Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered April 28, 2007
5After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 2Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. 3In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 7The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” 8Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 9At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.
9During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. 11We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, 12and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. 13On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. 14A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. 15When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
Out of Bounds
When Paul lands in the city of Philippi, he describes the place of worship as “outside the gate by the river.” In this outpost of the Jewish Diaspora, it sounds as if there was no regular synagogue, no house or building within the gates of this European city where people were allowed to learn about and worship the God of Israel. Macedonia was so far from Jerusalem that Jewish influence was minimal in the religious life of this city, and the local authorities had no political need to provide protection within the city gates for this small group of people, mostly women, who recognized one God and turned away from the Old Time Religion of their city, the Greek pantheon. They had to worship outside the gate, out of bounds, outside the protection of the civil authorities.
They worshiped “by the river.” As Luke tells us this, it is no accident that worship by the river raises two different images – an Old Testament image of exile, and a Gospel image of baptism. During the exile, the people of Israel, forced from their homeland and plopped down in Babylon surrounded by people who worshiped other gods, sang in a minor key:
By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137)
Paul and his companions, responding to a vision, have traveled way out of bounds. Out here on the frontier, they find a wealthy business woman with a Greek name who worships the God of Israel, and leads a group of women. Paul, as visiting rabbi, sits right down and preaches.
By this time, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Holy Spirit would lead Paul and his companions out of bounds. The Spirit is always leading, pushing, cajoling the church to disregard the walls and barriers that society puts up between people. When Jesus saw someone in need of healing, he healed them even on the Sabbath. When he saw a tax collector up in a tree in need of grace, he told him, “Zaccheus, I’m coming to your house today.” When he was killed and shut away in a tomb, the earth could not hold him, he broke the boundary even between death and life and came back to tell the disciples, “Go to the ends of the earth to baptize all nations and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.”
So, here we see Paul going to the ends of the earth as he knew it, far from home, and out of bounds on so many different levels. The whole community was out of bounds in this Greek culture, forced to worship outside the gates, and he was out of bounds socially, sitting himself right down in the middle of a group of women and then, when she invites him to stay, entering her house and spending the night.
Out of bounds is such a dangerous place to be, we have to wonder at the wisdom of Paul and his companions heading out of their homeland and then, when they get to Philippi, going outside the gates of the city to find the worshiping community.
Boundaries are dangerous places to cross. You may have seen, a couple of weeks ago, a clip on the news from a Colorado State University football game when a four year old boy was on the sidelines with his parents for a special family day game. The receiver made a diving catch into the end zone, his momentum carried him out of bounds and he collided with this little boy. It was a breathtaking moment between the time he hit and the moment when the boy took a breath and cried. It ended up that he needed a few stitches but other than that he was O.K. but it was a visual reminder of just how dangerous it is along the boundaries.
A parent of two foreign exchange students took them to see Big Bend. As they were exiting the park, immigration officers looked in the car and asked to see passports of anyone who was not a U.S. citizen. The exchange students had traveled all over the U.S. without carrying their passports, and no one had asked to see them, so they were surprised to be placed in detention until their U.S. parent could call the student exchange agency and get copies of their passports faxed to the immigration detention facility. They were too close to the border, not out of bounds, but reminded that the boundaries are places of heightened vigilance, more danger, a place where anxiety makes foreigners suspicious.
A friend who spent some time as a mission worker in Africa described that time of his life as traveling from one place to another that his mother would not approve of him going.
That’s the challenge of this passage. Our typical view of our mothers is that they want what is best for us, they want us to be safe and stay within the boundaries. We fathers, of course, want that for our children, too.
The challenge of this passage is that the Holy Spirit keeps calling and pushing and cajoling disciples to go places I think my mother wouldn’t want me to go; places that aren’t necessarily safe, places that push beyond the social norms, places that break the rules.
The further challenge of this passage is that it suggests that the preference for safety over adventure is a product of our own anxiety, that the whole image of our mothers, or any woman, being more fearful and anxious than men, does not necessarily hold up to scrutiny.
It is Lydia, in this story, who steps out on a limb. It is Lydia who has led this group of people out of the gates of the city, away from the protective walls, down by the river to pray. It is Lydia who steps forward for baptism and leads her household and many more to join a faith community whose leaders keep getting thrown in jail and flogged.
And, remember how, early in the morning of the first day of the week, when the disciples were all locked in their room for fear of the religious authorities, it was the women who got up, opened the door, and ventured out to the tomb of Jesus and found the stone rolled away.
I wonder if you feel the presence of the wall around the church as much as I do. I don’t mean the walls of the church building, but the emotional barrier that separates our life of faith from our everyday relationships. I mean the emotional barrier that makes it so difficult to tell a friend outside of our own faith community, “Let me tell you what God is doing in my life,” or asking a friend struggling to keep it all together, “Where do you see God in all of this?” and listening and listening and listening.
Polite society tells us that religion and politics are two subjects unfit for polite conversation; probably because we have such passionate feelings around those subjects that it tests the limits of our manners to enter into conversation about things of ultimate importance.
Polite society tells us that – but the Gospel tells us something quite different. The gospel lifts up a picture of disciples sharing their faith as a basic element of discipleship.
In our social context, even trying to talk about faith with someone outside the faith can alienate a friend; most of us are so inexperienced at talking about our faith that it feels forced to do so. We may feel like the paralyzed man by the pool of Beth-zatha waiting for just the right moment to wade into the water. When it comes, when the moment is just right, when the angel’s wings trouble the water and the time is right to bring healing, we are paralyzed. We cannot move. We cannot speak. We cannot cross that barrier for fear of sounding like we have stepped off another planet.
Often, then, we live in this place of tension – on the one hand knowing that the faith of Christ we have been given has the power to heal, to comfort, to give hope, to give all the tools someone needs to live in this broken world; and, on the other hand, we struggle to find words adequate to express this faith to a member of a secular society that has been conditioned to hear the name “Jesus” and feel judged and manipulated.
Here’s the good news in both of these passages as we consider how to share our faith with others: We are not responsible for changing people’s hearts and minds. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit. The biblical message of disciples is not about convincing people, “Here’s what you need to do, here’s what you need to pray, here’s where you’re wrong and I have the truth.”
Luke tells us specifically about Lydia, “The Lord opened her heart.” Our calling as disciples is to tell the story, to say, “This is how faith in Christ, how being a part of the community of faith makes a difference in my life. You’re invited.” Whether people respond to the invitation with closed or open hearts is the work of the Spirit.
In the first church I served, in Stephenville, I always saw this guy Brent at the theater cast parties that I went to and the Optimist club and the other non-church social events I attended. Almost always, he would seek me out and come talk to me and his conversation always started with the same thing, “You know what the problem is with you Christians?” And he would shake his finger in my face and launch into a rant against the latest stupid thing some television evangelist had said or done. “And that’s why I’m an atheist,” he said. Usually, when he finished his harangue, he wandered off to talk with someone else, so I didn’t have much opportunity to get to know him beyond his fervent atheism.
But, here’s what I noticed. If there was a member of the clergy at an event, he always spoke with all of us. His harangue was sometimes good natured, but often it seemed there was an underlying sadness to it that came out as hostility. I had no idea how to penetrate that sadness or hostility and never felt that I made much of a case for the Christian faith in a way that he heard it.
So, it was a surprise a few years after I had left that church when I read in the newsletter that Brent made his profession of faith and joined the Presbyterian Church. It boggles my mind to think of how that happened. But, one thing I know for sure – it wasn’t the work of any human being. Nobody could tell Brent anything. All anybody could do was listen.
So, through that wall of hostility, somehow the Holy Spirit broke through with the truth about who Jesus is instead of who Brent thought Jesus was. All the people of Stephenville did was be his friend and listen and listen and listen.
Thanks be to God. Amen.