Discovering Ourselves Across the Waters

Acts 16:9-15
In the night, Paul had a vision. A certain Macedonian man was standing and calling to him, saying, "Come over into Macedonia and help us."
Since he had seen the vision, we immediately sought to go into Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to preach good news to them. We put to sea from Troas, on a straight course to Samothrace, followed the next day by Neapolis. From that place we came into Philippi, which is in the first ranks of the Macedonian cities and a colony. We stayed in this city for several days.
On the day of the Sabbath we went outside of the gate by the river where we supposed prayer would be happening, and taking a seating position we spoke to the women gathered there. Then a certain woman named Lydia, a dealer in fine purple cloth from the city of Tiatira and a worshipper of God, heard. The Lord opened up her heart completely to attend to what Paul was saying. When she was baptized along with her whole household, she beseeched us, saying, "If you judge me to be a believer in the Lord, come stay in my house." So she prevailed upon us.

One of the things that I live with as a pastor is the fact that there are a fair number of people who think that what I do makes absolutely no sense. There are not many people who question the need for builders, janitors, teachers, police officers, store managers, or farm workers. If there were no farm workers it would be pretty evident pretty quickly that we have a serious problem. But pastors? What would change in our world if there were no pastors? And by extension there is a question for you. Christians? What is it that Christians do that we would miss if they weren't there?

There are some people who are asking that very question. Recently some high-profile books have been written by authors who feel like religion is not only nonsensical but it actually has some negative effects on the world. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, has written two books recently, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, which call faith into question.

“Religious faith is a conversation stopper,” Harris says. “The only thing that guarantees a truly open-ended collaboration among human beings is their willingness to have their views (and resulting behavior) modified by conversation--by new evidence and new arguments. Otherwise, when the stakes are high, there is nothing to appeal to but force. If I believe that I can get to Paradise by flying a plane into a building, and I am content to believe this without evidence, then there will be nothing another person can say to dissuade me, because my leap of faith has made me immune to the powers of conversation.”[i] Harris is basically saying that religion, faith, can lead people to do crazy things…terrible things because how do you convince them otherwise? He assumes that because there is no rational evidence for faith it will always lead to irrational acts.

Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist, has also written a new book on atheism entitled God is not Great. He also believes that religion, including the Christian faith, is a leftover from days of superstition and that it causes people to hate others rather than to love them. “Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred,” Hitchens says, “with members of each group talking of the other in precisely the tones of the bigot.”[ii]

These are intelligent guys and fascinating to listen to. I respect their insight and their challenge. But they don’t respect what I do and they don’t respect who we are because they have come to see faith, whether Islamic or Buddhist or Christian, as irrational, unyielding, inhumane, bigoted, hate-filled and bound to old, old beliefs. Interesting. It would be easy to respond by pulling out defensive slogans, like a T-shirt I once saw that said, “God is dead, and it credited the quote to the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. Then it said, ‘Nietzsche is dead’ – God.” But there’s something to be learned from listening to our critics. Christianity needs some evangelists who will listen and respond and help others to see what true Christian community looks like. Books like these also challenge us to look again at what we do believe and why we believe it. What is the ground of our hope? It’s a new mission field.

But I really didn’t come here today to talk about Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I came here to talk about the Holy Spirit because that’s what sends us forth into these mission fields. The Holy Spirit is what grabs hold of us and rattles our cages and turns our world upside down and gives us visions of things we have never seen and sends us places we have never gone. If we look unusual or even threatening to the world, it is because the Holy Spirit has made us different from the rest of the world.

The story we have from the scriptures today is one that gives us a blueprint for what all Christian outreach and evangelism is about. In a lot of ways it is similar to the story we had last week about Peter and his vision in the sailcloth. You remember that Peter’s vision was of animals – creatures that had been declared unclean by the law of Moses. A voice comes to Peter and tells him to kill and eat and he resists, but it is a vision that changes everything. The door was being opened for new things to happen and new people to come in. The result was that Peter baptized a Roman soldier and his family causing a big crisis within the early Christian church. God was opening the door to foreigners to come into the faith.

Well, the vision in today’s story is very similar. Paul had been traveling as an apostle to the Gentiles – the nations. But his journeys had only taken him within Asia. But he has a vision. In a dream he sees a Macedonian man standing on the other side of the strait that separates Asia from Europe. The Macedonian says, “Come across and help us.” It was a crazy thing to do. A dangerous thing to do. Christians had no foothold in Europe. There was no compelling reason to go. No precedent. But when the Holy Spirit had fallen at Pentecost Peter had remembered the words of the prophet Joel – “Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions, your old people dream dreams.” Visions had an impact. Dreams meant something. It was tested by the community. There were conferences to determine whether things were ‘of God’ or not. But people did not believe that God had stopped communicating. God still had things to do and Paul and the early missionaries were caught up in the energy of the Holy Spirit.

So when the vision of the man from Macedonia comes along, Paul and his companions go. Luke, who wrote Acts, says, “We sought to go immediately because we were convinced that God was calling us to preach the good news in this new place.” So they sailed and they traveled to Philippi, a major city in the area of Macedonia.

But listen to what they did. They didn’t just set up on a street corner and begin to preach. The scripture says they stayed in the city several days. They were getting the lay of the land. Trying to understand this new environment. Trying to listen for what God wanted them to do.

Philippi was on the main road across Macedonia. It would be a place where all sorts of ideas were in the air. All sorts of religions would have been represented. It was also a colony of Rome, which meant that it had a lot of Roman features. This was a cosmopolitan place – a crossroads of the world.

Does this sound familiar? The Eastern Shore may not be the crossroads of the world, but we know something about living in a nation where a lot of different ideas are in the air. We know something about living in a world where religion is a question of debate and a source of energy and tension. We know something about looking around at the world and wondering, ‘How do we speak to this place? These people? This time?’

Well, that’s what Paul and these early disciples were doing. They spent several days in the city, and then on the Jewish Sabbath, they went looking for the place where Jews would gather to pray. This was outside the city gates, down by the river. What they found was a small group of women, including Lydia, a businesswoman who dealt in clothes dyed in purple. They sat down and began to talk and in the midst of their talking, it happened. Lydia heard. I mean, really heard. She believed and on the spot she and her entire house were baptized.

The Holy Spirit was in Europe, too. And the same sorts of things that the disciples had seen happening in Asia were now happening here. Lives were changed. Lost people were found. Women who lived on the edge were brought to the center. And people who were searching for life and love and hope, found it. Lydia said, “If you think I’m a believer…if you think I can be…come, stay in my house with my family.” Lydia was the first European Christian.

So what’s the word for us? There is a word for us here. One of the things that make people like Harris and Hitchens shake their heads at us Christians is that we read this story, which is an old history lesson from two millennia ago and we believe that God has something to say to us through it. How can that be? What do Paul and Luke and Lydia have to tell us 21st century people?

Maybe it’s the message that we have been here before. As Christians we have been in this situation before. There have been times in our history before when we have had to listen for a voice, search for a new vision, change the way we have done things. The early church began as a small band of Jews in Jerusalem in a far-off corner of the Roman Empire. But the Holy Spirit came on them and it was suddenly clear that things were going to get uncomfortable. Peter had a vision and they realized that it was now going to be O.K. to let in people they didn’t think they could. Paul had a vision and it took them one step further. Now we don’t just welcome those who come, we go to them, even if it means going to places that we have never been.

The truth is being learned over and over again. If you want something you’ve never had – like an experience of the Holy Spirit – you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done. If you want something you’ve never had, you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done. And when the church has listened to that challenge and acted in that way, it has been embraced by the Holy Spirit all over again.

And the kingdom grows, not by domination, not by the sword, not by hate, and not by ignorance and failing to listen – the kingdom grows by going to be with people where they are and sitting down with them and talking with them and going into their homes. Those are all the methods that Paul used. And it challenges us to a relational form of evangelism – that keeps reaching out.

You know people who are thirsting for a word of truth. You know people who are hurting. You know people who don’t want to be beat over the head with another sales pitch. They just want someone to listen to them. They just want someone whom they can look at and see in their lives a bit of integrity. They want to see someone who is earnestly struggling to be a better person and who is doing that because they have had an encounter with the Living Christ. Will you be the person to whom they can look? Will you be the one who sits with them and offers a word of hope?

This week a lot of the small groups in our church are beginning a study of the book The Myth of the 200 Barrier. It’s a book that’s going to get us asking a lot of questions about ourselves. The 200 in the title refers to the Average Sunday Attendance in a church, which happens to be about where we are. The book describes what happens in churches that are our size.

Now you might wonder – why the emphasis on numbers? Isn’t our size the right size? The size God has created us to be? What is our purpose in reading this? Are we focusing on numbers over quality of ministry? Why are we rocking the boat? Why are we talking about change?
Those are good questions. And I hope you’ll ask them as you go through this study. But one thing the Vision and Design Team hopes is that you will recognize Franktown Church in this description and realize that one thing that characterizes churches our size is that they go through certain changes. They can’t stay the same. In order to continue to be faithful, they have to do new things, listen for new voices, search for new visions, and reach new people. Sound familiar?

If we want something we’ve never had before, we’re going to have to do some things that we’ve never done before. We will build on our history. We will still be Franktown Church. But we will be more. If we are gripped by the Holy Spirit we will be going into a new future that we could not have imagined.

God is going to do great things in us and through us yet. I think Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens will be surprised. Because God is reconciling the world to God’s own self. Christ is making all things new. We are walking, not according to flesh, but according to the Spirit. The only question is: Are we going to let that knowledge change us? It’s better the world know this now. Who you gonna tell? Thanks be to God.

[i] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/542154
[ii] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, excerpted on http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18503995/site/newsweek/page/9/