|
Click to hear this sermon sermon100926
If
God could get tired, I imagine that one of the things that would tire Him most
of all is the walls we humans love to build.
Three Corrections: It's not Mine
- Acts 8: 26-40 - September 26, 2010 - Cicero United
Methodist Church
- Everett J. Bassett
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If
God could get tired, I imagine that one of the things that would tire Him most
of all is the walls we humans love to build. They are everywhere. For example,
I saw a cartoon a couple
years back entitled, "The end of Christmas." And it showed the three
Wise Men travelling
toward Bethlehem
to see the baby Jesus, but unable to get there because they encounter a
solid wall built to keep foreigners out. Of course, the cartoon was a political
commentary on
the wall that Israel
was building to separate themselves from the Palestinians. And whether or
not you think that was a good idea, it illustrates our tendency to build walls,
and the truth to
the saying I've heard in one form or another here and there - that whenever you
build a wall to
separate yourself from others, you have begun your own prison.
And
from where God sits and looks at the world, I wonder if it looks like a bunch
of prison walls separating people. In our recent memory, of course, one huge
wall came down - the
Berlin Wall. But for that one historic liberation, it seems like dozens of
walls go back up. Some
are literal walls, like the one in Israel,
or the one some Americans want to build on our Southern
border with Mexico.
And some are imaginative walls, which are just as real and just as solid -
like the walls of racism, or political extremism, or religious prejudice.
You
can't quite hear the crash of it, but in this morning's scripture lesson, a
wall came
smashing down. It is the wall that is implied in the Ethiopian eunuch's simple
question to the
disciple Philip: Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being
baptized? A simple
question, but a legitimate answer in that day and time would be, "Lots of
walls," There were
some who would say to that man, "What prevents you from being baptized?
You're a eunuch-
and God doesn't welcome eunuchs." Others would say, "You're a
foreigner. And Christian faith
isn't for foreigners." Others would say, "You're black. And grace is
for lighter-skinned people."
Those were the walls that came crashing down when Philip said, "Nothing
will prevent you,"
and they went down into the water together, and the baptism took place, and the
Spirit moved.
When
we hear the Ethiopian's question, we can't help but hear echoes of our own
history:
black slaves saying, "What's to prevent us from being free?" Waves of
immigrants saying,
"What's to prevent us from pursuing the American dream?" Women
saying, "What's to
prevent us from voting, and attending universities?" Rosa Parks saying,
"What's to prevent me
from sitting at the front of the bus?" And, the one we are struggling with
now, and have many
opinions about - homosexual couples saying, "What's to prevent us from
being married?"
The
answer is Walls. And walls can be important. They sort things out; they protect
us from the storms; they give privacy; I wouldn't say for a minute that walls
don't serve a purpose, or that all walls are bad. But eventually they become a
prison. I read a Haitian columnist after the
terrible earthquake in Haiti
last year, and he was saying that if there was a silver lining in that
terrible tragedy, for him it was that the walls were down. He lived in a city
where everyone was
behind a wall. And the feeling was one of confinement. And now the walls were
swept away
by the storm, and people could see what was behind, and there were gardens and
terraces and
neighbors - neighbors were actually seeing each other, and helping each other.
This is not to make light at all of that terrible disaster in Haiti and the
suffering still happening, but one of the sweetest sounds in all God's creation
is the sound of walls that separate people crashing down.
If
you've been here the last couple Sundays, you know that we have been reading
through
Acts, chapter 8. And I've been using these stories from the early church to
lift up three
corrections that needed to be made to the course of this new Christian faith.
The first
correction was that it is not magic - Christian faith is not something we can
manipulate by
knowing the magic words or the having the secret power. Then last week I said
that it was not
merchandise - the blessings of life with God are not something we can buy like
merchandise -
but that's okay, because they are given to us for free through the loving arms
of Jesus.
So
today we add the third correction, and to keep with my letter M theme, I'm
going to say that the third correction is It's Not Mine. And what that refers
to is this tendency in people of
faith to put God's love behind walls, and say it is only for particular chosen
people. We have it
right, and they don't. It's ours to define, to keep pure, to defend from all of
THEM. When we
do that, we have begun to build a faith-prison, and to limit God's
possibilities in our own lives.
It's important to say it that way, because we don't really limit God's
possibilities - God will
break down the walls. But we imprison ourselves -- limit the possibilities in
our own lives.
The
classic example of that is the Pharisees in the Bible, and the people who
associated with them. The Pharisees saw themselves as religious authorities.
They possessed the faith. It was 'Mine.' They knew the mind of God. And for
some of them, that certainty was corrupting-
they became power-hungry and ruthless. But for most, I suspect, it was merely
blinding. They
were sincere, good people - but they were imprisoned by their religious
certainty. They
believed that they possessed so thoroughly the thoughts of God that when God
did the most
wonderful thing of all - sent His Son for the salvation of the world - the
Pharisees missed it.
Jesus didn't fit into their definition, into their box, behind their wall. So
Jesus was not only
mistaken, Jesus was dangerous. And he wouldn't change, so he had to be stopped.
We
Christians can tend to have that same certainty today. We know the ways of God.
We
are certain we have it right. For example, many Christians believe they know
how the world is
going to end. The scenario is clearly told in the Bible. A British preacher
named Darby in the
19th century put all the pieces together, and many Christians
believe it. Preachers like Billy
Graham picked it up; Hal Lindsay wrote about it in the '70s, in his bestseller The
Late, Great
Planet Earth, and more recently, Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins popularized
it with their Left
Behind novels, which are extremely popular. So End Times thinking is big in
a thousands of
churches, with a carefully mapped out scenario -- there's going to be a
Rapture; there's going to
be a Tribulation; there's going to be an Antichrist, and the Sign of the Beast,
and Armageddon,
the Breaking of the Seventh Seal, and so on. There are people who will tell you
that if you
interpret those scriptures some other way, then you don't really believe the
Bible; you're not a
true Christian. The Bible, they say, describes it all as clear as day, and it
is exactly what God's
going to do. And it is ... unless God decides to do something else. Oh, but God
can't. It is written ... the Book is closed. I don't mean to assault anyone's
faith - sincere Christian people
believe passionately in Darby's scenario. If you are one of those people, God
bless you. But what if God has something better in mind? Be careful of the It
Is Mine syndrome. No one
possesses God. No wall of human belief confines God. And we can become so set
in our
understandings that, like the Pharisees, we miss some of the best things.
A
lot of this has to do with how you read the Bible. A lot of people believe that
the Bible is the Final Authority, the Last Word, the Truth, the Word of God. In
some sense of each of those words, I believe that too. But only because the
Bible points to something more. The Bible is not some static law book that
nails down God, so that if you just know enough about it you can
see everything that God is doing. What I see when I read the Bible is an
ever-growing, ever-
evolving, very tiny glimpse of what God is doing. And if we really read those
pages, we will see
a God who can't be pinned down by our puny understandings - a God who sometimes
changes
his mind, and who always exceeds expectations, and whose grace cannot be
contained, and
who loves to break down walls and surprise us, and whose Son is not captured on
a page or in a
grave or in some human doctrine, but is alive and moving and healing and saving
and
challenging us to think bigger and bigger - and who unleashed a Holy Spirit in
this world that
blows as powerfully and unpredictably as the wind to bring life and hope to the
human heart. I
love to read the Bible precisely because the Bible itself does not claim to be
the Word of God,
as if God is imprisoned in the words on a page. I love to read the Bible
because it points me to
the living Word of God, Jesus Christ who is my living Lord. And I thank God
every day that His
grace is not confined to anything that I could interpret or understand or
possess or limit.
Those
first Christians described in the Book of Acts had many walls. They had been
taught that 'salvation comes to the Jews.' They had been raised with strong
racial divisions. They had had been given certain ideas about those whose flesh
had been altered - eunuchs and such.
They distrusted foreigners. All those walls. And then a black African eunuch
whose heart had
been touched by the testimony of scripture and the witness of a Christian
disciple said, "Why
can't I be baptized?" And God spoke to Philip's heart and said something
like, "Break through
those walls so my Spirit can move and breathe life and hope to all
humankind."
And
that was risky for those first Jewish Christians. They took a huge chance by
opening the Gospel to all the world - which is what the baptism of that
Ethiopian man represents in the
story told in Acts. But what they discovered is that God's grace was stronger
than they had
even dared imagine. That once they let it go, it only got better. The other
thing they
discovered is that they didn't lose what they had. They still had the
foundation of their
traditions and their scriptures and their history. But now faith was unwrapped,
and the Holy
Spirit that had transformed them would transform the world.
We
have today something priceless - greater than any magical power, or anything
money
could buy, or something we can wrap up and keep safe and sound in our closet.
We have an
invitation from Christ to be in a living, growing relationship with God - one
that is full of
surprises, full of grace, full of joy, eternal. And, if we open our hearts
fully, one that offers not
only salvation, but adventure. The endless adventure of encountering new and
wonderful
possibilities - new and wonderful people - of discovering things other people
knew and we
didn't. God's love, it turns out, is so good, so big, so freeing.
|
