“A Courageous Church”

A Sermon Based Upon Acts 4: 1-12

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

7^th Sunday of Easter, April May 17th,  2015

Several years ago I was speaking to a elderly Russian Baptist woman about her family. 

        “My son’s a preacher too,” she told me.   Then, a tear came into her eye.    

She continued: “One Sunday, after he preached, he left the house and we haven’t seen him since.”

       “Where did he go, I asked?”

She was silent.   She couldn’t tell me the awful truth.  I had to find it out from others.   Her son, like many others in those days of atheistic communism, were arrested and taken to hard labor camps in Siberia were most of them died.   This is how the KGB dealt with those who dared to preach Jesus Christ over Joseph Stalin.

Our text today says that ‘while Peter and John were speaking to the people…’, ‘much annoyed’ authorities came and ‘arrested them’ (4: 1-3).   Most of us can’t imagine preachers being arrested for preaching.  I know I don’t want to think about it.   Still, it’s true, that there are parts of the world where the Christian faith is not only not appreciated, but also not welcome; where Christians are persecuted for their faith, and where those who dare preach or witness, must do so underground or in secret, or risk being arrested.  

A couple of years ago, the Atlantic Magazine ran an article entitled, “How to Get Yourself Arrested on Moral Monday in North Carolina”   The article told about religious leaders of different faiths and denominations showing up on Monday’s to intentionally get themselves arrested and draw attention to the plight of the poor as politicians drafted new policies about medical care, unemployment and education.  While they being arrested for refusing to clear the legislative building, they sang “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…” and quoted Scriptures such as “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  One pastor commented to the reporter for the Atlantic: “There are no unclean people here, only unclean systems….”   Whether you agree such civil disobedience, you should be thankful to live in a country where people can peacefully ‘get arrested’ to draw attention to matters of justice and human need. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/how-to-get-arrested-on-moral-monday-a-north-carolina-ministers-protest/277070/ .

Do you have enough faith, enough courage, or enough passion for Jesus Christ, or for God’s justice that you could be arrested for it?   Would there be enough evidence to convict you of being Christian?   I’m not wishing for it for any of us, but I want us to think today about how courageous should be in our own witness for Jesus Christ in the context our changing, challenging, and a very confused culture.   In today’s passage, we can clearly see that the church grew because it was passionate, was ‘counter-culture’, and because it was witnessed in ways that gained the attention of the community around it.   Could we also find ways that could help embolden our own witness and work for the Lord?

  

THE REASON FOR COURAGE

The big mistake the authorities made in arresting Peter and John was that when they arrested them, the church grew bigger not smaller (4.4).    The more they arrested them; the more they tried to ‘stop the spread’ and ‘warned them not to speak in his name’ (4.17), the more they did speak and the more it spread.    Have you ever thought about why this happened?

Part of the reason they could not ‘stop’ this church from speaking is because the very message they wanted to stop was the very message that put life in them.  We are told that these disciples were arrested because ‘they were teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead’ (4.2).   What was the big deal about preaching ‘the resurrection’?  

What we need to understand in this story is that the ‘priests, the captain of temple, and the Sadducees’ (4.1) were not just the religious parties, but they were also the ruling political parties of that time.  These Sadducees not only did not believe in any kind of resurrection of the dead, they did not want to.  Most of the reason why they did not agree with the Pharisees, was because the Sadducees were the, wealthy, political conservatives of the ‘old school thinking,’ who held firmly to the original five books of the Hebrew Bible, and did not have any desire to follow any of this new school thinking of the Pharisees, who followed Daniel’s new vision of resurrection.   According to Daniel, one day God would awaken the dead for judgment for both their good or evil deeds (Dan. 12:1ff).  If you are rich, if you are comfortable, if you are in power, and especially if you’re not living the kind of life you should, of course, you wouldn’t appreciate resurrection where God takes charge and has the final word either.

What made the church’s preaching and teaching especially dangerous, is that now they were teaching this religious perspective with new fervor and new enthusiasm ‘proclaiming’ that ‘in Jesus there is a resurrection of the dead’ (v.2).  This made the growing church even more of a threat to the ‘political peace’ than the Pharisees were.  Can you grasp why?   Don’t miss how ‘the next day’, after Peter and John’s arrest, that ‘rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high priestly family” (4:5).   Do you see that these are the same people who were in charge of crucifying Jesus?  Do you see that these are the people who have the most to lose, if Jesus, or even if only the teaching of Jesus, has come back to life in Jerusalem?  

If the resurrection is true, or even if people think it is true, everything might change.   People in charge, or on top, or in control, do not like change.

The kind of change the preaching of the church threatened was unique.   People in power still recognize it.  Recently, I read a review of how Netflix released a new movie series about Marco Polo’s travel’s in China and his encounter with Kublai Khan.   They became friends, but at the beginning, at least in the movie, Kublai Khan, was repulsed by the inscription on the cross he was wearing which said, “All kingdoms will bow to Christ”.   That’s the ramifications of resurrection that still put fear into the hearts of any who only want their own life their own way without regard to God or others.  But it’s also the kind of hopeful message that put life and courage into the hearts of ‘uneducated and ordinary’ (13) who are disenfranchised, disadvantaged, or underprivileged by the ‘principalities and powers’ of this world.  

THE SOURCE OF THEIR COURAGE

While the church was encouraged and emboldened by the preaching of Christ’s resurrection—a message that lifted up Jesus as the true Lord of life---the church was only able to preach and bear witness to this message because they were filled with the Holy Spirit.   Because he was ‘filled with the Spirit’ (4.8) Peter was able to face head them head on and look those rulers straight in the eyes and declare that ‘this Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone” (4:11).   That’s bold and that’s pure courage.

There is no magical, biblical, nor even an educational formula that enabled this church to become bold in their witness like this.   What amazed those rulers themselves was that these were ‘ordinary and uneducated men’ who were ‘recognized as companions of Jesus’ (4.13).  Could it be that Luke, the author of Acts is telling us here, more than we might want to know?  Could it be that exactly because they had been and still were spiritual ‘companions of Jesus’ that this boldness and courage was now being released in their speech and in their lives?  

 Jesus told them that the Father would send the Spirit to empower them (Acts 1.8) and now the Spirit has come (Acts 2.2).  

Because the church had been faithful to obey, to follow, and to continue to worship this ‘same Jesus’ (Acts 1.11), they were they now filled and emboldened by the ‘power of the Holy Spirit’ (1.8) Jesus had promised.   Isn’t this the only way the Spirit ever works and fills our lives too: when we are faithful to ‘this same Jesus’?   We are told in the gospel that the Spirit does not ‘speak for himself’ but is faithful to glorify Jesus (John 16:13).  The Spirit will only ‘take what is mine and declare it to you…” (Jn. 16.14), Jesus said.   The only way to find the fullness and filling of God’s Spirit is to make yourself a constant companions of Jesus.  It is outrageous to think that you can buy or obtain the ‘power’, the boldness, or the presence of God’ Spirit in any other way (Acts 8.19) than by being faithful to the ‘apostles teaching and fellowship’ (Acts 2.42).  But what does it mean to be faithful in a way that leads to a bold witness?

Pastor James Merritt tells how back in the 1990s,  a mission team from the US preached to packed crowds in Romania with people standing outside in 10° weather, listening to loud-speakers to hear God’s Word.  The U.S. Christians asked Pastor Josef Tson why Romania had a spiritual fervor and a fire that America didn’t have.  He said, “Americans, here is the difference. In the United States, you talk about commitment. In Romania, we talk about surrender. When you are committed to God you hold all the cards. You decide when you are going to be committed and when you are not. When you surrender, God holds all the cards.” Then he shared this unbelievable example to back up his point.

During the 1970s, Tson, who was recognized as probably a leading pastor in the entire country of Romania, was arrested and imprisoned multiple times. The only thing they ever charged him with was preaching the Gospel. Every time he was arrested he would undergo several weeks of intense interrogation, beatings and mind games and then released.    It all came to a climax in the middle of one night when about 3am in the morning, Romanian police broke into his home, literally dragged him out of bed, threw him into the back of a car, took him down to the police station, stripped him naked, tied him to a chair, and began the most offal beating he said he had ever incurred. They kept making one demand, “Quit preaching the Gospel. Quit talking about Jesus.” He absolutely refused.

After hours the captain of the police station came bursting into the room, pulled up a chair in front of him and said, “Tson, I am through with you. I am going to ask you one last time to quit preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ or I am going to kill you here and now.” Josef Tson said, “I knew that he meant it. At that moment, I was filled by the Holy Spirit like I have never been before. I looked at him and here is what I said, ‘Captain, I want to warn you. If you use your weapon I will be forced to use mine.’” The captain jumped up out of his chair in fear and said, “Search him immediately! Which was kind of funny, because Josef Tson was completely naked, but they dutifully did what the captain said. The captain set back down and said, “What are you talking about?”

Tson said, “Your weapon is killing. My weapon is dying. Now here is how it works. If you kill me, my popularity will explode. If you kill me, my tapes, my manuscripts, and all of my messages will multiply like rabbits. Unbelievers will say, ‘This man was willing to die for what he was preaching. I’d better hear what he has to say.’ My sermons will speak 10 time louder after you kill me and because you killed me. In fact, God will use me to conquer this country because you killed me. I’m warning you captain, you use your weapon and I’ll be forced to use mine.”

The captain of the jail jumped up and said, “Tson, you are crazy! You’ve lost your mind” and walked out of the room. Later they came back in, gave him his clothes, dressed him and drove him back to his home. Tson said the next morning, barely able to walk from the beating, he got up to walk to the church and when he walked outside there were two Romanian policemen there. He held out his hands thinking they had come to cuff him and take him back for more beatings and they said, “Sir, we are not here to arrest you. We are here to protect you.” Tson said, “What do you mean?” One of the officers said, “Sir, we don’t understand. We just know we have been given orders to escort you everywhere you go and to make sure that nothing happens to you.”  (From a Sermon by James Merritt entitled,  “Fight Fire with Fire”).

Can we imagine this kind of courage and ‘boldness’?  Can we imagine this kind of surrender and commitment to Christ?

                                                                                                              

THE MOTIVE FOR THEIR COURAGE

We can only imagine it when we know that the church was courageous because it boldly preached and announced that ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved (Act 4:12 NRS). 

Isn’t the reason the church lacks boldness today is because we just don’t know how to believe this, live this, or preach that Jesus as the ‘only way’ of salvation in a world where there are more ways than we can count?   How can we have the same motivation those first disciples had in their world, when we don’t live in that same world?   Do we have the boldness and courage to preach Jesus as the ‘the way, the truth, and the life’, when even we have found and do follow so many other ‘healing’ or saving ways, such as our own politics, our own wealth, our own views of faith and religion?   We too know, even as Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, or Pentecostals, that there is more are even many ‘ways’ of even finding this ‘one way’ of being saved in Jesus.  So, how dare we dare we preach ‘there is salvation in no one else’ when we haven’t even agreed on how this salvation comes to us? 

That’s exactly the protest a woman gave to me when I invited her to church once.  She was telling me how proud she was of her daughter and about that time I invited her and her daughter to our come as guests at our church.  She responded that her she and her daughter were respectful of all religions, but they didn’t need to have a particular faith because all religions are the same.  That was of course, before 9-11-2001. 

This is exactly the problem with preaching Jesus today, isn’t it?  It’s not the big picture that hooks people, saying that Jesus was a great religious teacher or reformer, but it’s the particular picture of getting to the claim that God ‘became flesh and dwelt among us’ in one particular person, in one particular event, and in one particular people--that’s the problem.   How do we preach, that though God has always be more than Jesus, as he was also in Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets, before Jesus, that God was uniquely revealed in Jesus or that God is never anything less than Jesus?   How can we preach Jesus in world where Mohammed, Krishna, and Buddha are just as prominent?  Can we still boldly preach that there is ‘salvation in one else’?

My answer is that not only can we, we must.   “There is no other name given among mortals, whereby we must be saved.”    How do we preach this?   When Peter and the early church spoke these words, they were all still Jews.  They were convinced that the only way the Jewish people could be saved was to follow a way of Jesus, the truth of Jesus and the life of Jesus.  But what was that?  Do you know?  Do you dare want to know?   The way of Jesus was the way of the cross, the way of sacrifice, the way of giving yourself to others, and most of all, it was the way of love, even loving ones enemies.   There is no salvation in any religion, any politic, any denomination, or any human reality at all, unless we follow this unique, exclusive, exceptional, and specific way Jesus revealed God’s love.  It is a saving love which also commands and motivates us to love.  Through Christ’s own sacrifice and death on the cross, he calls us to ‘love God with all our hearts’ and to ‘love our neighbor as ourselves’, even if it kills us.  This is the way all humans everywhere, must take God serious or we have no hope at all.  

This unique way self-giving love is the only way to take God and religion serious, because only when we ‘love God with our whole heart in a way that includes loving others’ we can’t or won’t find any salvation that only God’s love can bring.  Saving love is just that peculiar and that particular.  We have to receive God’s unconditional love.   We have to give unconditional love.  We must love the God who loves us and we must love the neighbor we need to come to know and we must love.  We can only be saved by such unique, exceptional love, because only God can love like this and only when a divinely revealed love becomes real in us, can salvation come to the world.  Isn’t this kind of salvation that should still motivate us?    Doesn’t God’s unique love give us all something to be courageous about, whether it be to be a good parent, a caring person, or do the right thing in a difficult situation?  That’s exactly what Paul Grüninger did.  He wasn’t a Peter or John, nor was he a Josef Tson, but he was ‘courageous’ with his faith. 

IN THE SPRING of 1939,47-year-old Paul Grüninger was a middle-level police official in St. Gallen, a picturesque Swiss town near the Austrian border. The son of middle-class parents who ran a local cigar shop and a mediocre student who enjoyed the soccer field more than his studies, Grüninger became an unprepossessing man of quiet conventionality.  After dutifully serving time in the Swiss army in World War I, he obtained a teaching diploma, settled into a position at an elementary school, attended church on Sundays and married Alice Federer, a fellow teacher.

To please both his mother and Alice, Grüninger applied for a better-paying position in the police department, a job that involved mainly filling out reports and arranging security details for occasional visiting dignitaries. Or so it seemed. In April 1939, Grüninger found his way to work blocked by a uniformed officer who told him: “Sir, you no longer have the right to enter these premises.”

An investigation had revealed that Grüninger was secretly altering the documents of Jews fleeing Austria for the safety of Switzerland. “Non-Aryan” refugees were not allowed to cross the border after August 19, 1938, but all it took was a few strokes of Griininger’s pen to predate a passport and perhaps save a life, a small action but one of great personal risk. Grüninger was dismissed from his position, ordered to turn in his uniform and subjected to criminal charges. The authorities spread false rumors that Grüninger had demanded sexual favors from those he aided. Disgraced as a law breaker and shunned by his neighbors, Grüninger peddled raincoats and animal feed until he died in poverty in 1972.

Paul Grüninger is featured in journalist Eyal Press’s book Beautiful Souls, a study of seemingly ordinary people who exhibited extraordinary and risky courage on behalf of others.  Paul Grüninger was not Braveheart. He was an unassuming man whose family and faith formed him in a world—a kingdom, if you will—in which anyone who saw what he saw, “the heartbreaking scenes ... the screaming and the crying of moth- ers and children . . . could not bear it anymore . . . could do nothing else.” Paul and Alice are buried together near St. Gallen. Seventy years later a plaque was placed at the foot of Paul’s grave. It reads: “Paul Grüninger saved hundreds of refugees in 1938/39.” At his funeral, a choir sang “Nearer My God to Thee,” and a rabbi read from the Talmud: “He who saves a single life, saves the entire world.”

Just this past week, in that terrible train wreck in Philadelphia, and in the horror of that terrible darkness, one uninjured man courageously stayed on the train to hold the hand of another man who was pinned in the wreckage.  “I’m here,”  he said.  “I’m staying here with you until they get you out.”   Being extraordinary in courage doesn’t get any more ordinary than that.  And isn’t this what the church also does, saying,  “We’re here!  “We’re staying with Jesus until everyone gets out.  It is faith in this kind of love that is great enough to save us all.   Amen.