Pushing Boundaries - The Graceful Life

Preached on Sunday, September 4, 2016

Scripture reading: Acts 7:51-8:1

Photos Along Lower Crab Creek, WA: May 2016

A mother was making pancakes for her family, and her two sons started arguing because each one wanted to get the first one. The mother tried to reason with them, “Now, boys, think of what Jesus would do. Jesus would let his brother have the first pancake.” The oldest boy had a comeback for this: “Mom is right. Billy, you be Jesus.”

In our reading from the Book of Acts, the author (Luke) tells us that Stephen, in his sacrifice, is Jesus. Stephen’s last words are a prayer for those who are killing him: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:59-60) On the cross, Jesus prayed for those who were killing him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

Stephen, in his final prayer in this world, was being Jesus, just as we are called to be Jesus. At least we are called to represent him in this world, and to be like him.

Our reading from the Book of Acts is part of the story called “The Martyrdom of Stephen”. Stephen was the first disciple of Jesus to die for his faith: the first to die for Jesus. Martyr is a Greek word that has come to refer to those who die for their faith; those who die for what they believe in and who die for whom they believe in.

But the word martyr didn’t start out that way. It really means witness. At the beginning of the Book of Acts, Jesus, just before he returned to heaven, told the disciples: “You shall be my witnesses.” (Acts 1:8) The Greek word here, for “witnesses”, is the word “martyr”.

The word martyr is a courtroom word. It’s a legal word. It means giving evidence. Since a witness, in court, tells what he or she has seen and heard (telling what he or she knows), a witness is, in some sense, serving as evidence. In some sense, surely, the witness is the evidence.

The false witnesses who gave false evidence against Stephen, at this trial, are also, in the Greek, called martyrs. They gave bad evidence. They were false evidence. In a sense, they also sacrificed themselves, but not for a good cause. They did it for a lie.

And so they made themselves into a lie. They were bad evidence for what they saw as a good cause, but death was at work in them. They were bad martyrs in a bad cause. Yet Stephen prayed that the Lord Jesus would forgive them. He prayed that the killers and the bad witnesses would receive grace.

We are all evidence for something. Stephen was the living and dying evidence of Jesus.

Before we picked up this story in our reading, Luke wrote that Stephen was full of God’s grace and power, and that (as such) he did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. (Acts 6:8) We need to see that his arrest, and his trial, and his suffering and death, were just as full of wonder and power as anything else Stephen ever did. His suffering and death were Christ-filled and Spirit-filled.

We look for the experience of being Christ-filled and Spirit-filled in our joys and happiness, but Stephen also found this in his persecution, and his suffering, and his dying. Perhaps we can find our greatest filling with Christ and the Holy Spirit where Stephen found his.

If a mob of people started lying about you and making fun of you, and then they started hurting you with the intention of killing you, what would you pray for? Stephen prayed for grace for the mob because he was full of Christ and full of the Spirit.

Stephen was full of grace. This grace didn’t suddenly appear in the moments before his death. Stephen belonged to the group of seven who were chosen to make sure that the widows of the church were properly cared for. The presence and work of the Holy Spirit had shaped him into the kind of person who was the natural choice for that kind of responsibility and ministry. Stephen was Spirit-filled with compassion, and love, and kindness.

Without remembering this, we will not understand Stephen’s last testimony, given at this own trial. In that message he gave an outline of the history of the people of Israel, blessed with so much grace from God, yet always failing to truly understand the meaning of that grace in the form of Moses, and God’s law, and the Temple where human beings could come into the presence of God.

Stephen’s outline was his evidence that they were once again misunderstanding God’s grace, because they had rejected Jesus, who died to fulfill the law of God in order that we could receive the grace of God. They had rejected Jesus, who was God in the flesh, and in whom human beings could come into the presence of God himself.

Where we misunderstand the power of this message is where we hear the anger and judgment in the message, and we think the story tells us that the council and the mob responded to this anger. The truth is that Stephen loved these people. He called them “brothers and fathers”. (Acts 7:2)

The anger in his words came from the grace of God in his heart. The people in the council, at the trial, saw that his face looked like the face of an angel. (Acts 6:15) Angels always see the face of God and are filled with love, wonder, and praise. Stephen himself saw the glory of God and Jesus standing up in love for an innocent person in the process of being judged, and about to be condemned and killed. He saw, and he was, as always, full of grace.

Someone has called this the balance of Stephen. There is his great integrity, and his anger, and his grace, praying for those who are the focus of his anger and who are angry at him. All of this goes together at the same time. This is what made Stephen such a powerful witness and this is what made Stephen such a powerful martyr.

Think of this balance as something we are called to if we are to be full of Christ and full of the Spirit. Stephen had great integrity, and a fine capacity for anger, and he was full of grace and prayer for the forgiveness of others.

I don’t have that balance.

I have trouble with anger. I hate anger. I hate it. I hate having anyone angry with me. I hate my own anger too. I have things in my past that make me angry, and I have never gotten over them.

I pray to be over them. I try not to let those angers rule me. This is a part of my life that reminds me that I am a sinner, and that I need the grace of God, and that I need the grace of gracious people, and that others need grace from me.

There is a thing called “righteous anger”. Stephen showed this in his last sermon. Jesus showed it in his dealings with the Pharisees, and in the scene where he drove the money-people out of the Temple. (Luke 19:45-46) Those people played a part in the killing of Jesus, and Jesus prayed for those people: “Father forgive them.”

I don’t know if I’ve lived up to that. Do you pray for the people you are angry at? Do you pray for the people who are angry at you? Yet this is part of being full of grace.

It isn’t only people who are the targets of our anger. We have a whole world to get angry about. We have politics, and nations, and wars to get angry about. We have issues and causes to get angry about. We have great dangers and injustices in our world. There is so much hurt and pain in our world.

We live in God’s world. We live in a beautiful world. We also live in a world where God moves in very mysterious ways. We live in a world full of sin and evil. I get mad when I look at this. But I get mad when I look at myself.

There is a classic verse from the prophets in the Old Testament. In the Book of Habakkuk (1:13) the prophet says this to God: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.”

We could be like that too. That would shape us into something like anger; and wouldn’t that make us like a holy God?

But look at what this God does. Instead of not looking on evil, and instead of not tolerating it, God came to stare that evil in the face, and to die for those who are evil. He came to die for us. Instead of not tolerating wrong (like the wrong that is so much a part of us) God carries the wrongs of the world on the cross. Then the wrongs of the world die with him on that cross, and God carries us, as we die with him on the cross, to the resurrection. And then we find a new life.

There is a verse in the Gospel of John that describes very well what this holy God, who cannot look on evil, did. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

There was a cross on a hill called Calvary: a name that refers to the top of a human skull. There was great evil and injustice done on Calvary, the place of the skull. On Calvary, the world reached out to kill goodness itself, and in doing so it reached out to kill God, if it could.

There was the same evil at work in the killing of Stephen. We see the same anger and the same falsehood in the perpetrators of that evil. We see the same innocence and love and grace at work in the one who died. With Stephen, we see a kind of repetition of Calvary (the place of the skull); only we see it happening in different circumstances. We see a different version of it.

We live in a world that repeats Calvary over and over again; against goodness, against the weak, against the innocent, maybe even against us, and certainly against our brothers and sisters in Jesus in the darker parts of the world.

But Calvary, the place of the skull, is more than a terrible pattern done to the small people and the innocent people. Calvary is a thing that God has done for us.

In Jesus, God has entered the place of the skull and, by dying there, and by rising from the dead, God has made the place of the skull into a doorway to him, and to healing, and to a life that is full of grace for us and for others: full of grace for a graceless world.

At every Calvary in this world, it is God, in Christ, who has the upper hand. When we take up our cross and follow Jesus, we can see him there, in our own Calvary, just as Stephen did.

This is what a holy God, who hates sin, does. This is the God we know, when we know Jesus. This is the good news that we are witnesses of. This grace is what we are called to be the evidence of.

This is what the balance of integrity, and anger, and grace, and prayer for the forgiveness of others looks like. This is what we have working in us when we have Jesus living in us as he truly wants to live in us.

Pushing Boundaries - The Gutsy Life

Preached on Sunday, July 31, 2016

Scripture reading: Acts 5:17-42

There was a family with two little boys, about eight and ten. They were full of mischief. That’s putting it nicely. Their parents were at their wits’ end, how to deal with these boys.

Each Photo Is Different:
May and June 2016

Then they heard that a minister in their town had a technique for straightening out kids like theirs. When they met with him, the minister asked to see the boys individually, and they sent their eight-year-old first.

The minister sat the boy down and asked him sternly, “Where is God?” The boy didn’t know what to say, and the minister repeated that same question louder, “Where is GOD?” The boy squirmed and the minister shouted, “WHERE IS GOD!”

The boy was scared to death. He ran home all by himself, and hid in the bedroom closet. His older brother went to be with him in the closet, and asked him what happened.

The younger boy answered, “We’re in big trouble this time. God is missing, and they think we did it!”

The Book of Acts is about the first followers of Jesus, and what their lives were like knowing that God is never missing. Jesus is the evidence of this. Jesus is God in the flesh. In Jesus, God came to be with us. He was born to be with us in life. He died for our sins on the cross in order to be with us in our sins and to take them upon himself. He also died for our sins on the cross in order to with us in our death. He rose from the dead to be with us in a life that is stronger than all evil and injustice; and stronger than death and stronger than hell.

Paul said it, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8:37) Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) The angel who opened the jailhouse doors for the apostles told them to “tell the people the full message of this new life.” (Acts 5;20) Wonderful words of life!

Now this life, following Jesus, and living as one in what the Bible calls “the church” is described all the way through the Book of Acts, and in all the letters of the apostles, and even the Book of Revelation. This life is described as a life together: “All the believers were one in heart and mind.” (Acts 4:32) It was also a life of miracles, with God, in Christ, constantly interfering in their lives in wonderful ways.

The old, full, traditional name of the Book of Acts is the “Acts of the Apostles”, but some people have wisely said that it should be the “Acts of the Holy Spirit”. It could just as well be called the “Acts of Jesus”. It’s about everything that Jesus continued to do, and to teach, after he was taken into heaven. (Acts 1:1-2)

In some way that you cannot understand until it happens to you, this life is a new way of life because it is simply life with Christ, and life in Christ. We belong to Jesus, and we are never alone. Again Paul says it in an amazing way: “For me, to live is Christ.” Then, the rest of Paul’s sentence is more amazing still, “and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

That whole sentence is very important, because it relates to the story we have just read in Acts. Jesus was with the apostles when the angel opened the jailhouse doors. Jesus was with them when they went back to share the wonderful words of life again, in the Temple, where they would be found and arrested again.

Jesus was also with them when they were being threatened with death, and when they all got the forty lashes less one; the standard maximum whipping, like the bloody whipping Jesus got before he carried the cross. They rejoiced over that whipping “because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name (the name of Jesus). (Acts 5:41)

You have to see that the angel opened the jailhouse door so that the apostles could be re-arrested and whipped till they bled. I don’t think the miracle happened because they had faith. I think the miracle happened because the Lord wanted to accomplish something. The Lord has a purpose, and part of that purpose was (and is) to make his kingdom come, and part of that kingdom coming needs to happen now; through us and in us.

There’s a sorting out that goes on in the coming of the kingdom now. The priests who had sent Jesus to be crucified didn’t seem to realize that they were guilty of shedding Jesus’ blood. The kingdom continued the process of sorting them out by letting them act out, more and more, who they truly were.

They were seeing the truth about themselves less and less, and that is part of the blinding that comes from sin, or what we might call the life of going our own way. They were seeing the truth about themselves less and less, but they were making themselves more and more into the very enemies of the kingdom of God that they would never have recognized in themselves. The truth was becoming truer and truer. And that’s part of the kingdom of God coming now.

For the apostles, Jesus, through his Holy Spirit, was making them more and more truly what he is. For the apostles, the kingdom of God was coming into their lives now, in order to make them more and more clearly part of the new life. More and more, Jesus was Lord, and Savior, and Christ in them.

In a period of about twenty-four hours, they were all free men, and they were arrested and jailed, and they were freed and sent back to certain arrest and to an uncertain fate, and they were all whipped until they bled.

It was all so unpredictable: so many ups and downs in twenty-four hours.  But it was a holy unpredictability. It was all in Christ.

In freedom, and in torture, and in danger of death, they were not in charge; they were not at the center of their own lives. Their lives were not about themselves. Their lives were about others and, most of all, their lives were about Jesus. The kingdom coming now meant that they were learning more and more who Jesus is, and that Jesus is good, and that Jesus can be praised.

This was not easy. They had to be willing to go back into danger. They had to bleed. They had to suffer. They had to say “yes”, and not find reasons for saying “no”. There were solid reasons for saying “no”, and they had to be determined to say “no” to saying “no”.

The scriptures are not only God’s words. They are God’s words to us. They are God’s words to you and to me.

These words in Acts tell you and me that it’s typical for the Lord to send his great joy and a holy arrangement of our lives, to include the sure and clear experience of his power, and love, and deliverance. It also tells you and me that it’s typical for the Lord to send his people into difficulties and troubles, and into dangers and pain.

Otherwise we would stop having the deepest unity and fellowship with those who don’t know Jesus. Otherwise we cannot be one with them, as Christ came to be one with us, and with the whole world.

In all of this, you and I are never alone. We have each other. Most of all, we have and share Jesus. Jesus (being Jesus) is Lord, and we have to always be ready to say “yes” to the next thing, because Jesus is Lord. We have to say “yes” and be willing to live into the next thing the way Jesus would have us to do.

In my life, I find that there is always something that needs my attention. Sometimes it wears me out to think about it. The Book of Acts presents us with an account of the Christian life where there is no pause, there is no let up. The next thing always comes promptly along, and the people of Jesus are always having to say “yes” to the next thing.

One of the disciplines in the prayer journal of the book our adult class is studying is the discipline of asking the Lord what to do next. What is the next thing?

It can be surprisingly difficult. But it’s good to visualize the next thing as God’s next thing, and say “yes” to it as such. It’s definitely the new life that the angel told the apostles to tell the people about. Like God’s holy unpredictability, it’s our form of a holy insanity that makes our offer of a new life credible and believable to others: our willingness to say “yes” to the next thing in a way that looks like Jesus.

We have learned, in Christ, to not find reasons for saying “no” to people and plans. We have learned, in Christ, to say “yes” to people and plans.

We have faith because we know God in Christ, and we are learning to know God in Christ all the time. We can know God in Christ all the time We can know God in Christ in the places of deliverance and possibility. We can know God in Christ in the hard places where we are sent: even in those places where we can see good reasons for saying “no”.

God came to share our temptation to say “no”. In Jesus, God deeply desired to say “no” to his own plan to die under the burden of our sins. The Son prayed to the Father, “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark14:36)

Jesus said “no” to himself and “yes” to the cross. He said “yes” to the cross in order to say “yes” to us.

The apostles rejoiced to be counted worthy to share the sufferings of Jesus by suffering for his sake. They said “yes” to sharing life with Jesus on the cross. If we say “yes” when we are tempted to say “no” then we can know that we are with Jesus, and that we truly belong to him all the time.

Wonderful things happen because the kingdom of God is on the move now. Jesus is Lord. How does the kingdom of God want to shape us now? What is the next thing the Lord is telling us to say “yes” to? What does he want to help us become?

We may be saying “no” to some wonderful and joyful things. We may be saying no to going back to a place where we got in trouble before; like the apostles being sent back to preach in the Temple. We may be saying “no” to something dangerous and difficult; something that is still God’s next thing.

Each of us, as individuals, have such next things. So does the church, the body of Christ. Our message is about life. We can say “yes” to whatever the next thing is, and find life there. We will find Christ there. What is it?