A sermon based upon Acts 5: 27-41
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
24thSunday in Ordinary Time, October 7th, 2018
(7-14) Sermon Series: Church: Then and Now
Not long ago, I got to hear and meet the pastor who preached the Funeral Service for Mohammed Ali, Kevin Cosby. He did a great job celebrating the boxer’s colorful life, as he did when he was preaching in that conference. But I still don’t like fights. I’ve never really been in a serious one and I don’t want to be. I have been in a few wrestling matches, but I’m normally the one who doesn’t fight fair. Fights don’t bring the best out in me. In fact, I don’t think fights bring the best out in anybody.
Years ago, our sixth grade teacher Mr. Lackey was late again, so we boys decided we would all have a free-for-all wrestling match in the floor. My sparing partner was Keith Snow. We were all having fun testing our strength, but since Keith and I seemed to be fairly equal, or I was getting tired, I decided to ask him to agree to a draw, and we got up and sit in our seats while the other boys were still wrestling. About the time we sit down, Coach Brown came into the room and demanded that the rest of the boys still on the floor come with him to the rest room. I can still hear the sound of the paddle: Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
In our Scripture text today, a wise Jewish leader warned against not just any kind of fighting, but against fighting God. He warned Jewish leaders of that day that it would be foolish to take on a fight against an opponent that you can’t defeat. His wisdom remains with us today, still reminding us, that sometimes the best way find God in our life and world, is to let God win in our hearts and minds. Until we acknowledge that could be at work, even in our world, even outside of our own wills and ways, then we can’t truly find God at work in our hearts and minds in ways that can change and redeem our own lives.
…RATHER THAN HUMAN BEINGS. (29)
Before we get the part of the story about ‘fighting God’, we need to start at the beginning. Here, we discover the best way to avoid fighting against God. This is neither to ‘walk away’ nor to ‘ignore God’, but it is to surrender to God’s will and to ‘obey’ God’s purposes for life.
What we discover in the biblical story, is that Israel’s God has a way of bothering the people he wants to save, heal, and help, but we humans also have ways of running away, making ourselves sick, and hurting ourselves and others. This is why God keeps coming to us again and again, sometimes annoying us terribly. But this God is not trying to pick a fight with us, since he knows we will lose and he will win. This God, Israel’s God, is trying to get us to surrender to his compassionate love, his saving will and his redeeming purposes. But how can we know this? How can we know that God is worth surrendering too? That’s part of what today’s story from Acts 5 is about.
In this passage we read how the authorities tried to stop Peter and the others from boldly preaching the truth about Jesus. This is a bit ironic, because it wasn’t that long ago that Peter denied Jesus, not just once, but three times (Luke 23: 34). But now, surprisingly too, we see an emboldened, brave, ‘fearless’ Peter and the other apostles too, ‘filling Jerusalem’ with their preaching about Jesus, refusing to back down when the authorities command them to stop. Even as Peter boldly and blatantly reminds the authorities of their guilt for Jesus’ crucifixion (5:28), they become so ‘furious’ that they are ready to ‘put Peter to death’ (5:33).
Why were Peter and the other apostles preaching like this? Why didn’t they just try to ‘get along’ with the authorities? They had been given ‘strict orders’ not to ‘preach in his name’ (v. 28), but when they are reprimanded again, Peter answers directly, ‘We must obey God, rather than human authorities’ (29).
This whole issue of ‘obedience’ seems foreign to our ears today. To most people, it sounds oppressive and confining. Our resistance to obedience now can make you curious as to why Peter and the other disciples dared to say they had to ‘obey’ God rather than these authorities. How could they know it right to go against the way things were and to preach a new way of being faithful and of doing faith?
The question of ‘obedience’ can get tricky, especially for those who are stubbornly sure of their own faith perspectives. When Nazism was growing in Germany in the 1930’s, many Germans felt it more ‘Christian’ to support their government, no matter what the government was doing, even when the government was plotting war and killing Jews. Only a few ‘confessing’ Christians were capable and willing to go against their own ‘authorities’ and obey the truth. Many of those who did this were silenced, and even worst, some were imprisoned, tortured, or executed. That’s how tricky obedience can become.
Obedience can become a very ‘costly’ discipleship that’s too painful for most people to consider. For example, do you think those who opposed or agreed with the American government during the Vietnam era were following or fighting God? Do you still think the government was right to send soldiers into a war they secretly admitted they could not win? That’s how complicated and costly this question of obedience can be. Those of us who still recall the social unrest and rebellion of the 1960’s and 1970’s also recall the moral and spiritual confusion that went along with it. It’s easy for us to say that those confused ‘youth’ were wrong, but we know that many of their feelings were right, even if some of their actions weren’t. Social, moral, and religious struggle in human life, reminds us just how difficult, divisive, and dangerous it can be to claim that what we are saying or doing is justified because we ‘must obey God rather than human beings’.
Even when we know that obeying God is the ‘right thing’ to do, what does obedience to God actually mean in our world today and for our lives right now? There is a still risk involved and reflection required of us, isn’t there? We know that obedience is also the kind of dangerous logic that cults have demanded from adherents. In fact, in our world, where there are so many other options, opinions, and viewpoints, who would actually want to confine or narrow our choices to suggest that is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do anything? Who wants to obey any God beyond our own desires, let alone Israel’s God? Doesn’t it even sound a little archaic or outdated to get up tomorrow morning say to yourself, ‘not my will, but thy will be done’? What would it mean to actually seek to find and obey God’s will in our life?
There was an interesting 60 Minutes News story I viewed recently about an amazing scientific breakthrough in DNA research known as CRISPR. CRISPR is a technology newly developed that promises to rewrite genomes for the prevention and treatment of cancer and all kinds of other genetic mutations. My point is this: With so much ‘hope’ in what this, and other technologies can do, who needs to seek, find, or obey the will of God? As the poem says, we are more inspired to be ‘masters of our own fate’, and ‘captains of our own souls’, aren’t we? It could be suggested that seeking God’s will makes us look lazy or out of touch? Why surrender to God when the way forward appears to be in the will of human minds and the work of human hands?
Real questions confront us out of Peter’s claim that he had to ‘obey God, rather than human authorities’ (NRSV, NLT). It might help us to also consider what was happening in Peter’s own life. In his boldness, Peter revealed the reason he obeyed God and resisted human authority: “The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead…God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. We are witnesses of these things…” (v.s 30-32). According to Peter, it was his own experience with the risen Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit that had filled him with the power, courage, and boldness to know God’s purpose and dare to obey God.
What we know about the Peter’s life, particularly, in Luke’s gospel, is that we see how Peter has been a man on a spiritual journey with Jesus. Peter was just another fisherman having had another poor night fishing when Jesus challenged him to push his boat out into deeper water. Peter resisted, reminding Jesus they had fished all night and caught nothing (Luke 5:5). But Peter ‘obeyed’ Jesus anyway, and his crew ended up making a catch that almost broke their nets. Peter then turned toward Jesus, admitting his shortsightedness, saying “Go, away from me, for I am a sinful man (5:8).”
Perhaps by telling this story, Luke, who also wrote Acts, wants us to know that this is where all of us begin our journey to follow and obey Jesus. We are not what we should be, but we are also not yet what we can become. There will be ups and downs, especially when we have our weak moments just like Peter, when we too deny the truth of our risen Lord. But Jesus does not give up on us, just like he didn’t give up on Peter. After the resurrection, according to Luke’s unique perspective, Peter looked straight into the empty tomb, but he is still ‘wondering’ about everything, unsure of what will happen next (Luke 24:12). Peter is ready to obey, but still unsure of what this obedience might mean.
This is how Luke left Peter in the gospel, not specifically mentioning Peter again until Peter is found leading a prayer meeting to reassemble the disciples (Acts 1:15), and after that, bolding explaining the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost (Acts 2:14ff). Now, without warning, much had changed in Peter’s witness and obedience to Jesus. Peter has gone from ‘sinful’ disciple, to ‘wondering’ apostle, and now, in the book of Acts, he has become the bold, daring, leading ‘apostle’ and ‘rock’ of the newly formed apostolic Church. How can we explain all this?
This is how ‘obedience’ to Christ transformed the life of a fisherman into the fearless apostle we call Simon Peter. This was not something that Peter did for himself, nor was this something anyone would have completely expected, given the circumstances, but this is how becoming and being ‘obedient’ to Christ and to God’s purposes can still change and transform us into someone we could never have imagined before.
Some time ago, I watch a historical drama about the founder of communism, entitled ‘The Young Karl Marx’. I was curious about Marx’s story because I once lived in a former communist country and had even lived on a street named Karl Marx Strasse (Street). The historical drama told the real-life story about two young philosophers, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, living in the 19th century, who were anti-religious thinkers who were also social activists for social change. Karl Marx was a very modest young German Jew, living and writing in Paris, and Fredrick Engels was a wealthy German aristocrat, whose Father owned a factory in England during the Industrial Revolution. In response to what this change was doing to poor and the working-class people, making industrialists richer and richer, while making the poor, not only poorer, but also making life unbearable for most people, Marx and Engels, with Marx being the primary genius, came up with an idea for a counter revolution. This later became known in our world as communism. Interestingly, most of Marx’s original ideas for social change were formed before he was 25 years old.
What impacted me most, was this ‘Robin Hood’ idea consumed the life of both Marx and Engel. Their dream was to ‘force’ a better, more equal, and more just world into being, and both of them where were willing to give up all comfort for this cause, even willing to risk their own lives, which would often put their own lives and their own families, in jeopardy and in danger.
The big problem with their idea, of course, was that they did not face honestly, the inherent flaw in all human systems. They not only omitted our human need for God to guide us in what is righteous and good, but they also omitted the most realistic truth of all; the sinfulness of humanity. They did not realize their sin or the sin which would finally come to the surface of any human system, no matter how great or needed the ideal. But still, what captivated me most in this historical drama was not the philosophical, or social theory they had, but how they became completely ‘obedient’ to that their ideals and beliefs and were willing to give their whole lives to it, and even ready to die for that cause, without thought of much anything else. Even when you disagreed with their naïve, short-sighted, anti-religious, revolutionary approach, you had to admire their will and their spirit of urgency to ‘change’ their world.
Are we so willing to give our lives for anything? When another German thinker, Henrich Heine, was walking near a great Church building in Europe, a young student of his asked him, “How did they come to build such amazing buildings like this, which sometimes took more than a hundred years to build? In answer, Heine said something like, “Son, in those days, when they built this building, they had and obeyed commandments. We can’t build building like this anymore, because we don’t have any commandments we must obey.”
Of course, as Christians, we believe that the greatest demands or commands for our lives should be based on the commandment of love given to us by Jesus Christ, revealed as God’s Son. Obedience to love cannot be overlooked, for God’s kingdom rule to be fully realized in our world. Leaving God out can be the fatal flaw for those who elevate capitalism too. Without Christ’s love as the command above all other commands, ‘all other ground is sinking sand’. But when we obey Christ’s love, lives can be changed, through human efforts, in ways that will impact life for good now, and for the future world still to come.
THE HOLY SPIRIT…GIVEN TO THOSE WHO OBEY (32)
Is there any proof of obeying God’s command to love and live in light of God’s grace can change us, and the world for good? Can obedience to God’s loving purposes still make a real difference in our own world?
The great father of modern missions, William Cary, once said, “Attempt Great things for God, Expect Great things from God.” Perhaps, if there is any alluring pull of ‘obedience’ to Christ, it is to ask ourselves, ‘What will we get out of it?’ Life can be difficult, confusing, and complicated, so if you know that that obeying God might cost you, you also want to know that it will count for something. But what is the ‘good’ or ‘goods’ that come from being obedient to the same living, loving, and commanding God, who still reveals himself through raising Jesus from the dead?
When Peter says that “God has exalted” Jesus as “Prince and Savior” to give ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel” (31), there is something being said to us too. Of course, today ‘repentance’ has become such a ‘churchy’ idea that is out of style in our society, and in most churches too, for that matter. But in the days of the early church, the real need for repentance was not simply religious, but it was also political, social, and urgent, meaning that Israel needed to turn from her selfish desires and resistant wills and move toward face their own reality through God’s forgiveness and grace. If they did ‘obey’ this call, the tiny nation might be saved from a very real, impending, catastrophe.
But as we should know from history, a story predicted in the Bible, but coming after biblical revelation ended, Israel did not ‘repent’ nor ‘turn’ from her sins, nor did she turn toward God. Instead, Israel followed those Zealots and Activists who refused to follow God in peaceful ways of resistance, refusing to obey the loving commands of Jesus given on the Sermon on the Mount. By stubbornly, selfishly, and egotistically resisting not only Jesus, but also by openly resisting the Roman authorities too, the people succumbed to the most radical voices calling for arms and for more revolutionary action to politically, religiously, and militaristically stand up against Rome. As a result, by resisting God’s more peaceful way of love, in 70 AD, just a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion, the great catastrophe came. The Romans finally entered the city, destroyed Jerusalem, and the Jewish people were scattered across the face of the earth, in what we call the Diaspora. All this ‘death’ and ‘destruction’ happened because people would not follow, obey, and submit to the truth that Jesus taught. Their lack of obedience to God’s new commandment of love, even to love their enemy, was the disobedience that destroyed Israel’s immediate hope of restoring David’s throne.
But what about those few who were obedient? What about those few who did obey? What did they get? Here, in our text, Peter says that God gave his new people, the church; God would give His ‘gift’ to them, a gift that could be given and received, even in the midst a failing politic and a dying nationalism. This gift was, and still is the gift of the of giving ‘the Holy Spirit to who obey him (32).’
When Jesus spoke of the ‘coming of the Spirit’ in John’s gospel, he made the insightful comment that ‘when the Spirit comes’, He ‘will guide you into all truth’ and that ‘he will not speak on this own…’ but that ‘he will bring glory to me’… This glory will come when the Spirit is given to us so that he will ‘take’ from what is ‘mine’ and ‘make ‘it known to you….” (Jn. 16: 12-15). The surprising point is that the gift of the Holy Spirit does not bring us anything completely new, but the Spirit keeps building faith, hope and love based on the love, the life, the ministry, and the truth about Jesus, God’s Son. This ‘gift’ of the Holy Spirit is that Jesus’ presence, teachings, ideals, and work continues, even into the present time, no matter what else in happening around us. This is God’s gift to us, to call us to continue God’s work, motivated by what God has done in us, not what happening in the world.
Someone once asked Philip Brooks, the great 18th century Pastor, who was teaching on Princeton’s Campus at that time, “Can you be a Christian without having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” Brooks, who was known as a soft spoken, very kind, easy going, fellow, but his answer took the student completely by surprise. He answered him frankly, “Son, having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ IS what Christianity is all about. You can’t have any kind of true expression of Christianity without knowing Jesus Christ in some kind of personal, particular, and individual way. The Christian Faith and the Christian Life, is about knowing, following, and obeying the loving message of Jesus Christ.
…IF IT IS …, YOU MAY BE FIGHTING GOD (39)
The Spirit that begins God’s work in our hearts, even before we can wrap our heads around what is happening, for good or ill in the world, is still the greatest reason to obey God with our lives. When we resolve to obey God, from deep within our hearts, God is at work in us, and his promises can always be realized and our lives and our world can be still be redeemed.
But what if we don’t want to obey, or we don’t care about what God is doing in the world? What do we say then? This is exactly the question Gamaliel, the trusted Rabbi directly addressed at the end of this story. Gamaliel warned the authorities in Jerusalem not to go against what God could be doing in them. Gamaliel warned, but didn’t listen. Will we? Gamaliel warned them that even if you don’t believe what these people are saying about Jesus, about the resurrection, or about the crucifixion, then you’d still better ‘leave them alone’. He reasoned: “If their purpose or activity is ‘man made’, then it will eventually fail. BUT IF IT IS OF GOD…’ you could be standing in God’s way ‘fighting against God’. Now, if you don’t know what it’s like to stand in the way of the God who not only owns the future, but is our future, just picture it as you standing in front of a Freight Train. You might not be able to imagine this, but I spent my early years living beside a very active railroad track, and I saw what standing in front of a Train can do to a human body.
But God is not a Freight Train, or at least, God intend to be. God is the God who commands, demands, and requires obedience, not for his sake and glory alone, or to win over us, but to win us over to what is right, holy, good and just. This is a fight God fights within our hearts, in our world, within our hearts, minds and souls, which is for our human redemption and salvation, not for judgment against us, or for our destruction.
The novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, tells a story of a young man who visited a monk at one of the Orthodox monasteries in the Aegean Sea. The monks had their cells on the face of the rock and lived there alone. A young man climbed up to the cell of one of the older monks and asked for some wisdom,
“Father, do you still wrestle with the devil?”
The monk answered, “Not anymore. I have grown old, and the devil has grown old with me. He no longer has the strength. Now I wrestle with God.”
“With God?” the man asked. “You wrestle with God? Do you hope to win?”
“No,” he said, “I hope to lose.”
God is the God who will wrestles, struggles and fights for us and with us, like he did with Jacob by the Jabbok (Gen. 32), so that if we really knew what was going on, we would want to lose, rather than to win. Frederick Buechner called this loss “the magnificent defeat.” He means that losing to God and his loving purposes, is really winning. It’s like a blessing in disguise. And to lose our fight with God, just like Jacob did, like Peter did, and like we all must do, when we face our own dying and death, is why God’s calls us to ‘trust and obey’ him in the first place.
I’m no Rock Music expert, but there is a song entitled Who Are You? by the British rock band The Who. You can hear it at the beginning of the reruns of CSI. Who are you? Who, who; who, who? But the last lines are seldom heard. They conclude a song where a man is waking up from a drunken night in SoHo only to find he isn’t dead, but that maybe the miracle of grace has found him too. The closing words sounds like a prayer: I know there's a place you walked/ Where love falls from the trees./ My heart is like a broken cup,/ I only feel right on my knees./ I spit out like a sewer hole,/ Yet still receive your kiss./ How can I measure up to anyone now/ After such a love as this?
Well, that’s really the point of losing the fight against God, isn’t it? As Texas Baptist pastor George Mason has said: “Once we know we are loved as we are, we are never the same again. We know who we are; or better, whose we are. And I might add, and we know we belong to Him. (http://www.wilshirebc.org/download_file/view/4347/).
Gamaliel’s negative wisdom not to fight God opens up to the discovery of the most positive wisdom of God’s love. Gamaliel’s wisdom, just like Peter’s preaching, and his personal transformation, confirms to us why we must obey and why Jesus still has the right to command love, both to Israel then, and to command love from us now. To close yourself to God’s surprising miracles of love and grace, either in yourself or in others, is to ‘fight’ against God is a way you really don’t want to win. It is better to learn to ‘trust and to obey’ God’s love, than to lose the most important gift God has ever given to us. You certainly don’t want to ever win the fight that would ever try to oppose love. We must learn to obey God’s love, so we can discover the wisdom of knowing why God’s loving Spirit is the most important gift we will ever be given in life. Amen.
No comments :
Post a Comment