen different denominations.  Surely we need prayer for Christian unity as we need little else.  Right?

Wrong.  I disagree emphatically with what I’ve just said.  I don’t think we need to pray for Christian unity because I’m persuaded that we are already one in Christ.  I believe Christian unity is a gift that Jesus Christ has already given his people.

Think for a minute about the Lord’s Prayer. We pray “Thy kingdom come.” On the one hand when we look out upon the world the kingdom appears far off: swords and spears haven’t been beaten into ploughshares and pruning hooks; the lion doesn’t lie down with the lamb; poverty and disease, exploitation and betrayal haven’t ceased.  It’s little wonder we pray for the coming of the kingdom.

On the other hand, as I remind my theology students constantly, there can’t be a king without a kingdom or a kingdom without a king. If Christ the king is in our midst, then the kingdom is here, now.  If the kingdom isn’t here now, then neither is Christ our ruler.

But Christ is king.  When we pray for the coming of the kingdom we are actually praying for the coming manifestation of a kingdom that is already here.  We are praying for the coming manifestation of a kingdom that only the kingdom-sighted can see at present, which kingdom therefore remains disputable to those who are kingdom-blind.

Tonight we are praying not for the unity of Christ’s people but for the manifestation of our unity, for until our unity is made manifest to the world our unity will remain disputable in the eyes of the world.

Do I exaggerate when I insist that Christ’s people are one now? Tell me: can Jesus Christ be divided? Can his body be divided in the sense of dismembered (one limb here, another there, the ecclesiastical equivalent of an explosion)?         Can Jesus Christ be severed from his body?  Unquestionably he is one. Since he is one, he and his body are one.         In other words, Christian unity isn’t something we work at or work up. Christian unity is Christ’s gift to us. Christ gives us himself; in giving us himself he gives us all of himself, head and body, head and body undismembered and unsevered.  Christian unity isn’t an achievement we are trying to pull off.   Christian unity is Christ’s achievement, an achievement and gift that we can’t undo however much we may contradict it or deny it.  Christian unity is never what we work at or work up; it is, however, what we must always work out, do.

 

IIa:– The first thing we must do in manifesting our unity is what’s mentioned in the text: we must devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching.  The apostles’ teaching, written, is the New Testament.  By extension, the apostles’ teaching, continuous with the prophets’ teaching, is scripture as a whole.  We must attend to scripture.

No doubt someone will object right away.  “Faith is a living relationship with a living person, Jesus.  Surely we’re to become and remain intimately acquainted with him rather than poking around in a dusty old book in the attempt at finding out something about God.”

This point has to be taken seriously.  Christians have been called “People of the book (i.e., the bible.)” Are we people of the book? In one sense, no.  Faith binds us to Jesus Christ in a relationship more intimate than any relationship we have or can have with anyone else.  We love him.  We obey him.  We aspire to please him. It’s all first-hand intimacy with him. Second-hand hearsay about him is categorically different from first-hand encounter with him.

When Mary Magdalene found herself startled on Easter morning she was face-to-face with Jesus Christ.  By the end of the conversation she knew she had encountered again the one who had turned her life around years earlier.         The selfsame Lord, present to us now, does as much today as he overtakes us and seizes us, transforms us and commissions us.

People of a book?  We Christians are people of a person, the person of the living Lord Jesus Christ.

And yet we Christians are people of the book, for scripture is the apostles’ teaching written.  We have to be people of the book, because we know that false prophets abound, and pseudo-apostles (“wolves” is how Luke speaks of them) are everywhere. In addition there’s no limit to superstition, subjectivism, religious romanticism, frenzied fantasy, self-serving self-deception, and sheer, imaginative invention. We have to be people of the book (people of the apostles’ teaching) in that hearing and heeding Jesus Christ in person always takes the form of hearing and heeding the apostles. To be sure, hearing and heeding Peter, Paul, James and John isn’t the same as hearing and heeding Jesus. They are not he, and he is not they. Nonetheless, hearing and obeying Jesus always takes the form of hearing and obeying the apostles’ teaching.

In her work of acquainting people with Christ the church must always be devoted to the apostles’ teaching.  In her diaconal service on behalf of the disadvantaged and dispossessed the church must always look to the apostles’ teaching.  When Mother Teresa was asked why she and her sisters arose at 4:00 a.m. daily and went to mass before attending to Calcutta’s neediest, Mother Teresa replied, “If we didn’t begin the day with mass (scripture, sermon, sacrament) what we’re about would be no different from social work.”

Anything the church does – sermon preparation, youth work, education, medical service, advocacy for the voiceless – it all has to be formed, informed and normed by the apostles’ teaching, or else what the church is about neither speaks Christ nor reflects him.

 

IIb: — The second thing we must do in manifesting our unity is to love the people Christ brings to us. I’m always impressed that the apostle Paul, who speaks so largely about faith and so emphatically about justification by faith (dear to us descendents of the Reformation); Paul ends his letter to the church in Ephesus with “Grace be with all who love our Lord with love undying.”

I’m moved as often as I recall the risen Lord’s question to Peter, to Peter in his humiliation and shame and remorse and self-disgust in the wake of his denial, a denial born of a 15-year old girl’s remark, “You say you aren’t a Galilean?         You sound like the Galilean soon to be strung up.” The question? – “Do you love me?”

Jesus doesn’t ask Peter, “Do you feel as wretched as you should?” “Do you promise never to deny me again?”         “Do you think you’ll ever be a leader?”  Simply “Do you love me?”  And Peter’s answer, “You know that I love you.”

Tonight I trust you and I do love our Lord with love undying. And I trust we are aware that we love Christ only as we love the body of Christ. We can’t love a severed head – and in any case there is no severed head.

And right here’s the rub.  The church is difficult to love.  Yes, the church is the bride of Christ.  And this bride, we might as well admit, is disfigured, so very disfigured, in fact, as sometimes to be hideous, outright repulsive.  The seventeenth-century Puritans used to speak of the church as “a fair face with an ugly scar.”  How extensive is the scar? How ugly? Is the scarred face even recognizable as the face of the bride?  Nevertheless as often as Christ asks “Do you love me” he asks in the same breath “Do you love those I love, those I’m not ashamed to call my brothers and sisters?”

The church manifests its unity in loving the body of Christ.

 

IIc: —The third thing we must do in manifesting our unity is what we are doing together tonight: worship. “They devoted themselves to the breaking of the bread (the Greek text supplies the definite article: plainly there’s a reference to the Eucharist) and to the prayers.” Four verses later we are told the same people were found in the Jerusalem temple. Plainly they worshipped publicly in the temple; plainly they celebrated the Lord’s Supper; plainly they prayed the prayers of the liturgy.

Worship is essential.  Worship is the one thing the church does that nothing else in our society attempts to do. Worship is nothing less than our public acknowledgement of God’s unspeakable worthiness. God is worthy to be worshipped.

We hear much today about our culture as a culture of narcissism. Narcissism is the state of rendering oneself the measure of everything.  The narcissistic person measures everyone by herself.  She assesses every situation in terms of how it affects her.  She views other people in terms of what they can do for her.  There is no suffering like her suffering; no cause like her cause; no ‘right’ like her ‘right’; and of course no victimization like her victimization.         She’s wholly self-absorbed.  Our culture is indeed narcissistic.

Worship is the one event that takes us out of ourselves. Worship takes us away from ourselves, takes us away from ourselves by taking us up into someone else. When he was exiled on the island of Patmos John didn’t fall into the cesspool of self-pity.  He looked up: “Then I looked, and heard around the throne…thousands and thousands saying with a loud voice, ‘Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.’”

If we are grasped by anything of God’s immensity, God’s inexhaustibility, God’s sheer Godness, how can we not fall on our faces before him and worship?

And yet while we don’t worship God for what he can do to advance our ‘selfist’, narcissistic agendas, we gladly worship himfor what he has done for us in Christ in accord with his agenda.  He has created us. (He didn’t have to.) He bore with his recalcitrant people for centuries (despite unspeakable frustration) as he brought about the fitting moment for visiting us in his Son. He incarnated himself in Jesus of Nazareth, thereby submitting himself to shocking treatment at the hands of the people he came to rescue.  In the cross he tasted the profoundest self-alienation, as the penalty his just judgement assigned for sin he bore himself, therein sparing us condemnation. He has bound himself to his church and to the world even though the world’s sin and the church’s betrayal grieve him more than we can guess. He has promised never to fail or forsake us regardless of how often we let him down.  Surely to grasp all of this is to see that we owe him everything; it’s to have gratitude swell within us until we have to express it; it’s to have thanksgiving sing inside us until we have to sing it out of us. We worship as our grasp of what God has done for us in Christ impels us to worship.

Our grasp not only what God has done, but also of what God continues to do for us.  God feeds us like a nursing mother (says the prophet Isaiah); God forgives us like a merciful father (says the prophet Hosea); he is saviour of sinners and comforter of the afflicted and benefactor of the bushwhacked. Then of course we want to worship him for what he has done for us and continues to do for us out of his love for us.

And yet even as we ever worship God on account of what he has done for us and continues to do, we worship him ultimately on account of who he is in himself.  God is immense. God is eternal. God is underived.  God is immeasurable: his centre is everywhere and his circumference is nowhere. God alone has life in himself and alone lends life.  God forever moves amidst all that he has created even as he towers infinitely above all that he has created.         God is holy; that is, he is uniquely, irreducibly, uncompromisingly, inalienably GOD. As our apprehension of God overwhelms us we can only prostrate ourselves before him and worship him.

I think that Martin Luther more than anyone else was moved at the compassion and condescension of God, the sheer self-humbling and self-humiliation of God.  I think that John Calvin more than anyone else was overwhelmed at the sheer Godness of God. I think that Jonathan Edwards more than anyone else was startled at the unsurpassable “excellence” of God, as he put it in his idiosyncratic way; startled at the profoundest attractiveness of God; the irresistible “beauty” of God. In other words, Luther was moved above others at what God has done for us; Calvin at who God is in himself; Edwards at the sheer magnetism of it all. And the Christian who gathers it all up in himself is our Jesuit friend, Hans Urs von Balthasar. As often as these men reflected on God they worshipped.

The church manifests its unity at worship.

 

IId: — The fourth thing we must do to manifest our unity is share.  Luke tells us the earliest Christians “had all things in common…they sold their possessions and goods and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need.”         In short, they sat loose to what they owned, for they knew that Christ had freed them from being possessed by their possessions.

The passage just quoted has given rise to much controversy in the church. Some people have read it and concluded that scripture forbids private property and requires communism of sorts.  But the text doesn’t support such an interpretation.  The passage tells us early-day Christians exercised hospitality in their homes. Then plainly they hadn’t sold their homes. We should note in this regard that Jesus nowhere forbids private property to all Christians; neither do the apostles.

We should note especially that not even our Mennonite friends in the sixteenth century, those who embraced what’s called the ‘Radical Reformation’; not even our Mennonite friends forbade private property  Menno Simons (after whom the Mennonites are named) wrote, “We…have never taught or practised community of goods.”

In setting the record straight about Acts 2, however, we mustn’t lessen the impact of Luke’s word: early-day Christians were noted for their generosity.  They owned but they didn’t hoard.  They possessed but they weren’t possessed.  They had open hearts, open hands and open homes.  They recognized the needy person’s claim upon their abundance.

Jacques Ellul, wonderful Reformed thinker in France , sobered me the day I read in one of his fine books, “The only freedom we have with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.”

 

IIe: — The fifth thing we must do in manifesting our unity is evangelize.  “Day by day the Lord added to their numbers those who were being saved.”

‘Evangelism’ is a word that many find suspect in contemporary society. “We live in an age of pluralism,” such folk say, “and therefore there’s no place for proselytizing.”   The word ‘proselytizing’ suggests something halfway between brutal browbeating and subtle seduction.  “Neither is there any place for propaganda.”  Agreed: propaganda is always to be eschewed.  Evangelism, however, remains something else.  Evangelism, said Dennis Niles (Sri Lankan Methodist), “is one beggar telling another beggar where there is bread.”  Charles Wesley has captured both the substance and the mood of evangelism in his fine hymn, “O let me commend my Saviour to you.”

Evangelism has nothing to do with pressure tactics whether overt or covert. Evangelism, one beggar commending the availability of bread to another beggar, is witness. We should note that witness is something we find everywhere in everyday life.  We move to a new neighbourhood.  We want to find a new dentist.  Do we look up the Yellow Pages, see there are 119 dentists within driving range, and try them out one a time?   We never do this. Instead we ask a neighbour, “Do you know a dentist you can recommend?” – whereupon she gladly recommends a dentist on the basis of what he has done for her.

Evangelism is neither more nor less than recommending Jesus Christ on the basis of our experience of him.  And by this means the Lord ever adds to our numbers those who are being saved.

 

In the spirit of our foreparents in faith, whose embodiment of the gospel we have probed tonight, let us pray not for Christian unity but rather for the manifestation of that unity vouchsafed to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. He, the only head of the church, is never found without his body – which body we recognize as we recognize each other to be sisters and brothers of our blessed Lord, sisters and brothers of whom he will not be ashamed.

 

                                                                                     Victor Shepherd

 

23 January 2011             

Prince of Peace Roman Catholic Church

Ministerial Association of North East Toronto

 

 

 

Acts 4:32-5:16

 

“All the believers were one in heart and mind,” Luke tells us. To say they were one in mind is to say they were united in their understanding; in their understanding of the gospel, in their understanding of him whose gospel it is, in their understanding of the mission to which they had been appointed; in their understanding of the world — with all its turbulence and treachery and turpitude — which the Christ-appointed mission is to engage.

And just as they were one in mind, so they were one in heart; that is, their experience mirrored and confirmed understanding of their Lord and his truth, of the task which he had assigned them and his promise wherewith he sustained them. Whatever they grasped with their mind they also found grasping their heart as understanding and experience interpenetrated each other, interpreted each other, corrected each other. In other words they didn’t display the grotesque disfigurement of a one-sided cerebralism that is devoid of matching experience, or the no less grotesque disfigurement of a sentimentality devoid of intellectual substance. Mind and heart, understanding and experience, truth and discipleship, comprehension and conviction: the earliest Christian community appeared not to be afflicted with that religious lopsidedness which leaves Christ’s people lurching.

Luke insists that they were one in heart and mind. No doubt there were several reasons why the apostolic community was united.

[1] In the first place they were all united to Christ. To be united to Christ was at the same time to be united to one another. Jesus Christ always renders one with each other all whom he renders one with himself. According to Scripture, all who are converted to the Master are added to his body. No one can be bound — or can claim to be bound — to Jesus and yet be unrelated to the Church. We should note, while we are considering this point, that Scripture never suggests that Christians must strive to render themselves one. Christians are never urged to bring unity to the body of Christ. They are never urged to constitute themselves that body. Their unity, rather, is given them in Christ, by Christ. They are henceforth to attest it, magnify it, live it, and take care not to contradict it. But they are never told they are to fashion it. Jesus Christ is himself the truth and reality of the individual who clings to him and also of his people collectively, his body. The unity of Christ’s people is given and guaranteed by the fact that Jesus Christ himself isn’t fragmented.

[2] The people of whom Luke writes were one, in the second place, in that they were together the beneficiaries of the Holy Spirit. Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus had been the unique bearer of the Spirit; now the exalted Christ was the unique bestower of the Spirit. Pentecost had been the final act in the saving ministry of Jesus Christ before the parousia. His people, beneficiaries of his teaching, his atoning death, and his victorious vindication, were now the beneficiaries of that last act which completed all he came to do and give for their salvation. Pentecost was as crucial for Christ’s people as the cross. They were one in the Spirit precisely to the extent that they were one in his death and his resurrection.

[3] They were one, in the third place, in that the Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit had been the reversal of Babel. “Babel” was a one-word abbreviation for the darkest recesses in the human heart that had continued to find men and women disdaining the goodness of God, despising their creatureliness, seeking to construct a monument to themselves that would allow them to boast that at last they rivalled God, even eclipsed him. Their culpable presumption had found them scattered by God’s judgement, unable to understand each other, unable to communicate with each other. Pentecost, however, had overturned Babel, gathering into one all who clung in humble faith to a crucified Messiah. Now believers of utmost diversity — racial, ethnic, linguistic, cultural — discovered that reconciliation with God through Christ overcame their ingrained hostility to each other. And as the Holy Spirit had communicated the gospel to them they were now able to communicate with each other.

[4] Undoubtedly there was a fourth reason for the community’s oneness, a reason, this time, that any social scientist grasps: the earliest Christians had been molested individually and collectively, and the more they were molested the more they found comfort and consolation in each other amidst relentless pressure.

Peter and John had already been imprisoned. “After further threats [the authorities] let them go,” we are told.(Acts 4:21) Sure, Peter and John were the primary targets, but all who claimed kinship with them and owned them publicly (that is, all the early-day Christians) were no less threatened themselves. Even the Criminal Code of Canada recognizes that the threat of an assault is itself an assault. The threat of an assault has to be a criminal offence just because the assault threatened is as much a psychological violation as the assault performed. Like Peter and John, Christ’s community had suffered at the hands of the state, at the hands of religious authorities, and at the hands of the mobs.

Of course the community was one. It was suffused with the Spirit; it knew itself to be God’s demonstration project in the reversal of Babel; it had been targeted only to find that abusers drove them into each other’s arms as surely as the abusers drove them into the arms of him whose cross was now invincible.

It’s no wonder that “with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” After all, their testimony to the risen one was simply his testimony to his own resurrection through them. Their testimony to him, therefore, could no more be feeble than his testimony to himself, the risen, ruling one, could be ineffective. Commensurate with the great power of the apostles’ testimony was the great grace that came upon all in the apostolic fellowship. And then in the same breath Luke tells us that there wasn’t a needy person in that fellowship. Why wasn’t there? “From time to time” (the NIV correctly grasps the force of the present iterative verb tense in Greek); “from time to time” — that is, as needed — the people liquidated real estate and possessions in order to ensure that no one in their midst was destitute.

The text doesn’t mean that believers literally renounced all private ownership. (Peter, a few verses later, acknowledges Ananias’ property to be his own.) Believers, rather, didn’t hoard any possessions as their own. They looked upon their possessions as trusts which they had been charged to steward on behalf of people who lacked possessions. Distribution was adjusted to need. Since Christians are those who cling to Israel’s greater Son, they looked back to God’s way with Israel and heard unmistakably the word from Deuteronomy (15:4), “There should be no poor among you”, and no poor among them just because God’s blessing upon his people collectively supported sufficiency individually. Barnabas, a son of Israel himself, embodied this text as he sold off some of his real estate in order to ensure that there would be no poor within the community described in Acts.

Barnabas, mentioned in the last verse of Acts 4, is contrasted starkly with Ananias, mentioned in the first verse of Acts 5. Barnabas is depicted as holy and exemplary where Ananias is depicted as wicked and despicable. What did Ananias (together with his wife, Sapphira) do?

The community was united, but Ananias and Sapphira violated the unity that Jesus Christ had vouchsafed to it.

The community was suffused with the Holy Spirit who magnifies truth; but Ananias and Sapphira plainly were of a different spirit, the Father of Lies.

The community shared openhandedly, sharing out of its abundance with those beset with scarcity; but Ananias and his wife dissembled, thinking they could deceive the very people who were always and everywhere transparent.

The community shared out of self-forgetful compassion, reflecting the compassion of its Lord whose bowels had knotted whenever he had seen people in any need of any sort for any reason. Ananias, however, in the shabbiest self-preoccupation pretended and postured a generosity he didn’t have in order to gain a reputation he didn’t deserve among people he wanted only to exploit. Ananias was duplicitous, fraudulent, phoney, a fake. What made it all worse is that he perpetrated all of this while masquerading as a follower of Jesus Christ and fellow-Christian in the community.

 

 

Christian leaders and Christian congregations ought to be truthful and transparent at all times, but especially when money is involved in the affairs of the congregation. Regrettably, however, Christian leaders and congregations aren’t always truthful and transparent where money and congregational life are concerned.

A dear friend of mine, a pastor in a Baptist congregation, discovered that the church-treasurer was embezzling congregational funds. He spoke with the church-treasurer about the dishonesty, only to find the man unyielding and defiant. A short while later he spoke with the man again, found him in the same frame of mind, and told him that if he didn’t straighten himself out and replace the money he had stolen the police would have to be notified. The treasurer did nothing. Finally my friend went to the police and had the treasurer arrested. Immediately the congregation turned on my pastor friend and accused him of humiliating everyone in the congregation by washing the church’s dirty laundry in public. With heavy heart my friend left the Baptist pastorate. To date he has not returned.

 

How different was the situation with Peter, Ananias and Sapphira, detailed for us in Acts 5. Ananias and Sapphira, husband and wife, church-members in Jerusalem, sold property. Part of the money received in payment they then contributed to the church. The remainder they kept back for themselves. They were denounced as traitors. Soon they were dead.

What wrong did they commit? They were under no obligation to give any of it to the congregation. They hadn’t had to sell their real estate in the first place. When they had sold, they had given part of the proceeds to the congregation. What had they done wrong?

This: they tried to acquire a reputation for large-hearted generosity fraudulently. They were not wicked in contributing only a part of the proceeds; they were wicked in contributing part while pretending to contribute the whole. They were deliberately deceptive. They schemed to acquire a reputation they didn’t deserve for a virtue they didn’t possess. Their scheme was a ruse, nothing more than calculated deception. Their deed was fraudulent; they themselves were phoneys.

Peter, with the heightened perception of the Spirit-attuned, X-rayed the heart of Ananias and said, “You fraudulent fake! You have lied to the Holy Spirit; you have lied to God.” Ananias collapsed. Dead.

Sapphira, wife of Ananias, sashayed into the church in Jerusalem three hours later. “Did you sell the land for — $50,000?” Peter asked her. “For $50,000 exactly!” she lied brazenly. “How is it that you and your husband colluded to tempt the Spirit of the Lord?” Peter shot back. “Do you hear footsteps at the door? They are the footsteps of the men who have just buried your husband, sister, and now they have come for you.”

Let’s return to my pastor friend. He certainly did the right thing by confronting the church-treasurer. He did the right thing by notifying the police. The congregation, however, did the wrong thing in turning on him and accusing him of washing dirty linen in public.

Luke tells us in Acts 5 that “great fear came upon the whole church, and upon all who heard of these things.” The people were right to fear. They had many reasons to be shaken up. (i) The fraud that Ananias and Sapphira perpetrated was the first outbreak of notorious sin in the young church following Pentecost. (ii) Peter, a leader of apostolic authority, was anything but a mush-head, confused and cowardly in equal measure. Neither was he inclined to pussyfoot around. When notorious sin appeared, he knew what to call it. (iii) Deliberate deception of Christ’s people is always heinous, never to be made light of. (iv) The dishonesty of Ananias and Sapphira, their hypocrisy, was reprehensible. It was more than hypocrisy, however; it was an attempt at “testing God”, a Hebrew idiom whose meaning we shall probe in a moment. (v) Such blatant phoniness, such unconscionable attempts at parading oneself as extraordinarily generous when one is actually corrupt and mean-spirited; this calls forth the judgement of God. And God’s judgement is decisive, thorough, unalterable.

The Christians in Jerusalem knew all this. They were wise to fear.

The story of Ananias and Sapphira illustrates a recurring theme in Luke’s writings, in his gospel as well as the Acts of the Apostles. The recurring theme is hypocrisy and God’s outrage in the face of it. In classical Greek HUPOKRITES meant “actor”, a theatre actor. Gradually the word was extended to mean “dissembler, deceiver”; then the word was extended again to include all the connotations of someone who is intentionally a fake, a phoney, a fraud. Over and over in Luke’s gospel Jesus is found foaming, “Hypocrites!” When our Lord came upon the calculated deceptions of religious phoneys he denounced them on the spot. Few things provoked his rage like the calculated connivings of the cutesies.

One thing has to be noted in this discussion: Jesus doesn’t flay those who aspire to godliness and transparency yet fall short of their aspiration. Any sincere person falls short. And for all sincere people who fall short our Lord has the tenderest word of mercy. But falling short of godly aspiration is as far from calculated duplicity as the east is from the west. Our Lord leaves no doubt of this at all.

Peter told Ananias and Sapphira that by their crafty, cunning, two-faced racket they had “tempted God”, “tested God”. To “test God” is a Semitism, a Hebrew idiom that means, “to see what one can get away with”. When Jesus was tempted or tested in the wilderness he refused to throw himself off the highest point of the temple and see if he would land on the ground intact. Quoting the older testament he had replied to the tempter, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” — meaning, “We ought never to see what we can get away with.”

Christians love God. Loving God includes obeying God. Then how can anyone who loves God try to see what she can get away with? We try to see what we can get away with only when, in a moment of sin-born folly, our folly-fuelled craftiness eclipses our love for God.

Folly? Yes, folly, because the truth is, in life we get away with nothing. Only a fool thinks that the holy God indulges unrighteousness.

There is another aspect to the story of Ananias and Sapphira that we should comment on. When Peter confronts Ananias he says, “You kept back part of the proceeds of the land you sold!” “Keep back” is the same verb in the older testament that is used in the story of Achan in Joshua 7. As the Israelites defeat other nations militarily they are forbidden to plunder the goods of the conquered people. Achan, however, covets the silver and gold belonging to the defeated people. Knowing he is supposed to leave it alone, he and his family filch it nonetheless and hide it in their tent. When he and his family are discovered they are put to death.

“Primitive barbarism!” you say. Not so fast, please; there’s more than a little wisdom here. We are told that Achan coveted. If his coveting were indulged, if his coveting were tolerated, then Israel as a whole would be infected with coveting. Once the people were infected with coveting they would be at each other’s throats; the consequences for the community would be disastrous. No community can thrive where coveting (the opposite of sharing) is unchecked. Martin Luther pointed out that if we violate the tenth commandment (concerning coveting), then we violate them all. For if I covet my neighbour’s goods I end up stealing; if his reputation, I bear false witness against him; if his spouse, I commit adultery, and on so forth. To violate the tenth commandment (re: coveting) is invariably to violate them all. Twelve hundred years after the incident with Achan Paul ranked coveting on the same level as the most lurid, pornography-abetted promiscuity. (In both Eph. 5:3 and Col. 3:5 he weights coveting equal with “fornication and impurity.”) Was he right?

The early church was as horrified at an outbreak of coveting and the deception surrounding it as it was horrified at an outbreak of fornication and the closet-secrecy surrounding that. Ananias and Sapphira wanted to advertise themselves as uncommonly generous people, detached from the octopus stranglehold of money; they wanted to advertise themselves as spiritually superior when all the while they were crafty schemers who wanted to exploit money and hoodwink people. They wanted to enjoy a reputation as sharers, self-forgetfully saintly, when all the while they were self-promotingly sleazy.

Peter tells them that however many people they may have deceived, they haven’t deceived God. Their folly is huge, since they should have known that God is not mocked. No one gets away with anything, ultimately.

Ananias and Sapphira have much to teach us negatively.

Peter, on the other hand, has much to teach us positively. Immediately following the incident of Ananias and Sapphira, Acts 5 proceeds to tell us of Peter. People in Jerusalem carried their sick friends into the street so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them. Were these people superstitious? Perhaps an element of superstition lingered in them. After all, what was Peter’s shadow supposed to do for them?

The point that concerns us today is the fact that Peter was esteemed, venerated even, in Jerusalem, the place where he had denied Jesus inexcusably and had wept inconsolably. Now the risen one has turned him rightside up and put him on his feet. Peter is recognized as leader in the young church.

We should note that no church hierarchy, no bureaucracy, no government has appointed him to such a position. He is recognized leader, acknowledged leader, inasmuch as Christians in Jerusalem see him, hear him, talk with him, observe him day-by-day. They know he is to be trusted as their spiritual guide. His influence is immense.

Influence — anyone’s influence — is always to be contrasted with coercion, with what we can do directly, with what we can effect by sheer force, with what we can engineer wilfully. Influence is what is left to us when we can’t coerce, can’t wrench, can’t engineer, can’t control or dominate.

When I was pastor in Mississauga a congregation in a nearby city asked me about the chairmanship of our official board. Does the minister or a parishioner chair the board? (A parishioner does.) Whereupon I was told, “Any minister who agrees to surrender his power-base and allow a parishioner to chair the board is a minister who isn’t worth his salt.” You see, a minister who surrenders his power-base is left only with his capacity to influence.

Influence was all Peter had. Yet this was enough for the Christians in Jerusalem. They loved him. They were in awe of him. They considered it an honour just to get close enough to him to have his shadow fall on them.

Think of our Lord Jesus Christ. Once he has decided to go to the cross he has renounced all control; influence is all he has left. No one, after all, is more powerless than someone skewered to a cross. Does anyone second-guess him for his decision, even fault him? “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all (manner of) men to myself.” Will draw them, not drive them; once our Lord has committed himself to the cross he has renounced driving in favour of drawing. “Any minister who agrees to surrender his power base…isn’t worth his salt.” Surely no one wants to say that by going to the cross the Sovereign One rendered himself useless.

A year or two ago I was in the home of a church member when the fellow told me I had saved his life. (My ears perked up since it isn’t every day I am told that I have saved life.) The man informed me that for years he had controlled (no other word will do) his wife and his two adult sons. Now his wife was resisting control while his sons simply removed themselves beyond the orbit of control. Now he was faced with a wife who was physically present but profoundly absent, as well as two sons who were absent in every sense. And how had I saved this man’s life? It turned out that a few weeks earlier I had mentioned in a sermon that the older I became the more I realized how small is the sphere of my control, even as I realized how large is the sphere of my influence. Therefore I was free to relinquish all desperate attempts at having to control, free to shed the frustration at not being able to control, free to rest content in my influence, knowing that under God this was enough. It was only a line in the sermon, not even a major point, let alone the entire sermon. When I returned home from making my house-call I pondered my own line. It has since saved my life many times over.

Not so long ago I had lunch with three middleaged women from St.Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Mississauga. Two of the women are gainfully employed. The third one, not gainfully employed, I met years ago when I was visiting in the psychiatric ward of Mississauga Hospital. Although she wasn’t a parishioner, I always spent time with her in the course of visiting our own people in hospital. She had been ill; deranged, in fact. I had called on her once a week for twelve consecutive weeks before she was discharged. A few months later she was back in hospital, psychotic once more. This time I called on her for thirteen consecutive weeks. She is well now, yet remains fragile, and is somewhat apprehensive on account of her fragility. As the lunch with my friends unfolded this woman lamented that she was the only one of the four of us who wasn’t gainfully employed. She said she felt useless, couldn’t do anything, anything worthwhile, anything helpful. Not only did she lament this, she was enormously frustrated by it.

I spoke gently about the difference between control and influence, coercion and influence, force and influence. Then I reminded her that she loves me and she prays for me. What could be more important? Her cheerful disposition brightens many. How many people can say as much? Most importantly, her courage during her psychiatric downturns has continued to supply courage for dozens of other people who have fallen ill psychiatrically and would otherwise think that they are never going to be well again. I told her how often I have mentioned to ill people (without divulging any confidences) that I know someone who was deranged and who recovered. I told my friend that her influence is vastly greater than she will ever know.

This woman is a Roman Catholic, married to a truck driver. With respect to denominational affiliation, social position, education, cultural preferences; with respect to these matters she and I live on different planets. Yet her influence is limitless, none of which she sees.

For a long time now I have pondered the link between influence and intimacy. Of course there is a link: my wife’s influence on me is huge, while her coercion of me is minimal. Plainly our intimacy is the context and vehicle of her influence. To be intimate with someone is to know that person well. Or is to be known well? Or is it both?

Martin Buber, one of Jewry’s finest 20th century philosophers, maintained that what we know of a person must never be confused with information we have about that person. What we know of a person, rather, is the extent to which we ourselves have been changed by that person. What I know of my wife is the alteration she has brought about in me. Please note this carefully: what I know of her is exactly the difference she has made in me. In other words, we know someone else only to the extent that that person has changed us. (Buber, of course, developed his understanding from his grasp of what the Hebrew bible means by “knowledge of God.” We know God precisely to the extent that we have been changed by him.)

Dozens of people who have no control over me have nevertheless changed me profoundly; which is to say, I know them. Dozens of people over whom I have no control my influence has nevertheless changed; which is to say, they know me.

All of this adds up to one thing: influence is infinitely more important than control. We must never so bewail our inability to control that we cease praising God for our influence.

Peter, turned rightside up by the risen one, was possessed of measureless influence; people were helped just to have his shadow fall on them.

Acts 5 concludes in a way that always moves me. “Then they [Peter and John] left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name [of Jesus]. And every day in the temple and at home they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ.”

Peter and John had been arrested a second time inasmuch as they had defied the authorities and had continued both to proclaim Jesus as the world’s sole saviour and to denounce the authorities as murderous. The apostles’ imprisonment had concluded with a beating and release. At the end of it all, so far from remaining silent as instructed, they were found commending Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen.

I am always moved at their unalterable conviction of the truth of Jesus Christ; moved again at their invincible assurance of their inclusion in the life of the risen one himself. The authorities tell them to be quiet lest they be jailed again? They reply, “Do what you want with us. We must not, cannot, suppress the truth. We are witnesses [that God has exalted him as Leader and Saviour].”

A witness, be it noted, is not the same as an announcer. An announcer simply makes announcements. The announcer announces whatever he is told to announce. The announcer is himself detached from whatever he announces. In fact he has acquired the information he’s announcing third-hand.

A witness to Jesus Christ is different. The witness testifies to that event which has swept up and seized the witness himself. Whereas the announcer is personally uninvolved in the news he is spouting, being no more than a mouthpiece for it, the witness has first-hand experience of the event to which he is testifying; he embodies it.

Right here we must be careful to distinguish the gospel understanding of witness from the modern understanding. In a modern setting a witness (of an automobile collision, for instance) must, by law, be impartial, someone who observed the event but wasn’t involved in it. With respect to the gospel, however, the opposite is the case: the witness must be someone who didn’t merely observe the event but was (and is) involved in it.

Peter and John, having been drawn into the risen Christ’s life, cannot remain silent about his truth or about their involvement with him. The authorities insist they shut up? They must speak, not because they are ornery or unmindful of the pain the authorities can inflict, but just because their immersion in Jesus Christ renders silence impossible.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was told to remain silent. He didn’t remain silent, and was hanged. Martin Niemoeller was told to remain silent, and instead he told Hitler to his face that Hitler was a coward who had no right to molest the church — whereupon Niemoeller was imprisoned for eight years and scheduled for execution. Oscar Romero was told to remain silent, and the authorities in El Salvador had the Roman Catholic archbishop gunned down. Gunpei Yamamuro, a leader of The Salvation Army in Japan, was told to remain silent, and was beaten half to death repeatedly by order of the Japanese government.

We must never confuse tenacity concerning the gospel with orneriness or rigidity. Peter and John were neither ornery nor rigid. Jesus Christ had seized them and commissioned them witnesses.

At the end of the day Peter and John know who they are because they first know whose they are. Knowing this, they are unable to remain silent. If their testimony brings them suffering, then knowing why they are suffering is reason for rejoicing.

What is it, then to be a sharing community?

It’s to share material goods and spiritual gifts with our fellow-believers so that the needs among us are met.

It’s to share all that we have and are in such a way as to make plain that coveting has ceased to hook us.

It’s to share ourselves with others, renouncing all attempts to control, coerce or manipulate, entrusting ourselves instead to our Lord who knew his vulnerability to be an influence, charged by the Holy Spirit, that was nothing less than effectually sovereign.

It’s to share in the witness of him who came to bear witness to the truth he is himself, therein to find that the Word of life expands unstoppably, bringing forth life and fruitfulness as only it can and as it assuredly will.

 

                                                                                            Victor Shepherd           

August 2002

 

ACTS 5

 

Part I: Ananias and Sapphira

A dear friend of mine, a pastor in a Baptist congregation, discovered that the church-treasurer was embezzling congregational funds. He spoke with the church-treasurer about the dishonesty, only to find the man unyielding and defiant. A short while later he spoke with the man again, found him in the same frame of mind, and told him that if he didn’t straighten himself out and replace the money he had stolen the police would have to be notified. The treasurer did nothing. Finally my friend went to the police and had the treasurer arrested. Immediately the congregation turned on my pastor friend and accused him of humiliating everyone in the congregation by washing the church’s dirty laundry in public. With heavy heart my friend left the Baptist pastorate. He has never returned.

How different was the situation with Peter, Ananias and Sapphira, detailed for us in Acts 5. Ananias and Sapphira, husband and wife, church-members in Jerusalem, sold property. Part of the money received in payment they then contributed to the church. The remainder they kept back for themselves. They were denounced as traitors.

What wrong did they commit? They were under no obligation to give any of it to the congregation. They hadn’t had to sell their real estate in the first place. When they had sold, they had given part of the proceeds to the congregation. What had they done wrong?

This: they tried to acquire a reputation for large-hearted generosity fraudulently. They were not wicked in contributing only a part of the proceeds; they were wicked in contributing part while pretending to contribute the whole. They were deliberately deceptive. They schemed to acquire a reputation they didn’t deserve for a virtue they didn’t possess. Their scheme was a ruse, nothing more than calculated deception. Their deed was fraudulent; they themselves were phoneys.

Peter, with the heightened perception of the Spirit-attuned, X-rayed the heart of Ananias and said, “You fraudulent fake! You have lied to the Holy Spirit; you have lied to God.” Ananias collapsed. Dead.

Sapphira, wife of Ananias, sashayed into the church in Jerusalem three hours later. “Did you sell the land for — $50,000?” Peter asked her. “For $50,000 exactly!” she lied brazenly. “How is it that you and your husband colluded to tempt the Spirit of the Lord?” Peter shot back. “Do you hear footsteps at the door? They are the footsteps of the men who have just buried your husband, sister, and now they have come for you.”

Let’s return to my pastor friend. He certainly did the right thing by confronting the church-treasurer. He did the right thing by notifying the police. The congregation, however, did the wrong thing in turning on him and accusing him of washing dirty linen in public.

Luke tells us in Acts 5 that “great fear came upon the whole church, and upon all who heard of these things.” The people were right to fear. They had many reasons to be shaken up. (i) The fraud that Ananias and Sapphira perpetrated was the first outbreak of notorious sin in the young church following Pentecost. (ii) Peter, a leader of apostolic authority, was anything but a mush-head, confused and cowardly in equal measure. Neither was he inclined to pussyfoot around. When notorious sin appeared, he knew what to call it. (iii) Deliberate deception of Christ’s people is always heinous, never to be made light of. (iv) The dishonesty of Ananias and Sapphira, their hypocrisy, was reprehensible. It was more than hypocrisy, however; it was an attempt at “testing God”, a Hebrew idiom whose meaning we shall probe in a moment. (v) Such blatant phoniness, such unconscionable attempts at parading oneself as extraordinarily generous when one is actually corrupt and mean-spirited; this calls forth the judgement of God. And God’s judgement is decisive, thorough, unalterable.

The Christians in Jerusalem knew all this. They were wise to fear.

The story of Ananias and Sapphira illustrates a recurring theme in Luke’s writings, in his gospel as well as the Acts of the Apostles. The recurring theme is hypocrisy and God’s outrage in the face of it. In classical Greek HUPOKRITES meant “actor”, a theatre actor. Gradually the word was extended to mean “dissembler, deceiver”; then the word was extended again to include all the connotations of someone who is intentionally a fake, a phoney, a fraud. Over and over in Luke’s gospel Jesus is found hissing, “Hypocrites!” When our Lord came upon the calculated deceptions of religious phoneys he denounced them on the spot. Few things provoked his rage like the calculated connivings of the cutesies.

One thing has to be noted in this discussion: Jesus does not flay those who aspire to godliness and transparency yet fall short of their aspiration. Any sincere person falls short. And for all sincere people who fall short our Lord has the tenderest word of mercy. But falling short of godly aspiration is as far from calculated duplicity as the east is from the west. Our Lord leaves no doubt of this at all.

Peter told Ananias and Sapphira that by their crafty, cunning, two-faced racket they had “tempted God”, “tested God”. To “test God” is a Semitism, a Hebrew idiom that means, “to see what one can get away with”. When Jesus was tempted or tested in the wilderness he refused to throw himself off the highest point of the temple and see if he would land on the ground intact. Quoting the older testament he had replied to the tempter, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” — meaning, “We ought never to see what we can get away with.”

Christians love God. Loving God includes obeying God. Then how can anyone who loves God try to see what she can get away with? We try to see what we can get away with only when, in a moment of sin-born folly, our folly-fuelled craftiness eclipses our love for God.

Folly? Yes, folly, because the truth is, in life we get away with nothing. Only a fool thinks that the holy God indulges unrighteousness.

There is another aspect to the story of Ananias and Sapphira that we should comment on. When Peter confronts Ananias he says, “You kept back part of the proceeds of the land you sold!” “Keep back” is the same verb in the Hebrew bible that is used in the story of Achan in Joshua 7. As the Israelites defeat other nations militarily they are forbidden to plunder the goods of the conquered people. Achan, however, covets the silver and gold belonging to the defeated people. Knowing he is supposed to leave it alone, he and his family filch it nonetheless and hide it in their tent. When he and his family are discovered they are put to death.

“Primitive barbarism!” you say. Not entirely; there is more than a little wisdom here. We are told that Achan coveted. If his coveting were indulged, if his coveting were tolerated, then Israel as a whole would be infected with coveting. Once the people were infected with coveting they would be at each other’s throats; the consequences for the community would be disastrous. No community can thrive where coveting is unchecked. Martin Luther pointed that if we violate the tenth commandment (concerning coveting), then we violate them all. For if I covet my neighbour’s goods I end up stealing; if his reputation, I bear false witness against him; if his spouse, I commit adultery, and on so forth. Twelve hundred years after the incident with Achan Paul ranked coveting on the same level as the most lurid, pornography-abetted promiscuity. (In both Eph. 5:3 and Col. 3:5 he weights coveting equal with “fornication and impurity.”) Was he right?

The early church was as horrified at an outbreak of coveting and the deception surrounding it as it was horrified at an outbreak of fornication and the closet-secrecy surrounding that. Ananias and Sapphira wanted to advertise themselves as uncommonly generous people, detached from the octopus stranglehold of money; they wanted to advertise themselves as spiritually superior when all the while they were crafty schemers who wanted to exploit money and hoodwink people. They wanted to enjoy a reputation as self-forgetfully saintly when all the while they were self-promotingly sleazy.

Peter tells them that however many people they may have deceived, they haven’t deceived God. Their folly is huge, since they should have known that God is not mocked. No one gets away with anything, ultimately.

Ananias and Sapphira have much to teach us negatively.

 

Part II: Peter’s Influence

Peter, on the other hand, has much to teach us positively. People in Jerusalem carried their sick friends into the street so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them. Were these people superstitious? Perhaps an element of superstition lingered in them. After all, what was Peter’s shadow supposed to do for them?

The point that concerns us today is the fact that Peter was esteemed, venerated even, in Jerusalem, the place where he had denied Jesus and had wept inconsolably. Now the risen one has turned him rightside up and put him on his feet. Peter is recognized as leader in the young church.

We should note that no church hierarchy, no bureaucracy, no government has appointed him to such a position. He is recognized a leader, acknowledged a leader, inasmuch as Christians in Jerusalem see him, hear him, talk with him, observe him day-by-day. They know he is to be trusted as their spiritual guide. His influence is immense.

Influence — anyone’s influence — is always to be contrasted with coercion, with what we can do directly, with what we can effect by sheer effort, with what we can engineer wilfully. Influence is what is left to us when we can’t coerce, can’t wrench, can’t engineer, can’t control or dominate.

When I was pastor in Streetsville a congregation in a nearby city asked me about the chairmanship of our official board. Does the minister or a parishioner chair Streetsville’s board? (A parishioner does.) Whereupon I was told, “Any minister who agrees to surrender his power-base and allow a parishioner to chair the board is a minister who isn’t worth his salt.” You see, a minister who surrenders his power-base is left only with his capacity to influence.

This is all Peter had. Yet this was enough for the Christians in Jerusalem. They loved him. They were in awe of him. They considered it an honour just to get close enough to him to have his shadow fall on them.

Think of our Lord Jesus Christ. Once he has decided to go to the cross he has renounced all control; influence is all he has left. No one, after all, is more powerless than someone skewered to a cross. Does anyone second-guess him for his decision, even fault him? “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all (manner of) men to myself.” Will draw them, not drive them; he has renounced driving in favour of drawing. “Any minister who agrees to surrender his power base…isn’t worth his salt.” Surely no one wants to say that by going to the cross the Sovereign One has rendered himself useless.

A year or two ago I was in the home of a church member when the fellow told me I had saved his life. (My ears perked up since it isn’t every day I am told that I have saved life.) It turned out that a few weeks earlier I had mentioned in a sermon that the older I became the more I realized how small is the sphere of my control, even as I realized how large is the sphere of my influence. Therefore I was free to relinquish all desperate attempts at having control, free to shed the frustration at not being able to control, free to rest content in my influence, knowing that under God this was enough. It was only a line in the sermon, not even a major point, let alone the entire sermon. When I returned home from making my house-call I pondered my own line. It has since saved my life many times over.

Not so long ago I had lunch with three middleaged women from St.Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Streetsville. Two of the women are gainfully employed. The third one, not gainfully employed, I met years ago when I was visiting in the psychiatric ward of Mississauga Hospital. Although she wasn’t a parishioner, I always spent time with her in the course of visiting our own people in hospital. She had been ill; deranged, in fact. I had called on her once a week for twelve consecutive weeks before she was discharged. A few months later she was back in hospital, psychotic once more. This time I called on her for thirteen consecutive weeks. She hasn’t been psychotic since. She is well, yet remains fragile, and is somewhat apprehensive on account of her fragility. As the lunch with my friends unfolded this woman lamented that she is the only one of the four of us who isn’t gainfully employed. She said she feels useless, can’t do anything, anything worthwhile, anything helpful. Not only did she lament this, she was enormously frustrated by it.

I spoke gently about the difference between control and influence, coercion and influence, force and influence. Then I reminded her that she loves me and she prays for me. What could be more important? Her cheerful disposition brightens many. How many people can say as much? Most importantly, her courage during her psychiatric downturns has continued to supply courage for dozens of other people who have fallen ill and would otherwise believe that they are never going to be well again. I told her how often I have mentioned to ill people (without divulging any confidences) that I know someone who was deranged and who recovered. I told my friend that her influence is vastly greater than she will ever know.

This woman is a Roman Catholic, married to a truck driver. With respect to denominational affiliation, social position, education, cultural preferences; with respect to these matters she and I live on different planets. Yet her influence is limitless, none of which she sees.

For a long time now I have pondered the link between influence and intimacy. Of course there is a link: my wife’s influence on me is huge, while her coercion of me is minimal. Plainly our intimacy is the context and vehicle of her influence. To be intimate with someone is to know that person well. Or is to be known well? Or is it both?

Martin Buber, one of Jewry’s finest 20th century philosophers, maintained that what we know of a person must never be confused with information we have about that person. What we know of a person is the extent to which we ourselves have been changed by that person. What I know of my wife is the alteration she has brought about in me. Please note this carefully: what I know of her is exactly the difference she has made in me. In other words, we know someone else only to the extent that that person has changed us. (Buber, of course, developed his understanding from his grasp of what the Hebrew bible means by “knowledge of God.” We know God precisely to the extent that we have been changed by him.)

Dozens of people who have no control over me have nevertheless changed me profoundly; which is to say, I know them. Dozens of people over whom I have no control I have nevertheless changed; which is to say, they know me.

All of this adds up to one thing: influence is infinitely more important than control. We must never so bewail our inability to control that we cease praising God for our influence.

Peter, turned rightside up by the risen one, was possessed of measureless influence; people were helped just to have his shadow fall on them.

 

Part III: The Conviction and Assurance of Peter and John

Acts 5 concludes in a way that always moves me. “Then they [Peter and John] left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name [of Jesus]. And every day in the temple and at home they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ.”

Peter and John had been arrested a second time inasmuch as they had defied the authorities and had continued both to proclaim Jesus as the world’s sole saviour and to denounce the authorities as murderous. The apostles’ imprisonment had concluded with a beating and release. At the end of it all, so far from remaining silent as instructed, they were found commending Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen.

I am always moved at their unalterable conviction of the truth of Jesus Christ; moved again at their unerodable assurance of their inclusion in the life of the risen one himself. The authorities tell them to be quiet lest they be jailed again? They reply, “Do what you want with us. We must not, cannot, suppress the truth. We are witnesses [that God has exalted him as Leader and Saviour].”

A witness, be it noted, is not the same as an announcer. An announcer simply makes announcements. The announcer announces whatever he is told to announce. The announcer is himself detached from whatever he announces. In fact he has acquired the announcement itself third-hand.

A witness to Jesus Christ is different. The witness testifies to that event which has swept up and seized the witness himself. Whereas the announcer is personally uninvolved in the news he is spouting, being no more than a mouthpiece for it, the witness has first-hand experience of the event to which he is testifying; he embodies it.

Right here we must be careful to distinguish the gospel understanding of witness from the modern understanding. In a modern setting a witness (of an automobile collision, for instance) must, by law, be impartial, someone who observed the event but was not involved in it. With respect to the gospel, however, the opposite is the case: the witness must be someone who didn’t merely observe the event but was (and is) involved in it.

Peter and John, having been drawn into the risen Christ’s life, cannot remain silent about his truth or about their involvement with him. The authorities insist they shut up? They must speak, not because they are ornery or unmindful of the pain the authorities can inflict, but just because their immersion in Jesus Christ renders silence impossible.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was told to remain silent. He didn’t remain silent, and was hanged. Martin Niemoeller was told to remain silent, and instead he told Hitler to his face that Hitler was a coward who had no right to molest the church. Oscar Romero was told to remain silent, and the authorities in El Salvador had the archbishop gunned down. Gunpei Yamamuro, a leader of The Salvation Army in Japan, was told to remain silent, and was beaten half to death repeatedly by order of the Japanese government.

We must never confuse tenacity concerning the gospel with orneriness or rigidity. Peter and John were neither ornery nor rigid. Jesus Christ had seized them and commissioned them witnesses.

At the end of the day Peter and John know who they are because they first know whose they are. Knowing this, they are unable to remain silent. If their testimony brings them suffering, then knowing why they are suffering is reason for rejoicing.

And so the gospel spreads unstoppably.

 

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd       

September 2000

Acts 10 & 11

 

I: — William Wilberforce had long known his vocation to be the emancipation of slaves. He had long expected — and received — frustrations, setbacks and persecution.  As assaults on him intensified and discouragement lapped at him, he received a letter from an eighty-eight year old man.  It turned out to be the last letter the aged fellow would write.         The letter said, “Unless God has raised you up for this very thing [‘your glorious enterprise of opposing that execrable villainy’ — slavery] you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God is with you, who can be against you?  Oh, be not weary in well-doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.”  The letter was signed, “Dear sir, your affectionate servant, John Wesley.” One month later Wesley was dead. His letter was life-giving to Wilberforce, for Wilberforce did “go on in the name of God and in the power of his might”.  Britain abolished the slave-trade in 1807 and ended the practice of slavery in 1833. Wilberforce died in 1833; the news of Britain ’s slavery-ending legislation was brought to him on his deathbed.

 

Black slaves appeared in the New World in 1619, brought to Virginia on board a Dutch ship. By 1681 there were 2,000 slaves in Virginia , working the tobacco fields. (Later it would be sugar and cotton.) European ships, loaded with liquor, firearms, textiles and trinkets, sailed for Africa where they exchanged their cargo for black people.         The next leg of the voyage, Africa to the new world, found slaves packed into the ship’s hold, chained in place to prevent both rebellion and suicide.  There were no sanitation facilities whatsoever on slave-ships; anyone downwind of a slave-ship could smell it thirty kilometres away.  John Newton, a slave-ship captain whom God’s grace eventually rendered clergyman, hymn-writer and spiritual counsellor, was eager to deliver as much of his black cargo alive in the new world as he could.  To this end Newton occasionally had the slaves brought up on deck (shackled together, of course) while the ship’s crew scraped the accumulation of human sewage out of the hold, then fumigated the hold with tar, tobacco and brimstone, and finally washed it down with vinegar. Even so, at least 20% of the cargo died en route.

After the slaves had been put ashore the ship loaded up with staples, including molasses. The molasses was processed into rum, and the rum was used to purchase slaves on the next trip. By 1860 there were four and a half million slaves in the United States alone. The business of buying and selling slaves was so lucrative by now that slave-trading was more profitable than trading in the agricultural items that the slaves produced.

 

Then must be it be concluded that the heart of the white person is extraordinarily cruel? Are white people fallen creatures who are extraordinarily fallen?  Is white rapacity unparalleled?   No. While white enslavement of black people is without excuse, the first black slaves in Africa weren’t enslaved by white Europeans but by black fellow-Africans. For centuries tribal warfare in Africa had yielded countless prisoners of war. Prisoners of war are useless as long as they are merely standing around in a compound. Since they have to be fed anyway, why not turn them into slaves and get some useful work out of them? The first black slaves anywhere in the world were black prisoners of war who had been enslaved by fellow-blacks in Africa . The prophet Jeremiah writes, “The human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?” No one can understand the human heart, just because it’s so desperately corrupt.

When white Europeans appeared who were willing to exchange trade goods for slaves, African tribes competed with each other to sell their prisoner of war slaves for export to the New World .

 

The first black slave to be transported directly from Africa to Canada was Olivier Le Jeune, assigned a French name while crossing the Atlantic . The first, he was by no means the last; slaves were regularly imported from the West Indies and from New England; by 1759 there were 1132 slaves in New France.  Slavery, however, didn’t flourish in New France . For one reason, the cold weather was exceedingly hard on someone from a hot country; for another, the economy never flourished in New France, since France ’s principal export to New France was soldiers, and soldiers, however skilled militarily, do little for a country economically. With the British defeat of the French in 1760 even more slaves were brought to Canada . Like slaves everywhere, they were restricted to doing the most menial, dehumanizing work – and thereupon they were accused, according to stereotype, of lacking independence, lacking initiative, lacking education, suited only for servility.

The American Revolutionary War found United Empire Loyalists flocking to Canada and bringing black slaves with them.  In addition many slaves appeared in Canada who weren’t attached to Loyalists but who were simple fugitives, hoping that the bondage they were fleeing in the United States they wouldn’t find in Canada . There appeared in Canada as well 3,500 free black loyalists; they had been American-owned slaves and had been granted their freedom by the British when they sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. In fact they had been promised the same privileges and rights as the white Loyalists. These free black loyalists settled in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia . As government officials found themselves overwhelmed at having to process so many newcomers at once, delays mounted in the assigning of land-grants.  Needless to say, the people who had previously been at the bottom of the social order (if they were even in the social order) found themselves at the end of the line-up: the result was that the black newcomers who had been promised land as loyalists were granted no land at all, for the most part; the few who did get land were assigned land that was virtually useless. All they could do was deliver themselves into the hands of white people eager to exploit them.  At the same time the black victims of broken promises were now segregated in churches and schools or even excluded from churches and schools. All of this was rendered the more distressing in a class-conscious society whose rigid social distinctions were rooted in centuries of European prejudice.

Fifty years after the American Revolutionary War the War of 1812 broke out. Thousands of black American slaves fled to the British for protection.  Once again they were promised land and freedom in Canada . Formally known as “Black Refugees”, the first of them arrived in Halifax in 1813. They were welcomed enthusiastically as a large supply of cheap labour.  Immediately following the War of 1812, however, a severe economic recession, along with a sudden influx of white immigrants from Britain , pushed the black people even farther down the social order and removed the little economic opportunity they had had.  In 1815 legislation was passed in Nova Scotia banning further black immigration. The British parliament overturned this legislation, but the mood of white Canadians was clear. Their mood didn’t improve when part of their taxes was used to keep black people from starving.

In Ontario black people were used to construct roads and clear land.  When in 1793 the Provincial Assembly attempted to phase out slavery in Ontario , objectors insisted that cheap labour (i.e., free labour) was still needed. By the 1840s poor Irish immigrants were competing with blacks for the most menial jobs; at the same time farm-mechanization eliminated much of the work that black people had always done.

While Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833 ( France in 1848) slavery continued to thrive in the United States . In 1850 the USA passed the Fugitive Slave Act, promising even harsher treatment for runaway blacks and anyone who assisted them.  Not surprisingly, many more slaves fled to Ontario , whose black population now numbered 40,000.  In the same year (1850) Ontario reacted by passing the Common School Act.  This act permitted separate schools for blacks.  If no separate school existed, then black children could be made to attend class at separate times from white children, or be made to sit on segregated benches. We must note that while black/white segregation was legal in Ontario only in the school system, de facto segregation occurred everywhere else (e.g., black people in Ontario could neither vote nor sit on juries; interracial marrying was enough to provoke a riot).

In the 1850s black people in California who had never been slaves ( California never was a slave-state) nevertheless found themselves set upon.  Seven hundred of them moved to Victoria , B.C., in 1858. These people, never having been slaves, possessed employable skills, business experience and investment capital — all of which were put to use immediately in Victoria . But the city of Victoria also accommodated white Americans who spoke loudly of annexing Victoria to the USA . The black people, fearing annexation, formed the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Company to defend the city (not merely themselves) against American aggression.  Despite their loyalty to Britain , and despite their moderate affluence, they found churches that allowed them to sit only in segregated sections, public institutions that refused to serve them, and theatres that permitted them to sit only in the balcony. The Victoria Pioneer Rifle Company was forbidden to parade or take part in public ceremonies. Physical intimidation was rife — and all of this in a society that accorded blacks full legal equality.

Violence always simmered beneath the surface.  Violence erupted in the Maritimes in the 1780s when a black preacher baptized white Christians, in St. Catharines in 1852 when blacks formed a militia unit, in Chatham ( Ontario ) in 1860 when a black man married a white woman, in Victoria in 1860 when black people left the balcony of a theatre and sat in ground-floor seats.

 

After Confederation (1867) huge numbers of white immigrants came to Canada . This influx rendered the black minority that much smaller a minority, with the result that their social and economic situation worsened.  Then in 1907 living conditions worsened for black people in Oklahoma . Between 1910 and 1912 1,300 immigrated to Canada . They settled in Alberta and Saskatchewan . Immediately white people on the prairies demanded legislation to preserve the Canadian West for Caucasians. Public petitions and municipal resolutions from all three Prairie Provinces urged Ottawa to end all further black immigration and segregate all black people already residing in the prairies. Newspapers in Ottawa , Toronto and Montreal supported the demand for legislation.  The Canadian government prepared the legislation but never enacted it out of fear of damaging relations with the USA . Less formal means were deployed to prohibit black people from entering Canada ; for instance, the physical and financial qualifications for black immigrants were made insuperably difficult, while Canadian immigration officials who disqualified blacks were surreptitiously rewarded.  The result was predictable: by 1912 all black immigration to Canada had been halted without Canada ’s ever having declared a racist policy formally.

Despite the prejudiced treatment they had received from Canada ’s people and government, black men volunteered for overseas service in World War I. Commanding officers were permitted to reject black volunteers, and most did just that. When black men persisted they were allowed to form a black battalion in 1916 — but were not allowed to fight the enemy.  They were allowed only to perform auxiliary services for white troops. Canadian soldiers and Canadian civilians attacked them with impunity.

After the war black people found they could get only the most menial jobs. Sleeping-car porters were almost exclusively black, for instance, while dining-car waiters were exclusively white. Even the federal government permitted racial restrictions in hiring and promotion practices within the civil service.  Housing discrimination abounded.  In fact when I was a teenager in the late 1950s I knew that black players on Toronto ’s professional minor league baseball team regularly responded to advertisements for rental accommodation only to be turned away when they appeared in person.

There’s a point about all of this that we must note carefully.  Canada (after 1867) has never enacted race-legislation; nevertheless, race-discrimination has been upheld by Canadian courts as legally acceptable.         In 1919 a Quebec appellate court deemed it legal for a theatre to restrict blacks to inferior seating. In 1924 Ontario courts upheld a restaurant which refused to serve blacks.  In 1941 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Montreal Forum Tavern in its refusal to serve blacks.  The courts consistently upheld racial discrimination as legal in a country that boasted of having no racial legislation.

Improvement appeared in the 1940s and 50s as most provinces and some municipalities passed laws against discrimination.  In 1945 Ontario courts declared that racial discrimination was contrary to public policy. The Canadian Bill of Rights and the Human Rights Commission were steps in the direction of justice. Passing legislation, however, does nothing to alter attitudes in individuals.  Black people, faced with persistent discrimination, have formed the Black United Front in Nova Scotia and the National Black Coalition of Canada.  Studies undertaken by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have revealed that most employment agencies will agree, if asked by prospective employers, to screen out non-white job applicants.  Once hired, black people as a group appear at the lowest end of the wage scale without regard for training or experience. An Ontario Human Rights Commission study has disclosed that blacks who hold a Master of Business Administration degree earn 25% less than whites with the same degree and the same professional experience.

 

On the 10th of February, 1806 , a Toronto newspaper carried the following advertisement:  “For sale. Two slaves. Peggy, aged 40, adequate cook, $150. Her son, Jupiter, aged 15, $200.” Two hundred dollars for a fifteen year old black boy was a great deal of money in 1806. Whoever purchased these slaves was clearly expecting enormous work from them, since a horse would have cost far less.  We must never forget too that the last segregated school in Ontario was shut down as recently as 1965.

 

II: — I noticed in the “Children’s Moment” part of our service this morning how nervous the adults were lest they be asked to eat snake soup.

If you are queasy about eating snake soup you will understand how the apostle Peter felt when he had his dream or vision of the sheet let down by God, and inside the sheet were “clean” animals (those he could eat) and “unclean”, those he would never eat. As the sheet came closer and his aversion grew, God spoke to him: “What God has cleansed you must not call unclean”.

A short time later three messengers came from Cornelius to tell Peter that Cornelius wanted to see him.         Cornelius was a gentile and an officer in the Roman army.  He was also what was known as a “God-fearer”.         God-fearers were gentile men and women who had become disgusted with the pagan religiosity which surrounded them, together with its immorality; they were attracted to the monotheism and ethics of Judaism.  They remained on the fringe of the synagogue, however, inasmuch as they didn’t conform to the dietary laws of Judaism or submit to circumcision.
Cornelius sends word that he wants to see Peter, a Jewish believer in Jesus, and Peter responds. It was a miracle of grace — nothing less than a miracle — that Peter went to the home of Cornelius, because Jews never entered the home of a gentile. After all, every morning a Jewish man thanked God that he hadn’t been born a gentile. No help was to be given a gentile woman in difficulty during childbirth, because to help her would only add one more gentile to the world.  And a gentile man, uncircumcised, was spoken of as a dog.

And then the God-ordained dream/vision and the God-spoken word: “What God has cleansed you must not call unclean”.  Whereupon Peter goes to the home of Cornelius and defiles himself (according to the Judaism of that era) as he eats with a gentile.  Peter commends the gospel to the Roman officer, with the result that Cornelius and his household joyfully embrace Jesus Christ in faith.   The conclusion of the story is found in Acts 11:18: Peter and his fellow Jewish-Christians “glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life.’”

Do we grasp how crucial this episode was in the history of the young church? Apart from this episode you and I wouldn’t be here today.  Apart from this episode the gospel would have been confined to Judaism. Let me tell you how crucial Luke, the writer of Acts, regards this episode.  Luke wrote Acts in an era when there were no books (a book being a convenient, cheap way of bringing together a vast amount of detail).  People wrote on papyrus scrolls, papyrus being made from the pith of the bulrush plant. Scrolls were exceedingly cumbersome. A scroll couldn’t be longer than 35 feet (unrolled) or else it couldn’t be handled. Because of its bulk and its cost and the fact of its being hand-lettered, a scroll contained relatively little (compared to a modern book): you were very careful what you put into it, there being space only for what was crucial. Acts, for instance, would have taken up an entire scroll.  Luke had reams of material he could have put in and no doubt wanted to put in; yet so crucial was the episode of Peter and Cornelius that Luke uses two precious chapters in order to tell the story twice.  “Then to the gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life”.

When Cornelius came to faith in Jesus Christ and found himself invigorated by the Holy Spirit his first reaction was to kneel before Peter as a sign of reverence; after all, Peter was the spokesperson of that gospel which brings repentant people like Cornelius from death to life. But Peter refused to accept such subservience from Cornelius: “Stand up”, Peter said, “for I am only a man, just like you.”

In Christ there is no subservience; within the fellowship of Christ there is no grovelling. By his grace God grants repentance of sin, faith in Jesus Christ, and obedience to the master; by his grace God grants this to any and all, regardless of racial distinction. Any and all whom God brings to repentance, faith and obedience thereafter embrace each other without distinction.  After all, everyone whom the cross has drawn knows that the ground at the foot of the cross is level.  Peter says, “What God has cleansed I must not call unclean”.  Paul says, “All Christians are one in Christ Jesus…in him there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free”.

 

We must note one last feature of Peter’s episode in Acts 10 and 11. According to Luke, Peter sets off for the home of Cornelius, saying, “The Spirit told me to go; six brethren accompanied me, and we seven entered the man’s house”.         According to Egyptian law (which first century Jews knew well) seven witnesses were necessary to prove a case.         According to Roman law (which first century Jews also knew well, since they were governed by it) seven seals were needed to authenticate a legal document. When the seven Jewish Christians enter the gentile home of Cornelius and break down centuries of deadly prejudice, the fact of the seven witnesses renders the case proved. It stands proved and sealed that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free. It stands proved and sealed that what God has cleansed we are not to call unclean.

This morning you and I and all Christ’s people aren’t charged with proving or sealing anything. We are charged simply with living, day by day, so as to demonstrate the truth of what has been proved and sealed already, never yielding any support to those who want to contradict it.

 

                                                                       Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                       

March 2007

Acts 11:26

[1] SAINTS   Most people wouldn’t want to be called “saints” since they never think of themselves as saints. They think that the word “saint” refers to a Christian of extraordinary achievement (like the apostle Peter) or to a Christian with an unusually vivid experience of God (like Francis of Assisi) or to a Christian of world-renowned dedication (like Mother Teresa of Calcutta ). Our reluctance notwithstanding, “saint” is one of the commonest names for Christians throughout the New Testament. All who believe in Jesus Christ and aspire to follow him are called “saints”.

The truth is, the word “saint” doesn’t have anything to do with extraordinary achievement or experience or dedication; the word “saint” is a synonym for “holy”; to be a saint is to be holy. “Holy” means “set apart”. To be a saint, then, is simply to be set apart. All Christians are saints in that all Christians are set apart.

Set apart by whom? Set apart by God.

Set apart how? Set apart by God’s call, his ever-renewed invitation, his heart-thawing mercy, his undeflectable patience, his gentle nudging and his sometimes-painful prodding.

Set apart for what purpose? Set apart for two purposes. First, that we might simply find ourselves home again in our Father’s house, beneath our Father’s smile. Isn’t this purpose enough, just as intimacy is purpose enough for marriage? Yet set apart for a second purpose too; namely, to be a witness. Peter maintains that we’ve been set apart “that we may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

Luke maintains that Christians are saints. “Saint” means “holy”. To be holy isn’t to be a religious super-achiever; to be holy is to be set apart by God for two purposes: that our darkness might give way to light, our guilt to pardon, our confusion to clarity, our estrangement to intimacy – and also that we might to declare to others all that we have received at the hand of Jesus Christ.

Christians are saints.

 

[2] BELIEVERS   “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus had asked the twelve one day. “You are God’s anointed one, the Son of the living God!”, Peter had replied on behalf of the others. Christians are identified not by what they believe but by whom they believe; or at least by whom they believe in the first instance and what they believe in the second.

The earliest Christians were crystal-clear on both first and second instances. Their earliest confession was “Jesus is Lord.” It sounds simple, doesn’t it; it is simple — so simple, in fact, that their opponents knew exactly what early-day Christians didn’t mean when they said “Jesus is Lord.” They didn’t mean “Caesar is lord.” “Caesar is lord” was the official oath of loyalty everywhere in the Roman empire . Anyone who wanted to join the armed forces or the civil service had to vow, “Caesar is lord.” In fact, anyone who wanted to remain free of governmental molestation had to vow it. Christians, however, wouldn’t vow this. They wouldn’t because they couldn’t. They didn’t believe that the state, the government, was the one to whom they owed their ultimate loyalty and from whom they expected their ultimate good. They maintained that Jesus Christ was owed their ultimately loyalty and he alone guaranteed them their ultimate good. For their conviction here our Christian foreparents paid dearly.

What about us? We live in an era that believes Caesar to be lord. Our era believes the state to be our greatest good. The state is going to provide womb-to-tomb security. Material security? Our era believes that material security is the only kind there is. Those who regard the state as final saviour and benefactor are shouting “Caesar is lord!” whether they know it or not. Such people believe that the powers the state has can transmute the human heart and render the society the kingdom of God (or the secular equivalent thereof). Does the human heart need to be changed? The state can do it! A few laws enacted here and there, and presto – human savagery has been eradicated forever. A few more laws enacted and presto — the Age of Aquarius is upon us, new heavens and new earth. Is our humanness threatened as the right-to-privacy disappears, thanks to the state’s surveillance? Who cares? After all, if the state is our final saviour and greatest benefactor, shouldn’t the state be allowed any power it wants? And since it is held that social engineering will give us Eden all over again, social engineering (i.e., governmental coercion) is a small price to pay for Eden restored, isn’t it?

Christians, however, know that Eden can’t be restored. (Even it could, humankind would only trash it all over again.) Christians know that the state can’t bring in the Age of Aquarius. Christians know that regardless of what good the state can do, it can’t effect the good, the kingdom of God . Christians know that while the state is supposed to restrain criminality and promote social breathing-space, it is powerless to alter the human heart. Christians know that while the state is supposed to prevent us from being murdered, it can’t bestow eternal life.

“Caesar is lord!”? No. Jesus is Lord! We believe in him. We don’t believe the state to be able to remedy what ails us most profoundly or supply what we long for most ardently or save us from our deepest-down self-contradiction.

Christians, says Luke, are believers. We believe him whom “God has made both Lord and Christ.” (Acts 2:36)

 

[3] DISCIPLES   Luke maintains that all Christians are disciples. “Disciple” means “learner”. But how do we learn? We learn through keeping company with the Master himself.

We people of modernity assume that learning comes chiefly through a book. It does come chiefly through a book if we are learning facts. The facts of geography, the facts of grammar, the facts of geology, the facts of history — all of this can be learned from books.

But if it is wisdom we are learning rather than facts, then more than a book is needed. Learning algebra, learning French irregular verbs, learning the economic geography of western Europe; all of this is quick and easy compared to learning the wisdom we need as disciples. More than a book is needed.

What more is needed? We need the Master himself, the same one whom his followers knew in the days of his flesh; we need the specific wisdom without which we shall only blunder in life, regardless of our expertise in matters of fact; and we need fellow-disciples who will learn with us, warn us, correct us, encourage us, inspire us. More than a book is needed.

And yet, paradoxically, it is by means of a book that we are given so much more than a book. I speak now of the written gospels. There is no substitute for the written gospels. For as we immerse ourselves in them our Lord himself emerges from them. As we immerse ourselves in them we find ourselves with the wisdom that he alone imparts: wisdom concerning anger, impatience, lust, doublemindedness, but also wisdom concerning purity of heart, persistence, resolve, transparency, forgivingness, hope. As we immerse ourselves in the written gospels we find other “immersionists” emerging in our midst and standing with us. Soon there’s no shortage of fellow-disciples who can learn with us, warn us, correct us, encourage us, inspire us.

You must have noticed how often Jesus paired up disciples. When he sent them off here or there he sent them off in twos and expected them to return in twos. Why? It was said in Israel of old, “Wherever there are two Jews, there the whole of Israel is present.” Jesus knew that one disciple all alone will never survive. If, however, there are two, at least two, then all the resources of God’s people will flood those two.

Luke says that Christians are disciples. Immersion in the written gospels yields the Master himself, the wisdom that characterizes disciples, and the fellow-disciples without whom none of us will survive.

 

[4] BRETHREN   It’s one thing — and a big thing! — to have a fellow-disciple. But it’s something else — and a bigger thing! — to have a brother or a sister in faith. To have a brother or sister in faith is to belong to the family of God.

Discipleship is how we gain the wisdom we must have if we are not to stumble; family-membership, on the other hand, is where we are cherished, loved, treasured, embraced. Early-day Christians often found themselves despised by their blood-family. Someone who exclaimed “Jesus is Lord” when all other relatives were shouting “Caesar is lord” – such a person quickly found himself spun out of his family. Then his new-found family, the family of faith, the household and family of God; this was all the more important, for here he was cherished and held onto and held up — loved.

I’m convinced we make far too little of affection in church life. To be sure, no one wants to reduce Christian love to affection without remainder. At the same time, I simply cannot imagine what the word “love” is supposed to mean if it is utterly devoid of affection. Christians will talk about love at the drop of a hat, and rightly talk about it; after all, if faith in Jesus Christ is our identity, then love for one another advertises our identity. But what is advertised if love, so-called, is colder than a frozen cod? How different Jonathan and David were. “The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David”, we are told, “and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” (1^st Samuel 1:18) In the same vein Peter urges the Christians to whom he writes, “…love one another earnestly from the heart.” Paul signs off his letter to the congregation in Thessalonica with the words, “Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.” (1st Thess. 5:26)

Kissing is everywhere a sign — more than a sign, it’s a vehicle – of affection. In the Hebrew bible kissing isn’t customarily kissing only; kissing is accompanied by hugging, by clutching, by weeping, by dancing. In the Hebrew bible kissing is one expression, one expression among the many expressions that accompany it, of the most ardent affection.

Luke insists that Christians are brothers, sisters. He knows that in the household and family of God we are to love one another ardently. He knows too that while Christian love has to be more than affection, it must never be less.

 

[5] FOLLOWERS OF THE WAY   Again and again the older testament insists that there are two ways. Jeremiah thunders, “Thus says the Lord… `Return, every one, from his evil way…’.” (Jer. 24:15) Psalm 1 concludes, “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” (Ps.1:6) Joshua exhorts his people, “Choose this day whom you will serve….But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

There are always two ways before us, but there’s only one way that we are meant to travel. Luke maintains that Christians are called “followers of the way”. Both truths need to be emphasized: we are followers, not leaders. (Jesus Christ, says the book of Hebrews, has pioneered the way for us; he — and he alone – has blazed the trail for us. {Heb. 12:2}) At the same time we are followers of the way. It’s the supreme venture. It’s not a stroll or a saunter or a promenade; it’s a venture, the venture.

What’s needed on the way? We need the intuition of the experienced spy; we need the perspicacity of the long-distance runner; we need the sensitivity of the microsurgeon; we need the resilience of the boxer getting up off the canvas; we need the singlemindedness of the student preparing now for a career that will occupy her for life; we need the courage of the soldier who knows that fear is found in every sane person at the battle-front, even as he knows that his fear mustn’t immobilize him; we need the love of the nursing mother for her newest babe if we are ever going to bond to the newest believers among us.

We are venturers on the way.

 

[6] THOSE BEING SAVED   When we were youngsters we frequently checked to see how much taller we’d grown. We knew that we were growing taller slowly but surely; we knew too that we also grew suddenly in growth-spurts. We were both growing steadily and growing in spurts.

So it is with the Christian life. We are “being saved” inasmuch as we are steadily “growing in Christ”; we are “being saved” inasmuch as little-by-little we are coming to think and act in conformity with Jesus Christ. And then we are also “being saved” in spurts. In my former congregation in Streetsville we frequently used, on the first Sunday of the New Year, John Wesley’s service of “Owning the Covenant”. (In 1755 Wesley prepared a service of covenant re-dedication wherein worshippers pledged themselves anew to God and to each other. Since 1755 Methodists have traditionally used the service on the first Sunday of the year.) A fellow spoke to me several weeks after we had used John Wesley’s service of “Owning the Covenant” wherein I had preached on the difference between a contract and a covenant. “I grew more in that one service than I had in the previous ten years”, the man reported to me. This isn’t to say that he hadn’t grown at all in the previous ten, but it is to say that on that occasion a growth-spurt had occurred and the whole matter of moving ahead in Christ or “being saved” had accelerated for that moment.

The apostle Peter urges us, “Keep on growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 3:18) The apostle Paul insists that his ministry aims at “presenting every person mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28) Plainly if we are ever to mature we have to grow. And if we grow we shall find ourselves growing both steadily and in spurts.

Steady growth occurs as we steadily attend to worship, watchfulness, obedience, study, gratitude. Spurt-growth occurs as unforeseen developments startle us and challenge us and invite us to stride ahead in a stride that outpaces our normal pace. Spurt-growth occurs too as our attention to unglamorous steady growth is suddenly blessed in a way that we couldn’t anticipate. A physician-friend of mine was living in Boston for a year while he completed part of the residency-requirements for his qualifications in internal medicine. He was sitting in church one day, listening to a preacher who he said was dull every Sunday, when suddenly, my friend told me, “It was gone, never to return.” What was gone? He gave no details and I asked for none. He simply said that he had struggled for years with a besetting temptation that haunted him and in that moment, on that morning, he knew he was to be harassed no more.

Luke speaks of Christians as “those who are being saved.” He knows that we shall continue being saved until that day, in the words of his friend Paul, “God completes the good work that he has begun in us.” (Philippians 1:6)

 

[7] CHRISTIANS   Luke reports that it was in Antioch that Christ’s people were first called “Christians”. They were dubbed “Christians” for two reasons. One was simply a readily understood means of referring to unusual people. The second reason disciples were called “Christians” was to visit a term of contempt upon them. The Roman government suspected Christians, after all, and would soon escalate suspicion to persecution. And Christians themselves? They were deemed too stupid to know what was going on! Why, they seemed naive, as vulnerable as a child in a prison full of paedophiles.

But of course the Christians of Luke’s era were anything but clueless. They — and they alone — were kingdom-sighted in a world of the blind; they were entirely “clued in” when all the while it was their detractors who were ultimately clueless.

The term of contempt that was hung on early-day Christians they turned into a badge of honour and then displayed it unashamedly. “Christian?” They knew that what possessed them wasn’t a notion or an idea or a theory; they knew they were seized and secured by their living Lord himself. They could no more be ashamed of “Christian” than they could be ashamed of the Master himself. They knew that his grip on them would always be stronger than their grip on him; and they knew that his grip on them would see them through the horrors ahead. Publicly identified as both silly and subversive? Yes, in the eyes of a treacherous world. Yet they knew they were also secure in the heart and hand of him whose resurrection would eclipse what they couldn’t avoid and whose victory no earthly torment could overturn.

Luke knew that those who were first called “Christians” had already turned a sign of reproach into a badge of honour.

 

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 May 2005

 

 

Acts 16:11 -15      Deuteronomy 6:1-9

 

I: — In 1939 67% of the Canadian people lived below the poverty line. Today only 17% live below the poverty line.         Plainly a much larger proportion of Canada is well off materially. In addition the poverty line itself means something different now.  For instance, virtually anywhere else in the world anyone who had access to Canada ’s medical care and public education and criminal justice system would be considered extraordinarily privileged.  The poorest people in Canada have access to carriage trade health services.  Therefore even the 17% who live below the poverty line are well off, in many respects, compared to the rest of the world.

In saying this I’m not denying that some Canadians continue to live in dreadful poverty.  I must say, however, that we Canadians are better off materially than our foreparents ever were. I’m aware that I am affluent. The only difference between my affluence and the superrich person’s is that the latter can buy bigger toys, and his financial statements have more zeros on the page. Right now I have more clothes than I can wear out, more food than I need.         And books? If I live to be 150 years old I still won’t have read all the books I purchased inasmuch as I could afford them. I can sleep in only one bed at time, and I have a bed.

Furthermore, since wealth is measured not by what we own but by what we have access to, and since I have access to Legal Aid, Employment Insurance, public libraries and swimming pools and parks, I’m doubly affluent. I think I’m as affluent as I should ever want to be; certainly as well off as I shall ever need to be.

Lydia , the first person to respond to the gospel on Paul’s second missionary journey (she’s sometimes said to be the first European to come to faith in Jesus Christ); Lydia was affluent. She was affluent like Erastus, a Christian from Corinth . Erastus was city treasurer, and Corinth was a major financial centre in the Roman Empire . The point I am making is this: not everyone who came to faith in Jesus Christ was dirt poor and socially disadvantaged. Part of the mythology of the anti-Christian nay-sayers is that the Christian faith thrived in an era when few were affluent and the majority were poor; therefore the Christian faith thrived inasmuch as it fed and encouraged the resentment and envy and acquisitiveness of the “have-nots” in their murderous pursuit of the “haves.” The myth is just that: myth. The truth is, our Lord drew people to him from every social and economic class.  Let’s not forget that Paul himself was a citizen of Rome , with all the privileges that accompanied citizenship, and this when very few people in the Roman Empire ever became citizens.

Lydia was a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, a self-employed cloth merchant.  Europeans of her era valued clothing made from cloth that had been dyed an exquisitely beautiful purple.  The purple dye dame from a substance found in shellfish.  It took thousands of shellfish to yield a usable amount of dye.  As a result the purple cloth was exceedingly expensive.  Lydia owned and operated a carriage-trade business that sold upper-end women’s clothing. She wouldn’t have been out of place in Toronto ’s Yorkville or New York ’s Fifth Avenue .

 

II: — The second noteworthy feature of Lydia is that she was a “God-fearer” in the vocabulary of Acts, a “worshipper of God” as some English translations have it.  The Greek expression is phoboumenoi, and the phoboumenoi, in the First Century, were Gentiles who were attracted to the synagogue in their town or city but who did not become Jewish converts.  They worshipped week by week with a Jewish congregation and associated with Jewish people without ever becoming Jews.

Why were they drawn to the synagogue?   They were attracted to Jewish monotheism and Jewish ethics.         The Gentile world of that era was riddled with assorted deities.  These pagan gods and goddesses were said to squabble among themselves incessantly and to behave immorally.  In other words, pagan religion was no more than a projection of the messed-up human heart. Pagan religion constantly reinforced fallen humankind’s confusion and savagery and disintegration. There was no help, then, to be found in pagan religion.  The God-fearers, however, recognized in Jewish faith a throbbing conviction that God is one. God is holy. God is exalted.  God blesses his people by suffering on their behalf, by delivering them from assorted bondages, and by claiming thereafter their obedience for himself. Earnest, thoughtful, sensitive Gentiles were only too glad to live on the fringe of the synagogue.

At the same time, they tended not to take the final step and become Jews. If an adult Gentile male became a Jew he had to be circumcized — and this in a day and age that had neither anaesthetic nor antiseptic.  And Gentile women? They weren’t always eager to embrace all the details of the Torah, the dietary restrictions, and so on. Lydia relished the company of the Jewish world without becoming a Jew herself.   At Knox Presbyterian Church we’d call her an adherent.

I’m convinced that today we are surrounded with God-fearers. I’m convinced that there are many people in our affluent era who are in fact very close in outlook to Lydia . They are attracted to the church in their neighbourhood, be it Presbyterian or Roman Catholic or whatever. They are attracted by its monotheism and its ethics. At the same time they are cautious, reserved, lest they appear too “religious.” They don’t feel they can honestly, unreservedly, assent to all the major doctrinal statements, and therefore they don’t become church members officially. They may even hesitate to declare themselves Christians.

Yet they come to church and associate with its people because they are attracted by Christian monotheism and ethics. They know that the world is a perilous place; they know it’s a jumble of rival ideologies and a jungle morally. If we asked them whether they believed in God they’d say “yes” even if they had to pause a moment before answering.         If we then asked them whether they believed in Jesus as the Son of God, the Son of Man, the world’s sole Saviour and Lord, the Messiah of Israel and the coming Judge, they would shrink back.  And if we said to them, “Since you are attending a Presbyterian church rather than a Lutheran, you must think that Calvin’s extra-Calvinisticum is preferable to Luther’s communicatio idiomata;” if we said this to them they might not appear for a week or two.         But for now they intuit that Jesus is more than a good man or a fine teacher even if they can’t say what more; they intuit that there’s something unique about the cross even though they can’t articulate the atonement or explain how the cross saves anyone.

I’m convinced that there are more such people among us than we commonly admit.  I’m equally convinced that a major aspect of my ministry is honouring these people in their quest; honouring them and cherishing them. (Cherishing them?   Yes. After all, in some churches such “questers” are suspect, to say the least.)  A major aspect of my ministry is to spare no effort, no seriousness, no persistence in helping them; helping them, that is, until that day when they are possessed by that faith and the assurance of faith which prophets and apostles and saints have found to be as rich as a goldmine, as bright as diamonds, and as resilient as springsteel.

 

III: — We are told that Lydia moved from being a God-fearer to being an enthusiastic disciple as “The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul.”  What had Paul said? We aren’t told, but we may be sure that he said to her what he said to everyone else. How did Paul speak? We can only assume that he spoke with her as he spoke with everyone else.  Lydia would have heard him preach since he preached wherever he went.  In addition, we must note carefully, she would have profited from informal conversation with him. Luke tells us that it was as Paul sat with her — casually — and chatted with her — informally — that the truth of the Gospel dawned upon her and then lit up for her and finally engulfed her.   We must never underestimate casual, informal encounters.  Certainly the apostle didn’t.         We tend to imagine him addressing crowds the size of the Super Bowl turnout in the Los Angeles Colosseum.         Typically, however, he preached to small gatherings.  And of course we overlook most readily the fact that he regularly conversed with individuals.

All of us have no difficulty remembering that Jesus preached to multitudes, if only because the word “multitude,” a word none of us uses in everyday English, we have come to associate particularly with our Lord’s public ministry.         In turn we creatures of modernity have come to associate crowds with success and small gatherings with failure.         We appear to have enormous difficulty remembering that Jesus spent hours patiently conversing with individuals.         Think of Nicodemus; the unnamed woman he met at high noon in a Samaritan village; Bartimaeus, a blind man who called out to Jesus and for whom the master stopped.

Think of the Syrophoenician woman — bold, brassy, sassy — who spoke to Jesus with feminist aggressiveness.         She was a Gentile. She called out to Jesus, a Jew, that her daughter was bent out of shape.  Jesus, the text tells us, “…did not answer her a word.”(Matt. 15:23) When she cried out again he said to her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel . You don’t belong to Israel , dog.” (“Dog” was the way Jewish people commonly spoke of Gentiles.)  “But even canines get to eat table scraps,” she sassed him back, “and so maybe you’d like to give this ‘dog’ your dinner plate scrapings and help my ‘shiksa’ daughter.”  Whereupon our Lord did all that she asked of him. (In this unusual conversation Jesus was testing her persistence and her confidence in him.)

Think of the man whose son suffered from epilepsy. Or the deranged fellow, violent and dangerous, now restored; he wanted to join the twelve, but instead Jesus told him to go home and tell his family how God had had mercy on him.

We tend to think nothing important is happening unless it’s happening to many people at once in a large crowd.

John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Wesley, the leaders of the Eighteenth Century Awakening; they preached to huge crowds, often several times in the same day.  Come nightfall they had to stay somewhere.  Over and over I read that when these fellows settled in an inn or a home they found themselves in “earnest conversation” (as they described it.) “Earnest conversation” isn’t a public address; it isn’t a lecture; it’s not verbal aggressiveness of any sort.  (If it were, these men would have been invited to find another home or inn.) It means, rather, that when earnest people brought perplexities and problems and griefs to Wesley privately he always had time for these people.  He was glad to address their perplexity or problem or grief in the light of the gospel. For the gospel was in his bloodstream, and he spoke of it as naturally, unselfconsciously, as you and I speak of the weather or the latest newspaper headline. At the very least “earnest conversation” was the setting in which someone’s needy heart was met by Wesley’s overflowing heart.

I myself am a preacher who will never undervalue the preaching event. Throughout my ministry I have given it the attention and diligence that the public declaration of the Word of God demands.  I am dismayed when I hear sermons that were plainly scratched out on the back of a used envelope between periods of Saturday night’s hockey game. At the same time I know the value of informal conversation.  People approach me anywhere at all: in the food store, at the arena, on the street, by the gasoline pump.  They casually mention the difficulty or discouragement they don’t raise with me on Sunday, for who knows what reason and who cares. To be sure, I have never doubted that the sermon is a means of grace.  But I am convinced that casual conversation is no less a means of grace.

I’m not the first to come to this conclusion. Anyone who reads scripture could scarcely doubt it. But if reminders are needed then one of the more pointed reminders is heard in the Seventeenth Century, when the English Puritans insisted that “Christian conversation,” as they put it, is a means of grace.  Having read the Seventeenth Century Puritans, Eighteenth Century Methodists insisted that conversation was an instituted, divinely instituted means of grace (along with and on the same level as Scripture, Holy Communion, prayer and fasting.)

 

There are lines from informal, casual conversations that I at least shall never forget. They aren’t lines that someone laboured over in order to turn a “catchy” phrase; they are lines, rather, that someone spoke as unselfconsciously as you or I would speak of the weather or sports scores.

My father, for instance. Throughout his life my father inculcated in me a passion for excellence and an awareness that non-excellence born of indifference, unnecessary mediocrity, anywhere life, is nothing less than sin.         One evening when I was sixteen my father said to me, “Last Sunday in church we sang a hymn with the words ‘utter, consummate skill’. Now today is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt, as you know.” (I didn’t know, but for some reason he expected me to know.)   “Utter, consummate skill,” my father continued, “is Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin playing a piano duet.”   That is an image of excellence I shall take to my grave.

And then there’s my off-hand conversation with a prison chaplain who said, quite in passing, not thinking he was saying anything memorable, “Violence is what happens when we reduce any individual or any group to powerlessness.”  There’s immense wisdom here.

The aged Anglican clergyman and professor who schooled me in the subtleties of Greek syntax and whose spiritual depth was fathomless; in the course of afternoon tea and casual chit-chat in his living room he said, as though everyone knew already, “Well, Victor, the worst consequence of sin is more sin.”   (His line has moved me away from the abyss more than once.)

When I was crumpled in an automobile accident that killed three people I was hospitalized for 45 consecutive days. A nurse, considerably older than I, used to steal into my room and talk awhile whenever she was working the night shift. Her husband had left her; then she had lost everything in a house fire; and now one of her children was in difficulty at school and in trouble with the law. Despite the fact that my spine was fractured, several friends were dead, my father had died four months earlier and I was 250 kilometres from anyone who knew me, she sought me out because she found in our late-night conversation comfort and encouragement and hope — truth.

I can’t tell you how often people who conversed with me informally have been a vehicle of grace.  Some were educated, some were not — like the New Brunswick lumberjacks who told me they had never had a clergyman visit them in their backwoods shanty in the dead of winter.  The woodstove in the plywood shanty kept the indoor temperature only slightly above the outdoor temperature.

And of course I shall never forget the fellow, mentally ill for 30 years and furious with a minister who had told him that mentally ill people couldn’t be Christians since they couldn’t grasp the gospel. In his fury he shouted to me, “Do you have to be sane to be a Christian?” “On the contrary, Eric,” I said, “on the contrary….”  Let us never forget that our Lord’s family thought him deranged and came to take him home before he embarrassed the family any more.

Let me repeat: I am the last person to belittle the preaching office. Necessary as preaching is, however, it isn’t sufficient.  Conversation (among other activities) must always accompany it.

There are many kinds of conversation in this regard. There is the institutionalized conversation of pastor and counselee; the semi-institutionalized conversation around a church meeting; and of course the uninstitutionalized encounters at the ballpark, on the street, in the dentist’s waiting room.

 

I am convinced that there are God-fearers in any congregation.  They have been attracted; they are intrigued; they find themselves wistful. They are tentative about their nascent faith and would feel pressured and awkward if they were asked to endorse right now, sign ‘on the dotted line,’ a creed or confession of faith or denominational statement.  Nevertheless they are moving in the right direction and will be helped to a Lydia-like standpoint through countless conversations on the church premises and elsewhere in the community.

Between Lydia and us there stands a Christian thinker who is mentioned often from this pulpit (I trust), Martin Luther. In 1537 Luther wrote a document called “The Schmalkald Articles.”  The Schmalkald Articles mention five means of grace: the sermon, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the pronouncement of forgiveness, and mutual discussion and comforting of the brethren.

The day came when Lydia was possessed of such resilient faith that she asked to be baptized; that is, she now wanted to confess her faith in Jesus Christ before the world. She did so.  Then she opened her home to Paul and Silas.         Opened her home: that means hospitality, more neighbours, more conversation, greater faith, wider outreach, other God-fearers helped along the road to faith.

And so the people of God grow in grace, in godliness, and in numbers.
                                                                                               Victor Shepherd   

May 2010

Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto

Acts 16:30

 

I: — Two decades ago Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the minister at Westminster Chapel, in London , was the best-known preacher in Great Britain . He addressed 2000 people Sunday by Sunday, each year turning his sermons for the past year into books that sold scores of thousands of copies.  Earlier in his life he had trained as a physician, as a cardiologist, to be exact. Having practised for several years as a specialist in Britain he left medicine – where he was a rising star among England ’s medical fraternity – and entered the ministry.  He began by serving small congregations in Wales , and eventually became senior minister to one of London ’s largest congregations. When he was about to retire, decades later, someone gushingly remarked that he had made a huge sacrifice in giving up his career in medicine.   (British clergy of the mid 1950s were paid even less than British clergy are now; Lloyd-Jones was 52 years old before he could afford a car.) “Sacrifice?” the man said in bewilderment, “What sacrifice?   What greater privilege is there than being a minister of the gospel that saves and therefore is humankind’s only hope?”   As important as cardiology is, its importance is relativised by the importance of announcing the gospel.

Whenever I teach a course on the theology of John Calvin, my first lecture is always on Calvin’s health; specifically, his ill health, his medical problems: kidney stones, nephritis, haemorrhoids, asthma, migraine headaches, pulmonary tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, spastic colon. The lecture amplifies each of these ailments in considerable detail.  When the class is beginning to turn green I say to the students, “Why didn’t Calvin take it easier on himself?”   Then I quote Calvin himself from the preface to his commentary on 2^nd Thessalonians, where Calvin says tersely, “My ministry is dearer to me than life.” In view of Calvin’s health problems and the atrocious suffering they brought him he could have been easy on himself, could have excused himself from his relentless work, could have spared himself the fatigue and frustration his manifold responsibilities in Geneva brought him. Everyone would have understood if he had said, “I’m not well: I’ll have to stop now.” No one would have faulted him for easing up and reducing his pain; instead, “My ministry is dearer to me than life.”

I understand Calvin. What could ever be dearer to someone whom the crucified has called than the ministry of that gospel which alone “saves” in every sense of the word?

II: — The gospel of Jesus Christ addresses us all, mired as we are in the human predicament. “Mired” is scarcely a neutral word. Other words could as readily be used: “fixed”, “bound”, “sunk”, “fastened”, “imprisoned”. Any of these words would indicate that the human predicament isn’t something humankind can alter. The root human situation can’t be remedied by human effort. This has to be made plain Sunday by Sunday.  It has to be announced again and again that the gospel uniquely provides deliverance. Worshippers must never be given the impression that “Christianity” merely puts a religious “spin”, a religious interpretation, on the world’s self-understanding, which self-understanding never goes so far as to speak of a predicament.

The world has an unrealistically roseate view of the human situation just because the world’s unbelief has blinded it to its own condition. (“Their foolish minds became darkened…” is how the apostle Paul puts it.)  The world views the human predicament in terms of social problems (the fact of social problems is undeniable) or in terms of national self-interest or in terms of corporate rapacity.  But individuals themselves are in fine condition, the world thinks; we are mere victims; we are never perpetrators.  Not surprisingly, then, the world continues to worship the myth of progress. “Every day in every way we are becoming better and better” announced Auguste Comte, the 19^th Century “positive thinker.”   The presupposition of human progress appears everywhere in board of education documents, for instance.  It’s taken as self-evident that culture in general and education in particular are vehicles of a human amelioration that admits no profound predicament, no innermost self-contradiction and outermost manifestation of it.

On the one hand, the depredations of the century just behind us — particularly the depredations of the most educated nations — should find us laughing at the ridiculous naiveness of this.  On the other hand we shouldn’t laugh, since people who reject the gospel’s cure and therefore the gospel’s diagnosis are left believing in human progress (despite counter-evidence as unanswerable, for instance, as the history of the western world in the 20^th century) as the only alternative to despair.

Of course there’s progress in the realm of technology, but only in the realm of technology. Technology is the human mastery of the less-than-human, the sub-human.   Therefore there is progress in humankind’s mastery of wind and water and electrons and chemicals and atoms.  But what of humankind’s self-mastery?  There’s no evidence of this at all.  And as a matter of fact it is humankind’s misused mastery of the sub-human that has brought unspeakable suffering, especially in the past 150 years. It’s humankind’s misused mastery of the less-than-human (why does no one ask why it’s forever being misused?) which proves that humankind’s self-mastery is a fable more ludicrous than anything a four year old believes in.

Progress? Think of some of Russia ’s greatest names from the last 150 years: Doestoievski, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov. Then think of Russia ’s history from 1900 to the present.

Progress? Think of some of Germany ’s greatest names: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schweitzer, Grass, Einstein. Then think of Germany ’s history from 1900 to the present.

Progress? I listen to the radio while I eat my lunch. A noon-hour phone-in program invited listeners to comment on the reduced sentence recently imposed upon a man who had raped his stepdaughter. Because the man had raped his stepdaughter anally it was argued in court that he had preserved her virginity. In recognition of the man’s thoughtfulness the judge reduced the sentence. Is this progress? in a society whose midday radio programming turns a young woman’s lifelong devastation into public entertainment?

Only the gospel saves. Only the gospel tells us that we need to be saved. Only the gospel tells us from what we need to be saved.

 

III: — Then from what do we need to be saved?

(i)         We need to be saved from ourselves.  Have you ever noticed how off-handedly (it would seem) Jesus refers to our polluted hearts and heads?  “You, evil as you are…” he says to his disciples; to disciples, no less. “Out of the heart of humankind bubbles up all manner of depravity…” he says so matter-of-factly, as though it were so obvious that no one could think of disagreeing with him. Our Lord simply assumes that the root human condition is obvious to anybody with one eye open. Were he among us today in the flesh he would say, “ Serbia ? Kosovo?  Iraq ? What’s extraordinary about them? What else would you expect from people like yourselves?”  To those who are religiously fussy about what they eat he declares, “It isn’t what goes in that defiles you; it’s what comes out.” Then he lists some – but only some – of the everyday depravities which he regards as undeniable. Undeniable, to be sure, yet just as certainly incurable — apart from that radical cure of an ailment he presupposes everywhere but argues for nowhere.         Our Lord never attempts to build a case for his understanding of the human predicament; he simply states it, assuming that anyone who disagrees with him demonstrates, by her disagreement, that the human head and heart are every bit as perverse and folly-ridden as he maintains.

In speaking so matter-of-factly about the state of the human heart our Lord is simply endorsing what has since been labelled “Original Sin”. We aren’t going to finesse all the subtleties of the doctrine this morning or attempt to correct all the misunderstandings that surround it. But we must say this much about it. We must understand that sins (small “s”, plural) are the outcropping, the effervescence, of Sin (capital “S”, singular). Our behaviour is an outflow of the condition.  Our thinking, willing, doing are symptoms of our innermost ailment. To treat the symptoms (or think we can treat the symptoms) while overlooking the condition is not only to find the symptoms unaltered; it’s also to persist in blindness, shallowness and folly concerning the condition.  When next someone says to us, “Have a good day”, we should ask ourselves in what a good day would consist.  Good day?  The world-at-large tells us that a good day is a day when we feel so good about ourselves it’s as if we were slightly “high” on whatever it takes to make us slightly “high”.  Our Lord tells us, however, that a good day, a really good day, is the day our Sinnership comes home to us with a conviction that is equal parts horror and disgust.

On the day of Pentecost many people had a “good day”; that is, a Godly day. Peter preached; the Spirit of God drove the message home; dozens cried, “What are we going to do?” Whereupon Peter told them what they had to do: they had to repent, cast themselves upon the mercy of God, look to God in saving faith every day, and pursue that road of discipleship which is narrow because it has to be narrow, just as the cutting edge of a knife has to be narrow if the knife is to be of any use.

It isn’t the case that we need our sins laundered, as though we needed an injection of something-or-other to bring about moral improvement. At bottom we need our Sinnership, the underlying condition, dealt with, for we need innermost Godwardness more than we need anything else.

(ii)         In saying that we need to be saved from the root human condition we are saying as well that we need to be saved from the judgement of God. You have heard me say many times that God’s judgement is medicinal or surgical; that is, it’s meant to heal. True.  God’s judgement is medicinal or surgical; and it will heal — as long as we submit to it.         To flee it, however, is to forego what alone will heal. Judgement welcomed means restoration to God and recovery within ourselves; judgement dismissed means alienation from God fixed and self-alienation unaltered.  We are delivered from the judgement of God by welcoming the judgement of God. Let me repeat. To flee the judgement of God is to be stuck in it; to welcome the judgement of God is to be delivered from it.

 

IV: — It all happened like this for the prison guard in the city of Philippi . The guard had been charged with ensuring that his prisoners, Paul and Silas (apostles), didn’t escape. A few hours earlier Paul and Silas had been beaten up by mobs egged on by magistrates; then they had been thrown into jail. The prison guard knew, of course that the apostles were Christians.  During the night an earthquake rumbled through the city.  The earthquake broke open the prison doors.  The guard knew that his Roman overseers would execute him if his prisoners escaped. He was about to commit suicide when Paul spoke up: “Don’t bother killing yourself; we’re still here.” Whereupon the guard cried out, “What must I do to be saved?”   The apostles’ reply was quick: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.…”

To believe in the Lord Jesus is to commit ourselves to him.  To believe in the Lord Jesus is to commit ourselves to him whom we now know to be God incarnate. Note Paul’s instruction: “Believe in the Lord Jesus….” Then note how the story concludes: “[the guard] rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God.”  Plainly, to give ourselves to Jesus Christ is to give ourselves to God.

 

We need to say more about the prison guard who now rejoiced that he had believed in the Lord Jesus and now knew himself saved.  What had happened to him? What had happened to him to render him saved?

(i)         He was now newly related to God, rightly related to God.  The moment he clung in faith to Jesus Christ; that moment he became as much a child of God as he could ever be.  Because there was now faith rather than unbelief in the depths of his heart he had moved from being a creature of God to a child of God.

The profoundest description of him was “alive” unto God rather than “dead, inert”. The most important activity in his life, when alone, was prayer; when with others, worship. The truth about him concerning God the judge was “pardoned”; the truth about him concerning God the father was “reconciled”.

 

(ii)         Yet the prison guard, in his new-born faith, was given more than a new standing before God; he was also given a new nature from God.  This is not to say he was rendered sinless instantly.  Not at all. In fact he would have to contend with his “old” nature until life’s end.  But at least he could contend with it and wanted to.  And he wanted to contend with his old nature just because he had been given a new nature and knew it.

One of the weaker spots in my 37-year ministry, I feel, has been right here. I think I have understated the profoundest difference that faith in our Lord makes to the total person.  Not merely the difference it makes to our intellectual furniture (I’ve never understated that), but the difference it makes now to the total person. You see, the one question which seekers put to me over and over is, “What difference is faith in Christ going to make tomorrow morning when our feet hit the floor and we have to contend with a world that is as foreign to the gospel as cannibalism is to a Canadian?”

The prison guard in Philippi knew it had made a difference within him so telling that he would never doubt it. It will never make any less a difference to any of us.  Think for a minute: we live in a relationship with God that can never be adequately described but is always intimately known; we are informed by truth that we could never find for ourselves but will always be given to us; we are secure in our Lord not because of the strength of our grip on him but because of the strength of his grip on us; we have been flooded with the a love that Jesus himself calls “living water”.

 

(iii)         The prison guard knew one thing more: he knew what future his faith would bring him. His future was what scripture calls “glorification”, or the consummation, the full flowering of his life in God.

I am not embarrassed to speak of the life-to-come.  I am not embarrassed at finding comfort in the fact that the end of all who are named Christ’s people is a glorious end: we are going to stand forth resplendent on day of our ultimate deliverance.  The apostle doesn’t hesitate to encourage the Christians in Philippi, doesn’t hesitate to encourage the congregation which the prison guard himself now joined, by reminding them, “I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil 1:6)

 

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

 January 2007

 

Acts 17:16-34.

 

I: — What irks you? What upsets you? For a long time I have thought that the thing which irks us most (like the thing which delights us most) tells the world what is really on our heart, what we really live for, how profound (or shallow) we really are. If we are most upset when we can’t find a parking spot, or when the weather isn’t what we’d like or when the laundry tub overflows, then we are shallow. If, however, we are most upset when spouse or child or friend is misrepresented or victimized in any way, we are deeper. If we are most upset when God’s honour is besmirched, God’s truth ridiculed, God’s glory trifled with, God’s patience presumed upon and God’s mercy disdained, we are deeper still. What irks us tells the world what we truly cherish, what we pursue, what possesses us; in a word, what irks us indicates how godly we are.

On one of his missionary journeys Paul stopped over in Athens . He spoke with the people of the city. He commended the gospel to them. They slighted him; called him a “babbler”. “Babbler” is a very sanitized English translation of a Greek word which means “seedpicker” or “gutter sparrow”. Gutter sparrows pecked around on the streets looking for second hand seeds; seeds which had spilled out of a horse’s feedbag, even seeds which had passed through the horse and had to be pecked more diligently. When Paul announced the gospel in Athens the Athenians regarded him as a rummage clerk who peddled cast-off intellectual scraps. “Gutter sparrow”, “babbler”. Unlike you and me, however, Paul didn’t have a fragile ego and therefore he wasn’t upset at this. The Athenians could call him whatever they wanted to. He wasn’t irked.

What did irk him, however, was the proliferation of idols throughout the city. As a Jewish person who had the first and second commandments in his bloodstream he was most upset when he saw the uniqueness of God denied and the glory of God slighted by the city’s flaunted idolatry. Luke tells us that Paul’s “spirit was provoked” when he saw this. To say Paul’s spirit was provoked is to say that he was both angry and repelled at the spectacle. The fact that he was upset at this, and not upset when he was abused himself, tells us that the apostle was oceans deep. You and I should soberly take note of what we have inadvertently yet truthfully told the world is really important to us, inasmuch as the world has already taken note of it.

 

II: — In Athens Paul found two principal groups of hearers: Stoics and Epicureans.

(i) Stoics aimed at living in harmony with nature. Their concern with nature led them to espouse a world-state, national boundaries being as obsolete as a caveman’s club. The Stoics were morally earnest; in fact moral earnestness, especially with respect to their concern for nature, was what distinguished them. They were possessed of the highest sense of duty. And concerning all of this they were as proud as peacocks.

Think today of Greenpeace, for instance. Greenpeace aims at living in harmony with nature. Moral earnestness. Highest sense of duty — so high, in fact, that it courts personal danger. (How many of us would drive our rubber dinghy under the bow of an oceangoing vessel in order to save a whale?) Don’t get me wrong. I’m not belittling Greenpeace at all; nor any other environmental group. I am not so stupid as to think that I can allow the whales and fish and animals to perish and yet survive myself. They don’t need me to survive; but I need them. Vegetation doesn’t need me; but I need it. And therefore the moral earnestness of those bent on living in harmony with nature, as well as their sense of duty; it is all commendable and is not to be belittled in any way.

But is there also a chilling pride which goes with this? Is there a sense of superiority? Do morally earnest people regard themselves superior to those who are morally indifferent? We shall come back to this.

(ii) — Epicureans confronted Paul in Athens as well. The Epicureans believed that pleasure is the chief end of life. Now when you hear this don’t assume the most profligate debauchery. The Epicureans were smarter than this. They knew that unrestrained indulgence doesn’t magnify pleasure, ultimately; unrestrained indulgence only increases suffering. The Epicureans wanted a life free from suffering, free from pain, free from disturbing passions. They wanted tranquillity. In addition, they were agnostics. Whether there were deities or not made no difference to them, since the deities (if deities there were) took no interest in people anyway.

Today Epicureanism is the ruling ideology of many suburbanites (like me); it’s the ruling ideology of all yuppies (by definition).   Unthinking oafs may go on binges and “blowouts,” only to suffer for days afterwards. Unthoughtful people may fritter their entire paycheque at once with nothing left for a year-end RSP. But the true Epicurean is never this shortsighted. He knows what kind of pleasure is ultimately most pleasurable. He knows that unthoughtful appetitive indulgence isn’t ultimately pleasurable. And so he calculates and estimates and gradually becomes ever so shrewd in adding up what gives greatest pleasure over the greatest period of time.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Epicureanism (including its modern version) always appears decent and honourable when in fact it is the most coldly calculating self-indulgence. It appears virtuous inasmuch as it isn’t vulgar, gross or lurid. But in fact it is maximal self-indulgence disguised with a cloak of refinement.

Stoics and Epicureans are still with us. Present-day Stoics — morally earnest, dutiful people who recognize genuine threats to the world — present-day Stoics pursue worthy goals. Nonetheless, while they are zealous in pursuing much that is good, they are blind to the good, the kingdom of God . Blind to humankind’s need of salvation in Jesus Christ, they invest their own pursuit and their own agenda with a salvific force and ultimacy which renders it idolatrous.

Present-day Epicureans, on the other hand, despite a veneer of sophistication and refinement, are simply self-serving. They don’t understand, can’t understand, that the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, whether in its crude form or its refined form, is unworthy of a creature of God, is finally dehumanizing, and is self-defeating in any case. As for avoiding passion as much as possible inasmuch as passions disturb, no Christian would want to live impassively. Is lukewarm anaemia our idea of living? More profoundly still, cosy impassivity is sinful when God himself is exceedingly impassioned. Myself, I love the biblical passages which speak of God’s passion. The Hebrew prophets speak of God snorting through his nostrils in exasperation; God’s speech is strong enough to break rocks; God’s anger is a consuming fire. At the same time, so tender is God that he aches to have his flippant people attuned to him; God longs to nourish his children as surely as a nursing mother wants her babe to thrive. God is so infuriated by a disobedient, ungrateful Israel that he wants to thrust it away, get clear of the people, and get his own gut disentangled. (Haven’t you ever felt this way about someone?)   Then, Hosea tells us, God says to Israel , “How can I hand you over? My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender.” (Haven’t you ever felt this way about the same person thirty minutes later?) The unimpassioned life isn’t worth living. Unimpassioned people are concerned only with gentle, self-stroking self-gratification. God, meanwhile, is bleeding to death for the sake of the world. Present-day Epicureanism (typified by so many suburbanites and yuppies) is self-serving shallowness. It is dehumanizing.

Paul had engaged both the morally earnest who are blind and the morally non-earnest who are shallow before you and I were ever exposed to them. Politely he told them what he thought: they were idolatrous. In one case (Stoics) a good had been confused with the good; in the other case (Epicureans) good wasn’t even pursued. Yet finally both were idolatrous alike. Rudely they told him what they thought of him: he was a babbler, a gutter-sparrow who picked over intellectual droppings.

Still, there were serious people among the Athenians. They told him they wanted to hear more about this “new teaching which you present”. They wanted to go from elementary theology to intermediate. And so Paul began his sermon.

 

III: — POINT ONE: The God whom they admit they don’t know (after all, they had written “To an unknown god” on the altar of their deity); the God whom they admit they don’t know is knowable. Not only is God knowable, God is known, right now, by multitudes without number. These people, Christian believers, know God as surely as they know their own name. They have come to know that this God doesn’t inhabit humanly-made shrines or buildings or cult-objects. The God who genuinely is God gloriously transcends all human attempts at containing him. Furthermore, this God needs nothing from us (he may want something from us — namely us ourselves — but needs nothing from us.) God is God.

POINT TWO: God has made us all “from one”. The Athenians were proud that of all the different ethnic groups which made up the Greek people, only Athenians were non-immigrants to Greece . Surely those who have never been the tired, poor, huddled immigrant masses yearning to breathe free; surely these people are superior! They certainly think they are superior! The apostle sets them straight: God has made them all “from one”. “From one” means a common ancestry. Humankind consists of commoners. Before God any pretence to superiority is ludicrous because false.

POINT THREE: All humankind, without exception, yearns with a common longing. All humankind has the profoundest disquiet. The German language has the best word for it: Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht can’t be translated by the English word “desire”. “Desire” is too close to the surface, too close to being frivolous wish or too close to being something hormonally driven. Sehnsucht is the nameless longing which God has implanted in the human heart. It is the profound disquiet which humankind cannot deny but also cannot identify. It is the profound disquiet which leaves us knowing that regardless of what we achieve, acquire or aspire after we were made for something better.

Sehnsucht always reminds me, in many respects, of what a homing pigeon has in its head. Take the pigeon anywhere, release it, and the pigeon knows instinctively that wherever it might be at this moment it isn’t home. What God has implanted in us is similar to the pigeon’s homing instinct. THERE IS, HOWEVER, A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US AND THE HOMING PIGEON: THE PIGEON KNOWS HOW TO GET HOME! Its instinct will get it home. Our Sehnsucht, however, won’t get us home. It merely reminds us that we aren’t at home. Pigeons, you see, aren’t corrupted by sin. But we are. Enough of our homing instinct remains operative in the aftermath of sin to let us know that we aren’t home, but not enough remains operative to get us home.

John Calvin used a different metaphor. He said that the situation of profound disquiet which God has sown in the human heart is like the situation of a person who is trying to find her way across unfamiliar terrain in the middle of a storm. Lightning flashes through the sky, lighting up the terrain around her. Before she can take a step towards home, however, the flash has disappeared. Paul tells the Athenians that the human condition is this: homing instinct, inability to get home, unidentified yet undeniable longing; Sehnsucht.

 

IV: — Then the apostle tells his hearers that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead. In raising Christ from the dead God has vindicated him as the righteous one. Therefore, says Paul, the Athenians should suspend their unbelief, forswear their pride, rouse themselves from their sophisticated self-indulgence. They should acknowledge that the one to whom their homing instinct couldn’t bring them; this one has mercifully brought himself to them – and therefore they should repent.

Repentance doesn’t mean self-deprecation. (God isn’t honoured by our self-belittlement or self-rejection.) Repentance doesn’t even mean remorse. (Many people are remorseful who never repent, inasmuch as remorse is tear-soaked regret over consequences.) Repentance is an about-face, a U-turn, a change in orientation (outlook) with an attendant change in lifestyle confirming the new orientation.

Paul informs his hearers that because they had been ignorant of the gospel God has not held them accountable for what can only be known and done in the light of the gospel. Now that the gospel has been announced, however, “the times of ignorance” are no longer overlooked. The time to get serious about the gospel is now. The time for a God-altered orientation (outlook), confirmed by a gospel-fashioned lifestyle, is now.

And therefore the present-day Stoic, the person who earnestly espouses the best causes, even necessary causes, must nevertheless repent. After all, even my utter self-giving for the sake of preserving the environment or the city streets or public education; even my utter self-giving here doesn’t reconcile me to God or renew me through God’s Spirit. In the same way the Epicurean, the moderately affluent suburbanite or yuppie preoccupied with stress-free selfism, must also repent. After all, the unimpassioned life isn’t worth living. The unimpassioned life is alien to the God whose passions throb, alien as well to a world whose needs pulsate. To repent is to turn (return) to the God who has already taken the world’s passion to heart.

It’s obvious, isn’t it, that preaching which is devoid of passion isn’t gospel-preaching. The announcement of the Good News isn’t like the broadcaster’s recitation of sports scores, amusing for those who are sports fans and insufferably boring for everyone else, when all the while the outcome of a game is only a trifle. The announcement of the Good News means, among other things, that the time of excusability through ignorance is over. Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. His resurrection vindicates him as the world’s sole saviour and lord and judge. It’s time to get serious.

V: — What response did Paul meet?

(i) Some people mocked. As soon as they heard him speak of the “resurrection of the dead” they hooted. Did they mock Paul’s message or mock Paul himself? Both. You can’t ridicule what someone says without also ridiculing the speaker who is so naive or silly or stupid as to say it. Some people mocked.

(ii)   Other people procrastinated. “We will hear you again about this.”   They deferred making a decision. We must note one thing, however. We can always postpone making up our minds; but we can never postpone making up our lives. The person who says she can’t make up her mind about getting married is still single. “We will hear you again” means “We haven’t made up our minds.” True. But their lives were made up: they remained set in unbelief and disobedience.

(iii) Some people received the Good News for what it is. They believed. They joined themselves to the apostle and stood with him publicly in that new-found courage which faith both requires and supplies. Among these new believers were Dionysius and Damaris.

Dionysius, a man, belonged to the most learned philosophical circles in Athens , a rarefied intellectual. Damaris was a woman. Women didn’t go to the Areopagus, the site of learned philosophical discussions, for a reason I am sorry to have to tell you: women in ancient Greece weren’t deemed capable of philosophical learning. The only woman at the site of the discussions was the woman who offered herself to brain-weary philosophers in need of a bodily distraction.

It’s the same gospel-message that commends itself to Dionysius and Damaris alike, poles apart as they are socially. In other words, regardless of our intellectual capacity or our formal academic training or our social position, our heart-hunger is for Jesus Christ. Our homing instinct knows this but can’t identify it and therefore can’t deliver us to him. Yet of his own grace and mercy and humility he has delivered himself to us, delivered himself up for us; of his own grace and mercy and persistence he longs to quicken and confirm our faith in him. In the assurance of faith which he imparts we then come to know ourselves home, home at last, home forevermore.

 

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

 August 2004

 

Acts 20

 

“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Every witness swears to do exactly this in court. It’s obvious why we are sworn to tell the truth: lying eliminates any possibility of justice. But a partial truth is also as false as an outright lie. “Did you see the bank employee place $5000 in her briefcase?” “Yes, I saw her do it.” The statement is true, but it’s only a partial truth — for the witness also knew that the bank employee had been instructed to place the $5000 in her briefcase in order to transport it to another branch. Any truth that is less than the whole truth has the force of a lie. In the same way when the whole truth is spoken but more than the truth is added to it, then even the whole truth has the force of a lie. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” means that there is no attempt to mislead, no attempt to falsify; there is neither anything said nor anything not said that will deceive anyone in any way. In other words, the witness is totally transparent.

When the apostle Paul was about to leave the congregation in Ephesus, where he had ministered for three years, and move on to Rome, he reminded the Christians in Ephesus, “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.”(Acts 20:27) He meant, “I have spoken the truth of God’s good news; I have spoken the whole truth, and only the truth; I am as transparent to the gospel as I can be.” What is “the whole counsel of God?” What aspects comprise the whole gospel? If we look at chapter 20 of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles we shall discover what Paul had in mind, what inflamed his heart.

I: — He tells the church elders in Ephesus that he testified “of repentance to God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.”(20:21) This is bedrock. This is the foundation. This is where Christian existence begins. Repentance to God means that the God we cannot escape in any case we shall now no longer flee. Repentance to God means that the God we have always ignored we are now going to honour and love and obey.

We must understand that repentance to God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ are not two different matters. Jesus Christ is the presence and power of God in our midst. To repent (return to God) and to entrust ourselves to Jesus Christ; these are one and the same.

The result of this is that under God we move from being a creature of God to a child of God. Everyone is a creature of God (as are the animals, for that matter); children of God are those who have welcomed Jesus Christ, their elder brother, and in his company have been quickened by the invisible work of the Spirit.

Needless to say in discussing spiritual matters we can bring forward all kinds of illustrations from the realms of botany and zoology and psychology and history. Eventually, however, the illustrations are seen to be just that: illustrations, but never exact parallels. They can’t be parallels just because botany and zoology, psychology and history all pertain to what is natural; they all pertain to what occurs as a development within nature. To move from a creature of God to a child of God, however; from someone whom God loves to someone who loves God, from assuming God to be maker to intimate acquaintance with God as father; all of this arises from the infiltration of God’s Spirit. And for the work of God’s Spirit there may be many illustrations from nature but there are no parallels from nature, just because the work of God’s Spirit isn’t a natural occurrence.

It was years before I understood the importance of horse-breeding. In fact I didn’t appreciate the importance of horse-breeding until a friend, a physician who is a lung-specialist with a professional interest in pulmonary function, told me that by dint of the hardest athletic training the most any person can improve her lung capacity is 3%. Should I train as a rower or a long-distance runner? The hardest training will enable my lungs to perform only 3% better. In other words, before the athlete is trained the athlete has to have the proper genes. The athlete has to be born with an athletic potential that is trainable.

At this point I understood why “horsey” people are so fussy about the pedigree of a horse. There’s no point in training any horse at all for the Kentucky Derby. The only horse worth training is the horse that has already been bred. To be sure, Jesus trained disciples. But before he schooled them and subjected them to daily rigour; before he did any of this he called them, and they responded in repentance and faith. Therein, precisely there, they were conceived and quickened and birthed as his men and women whom he would subsequently school and train and use.

We have to begin at the beginning. “Repentance to God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” is this beginning. It is the foundation of “the whole counsel of God.”

II: — Another aspect of the “whole counsel” Paul speaks of when he declares, “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable.”(20:20) The apostle had commended to anyone at any time anything that he deemed to be edifying, helpful, useful; anything that was instructive, enlightening, fruitful, beneficial. He did so because in the absence of what edifies there will invariably effervesce what coarsens; in the absence of ceaseless reiteration of what builds up or enriches there will inevitably appear what destroys or degrades. We never have to go out of our way to find any of this. All we need do is underemphasize, under-attend to all that is “profitable”, and instantly all that is demeaning and degrading and distressing will surge over us.

There is much evidence that our society has little appreciation of what is profitable, little appreciation of what ensues if we don’t know or don’t care or don’t hold up what is profitable. Several years ago a Canadian Prime Minister wished to explain to Canadians why his government had removed several expressions of sexual conduct from the criminal code. Assuming that what he put forward all Canadians of normal intelligence would see to be the soul of common sense he said, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” Many people remarked to me how sound the prime minister’s remark was. But I thought differently. To be sure, I think I know why he said what he said and whom he wished (rightly) to protect. At the same time, I didn’t regard his statement as self-evidently wise. What happens in Canadian bedrooms isn’t the concern of legislators? What if what happens in the bedroom is cruel? What if it is exploitative? What if it is degrading? What if it is perverse? “Perverse!” a woman in the congregation exploded at me, “‘perverse’ is an old-fashioned term that has no relevance today. The sexual revolution means that no sexual conduct should be labelled perverse.” Whereupon I told her that according to what she had just said, paedophilia should be celebrated as sexual liberation. She was appalled, and told me that paedophilia was perverse in that it entailed the sexual exploitation of a child. Whereupon I asked her if it had to be a child who was exploited before we could use the term “perverse.” (In other words, is it acceptable to exploit an adult?) By now she was angry at me in that I had got her to admit that there is such a thing as perversion. When she fell silent I decided to ask her a question: “Do you think that all social sanctions should be withdrawn with respect to bestiality? Should bestiality be looked upon as one more sexual expression, as acceptable as any other?” Silence. My point is this: what virtually all Canadians regarded as self-evidently wise (the Prime Minister’s statement) I regarded as asinine.

It is plain that there is no agreement as to what is perverse and what is normal, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible. The apostle told the congregation in Ephesus that he had always declared what he deemed to be profitable, and had declared it just because he knew that congregations need to hear what is profitable. Then what is profitable? Let’s be sure we know. Let’s be sure we think more critically than those Canadians who didn’t assess the Prime Minister’s remark. Let’s be sure we know where we can learn what is profitable. Paul says he didn’t shrink from declaring to the Christians in Ephesus anything that was profitable.

III: — Next the little man from Tarsus informs us of another aspect of the whole counsel of God. In Acts 20:2 we are told that as he travelled through Macedonia he “gave them [i.e., the Christians whom he met] much encouragement.” We need to be encouraged; all of us need to be encouraged; all of us need to be encouraged all the time. Why do we need to be encouraged? Because we are either discouraged or uncouraged.

Now here we have to take a little detour in English grammar. The English prefix “dis” means that something that was once the case is no longer the case. A dismasted sailboat is a boat that had a mast once but has a mast no longer. (The mast was broken off in a storm.) The English prefix “un”, on the other hand, means that something has never been the case: undeveloped camera film is film that has never been developed.

The point is obvious. We need to be encouraged both when we are uncouraged and when we are discouraged. Sometimes we find ourselves in new situations where fear freezes us; we are face-to-face with danger or threat or simply the unknown concerning something that we are looking at for the first time; at this point we are uncouraged and need to be heartened. At other times we find ourselves in situations that aren’t new; we’ve been in them before — and just because we’ve been there before, we are discouraged and need to be heartened. I am convinced that while we certainly do find ourselves uncouraged in life as we face something new, we find ourselves discouraged far more often. Most of life isn’t new; most of life is old; in fact, most of life is “same old.” That’s just the problem. We are discouraged far more often than we are uncouraged. Most often it’s the same old thing: same old letdown, same old betrayal, same old disappointment, same old frustration, same old sacrifice thrown back in our face, same old experience of giving, giving, giving while the “leeches” around us are satisfied with taking, taking, taking. We are discouraged in the face of the “same, old”; we are uncouraged in the face of the “different, new.” Since life is far more same than different, far more old than new, we are chiefly discouraged.

Then how are we to be encouraged? How will the whole counsel of God encourage us? We need to keep in our hearts the truth that we are not the only players on the stage of life; we are not the only actors in the drama. As was the case with the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, we are not alone. There is another one present whose presence counts for more than anyone else’s; this one’s presence is determinative. Because of this extraordinary player, the drama can never finally be tragic; the drama can never finally be pointless; it can never finally be inconclusive.

At the same time, when I need to be encouraged I find I am sent or given whatever I need to demonstrate once more the secret effectiveness of the extraordinary player in the drama. For instance, not so long ago I received a letter from a woman who had been a psychiatric patient in Mississauga Hospital years ago. She was writing me to encourage me, she said, inasmuch as I had encouraged her most tellingly when she was struggling for life in every sense of the word. Needless to say I did for her neither more nor less than I should expect any clergyman to do for her. No matter: her letter told me that at one point I had stood between her and an unravelling so pronounced as to be unimaginable.

In the providence of God, what is sent you or given you or shown you that profoundly encourages you, and encourages you particularly with respect to the truth and triumph of the kingdom?

(ii) There is another means by which we are encouraged, whether we need encouraging because we are uncouraged or discouraged: we are encouraged by something as simple as our bodily proximity to each other. I never weary of those two verses from the two shortest books in the New Testament, John’s second epistle and his third. In one verse of each letter John says that he wants to see his fellow-believers face-to-face, so that their joy (his and theirs) may be complete. (2 J.12, 3 J.13) Surely to find our joy complete in each other’s bodily presence is to find ourselves encouraged. Joy throbs only where discouragement is dispelled.

When I return home from a holiday, especially the sort of holiday that entails a protracted absence, the first thing I have to do is look up my friends; I have to go and see them. What do my friends and I talk about when we are beholding each other face-to-face? We talk about what we could just as easily talk about over the telephone. Then why get together? Because meeting bodily does for us both, does for our friendship, what no telephone conversation will ever do. The profoundest human meeting is always a bodily meeting.

If all of this is true with respect to natural friendships, how much more telling it is if we are going to encourage each others in matters of the Spirit.

IV: — The whole counsel of God includes something more; it includes admonition, warning, even heartache. Paul says to the elders in Ephesus, “For three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.”(20:31) At the same time that Paul was encouraging every one in Ephesus he was also admonishing every one. Why? What was occurring within the congregation that found Paul admonishing every one with tears night and day? To answer our question we must look at two other N.T. documents that speak of the congregation in Ephesus.

In his letter to the Corinthian Christians Paul writes, “I fought with beasts at Ephesus.”(1 Cor. 15:32) He doesn’t mean that he fought literally with wild beasts as a gladiator in an arena. Paul was a Roman citizen, and no Roman citizen could be forced into gladiatorial combat. “I fought with beasts at Ephesus” means “I had to contend with influential people in the congregation who were bent on distorting the gospel and dismembering the people.” In any congregation there can always appear those who knowingly or unknowingly deny the gospel, denature the gospel, and damage the congregation. These people may wreak their havoc through ignorance, through stupidity, through folly, through malice; but whatever their motive and however they behave, they are distressing and dangerous; they have to be resisted. Paul contended with them when he lived for three years with the Christians in Ephesus. He admonished others to resist these gospel-deniers as well.

But why does he say that he admonished night and day with tears? To answer this question we must turn to the book of Revelation. There we are told that the congregation in Ephesus was noted for its energy and its orthodoxy: energetically it had fended off any and all false teaching. Good. The gospel-deniers hadn’t been allowed to reach first base. Good. And yet the congregation in Ephesus was known for one thing more, says the book of Revelation (2:4): it had lost its first love.

What was its first love? What did it mean to lose it? There are two aspects of losing one’s first love. (i) The congregation in Ephesus was so very determined to fend off false teaching (as it should) that it became hard and harsh itself; it became more concerned with doctrinal precision than with whole-soulled, self-forgetful, other-embracing love. In its zeal for doctrinal purity it settled for spiritual sterility; it allowed love to evaporate. (ii) The second aspect of losing one’s first love is simply a matter of having one’s love for one’s spouse weaken and weaken until it dies out. According to the prophet Jeremiah (2:2) God says to Israel, “I remember; I remember…your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness.” Israel’s love for God was once new and fresh and vibrant and resolute; Israel’s love for God was once so ardent that Israel would follow God anywhere, even amidst wilderness hardships. And then the ardour and ecstasy of her love declined, and declined still more, until finally Israel lost her love for God. The book of Revelation says that this had happened with the congregation in Ephesus. Its love for its Lord had grown cold; its love for people had grown cold as, under pressure from the gospel-deniers, it became more concerned with doctrinal precision than with self-denying compassion.

Concerning this matter the message to any congregation is so obvious that I shall not say another word about it.

V: — Lastly, at the end of his address to the congregation in Ephesus Paul says, “I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities, and to those who were with me.”(20:33-34) Paul is reminding his hearers that all the time he was with them in Ephesus he didn’t sponge off them; he wasn’t a freeloader; he didn’t try to enrich himself by means of the gospel; he wasn’t a financial schemer; in fact he had no hidden agenda at all. Moreover, in envying nobody’s silver or gold or clothing he didn’t poison the congregation with that envy which always poisons congregational life. In short, he neither enriched himself nor poisoned others.

Paul is now speaking not of the content of the whole counsel of God but rather of the manner in which the whole counsel is delivered. At the end of the day the content of our witness and the style of our witness must be found to enhance each other. They will be found enhancing each other as long as in our encouraging, in our admonishing, in our exhorting to repentance and faith, in our speaking the profitable word; as long as in all that we do we continue to cherish, glory in, and find ourselves ravished by our first love.

                                                                     Victor Shepherd  

  April 2002

 

Acts 20:28-38

 

 

[1] Many people who become elders speak to me months later and tell me how disappointed they are. They are disappointed over what happens (or doesn’t happen) at our elders’ meetings (more commonly known as Official Board meetings.) What did they expect to happen? One thoughtful, godly woman told me she expected to discuss doctrine at elders’ meetings. Doctrine is rarely discussed at our meetings; and when it is, only briefly to correct moderator Phipps or others like him who are theologically challenged. Some new elders have assumed we spend no little time envisioning together where our congregation should be moving or what new ventures we should be testing. These new elders too have been disappointed.

On the other hand, many new elders have told me how disappointed they are at what does happen at our meetings: a great deal of time is spent on money matters and property matters. I should be the last person to undervalue the importance of property issues (we have to worship somewhere) or money issues (bills have to be paid somehow.) Still, I sympathise with newer elders who wonder why these two items seem to fill the horizon of our imaginations.

Later in our service today we are going to induct elders, as we do once per year. Will these people be disappointed as well a year from now? Will they say so then, or will they simply inform Mr. Turvey (chair of our personnel committee) that they are too busy to find a few evenings per year for the official board? Whether or not this is the case a year from now depends, I think, on whether our elders own their profoundest responsibilities as elders, insisting on nothing less, or settle for being property-managers and money-managers.

Before we can expect elders to own their responsibilities we must ensure that they know what elders are. What are they?

 

[2] By way of helping ourselves let’s look at the elders in the church of the old city of Ephesus. The apostle Paul’s address to the elders there is a word to elders in any congregation anywhere at all. Paul exhorts the Ephesian elders, “Take heed to (i.e., keep watch over) yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God….” (Acts 20:28) Elders are overseers who care for the church of God. The Greek word “care for” is the ordinary, everyday verb “to shepherd.” Elders, therefore, are overseers who shepherd the church of God. As overseers who shepherd, says the apostle, elders are to watch over themselves first. Then, and only then, they are to watch over (take heed to) the flock or congregation. Let me say it again: elders can keep watch over the congregation only if they first, and always, keep watch over themselves.

I’m speaking now of the spiritual qualifications of elders. Elders are to be possessed of throbbing faith in Jesus Christ. The gospel is to shine so vividly for them as to “light them up” even as the gospel illumines for them all matters great and small. Elders must be convinced of the truth of the gospel and convicted by the power of the gospel and confirmed in the reality of the gospel. Elders, in a word, are to be possessed of spiritual apprehension, spiritual maturity, and spiritual ardour.

Water, we need to remind ourselves, never rises higher than its source. Gospel-indifferent elders will never give rise to a gospel-invigorated congregation. Spiritually anaemic elders will never give rise to a congregation able to resist the blood-poisoning that weakens the church repeatedly. Water never rises higher than its source. A congregation is never going to be more perceptive of the truth of Christ and more attuned to the mind of Christ than are the elders who govern it. John Wesley used to say that all he ever needed to have the church revived was a handful of people who hated nothing but sin and feared no one but God. As much can be said of any congregation. We must be sure to note, however, that sin must be hated and God must be feared. Elders are charged first to keep watch over themselves. The qualifications of elders are above all spiritual.

 

[3] The point just made is crucial, for it’s often assumed that the qualifications of elders are chiefly natural. Elders, it’s commonly thought, have been asked to be elders inasmuch as they have natural gifts, natural talents, natural abilities that are eminently useful in congregational life; not only useful, even necessary in congregational life.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not putting down natural gifts and talents and abilities at all. They are helpful; more than helpful, they are necessary. Congregational life would be impossible without such natural gifts as bookkeeping, building repair, letter-writing, telephone-calling (it has to be wooing rather than jarring), and storm-stilling. In view of the storms that arise in congregational life, those people who have a natural talent for storm-stilling are utterly necessary. No one here is going to undervalue natural gifts and talents and abilities.

At the same time, all such gifts are useful and necessary precisely to the same extent (but only to the same extent) that they are useful and necessary in any group: a service club, the Women’s Institute, the Streetsville Historical Society, the Red Cross Auxiliary, the “Justus” singing gang. Without the deployment of natural gifts the corporate life of any group wouldn’t last two weeks.

The church of God, however, is qualitatively different from any other group. While community groups do much good, none of them is the body of Christ. While they do much good, none is charged with exalting godliness. While they do much good, none of them is essential to the eternal blessedness of a human being. For just this reason the qualifications of elders have to be more than natural; more than natural gifts and talents and abilities are needed.

Lest anyone accuse me falsely let me repeat myself: there is no natural gift that isn’t both useful and necessary to the corporate life of the church. At the same time, natural gifts of themselves don’t exalt the militancy of the gospel within a congregation or magnify the efficacy of the Holy Spirit within a believer. For this reason, graces are needed as well as gifts. Therefore in addition to an elder’s gift of bookkeeping and storm-stilling there has to be an experience of Jesus Christ that eclipses doubt. There has to be a conviction of truth that remains impervious to the corrosiveness of secular saturation. There has to be a relish for the gospel, a taste for it that finds the taster forever satisfied but never satiated, always hungry for more.

When people are considering the invitation to become elders I’m sure they ask themselves, “What ability can I bring to the Official Board and the congregation?” The profounder question is “What is it of Jesus Christ that I have proven true time and again? What is my experience of the Lord that I covet for any man or woman?” And needless to say, the minimal qualification for elders is that they be people much given to prayer.

 

[4] Let’s look at the second responsibility of elders. (Their first, remember, was to keep watch over themselves.) Their second responsibility is to keep watch over the flock, shepherd it; specifically, to look out for wolves. In addressing the elders in Ephesus Paul writes, “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert….” (Acts 20:29-30) Everywhere in scripture, in Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, the gospels, the epistles, the book of Revelation; everywhere the shepherds of Christ’s people are to be on the lookout for wolves.

The wolves are false teachers. False teachers are legion; they come from every direction. False teachers are relentless; they never give up. Plainly, elders are to be thoroughly acquainted with the gospel (that is, intimately acquainted with Jesus Christ himself) and thoroughly sensitive to the subtlest attacks upon it. Most tellingly, elders are to safeguard the congregation from the wolves that arise from within the congregation.

Two years ago this month I preached a sermon, “You asked for a sermon on Voices United’, Voices United being the new hymnbook. I had been asked to preach on it months earlier, but hadn’t planned to, since I was tired of exposing the illogic and the theological error of United Church documents produced since 1988. I thought I could avoid preaching the sermon that had been requested.

Then some people approached me, upset at an attempt to infiltrate the book into our midst. Now make no mistake: the book is treacherous. It denies the gospel at point after point. (If you want to reacquaint yourself with the sermon please see the secretary or the web page.) Several of us met several times concerning the attempted infiltration. Several people met several times with one person in particular. I felt that all of this was getting us nowhere, and the only effective way of handling the issue was for me to preach the asked-for sermon on Voices United. I did. After this the issue was dead.

Another way of handling the issue, a better way, is to put it in the hands of elders who are gospel-informed, spiritually alert, and able to recognise the wolf’s threat to the flock. This approach presupposes elders who are gospel-informed, spiritually alert, and wolf-sensitive.

 

[5] Paul says he admonished the elders in Ephesus, night and day, with tears, for three years. Imagine it: the apostle reminding the elders without interruption, with tears, for three years, and not only reminding them but warning them, urging them, exhorting them (as the verb noutheteo implies.) Obviously the apostle regarded the elders as crucial to the church. Obviously he regarded their responsibilities – shepherding the congregation, looking out for wolves from without and wolves from within, remaining spiritually vigilant over the flock but first spiritually vigilant over themselves – as immense responsibilities.

 

[6] And yet in it all Paul never suggests that he shares their responsibility. They are elders; he is not. Then what is he? He’s an apostle. He never suggests that he’s an elder like them, a player on their team now giving them a pep-talk. He isn’t an elder like them; he’s an apostle.

What’s the difference? While elders have spiritual responsibility for a congregation, apostles are normative with respect to the faith and obedience of all Christians everywhere. Elders have jurisdiction over a local congregation; apostles are the benchmark for the faith and obedience of Christ’s people in all places, in all circumstances, and at all times.

Apostles, we know from scripture, are eye-witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus. Apostles are those whom the risen One has stopped in their tracks, has called to apostleship, and has commissioned to be the source and norm, the benchmark, the standard of what is faith in him and obedience to him.

Or think of it this way. By Christ’s appearance, call and commission the apostles are the normative witnesses to Jesus Christ himself. The content of their witness, the substance of their testimony, the totality of their confession, we now have in the form of scripture. To say that we acknowledge the authority of scripture is to say that we acknowledge the authority of the apostles, acknowledge the authority of their confession of Jesus Christ. To be sure, faith is always faith in the living person of our Lord; faith is always faith in Jesus Christ alone; obedience is always obedience to him alone. It is always to the person of Jesus Christ that we are intimately related. Still, the form our faith and obedience takes is always the form of the apostles’ confession. To believe in Jesus Christ is to believe in him as the apostles believed in him and therein to find that we are now intimately related to the living person of Jesus Christ himself. It’s never the case that the apostles believe one thing about Jesus Christ but the church believes something else. Either the church believes in conformity with what the apostles believe or it isn’t “church.” Plainly, then, the apostolic confession stands above the church; it determines what is church.

Let me say it again: the apostles are those whom the risen Lord arrests, addresses, calls and commissions. For this reason when Paul speaks of “his gospel” he reminds the wayward Christians in Galatia, “No man gave me my gospel; no man taught it to me; it came as a direct revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 1:11 J.B. Phillips)

No man “gave” it to Paul. But this isn’t to say he’d never heard the gospel from human lips prior to his seizure on the Damascus road. He’d heard the gospel from human lips many times over. He’d heard it so often and understood it so thoroughly (albeit disagreeing with it) that he’d harassed Christians relentlessly. He’d been present at the stoning of Stephen. He’d heard the gospel from human lips time without number. Nevertheless he insists, “No man gave it to me; no man taught it to me; it came as a direct revelation from Jesus Christ.” What he means, of course, is that his apprehension of the gospel isn’t second-hand. Regardless of how many times he’d heard it from how many people, he was personally visited with a resurrection-appearance of our Lord; he was personally arrested, subdued and thereafter sent into the world as an apostle; sent as an apostle of Jesus Christ with a commission from the hand of the living-crucified himself. In other words, Paul was an apostle by direct appointment from Jesus Christ. He was not an apostle because the church made him such, the way the church makes elders. He was made an apostle the way all apostles are made.

For the next three years Paul worked as a missionary in Syria, Arab territory. Then he came back to Jerusalem for two weeks, he tells us, speaking only with Peter. Then he went back to Syria for fourteen years. When he returned once more to Jerusalem he spoke, this time, with the three “pillar” apostles (as he calls them, tongue-in-cheek), Peter, James and John. These three “pillar” apostles were satisfied that Paul was genuine, a bona fide believer in Jesus Christ, a real apostle, not a “phoney baloney.” With the approval of the three, Paul didn’t go back to Syria; this time he began working among the congregations in cities whose names are familiar to us: Ephesus, Philippi, Colosse, Rome.

For the next minute or two let’s pretend something; let’s pretend that Paul comes back to Jerusalem after seventeen years of faithful missionary work in Syria. He meets with Peter, James and John, and this time they don’t approve him. Let’s pretend they tell Paul they don’t think he’s an apostle at all. What does Paul do next? Does he fall into depression and mumble despondently, “For seventeen years I’ve done apostolic work and now you fellows tell me I was never an apostle like you at all. I must have fooled myself. I’ve wasted all those years. What’s more, I undertook the work because the risen Lord accosted me and commissioned me. At least I thought he had, but I must have been mistaken about that too. In fact, I’ve been mistaken about everything. I need a career change. Perhaps I can be a public relations specialist (since I get along well with Gentiles) or even a private detective (since I used to be good at sniffing out secrets.) But in any case I’ve been deluded and I need a career change” – would the apostle ever say this? If the three pillar apostles had not approved Paul, had not recognised him as fellow-apostle, he would have said to them as he said to the church in Corinth, “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (1Cor. 9:1) Well I have, fellows, and if you won’t admit this, too bad for you. Just stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours. But you are wrong if you think I am any less an apostle than you.”

 

[7] I’m not an apostle. I’m an ordained minister. As a minister do I stand closer to the apostles or to elders? Am I first cousin to the apostles or first cousin to elders? I am first cousin to the apostles. A minute ago I said that the apostles’ confession of Jesus Christ is the benchmark for everyone’s faith; that is, the apostles’ confession (scripture) separates true faith in the living Lord Jesus from sheer fantasy. As an ordained minister my responsibility is to hold the congregation to the apostolic confession of our Lord. Left to itself, a congregation drifts. It will drift of itself in any case; and when shoved by Bill Phipps and Howard Mills and Voices United, a congregation will be thrust away from the apostles and thereby thrust away from the Lord. As an ordained minister my responsibility is to hold the congregation to the conviction of the apostles and thereby keep the congregation within the orbit of him to whom the apostles always pointed.

Let me say it again. I am not an apostle. Still, under the apostles I’m charged with a normative task: ensuring that the congregation honours those whose testimony differentiates authentic faith in Jesus Christ from sheer fantasy.

I’ve spoken frequently here of my vocation to the ministry. Like the summons with which the apostles of old were summoned, my call to the ministry is a call “from above.” The church did not create it. The church can only recognise it. Ordination to the ministry is ultimately ordination at the hand of the Lord. The ritual of ordination is a denomination’s attempt at recognising a vocation from God. But in no case can a denomination either confer it or rescind it. If tomorrow morning The United Church ceases to recognise my vocation, that vocation remains unimpaired, as surely as Paul’s remained unimpaired whether the “pillar” apostles recognised him or not.

 

[8] There is no implied superiority in any of this. Paul never suggested he was humanly superior to the elders in Ephesus. He merely insisted that he was an apostle while they were elders. The nature of his authority differed from theirs. In this, however, he never undervalued them. On the contrary, just thinking that the elders might fail in their responsibilities caused him to weep, night and day, for three years.

 

[9] Today we are inducting elders in Streetsville United Church. What are their responsibilities? They are to be spiritually vigilant concerning themselves. They are to be spiritually vigilant concerning the congregation as they shepherd it under the care of the Good Shepherd himself. They are to look out for wolves, false teachers, whether the wolves come from without or arise from within. In all of this they are to be ministered to by the ordained ministers so that they will always have before them the apostles’ confession of Jesus Christ, thereby ensuring that the congregation is forever acquainted with the living person of the master himself.

Modern-day Ephesus is located in the country of Turkey. It seems a long way away from Streetsville. In fact, it’s right next door.

 

                                                                          Victor Shepherd

February 1999

 

Acts 26:17-18     Romans 15: 7-21    Ephesians 4:17-19    Colossians 1:13

 

 

I: — Life is full of contradictions. One such contradiction is someone noble on trial before a scoundrel; a man of integrity on trial before a changeling; a person of truth on trial before a liar; someone willing to lay down his life for others on trial before someone who will kill without compunction in order to feed his “selfism”.

Paul was on trial before Agrippa II. Agrippa II was the great-grandson of Herod the Great. Herod the Great, known to us through the Christmas story as King Herod, was a Jew in name only whom Caesar installed in 47 B.C.E. Caesar knew he had a spineless puppet in Herod; Caesar knew that Herod would treacherously sell out on his own people and betray them into the hand of Rome again and again. Once installed as puppet king, Herod became nervous every time he thought of the real royal family. He had married a member of the real royal family, but not even marrying into the family allayed his anxiety. He decided he would have to have the entire royal family assassinated in order to eliminate any smouldering opposition that might flare up and consume him. And so he had the royal family assassinated, Stalin-like. To be sure, Herod did refurbish the temple in Jerusalem, but he also built shrines to pagan deities wherever he thought it politically expedient. When he heard that a king had been born in Bethlehem he slew every male infant who might just be the new king.

Twenty-five or thirty years later Herod’s son, Antipas, thought John the Baptist to be a nuisance after John had told Herodias, a member of the family, that she was both adulterous and incestuous. Whereupon Antipas, Herod’s son, had John beheaded. Jesus spoke of Herod Antipas as “that fox”. “Fox”, in first century Palestine, didn’t mean sly or cunning or devious. These latter meanings all came out of the 18th century British sport of fox-hunting. In first century Palestine “fox” was simply the worst thing you could call another person. When Herod Antipas was mentioned to Jesus, Jesus said, “That slimeball, that sleazebucket, that loathsome creep; don’t even breathe his name!”

A few years later still Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, slew James the son of Zebedee.

And then came Herod’s great-grandson, Agrippa II. He hauled up Paul before him and insisted that Paul explain himself.

And Paul? Compared to the murderous, sleazy Herod family Paul resembled Martin Niemoeller before Hitler in Nazi Germany. After a pointed confrontation between Adolf and Martin, Else Niemoeller asked her husband what he had told Der Fuehrer. “I told him”, said Niemoeller, “that so far from being a great man he was a great coward.”

Paul? Compared to the Herod family Paul resembled Nicholas Ridley, one of the English Reformers, before his executioners on the eve of his death. “Do you know what’s going to happen to you tomorrow, Mr. Ridley?”, tormented those who hadn’t so much as a tenth of Ridley’s courage or brains. “Yes! I know what’s going to happen to me tomorrow”, replied Ridley; “Tomorrow I marry. Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb!”

Paul before Agrippa II? Paul came from Tarsus, which metropolis he proudly spoke of as “no mean city”. Tarsus was a university city, famous for its culture. Paul was anything but a cultural oaf. He was educated, multi-lingual. He was a Roman citizen. That means his father or grandfather had rendered outstanding service to Rome. (Very few Jews ever got to be citizens.) He belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. The most famous member of the tribe of Benjamin was King Saul, Israel’s first monarch. Paul spoke of himself as “a Hebrew of the Hebrews.” He spoke Hebrew fluently. (Most Jews in Paul’s day spoke Greek. As a matter of fact Jews didn’t return to speaking Hebrew widely until 1948.) To speak Hebrew in Paul’s day meant that he came from an old, historic family, like the Massey family in Canada, or the Robarts family or the Molson family. And needless to say, at one time Paul’s family would have lived in Rosedale or Forest Hill or Westmount.

This was the apostle to the Gentiles.

 

II: — It had taken Agrippa II ten years to catch up to Paul. Ten years earlier the apostle had been overwhelmed as the risen Lord accosted him, called him and commissioned him. Accosted, he was stopped in his tracks. Called, he entered the service of the crucified whom he now knew to be raised from the dead and vindicated as the Sovereign Saviour of the Cosmos. Commissioned, he knew himself appointed particularly to a ministry among the Gentiles.

 

III: — And who were the Gentiles? We! We were — and are — the Gentiles to whom Paul was sent. And what was our reputation? In Ephesians 4 (17-19) Paul tells us what the people of his era knew of the Gentiles: (i) “futile in their thinking” (i.e., futile in the sense that their thinking, apart from mundane matters, isn’t connected to reality and they are therefore spiritually deluded — which is to say, ultimately deluded about life); (ii) “darkened in their understanding” (i.e., they have no comprehension of the nature of God and the truth of God and the way of God); (iii) “hard-hearted” (POROSIS is the Greek word Paul uses, and it means harder than marble — i.e., the Gentiles are devoid of spiritual sensitivity, are ignorant of God, and therefore are alienated from the life of God). The result? The apostle doesn’t hesitate to say (i) Gentiles are spiritually callous (ii) they are licentious, indulging in sexual conduct that is abhorrent even as they think it to be fine; they even indulge in sexual conduct that is perverse while remaining unable to recognize its perverseness! (iii) Gentiles are so greedy that they don’t care whom they hurt or how they behave in their frenetic pursuit of all that they crave. To sum it all up: in the ancient world Gentiles gave every evidence that they were spiritually ignorant, mentally obtuse, and morally degenerate. If we modernites think Paul to be exaggerating we should (i) remember that no one in the ancient world disagreed with him (ii) read the daily newspaper.

Yet the little man from Tarsus knew that the risen Lord had appointed him apostle to the Gentiles. If he was going to be effective in his mission to us he would need to be possessed of resolute obedience to Christ that would remain resolute regardless of setbacks and hardships; he would need to be possessed too of boundless love for these people that would remain boundless in the face of Gentiles like the Christians in Corinth who behaved just like Gentiles and for whom immeasurable patience was needed. Resolute obedience to the Lord who had called him and commissioned him; boundless love for the people who had been placed on his heart; endless patience for spiritually challenged folk who put patience to the test every day: Paul needed all of this and had all of this.

 

IV: — Paul’s mission to the Gentiles took off like a rocket. He gladly told Agrippa II how God had honoured his obedience and love and patience.

(i) First of all he told Agrippa that the Gentiles who embraced the Gospel “had their eyes opened and were turned from darkness to light.” They had been in the dark. As they heard the gospel they were illumined and moved from darkness to light.

Many Gentiles in Paul’s era (and ours) thought all of this to be ridiculous. They insisted they couldn’t be in the dark. Why, they had in their ranks Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, plus so many other philosophers whose thought is studied to this day (as it should be). A student of philosophy myself, I am the last person to belittle the intellectual rigour of philosophy. The Gentiles of Paul’s day reminded him that not only could they claim the intellectual riches of the Greeks; they could also claim the practical genius of the Romans. Roman jurisprudence governed the inhabited world; Roman military science maintained order throughout the empire; Roman roads fostered trade and commerce and boosted the material prosperity of everyone; Roman architecture and Roman administration are models to this day.

The apostle belittled none of this. Roman roads hastened the spread of the gospel. He appealed to Roman justice as soon as he was victimized. He discussed Greek philosophy when he evangelized the Greeks in Athens.

Nevertheless, he insisted that Gentiles were in the dark with respect to the true and living God. After all, they knew nothing of the Holy One of Israel, nothing of God’s 1400-year struggle with that people he had chosen to bear his name, nothing of God’s holiness — completely foreign to the debauchery of the Greek and Roman deities — which rendered God wholly other than his creation in both its shame and its glory.

Similarly the Gentiles knew nothing of the Way that the God of Israel appoints his people to walk. After all, to look at one area of life only, Greek men knew that women were essential to reproduction even as they knew that ultimate sensual pleasure was to be found with a 12-year old boy.

Paul told the Gentiles that the only one who could illumine their darkness was the One who had humbled himself in a manger and humiliated himself on a cross. He told them that this one alone was God’s self-identification with them in their folly and sickness, suffering and sin. He told them that God loved them so much, despite their sin, that God had submitted himself in his Son to the contempt of Romans who reserved crucifixion for rapists and deserters and traitors.

When the Gentiles finally understood who God is and what he has done, they also understood who they were in the light of God’s truth and what they could become by his mercy. Their darkness was now light.

In scripture light is always associated with Truth. Truth (capital “T”) means reality. When Paul declared the gospel among the Gentiles he wasn’t offering them another philosophy, one more philosophy to be added to the curriculum of the University of Tarsus. When Paul declared the gospel he was exposing them to Reality. As they knew reality — the effectual presence of the living Lord Jesus Christ — they knew too that this reality transcended any and all philosophy. Their darkness had become light.

 

(ii) Next the apostle told Agrippa II that the Gentiles had also turned from the power of Satan to God; i.e., from the power of Satan to the power of God. We who are cerebral types (Streetsville congregation is markedly cerebral, on account of the bias of the preacher) unconsciously assume that the primary purpose of the gospel is to correct misinformation, to replace incorrect ideas with correct ideas. But correct information is only a means to an end; the primary purpose of the gospel is to do something, do something with us, move us from one sphere of dominion to another, move us from one orbit to another, from one jurisdiction or domain to another. Experts in electromagnetism speak of “force-fields”. Force-fields are the area within which magnets attract particles and set up electrical charges. If the position or power of a magnet is changed, the electrical charge is changed and the entire force-field is changed. Imagine Jesus Christ and the evil one as either magnets or electrical charges. The advent of Jesus Christ introduced a new power, new force, new charge into the cosmos, with the result that the entire force-field changed. Now the Gentiles didn’t have to be drawn to one only; they could be drawn elsewhere. In fact, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was a huge magnification of his power, with the result that he now could draw magnetically those who earlier had known only the “pull” of a force that did them no good. The Gentiles who came to faith under Paul’s ministry rejoiced that they had been drawn magnetically to the One whose charge changed the force-field for all time and would continue to draw all manner of men and women to him.

In his letter to the Christians in Colosse Paul exults with the congregation there, exclaiming with them, “God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” (Colossians 1:13) The two key words are “dominion” and “transferred”. “Dominion ” has to do with jurisdiction or mastery. The question then is, “Under whose dominion do we live?”

Let’s approach the matter from a different angle. When the apostle says that the Gentiles had turned from the power of Satan to the power of God, we must remember that power is the capacity to achieve purpose. The question then is, “What purpose governs our life?” — not, “What purpose do we say governs it?” (we’re all going to say that the most noble purpose governs it); not, “What purpose would we like to govern it?” but simply, “What purpose governs our lives now?”

And if power is the capacity to achieve purpose, what renders us able to achieve the purpose that now governs us? What resources surround us so as to foster fulfillment of that purpose? What force-field suffuses us and invigorates us and renders us visible evidence of a force-field that is as invisible (yet as real) as electromagnetism?

The Gentiles who now knew themselves embraced by Jesus Christ knew they had moved from the power of Satan to God.

 

(iii) Finally, Paul told Agrippa II that the Gentiles had “received forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in Christ.” At last the believing Gentiles had a place: they belonged to the people of God. It may seem obvious to us today that as soon as the Gentiles grasped our Lord they were added to the household and family of God. It may seem obvious to us now, after 2000 years of having Gentiles in the church. But it wasn’t obvious then, when Gentiles were thought to be forever barred from the household and family of God.

Let us always remember that while Israel of old distinguished between faithful Jews and unfaithful, Israel as a whole restricted the family of God to Jews, albeit faithful Jews. Let us never forget that the public ministry of Jesus unfolded within only a few miles of Jerusalem. Jesus never lingered in a Gentile city, darting in and out and that only rarely. He met very few Gentiles. When a Gentile woman pestered him until he helped her he told her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. 15:24) The earliest church looked upon itself as a Messianic group within Israel. It took a sledgehammer blow on Peter’s head before he saw that Gentiles could be admitted to the people of God through faith in Christ. And it took a shattering collision with our Lord on the road to Damascus before Paul knew that his vocation was to take the gospel to you and me in order that we too might be added to the family of God.

I’m not suggesting that there were no Gentile Christians at all before Paul’s adventures on our behalf. Certainly there were. There were Gentile Christians in Rome before Paul ever got to Rome. But Gentile Christians were few and far between. They would have remained few and far between had the little man from Tarsus not known that he had been sent among the likes of you and me as surely as Jesus had known himself sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

I’m a Gentile. I’m one of those who are strangers to Israel, says Paul, and who are spiritually ignorant, mentally obtuse, and morally degenerate. I’m a Gentile. But thanks to the undiscourageable man who spoke Hebrew like Moses and Greek like Socrates, a Jew who was yet a citizen of the Roman Empire, I’ve been turned from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, with the result that I have received forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in Jesus Christ.

If you are wondering what the point of this sermon is, the point is simple: it is one Gentile’s gratitude to a Jew who wanted only to tell all the Gentiles that they all could — and should — grasp the One Jew given to the world and thereafter enjoy the company of Abraham and Deborah and Jeremiah and Miriam. I’m a Gentile who will ever be grateful to that apostle through whose faithfulness the Holy One of Israel has become mine, and I his, for ever and ever.

                   

                                                                      Victor Shepherd

January 1997           

 

Acts 26:28

Many well-known preachers have preached well-known sermons on the person who is “almost” Christian. We can understand why. After all, the church has always been fringed with those who seem almost Christian! They appear to be on the cusp of the kingdom. They are sincere, zealous, concerned, committed, even though what they are committed to is less than the gospel; for if they were committed to the gospel (that is, committed to Jesus Christ, him whose gospel it is) they would no longer be “almost” Christian.

No doubt the well-known sermons by well-known preachers have used the text of Acts 26:28, where King Agrippa says to the apostle Paul, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” Note the archaic English: “Almost thou persuadest me…”. It’s from the old King James Version of the Bible (1611). Actually, the meaning of the Greek text underlying the English is ambiguous. Modern translations therefore read quite differently. Look at the Revised Standard Version, for instance: “In a short time you think to make me a Christian.” The sense here is entirely different, for there is no suggestion here that Agrippa is “almost persuaded”. On the contrary, he sounds defiant, intransigent, and perhaps even slightly mocking: “What makes you think you are going to make a Christian of me?”

The background to the text is this. Paul is on trial before Festus, the Roman Governor. Paul defends himself before Festus, telling the governor of his vocation and his mission to the Gentiles. Paul includes his seizure at God’s hand on the road to Damascus. When Festus hears all this — especially the Damascus road episode — he says, “Paul, you are mad.” Paul then turns to King Agrippa, the puppet Jewish ruler in the Roman province. In his exposition of the gospel (which Agrippa has overheard) Paul has argued that Jesus of Nazareth is the fulfilment of the Hebrew prophets. Now Paul says to Agrippa, “Do you believe the prophets?” Agrippa knows that Paul has backed him into a corner. If Agrippa says, “No, I don’t believe the prophets”, Paul will reply, “You don’t? You are a Jew and you don’t believe the prophets? What kind of a Jew are you?” On the other hand, if Agrippa says that he does believe the prophets, Paul will reply, “You tell me you believe the prophets and you have heard my reasoning as to why Jesus is the fulfilment of the prophets; so you too must believe in Jesus too. Then why am I on trial?” Agrippa knows he’s been cornered. Wearily, even slightly mockingly, he says to Paul, “In a short time you think to make me a Christian.”

Those well-known sermons of yesteryear on the theme of the “almost” Christian; they often appealed to a misunderstanding of the text of Acts 26:28. But no matter! Regardless of how the text may have been misread, many people are “almost” Christians. Our Lord admitted as much himself when he said of an earnest seeker, “You are not far from the Kingdom.” Not far from the Kingdom, to be sure, but also not quite yet in!

Today I am going to preach the sermon you have asked for: the “almost” Christian. Never mind the text in Acts 26; think instead of the text in Mark 12, “You are not far from the Kingdom”. Surely it means, “You are almost a Christian.”

Who are the “almost” Christians?

I:(i) — In the first place, they are those people who view the gospel as a trustworthy guide to personal morality. They deem personal morality to be the most significant aspect of anyone’s life. They know what overtakes a society when personal morality is undervalued. Chaos overtakes such a society.

Billions of dollars have been poured into the innermost inner cities of the U.S., into what is now called the “urban jungle”. There is virtually nothing to show for the billions spent. Robbery, murder, extortion, drug-trafficking; all these thrive, even proliferate. Not to mention the “graft”. Not to mention the indescribable violence. And no one knows what to do about it.

American cities? The last time I was in criminal court a judge was sentencing two 19-year olds who had jammed a knife against the ribs of a Brampton teenager and had stolen his Chicago Bulls jacket. As the judge pronounced sentence he told the two 19-year olds that they were despicable, loathsome in fact. “We don’t want a society where someone is going to be physically threatened and psychologically traumatized just because he’s wearing an item of clothing someone else wants”, the judge hissed as he locked up the two fellows. But of course such a society is the one we are certainly going to have when personal morality breaks down.

Moralists are correct in reminding us what happens when morality is set aside: no one can be trusted, everything breaks down, society crumbles.

In primitive societies a man often had more than one wife. Yet regardless of how many wives he may have had, he wasn’t permitted another man’s wife. The most primitive society knew what would happen to the society if wife-raiding were permitted.

Is cheating on examinations a small matter? If we think it is, then we should be prepared to be represented by a lawyer who knows nothing, be operated on by a surgeon who wouldn’t know an artery from an eyeball, sold drugs by a pharmacist who is just as likely to poison us, and drive on a bridge whose engineer builds collapsible bridges. To say that cheating on exams is a small matter is, to say the least, that professional competence is unimportant. Not only is this ridiculous; it’s lethal. (Strictly speaking, these considerations are nota even moral, but rather merely utilitarian. The moral issue is that cheating on examinations is simply wrong.)

Moralists who look on the gospel as a trustworthy guide for personal morality are not far from the Kingdom.

 

(ii) Who are the “almost” Christians? Those who regard the gospel as a program for social improvement. Surely a major factor in social improvement has been high-quality public education. Egerton Ryerson (who preached from this pulpit last century) was the father of Ontario’s educational system. I maintain that his vision was grand. He envisioned quality education for all children, not merely the sons and daughters of the rich, not merely the sons and daughters of Anglicans (the established church). He envisioned public education which was not at all inferior to private schooling, available to all regardless of financial status or religious affiliation. It was to be paid for by the taxpayer, since the entire society would benefit.

I am aware that there are problems with our health-care system. Nonetheless, I admire the populist prairie Methodism which eventually gave Saskatchewan quality health care for everyone, the remaining provinces soon following Saskatchewan’s example. Does anyone want to return to the days when hospital bills loomed as the biggest threat to any family? My mother was hospitalized for 75 days with a heart attack. Had she sold everything she owned (and thereafter become a ward of the state) she still couldn’t have paid the bills. Does anyone want to say that quality medical care should be available only to the most affluent?

“Almost” Christians recognize that it was the gospel which accorded women a place they were denied in ancient Greece and Rome. They recognize that the gospel inflamed those who led campaigns on so many social fronts, such as child labour and working conditions in mines and factories.

(iii) Who are the “almost” Christians? Included among them are those who recognize the Christian inspiration to the arts. Whenever I walk through an art gallery which features the history of painting I am startled at the gospel themes depicted. The annunciation to Mary; the boy Jesus “stumping” the clergy in the temple; the crucifixion, the return of the prodigal son.

My favourite musical composition is Handel’s Messiah. Close behind are Mozart’s Requiem and Masses. What about Michelangelo’s sculpture? And the gospel themes of countless novels! “Almost” Christians know that the gospel has inspired those art-expressions without which we should be humanly impoverished.

“Almost” Christians, those not far from the Kingdom, in a word, are the people who have seized one implicate or aspect of the gospel; they then identify the whole of the gospel with this one aspect. To be sure, they have skewed the gospel by doing this, and because they have skewed it they are near the Kingdom but not yet in it. Then how do “almost” Christians cease being “almost”? How do we simply become citizens of the Kingdom of God?

II(i): — First we need to see that the core, the hub, the essence of what the Christian church is about is the living person of Jesus Christ himself. To be sure, a moral code is useful. We’d all rather have moral neighbours living next door than immoral. Nonetheless, a code, however moral, is qualitatively different, categorically different, from the living person of the risen one himself.

We often fail to grasp this point, I think, inasmuch as we are misled by the word “believe”. In everyday English “believe” has the force of “admit the truth of a statement”. “Do you believe what you read in the newspaper?” means “Do you admit the truth of the statements in the newspaper?”. “Do you believe in Jesus?”, on the other hand, means eversomuch more than “Do you believe statements about Jesus?”. Our Lord did not first ask people to believe a statement about him, however true. He first asked people to follow him, live with him, love him, know him, trust him. The emphasis is always on him; the living person himself; nothing less, nothing other.

Mark tells us that the purpose of our Lord’s calling disciples was “that they might be with him”. What was the point of being with him? There is no point in addition to being with him. In view of who he is, being with him is the point! It’s as though someone were to ask, “What’s the point in loving one’s spouse?” In view of who our spouse is, loving her is the point. It isn’t the case that the point of loving our spouse is to gain something beyond loving her. To be looking for something beyond loving her is not be loving her at all.

“Almost” Christians assume that Christianity is helpful or useful somewhere, somehow. Christians, however don’t think first of usefulness; we think first of truth. Christians know that Jesus Christ himself is real; that he loves us, longs for us, calls us into his company. Once in his company we know that life with him needs no justification beyond this, just as loving one’s spouse is not a means to anything else and needs no justification in terms of anything else.

 

(ii) To say all of this slightly differently. We move from being “almost” Christian to actually being Christian as we come to see that life is finally, ultimately, profoundly, not a matter of codes or schemes or artistic inspiration but rather a matter of relationships; as we come to see that faith is simply a living relationship with Jesus Christ.

I often think we are confused by the different meanings of the English word “faith”. The word “faith” can mean either “that which is believed, the truth to which we subscribe”, or “our ongoing trust and love and loyalty and obedience.” When the Apostles’ Creed is recited the clergyman conducting the service usually prefaces it with something like, “Let us stand and repeat the historic expression of the faith.” “The faith” here refers to the notions, the ideas, the opinions, the views which people are asked to subscribe to. Everyone knows, however, that anyone at all may indeed subscribe to all the right ideas, even acknowledge them as true, yet be possessed of a heart which is far from God. Did not God himself say through the prophet Isaiah, “This people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me and their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote“? Listen to another translation: “This people has approached me with its mouth and honoured me with its lips, but has kept its heart from me, and its worship of me has been a commandment of men, learned by rote.” Isaiah’s people use the correct theological vocabulary, but all the while they neither fear God nor love God. Yes, they go to church, but their worship (so-called) of God is but a “commandment of men learned by rote”. They have not yet worshipped God because they have known themselves overwhelmed by God. The commandment of men is but learned by rote, having not yet been written on their heart. The apostle James says that the devils espouse an impeccable theology; it is entirely orthodox. Nevertheless, they remain devils.

If we are to understand the “almost” Christian and how we move from “almost” to “Christian”, we must differentiate between the two meanings of the word “faith”. After all, someone who can subscribe to every last item in the Apostles’ Creed is said to be possessed of strong faith, while someone who can’t is said to be possessed of weaker faith. The truth is, both of them could be possessed of no faith at all inasmuch as both of them could subscribe to right ideas yet be possessed of no trust in our Lord, no love, no obedience. We move from “almost” Christian to “Christian” as come to love our Lord, honour him, trust him, fear him, thank him, obey him. We commit as much of ourselves as we know of ourselves to as much of him as we know of him. And if for awhile there are items in the orthodox expressions of Christian belief concerning which we have reservations, then we can wait until our reservations are dealt with; but we cannot wait, must not wait, to commit as much of ourselves as we know of ourselves to as much of our Lord as we know of him.

 

(iii) All of which brings us to a point I have mentioned several times in the last few minutes: obedience. Jesus maintained that this was a major distinction between pseudo-disciples and genuine disciples. With, I imagine, a peculiar combination of exasperation and grief Jesus says to some would-be (i.e., “almost”) disciples, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and not do what I tell you?” Then he adds immediately the parable of the man who built his house on rock (which house survived a flood — flood being the biblical symbol for chaos) and the other man who built his house on sand (which house collapsed into ruin). The point to note is this: it is obedience which spells the difference between thriving and dying.

Have you ever heard of George MacDonald, novelist and poet? C.S Lewis wrote of George MacDonald, a 19th century Scottish writer, “I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ himself.” I think Lewis was correct: to read George MacDonald is to gain great affinity to the Spirit of Christ. What did MacDonald say about obedience and its place in our moving beyond the “almost” Christian? “Obedience is the one key of life.” This should be etched into our minds forever. “Obedience is the one key of life.” “Whoever will live [that is, truly live] must cease to be a slave and become a child of God. There is no halfway house of rest, where ungodliness may be dallied with [flirted with], nor prove quite fatal.” When a young man complained that he did not understand when Jesus commanded him to do this or that, MacDonald commented, “Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have come to understand. Obedience is the opener of eyes.” Again, MacDonald writes, “It is simply absurd to say you believe or even want to believe in him, if you do not do anything he tells you.” And finally, “To say we might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.”

 

(iv) The last point has to do with sacrifice. As we have seen so far we move from being “almost” Christian to “Christian” as the living person of Jesus is accorded first place in our hearts and minds and motivation, as we see that life consists in relationships, and pre-eminently in a relationship with him, as faith is seen to entail obedience; and finally as our obedience even goes to the lengths Jesus himself speaks of when he says, “If anyone wants to be mine, let him, let her, take up her cross and follow me.” In other words, the sign that our following is genuine, sincere, whole-hearted and not merely a romp or a picnic is this: our following entails cross-bearing. There is genuine sacrifice we make — gladly make — for him who first sacrificed everything for us.

At this point the “almost” Christian has become “the real thing”. At this point, says our Lord, there is indescribable joy in heaven. Not to speak of the joy in some individual’s own heart.

 

F I N I S

                                                                                     Victor A. Shepherd    

February 1994

Acts 26:28 KJV and RSV
Mark 12:34
Isaiah 29:13
Luke 6:46
Mark 8:34