Life in the Spirit: Untroubled Witness

Her name was Emily. Well, actually her name wasn’t really Emily. The program I was listening to changed her name and her voice so that she wouldn’t be recognized. Emily, you see, is a witness.

Not like a courtroom witness. She wasn’t in the witness protection program or anything like that. She is a paid witness. A marketer paid to give testimonies on behalf of products like video games. But in order to give witness in a way that people will listen to her, she has to pretend to be somebody else.

Emily’s company pays her to create fake user profiles on social networking sites like Facebook. If you are in the Facebook world you know that the face you present you present to the world is on your profile page. If you want to you can post your birthday, your relationship status, your favorite quotes, favorite hobbies, favorite TV shows. And you can post a picture of yourself. And there you are.

Only when Emily posts for her work, she isn’t there. She is creating somebody who doesn’t exist. She uses a fake picture. She researches an area so that she can sound like she’s really from there. She tries to choose associations so that, if you live in the place she’s researching you might think, “Hey, I think I might have gone to school with that girl and she wants to be my friend and she lives in my area…sure, I’ll let her be one of my online friends.” Emily even makes sure to include a few typos in her profile just so you won’t think she’s not real. Which she isn’t. Because she’s really just an imposter posing as your friend so she can slip in references to how cool Call of Duty 15 is.

Only she is real. Emily herself is a real person. And she feels badly about how she’s making a living. She cannot show her true self even though she sometimes gets involved in the lives of the people she befriends. Once she got invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. “In a way that was sad,” she said, “because that was such a nice gesture to make to someone who they really didn’t know. They just wanted to know we had somewhere to spend Thanksgiving.”[i]

This is where we are today in our crazy world. Online marketers are hiring real people to be fake people online so that they can hype real products to real people who want their fake friends to be real friends. And these marketers are doing this because they know that people will trust people that they think they know over advertisements on TV or radio. They know that we are hungry for real witnesses in the world.

So what does that mean for the people of God who are struggling to be real witnesses? At this point you may think you’ve got the whole sermon figured out. You may be saying, “I know where Alex is going with this. I know what he’s going to do here. He’s going to take this example from the real world and say, ‘Look how terrible this is that poor Emily has to be a fake Facebook friend.’ And then he’s going to contrast that with being a witness for Jesus, which means that we have to be authentic and be our selves. Emily’s world – bad. Being yourself for Jesus – good.” You might be thinking that, but you’d be wrong. What I want to say is that, if you’re going to be a witness you’ve got to be somebody else.

Not that I think you’re not qualified for the job. You are. We are all God has to work with in this world. And not that I think you should go create a fake profile to start telling your friends about Jesus. That is bad. But the scripture lesson from Acts for today tells me that when you become a witness for Jesus, you’ve got to be somebody else.

We’ve been talking about the Holy Spirit for these last few weeks and we have looked at how the Spirit inspires new communities and transforms relationships – how the Spirit makes Jesus present in the midst of us. Today, though, I want to look at how the Spirit empowers us to be witnesses and to be somebody else.

The witness in the story from Acts is a man named Stephen. Stephen was a deacon in the church and evidently one of those early Gentile converts to Christianity. That’s important because to this point the Christians had been identified as a subset of the Jewish community. Christianity was branching out, though, and lots of new people were coming into the new church. The Spirit was doing this.

Stephen was just trying to be faithful to what Jesus and the Holy Spirit had done to them, but it got them in trouble. The leaders couldn’t stand it. Partly because Stephen was accusing them of not enforcing the law they were supposed to be upholding and partly because Stephen was claiming that he was standing in the long line of God’s prophets and they were standing in the long line of those who rejected the prophets. They were furious at Stephen and the Bible says they were grinding their teeth.

That’s where the lectionary reading for today picks up. Stephen is facing this angry mob of religious leaders and suddenly he has a vision. For the whole chapter before this he has been telling the story of Israel’s history and how God has continued to speak to the people in each new generation and called them to something new, from Abraham leaving his home to travel to a new land, to Joseph going to Egypt and saving his family, to Moses leading the people out of slavery, to David and Solomon. That’s where Israel had been, but now Stephen has a vision of where God’s people were going. He looks up into the heavens and he sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Now this language is so familiar to people who have grown up in the Church that we just gloss right over this. It’s like Stephen starts quoting the Apostle’s Creed. “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and who shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.” But we forget what this image meant to the early Church and what it ought to mean to us.

It’s not just abstract language and a formulaic way of saying things. This was the vision that kept the persecuted Church alive in the midst of its darkest days. Not a therapeutic Christianity that talked about how Jesus is my best friend. Not a militant Christianity that talked about destruction. The image that the early Christians took with them was of God in glory and Jesus standing or seated at God’s right hand.

This goes beyond reason. It goes beyond history. The comfort that Stephen got when he faced the mob was a vision of God and Jesus. And this is what makes him so serene as they set out to kill him. He knows that it’s not about him anymore. He is a witness and he sees what the universe hangs on. It’s the love of the Trinity. That’s it. And having seen that love, his story suddenly becomes absorbed into Jesus’ story. It’s almost as if he’s becoming Jesus.

Listen to the story of his death and see if doesn’t sound like Jesus’ experience at the cross. When Stephen tells them about his vision, the crowd members stop their ears so that they don’t have to hear it. They cry out in a loud voice and they run at Stephen and grab him and drag him out of the city. They take up stones and they start to pelt Stephen with the stones, but even while he’s being beaten to death by these stones, Stephen kneels. It doesn’t seem to be the stones that make him kneel, he just kneels. He prays that God will not hold the sin of his murderers against them. Even as he dies, he wants them to know the beauty that he sees. Even as they give in to the evil that consumes them, he knows what they can be in God’s eyes.

When Stephen becomes a witness, he becomes somebody else. He becomes the one he’s proclaiming. And he doesn’t have to be deceitful about who he is. He doesn’t have to have anxiety about who he is or how he’ll be perceived. He’s an untroubled witness because his life is so transparent to Jesus that he becomes Jesus.

There’s one other character in this small story, though. He’s standing there as the crowd drags Stephen out for his execution. He’s watching with approval as they do the deed. They throw their cloaks at his feet – he’s the coat clerk for the first Christian martyrdom. It’s a young man who stands in for us. His name is Saul and later his name will be changed to Paul, the great apostle who will take the message of Jesus to the whole world.

He’s the one who gives me hope in this story. The crowds are too cruel and too possessed by their hatred for me to relate to. Stephen is too pious – I pray that I could respond as well to such a thing, but how many of us could? But Saul – there I see myself. Witnessing the worst that the world can do to assault truth and beauty and heaven itself, but still harboring the possibility of change.

Saul becomes the Apostle Paul by developing a relationship with the Jesus he had persecuted. Paul will spend days, months, years in prayer and seeking out Jesus. Paul will do the dirty, troublesome work of keeping Christian communities focused on who they are and why they exist. Paul will become a faint image, growing ever brighter, of the Jesus he proclaims.

That’s what Jesus asks of each one of us. Here’s the thing about Emily. She feels badly about what she’s doing because however realistic she makes her fake profile, she can never be authentic with the people she is trying to talk to. She can only be a deceiver. She may be able to have interactions with others that they value, but at the end of the day, she’s just engaged with them for one reason – to get them to buy a video game.

Witnesses for Jesus are not asked to be unreal. They are just asked to stay close to Jesus – to develop practices of prayer and Bible Study and small group accountability so that they can meet other people with the love of Jesus – as if they were Jesus. At first it will feel unnatural. That’s why Paul uses the image of putting on Christ – like a jacket that may not fit when we put it on. But eventually we grow into it. We start to think less from our anxieties and worries and more from our confidence that God can use even us. We stop letting sin distort our vision of who we are and we start to embody the love of the Trinity – the power of the Holy Spirit.

And one day we become somebody else – somebody made perfect by God’s love in Jesus Christ. It’s the work of sanctification – that grace-filled work that God does in us once we give our lives over to God’s love. And somehow people can see – even in us…even in us the Jesus we proclaim.

We may never have to suffer like Stephen. But we do face the choice of Saul. Are we going to stand by the coats and watch what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world? Or are we going to let it fill us? Who’ll be a witness for my Lord? Thanks be to God.

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[i] Spark 148: CBC Radio, 15 May 2011.

Life in the Spirit: Promises, Promises

Back in the days before my sister got married, she had some boyfriends who seemed to have no sense of direction. That's not a metaphor. I'm not saying they had no goals for their life. They just had a hard time getting from point A to point B. To be PC - they were GC - geographically challenged. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Most of us are at some point in our lives. I once went on a mission trip to Philadelphia with some college students and the biggest challenge for most of the work teams was getting back to our home base without going through New Jersey. It's a common problem.

These boyfriends, though, were exceptional. Once one of them left our home in Orange, in the central Virginia, headed to Maine. We had talked about how he should take Interstate 81 and he left with a lot of confidence. About four hours later we got a phone call from him saying, "I got on 81, but now I just passed a sign saying 'Welcome to Tennessee.' Should I be going to Tennessee?"

On another occasion, we were gathering in Pennsylvania at my aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving and this same boyfriend was due to meet us there. He ended up driving around and around within three miles of their house out in the country, never finding us. He was there, but he didn't know it. I hope that boy has got a GPS now.

I sometimes wonder if Jesus didn't know that we do some very similar things in our faith life. One of the most powerful parables he told was one that used a geographic metaphor. In the story of the prodigal son, the son takes his half of the inheritance and where does he head off for? A far country where where he blows the inheritance on loose living. Several months later, as he's out slopping pigs to keep body and soul together, he decides to go back to his father begging, but the father sees him, when? While he's still a long way off and runs to meet him. The story seems to say that there's a great distance to be overcome between God and us and that we've headed in the wrong direction. Like going to Tennessee when you're supposed to be going to Maine.

When I stop and think about it, though, the stories Jesus told and the story we read from Acts today all seem to be more like that boyfriend's second experience than the first. Because the point of Jesus' coming to live and breathe and walk and teach and die among us was to say that, even though we might feel like we're a long way from God, God is right here beside us and we didn't even know it. We're driving around and around and around and the driveway to Thanksgiving dinner is right there!

I've been reading a great new book on the theology of Julian of Norwich, a woman who lived in the 14th century but whose Christian writing is still popular today. It's the kind of book that you only pick up if you once were in a doctoral program in philosophical theology. But, hey, I was, and it's a great book.

Julian has a very interesting notion of sin and the distance between us and God. For her we would make a mistake if we focused on the prodigal son's loose living as the cause of his sin. That's what he believes. He thinks that he has lost any right to his father's love because of what he's done with his father's money. He still has the notion that his father will only love him if he lives up to a certain standard. In the vision of the son, all that love that has surrounded him from birth is hanging by a thread and as soon as he does something to show that he doesn't deserve his father's love, it will all be taken away. So he comes back to beg forgiveness and for a new relationship based not on love but on an economic bargain. I'll work for you, Dad, and you pay me like a servant.

The prodigal son gives himself way too much credit for being able to sever that relationship with the father. In Julian's eyes, the sinful tragedy is in the son's separation from the father. The separation is what causes him to forget who he is and to waste his wealth. The far country to which he goes might not be that far at all. But in the father's eyes, the son is still close to his heart. He only desires that the son turn around. He never stops loving that child. And the reunion at the end of the story - the party with the fatted calf - only shows how wrong the son's vision of his father was. That love didn't dangle from a thread. It was held fast from all eternity by the strongest rope. God's love is not offered to us on a thread.

Of course, the feeling of being far away is no worse whether you are two feet or three thousand miles from where you're supposed to be. Some of you will remember that lonesome old song that was popular some years back: "Lord, I'm one, Lord, I'm two, Lord, I'm three, Lord, I'm four. Lord, I'm five hundred miles away from home." It didn't matter how far it really was, it felt like a long way. Sometimes with God the distance can seem unbridgeable. The task of a good preacher, though, (and I'm not claiming to be one - just pointing out the job to be done), is to help us see that the gap has been bridged. Christ has bridged the gap through the cross and God is, in fact, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Like Dorothy discovering at the end of The Wizard of Oz that she had the power to go home all along and she didn't even know it.

There aren't any ruby slippers in the book of Acts, but I hear a few echoes of this same theme in Peter's sermon. You remember Peter. He's got a great back story. Peter's name means 'rock' but he turned out to be pretty unstable as Jesus headed to the cross. He walked on water, literally. Got right out of the boat and walked across the Sea of Galilee towards Jesus. He was doing great, too, until he realized how foolish it was to get out of a perfectly good boat and he took his eyes off Jesus and...splash. Peter was the first disciple to say to Jesus, "You are the Messiah!" and also the first to tell Jesus that he'd gotten it all wrong when Jesus told the disciples about the crucifixion. Peter said, "Lord, even if everyone else should fall away, I will never desert you." But he didn't even make it till the cock crow the next morning before denying Jesus three times. Yeah, THAT Peter.

Well, it seems that Jesus knew more about him than he knew about himself. Following the resurrection, the community recognized Peter as a leader and the sermon we got a piece of this morning was Peter's first. It came to the crowd gathered at Pentecost.

The disciples had all been gathered together in one place. Jerusalem was full of Jews who had gathered there for this important festival. Then all heaven broke loose and there were tongues of fire and speaking in tongues and wagging tongues wondering if the disciples were drunk - all kinds of tongues because the Holy Spirit had come into the place where they were staying. Remember the Holy Spirit? Somebody was doing a series on the Holy Spirit.

Peter is the one who gets up to explain that they are not drunk. "It's too early in the morning for that," he says. "No, let me tell you what this is really about. It's really about Jesus." Here's our first clue about this Holy Spirit. When it comes, it's not a new revelation. It's really about Jesus.

Peter goes on to preach an incredibly powerful sermon. It went something like this:
Do you remember Jesus of Nazareth, friends? (He calls them friends - brothers actually.) Do you remember how he walked among us and did great wonders and signs? Do you remember how powerfully God used him while he was alive? Do you remember how you killed him...how you handed him over to the Romans for crucifixion? Do you remember how he died?

Here's the place where you might expect a little fireworks from the crowd. You might not expect the crowd to react favorably to being told that they had killed the man Peter was calling God's Son - the Messiah. But Peter had called them brothers. He was not pushing them away. He was reminding them that they were still connected. The promise God had made with Israel from the beginning was still holding them and reminding them of who God was. God's love was not gone.

The crowd listening to Peter was stunned. They hadn't known what to make of these crazy Spirit-filled disciples. But now, they call the disciples brothers (and sisters, presumably). Not only do they call them brothers, but they ask them for guidance. "Brothers, what should we do?"

Peter answers, in effect, "Repent. Turn around. Be baptized in Jesus' name. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." And the Holy Spirit will let them know that this crooked, messed-up world has distorted their minds about who they were and what they desire. The Holy Spirit will point them back to Jesus who has defeated sin and death.

Peter goes on: "And know that this promise is for your, and for your children, and for everybody who is far away from God." For everybody who is far away from God? This is not geography that Peter is talking about here. These were mostly Jesus listening in. They were in Jerusalem. They were at the supreme home base for God's people. The distance they had to travel was not the problem. They were far away because they didn't know who they were or whose they were. And that was the day that three thousand of them found out and they were baptized on the spot.

Ever felt far away from God? Ever felt like there was something you'd done that was going to keep you in the far country forever? Ever felt like you'd never feel like God's child again? Ever wonder what in the world it is that you're supposed to do? Yeah, me too.

Ever been on a long trip and think that you're never going to get there and then realize that you're already there? Now that's the stuff to live for.

The good news of Easter is not that the gap between us and God has gotten smaller because Christ rose from the dead. The good news of Easter is that we suddenly realize that the gap was never really there. We were far away, but God saw us in the distance and ran to meet us. God sees us in the distance, but how are we going to see God unless you repent, a word which means 'turn around,' and unless you believe the promise of your baptism. Repent, people. And believe the good news. Thanks be to God.