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Sunday May 25, 2008 "Changing Hearts" Acts 16:11-15 |
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Location: Blogs Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons |
 | | Posted by: Brad Miller | 5/27/2008 8:22 AM | All month long we have been concentrating on the Pentecost story in one way or another. The day we celebrate as Pentecost, the birthday of the church, conincides with the appearance of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. With that appearance, amazing things began to happen. The disciples suddenly began communicating in different languages, languages they did not know. And the important word here is communicating, because it was not just the ecstatic murmurings of people caught in the spell of the Holy Spirit, but real, true communication – communication of the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who had not heard.
Peter gave an amazing sermon that day, and 3000 people were said to have become followers of Christ right then and there.
The church was born that day, but like a newborn baby, many things had to fall into place so that it would be nurtured and grow strong and healthy. We know from the book of The Acts of the Apostles that those who initially were drawn to this newly born church were Jewish believers who had come to accept Jesus as the messiah. They knew the prophecies, they believed that the messiah would come, and once convinced, they were on board with this new thing called Christ’s church.
The book of Acts tells us that they lived together, broke bread together, were in prayer together, and day by day, learned from the Apostles, those who had been with Jesus on his earthly ministry. Within this community of Jewish followers of Jesus, the Holy Spirit was at work and they began to be a formidable group.
Near the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus had made it clear that when he was gone, there would still be a guide, a comforter in the midst of the followers of Jesus. Clearly on that Pentecost day, that guide, that comforter had become known in the square in Jerusalem…God’s Holy Spirit moved among them to empower and embolden. This is a very important point in this whole story because without the Holy Spirit’s dramatic presence, Peter and the others would not have been able to do what they did. Without the Holy Spirit’s presence, the disciples might still be trying to figure out what Jesus would have them do in his absence. This was validation of what Jesus had told them, in a big, big way. If they had any doubts about what Jesus had told them, or what Jesus had asked of them, that day would go a long way in answering those doubts.
But still, lots of work needed to be done for this newly birthed church to grow and prosper.
Up near the top of that list was another one of Jesus’ last admonitions to his gathered disciples: “Go and make disciples of the world.”
The early church grew from within, with devout Jews who recognized Jesus as the Messiah. But what of those who were not part of this religion and culture? Eventually, if the disciples were to spread the Good News completely, if they were indeed to make disciples of all the world, they would have to begin to preach to and teach people who were not Jewish. As we sit here in America in 2008, in the midst of a society that includes millions and millions of Christians, it is clear that the early church did their job. From that small band of followers in the middle east came a worldwide religion that continues to be alive and active. But for that to happen, a lot of hearts needed to change.
Paul had his heart changed. Last week we heard of his change of heart and his change of life on the road to Damascus. He became the champion of the cause, and more important than the dramatic events of that day was the lasting impact of his ministry. Paul, you see, did something that few were willing to do. And he did it well.
Paul, along with Barnabas and Silas, and later Timothy, understood that if they were really going to make this thing called the church work, they must move into the larger world, the non-Jewish world, the gentile and pagan world and begin to do the tough missionary work that is involved. And it would be tough. Think about it. If you are dealing with a group of devout Jewish people and you are trying to convince them that Jesus is the messiah, half the work is done. You don’t have to convince them that it is natural that a messiah would come. You don’t have to teach them the whole history of God’s chosen people and the prophecies of one who would come to save the world. They know all that. Your task, admittedly not an easy one, would be to show that Jesus fulfilled all those prophecies and conditions.
When I was teaching, I was very surprised to learn that I was very good at teaching one class that none of my colleagues wanted to teach. That class was a “Statistics for the Social Sciences” class that all of our majors had to pass in order to graduate. And besides being good at it, I came to truly enjoy teaching it.
One of the things you have to understand is that the worst grade I ever got as an undergraduate was Statistics. It was like a foreign language to me. Every time I thought I had it figured out, I didn’t. The professor might as well have been speaking in tongues. I just didn’t get it.
Later on, when I was working on my Masters degree, I had to take another statistics class. But there was a difference this time: the class was taught by a political scientist, not by a statistician. Rather than just throwing formulas at us and telling us to plug it in, he helped us see the logic behind the formulas and thus made it all more understandable. When I was able to think about the material in that context, I got through that class with flying colors. When it was time to go on for my Ph.D, I ended up at arguably the most quantitative program in the country. We had to have proficiency in two foreign languages in order to graduate. My two languages were Spanish, and Statistics and Methodology. Go figure.
My point is that when I taught the class I taught students from the ground up: understand the logic, the background of what you are trying to do, the context, and the formulas become that much easier to manipulate. It was, in the 12 years I spent as a professor, the most rewarding class I taught. Because virtually every time I taught it, I got to see people “get it.”
If you are a missionary for the early church and you are dealing with a non-Jewish group of people, you’d first have to convince them of the need for a messiah, the purpose of a messiah. If, in the end, the gentiles did not get the whole picture, the strength of their convictions would be dependent upon the strength of the person who was trying to share the good news with them. But if they do see the whole picture, that understanding will undergird their belief. They will get it.
So this was where Paul began his work. With the task that so many others were not up to. You must remember that Paul was not immediately trusted by the other Apostles. Not only had he not been with Jesus during his ministry, he had actively worked against the church up to the point of his change of heart.
When he came to the other Apostles with the idea that this needed to be done, he was met with some skepticism, but the words of Barnabas added to Paul’s convinced the others to support the endeavor. Who knows, maybe some of them weren’t truly convinced that Paul could pull it off, but hey, maybe it would get him out of their hair for awhile. Of course, if any felt that way, it was clear that the Holy Spirit had other ideas.
Following a dream in which Paul saw a Macedonian man pleading for the missionaries to come to Macedonia, the entourage headed to Phillipi, a leading city of Macedonia. This is where today’s scripture is set.
You know, sometimes you can be reading along in the Bible and not truly see what is going on. I know I do that all the time. We are bound by our cultural and historical experiences. A word that we interpret one way might have been interpreted very differently back when the Bible was originally written. Our context is not their context. And most importantly, just like understanding the context in which we do statistics, if we do not understand the context of a passage we might be missing a big chunk of the message.
This is a pretty simple passage, on it’s surface.
Paul and the other missionaries with him hang out in Macedonia for awhile. Okay, we know that the early church missionaries traveled around some. What is the importance of Macedonia?
There is one big piece of information that we need to understand Macedonia’s importance: it is in Europe, north of Greece. Paul’s mission led him far away from his home region and he became the first emissary of the church to travel to the European continent to spread the good news to gentiles. That is big, with a capital B. It’s big because it shows that he understood what Jesus meant when he said to make disciples of the world. That was not going to happen by staying home. It is big for us today, because if the Good News was not spread beyond Jerusalem and its environs, we would never have heard. It is once again proof that the early church founders got it: if they were to truly change the world, if they were to change hearts, if they were to make disciples of all the world, then they needed to get out of their home countries and truly take the message to the world.
While in Phillipi, Macedonia, Paul and the other missionaries sought out a place of prayer on the Sabbath day. There would have been no synagogue in this gentile city, so they went in search of a place where they might find people of faith.
They ended up in a place with a group of women. Were they there to pray? We don’t know. But it seemed to the missionary team that it would be that type of place, based on their experience.
Whether is was a place of prayer or not, this is an important point in the story: they sat with a group of women. The author of Acts thought this was an important point, and so do I. Why? Because the acceptance of women as equals is an important part of understanding that the message of the early church was open to all, regardless of station, gender, culture or religion. To be sure, Paul does not seem like he is always so open to women in his ministry, but he never wavered in his belief that the good news was available to all who would accept it.
The story continues: present at this gathering was a woman named Lydia. Lydia is identified as a worshipper of God. What does that mean? Generally, when that phrase is used, it denotes a gentile who has converted to Judaism; what we know today as a proselyte. This type of person would never be considered truly Jewish; they would always be known as a gentile Jew.
Added to that, Lydia was from Thyatira, a city in Asia Minor well known for it’s manufacture of beautiful dyed cloth. She is a business woman, and if she is that far from the manufacturing center it is assumed that she is a well traveled, successful businesswoman at that. She is of a different social strata than the missionaries. Paul is, after all, a tent maker. In general, they would not have anything to do with each other.
God opened Lydia’s heart. She listened to what Paul had to say. She was baptized, along with her household, and she invited the missionaries to come stay at her house. And they did.
So, not only is Lydia a rich, Eurpoean, gentile woman, she is an independent one at that. She answers to no one except herself. She has no need to consult a husband, as would have been the custom for women in those times. She has no need of anyone’s permission to be baptized. She can make that decision on her own. She invites the group to stay at her house – “come stay at MY home”, she says.
This is where we have to sit up and do our best to understand the context of this whole situation. We cannot look at this through our lens of our 21st century American experience. We must look at try to understand what it was like back then.
Over and over again throughout this story, Paul and his missionary companions ignore the bounds of first century convention in order to reach out to anyone willing to hear the gospel story. But it is even more than convention that they flout. Jews at the time were taught by the temple leadership that women were not equals, that foreigners were not welcome, that social boundaries were not to be crossed. Many faithful Jews would see these things as violating God’s law.
And then comes the kicker, this is not simply a matter of Paul and his companions talking to these “others” and sharing the good news. No, at the end of this story we learn that the missionaries actually accepted the hospitality of this upper class, rich, gentile, independent woman, Lydia, and called her home their home while they were in Phillipi!
We know a little about Paul, and this would have been a major change in his life. He spent his life studying a the feet of the temple leadership. Their precepts were his precepts. For him to break away and defy them in this way means that Paul had definitely accpted what God had called him to do. It is easy to say that Lydia is the possessor of a changed heart, but in order to carry out Jesus’ diretion, Paul had to experience a change of heart, too. For in this story, the Holy Spirit that opened Lydia’s heart also opened Paul’s heart as well. In this story, we see that against the backdrop of preconceived notions of who was worthy and acceptable, God’s saving grace dismantles various social barriers and preconceptions that cultivate strife between people.
This is a wonderful story of the history of the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But it’s importance lies in the fact that the early church, despite it’s social and cultural context, was willing to let their hearts be changed so that all people might know God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
Such a simple story. But one we need to hear, again and again. Today, the church universal too often throws up barriers to entry. Different Christian traditions argue about who is worthy for communion, membership, ordination. Fear keeps us away from people who look and act different from us. Ignorance keeps others at arms length. But in the early church, those barriers, that fear, that ignorance was cast aside so that ALL might hear the good news.
The job is not finished. The early church took on the task of making disciples of all the world. Today, disciples are all around the globe. But still, there are people as close as down the street who need to hear the good news.
What are we willing to do about that?
We must emulate what Paul and the early missionaries did so many years ago. We must not be content to be comfortable with our own faith journey. We must move outside these walls to those who are marginalized, those who are ignored, those who do not fit neatly into our world, and we must offer them God’s grace through our presence. We must be walking examples of the Good News of Jesus Christ to all we meet. We must decide that we are going to continue the mission journey started those years ago and be intentional about making disciples of the world.
It begins with changed hearts. It begins with you and me.
Let us pray: Gracious God, we want to do your will. We want to fulfill your commission. We want to open our hearts to those who need your presence. Help us to recognize those who need to hear your word. Give us strength. Give us direction. Give us words and actions that will serve you, anywhere and everywhere. Amen. | | | Permalink | Trackback |
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