sharing our faith

Acts 8:1-13

And Saul approved of their killing him. That day a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria. ²Devout men buried Stephen and made loud lamentation over him. ³But Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.

⁴Now those who were scattered went from place to place, proclaiming the word. ⁵Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them. ⁶The crowds with one accord listened eagerly to what was said by Philip, hearing and seeing the signs that he did, ⁷for unclean spirits, crying with loud shrieks, came out of many who were possessed; and many others who were paralyzed or lame were cured. ⁸So there was great joy in that city.

⁹Now a certain man named Simon had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he was someone great. ¹⁰All of them, from the least to the greatest, listened to him eagerly, saying, “This man is the power of God that is called Great.” ¹¹And they listened eagerly to him because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic. ¹²But when they believed Philip, who was proclaiming the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. ¹³Even Simon himself believed. After being baptized, he stayed constantly with Philip and was amazed when he saw the signs and great miracles that took place.

Acts 8:26-40

²⁶Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) ²⁷So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. ²⁹Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.”

³⁰So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” ³¹He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.

³²Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. ³³In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” ³⁴The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

³⁵Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. ³⁶As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” ³⁸He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

³⁹When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. ⁴⁰But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

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            When Jesus gave his last instructions to the disciples, he told them that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Faithful to Jesus’ direction, the disciples waited in Jerusalem for the power of the Holy Spirit and then began to tell the story of God’s amazing grace in Christ. Last week Susan shared the story of Stephen, the first Christian to die for his faith. Stephen’s murder began a wider persecution that scattered the church, but God used that scattering to spread the gospel throughout Judea and Samaria and, eventually to the ends of the earth.

            What I love about these two stories, especially the story about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, is that the Spirit leads and Philip follows. The Spirit tells him to go to the chariot. He doesn’t know who is in it or what he’s going to do with this chariot, but he trusts that he will know what to do when he gets there.

Notice how Philip approaches the man in the chariot. He hears him reading scripture, so he opens the conversation by asking about it. He doesn’t force his way in. He doesn’t attack the man’s beliefs or push Christ on him in some aggressive way. He doesn’t start the conversation in a confrontational way. “Do you know where you’re going to spend eternity,” is almost never the best way to open a conversation. Instead Philip listens to what the man is reading and then asks a simple, respectful question.

            Miracle stories are sometimes hard to related to, since I don’t have any experience with miracles. But I can ask a question and tell a story, and so can you, so this story is easy to relate to. Philip is an especially good example of evangelism for our time. People are skeptical about authority telling them what to do or believe. But people are also hungry for meaning. In the aftermath of a Christian culture, most people know that the church has something to do with a man named Jesus. They know there’s something about eternal life, sin and salvation. But they don’t necessarily know the story, and more importantly, they don’t know the story is for them because no one has invited them recently.

            People need Christ, and you can reach people no one else can reach. As a disciple of Jesus you have what you need to evangelize like Philip, so let’s break it down. The first step is having a strong faith. You can’t share what you don’t have. Many of us mildly believe or mildly don’t believe in God, but we don’t do anything to change that. Going to church each week isn’t going to make you believe in God, it takes something more than that.

            Here’s a simple experiment I want you to try this week if you’re feeling unsure in your faith. Act like you believe in God this week. Pray frequently like you’re talking to someone who really cares about you. Don’t worry about saying the right words, just talk. Read scripture ready to hear a word to you. Spend some time in silence reflecting on who God made you and how you can use your gifts. Don’t spend time wondering if God is real; for the moment, just assume that he is and live like it.

What I think you’ll find is that as you actively reach out for God, you’ll find him. It might not be obvious or dramatic, but the more you practice relying on God and listening to God, the clearer God’s presence will become in your life. But you need to reach out.

The next step in evangelizing like Philip is to open your ears and your eyes and your heart so you can see where God is leading you. Keep doing the things you do: go to work, spend time with friends and family, play golf. As you do all your normal things, pay attention. Who is hurting? Who seems to need some hope? What do your friends worry about? Is one of your coworkers going through a hard time?

As you pay attention, make yourself available to the people God puts in your path. Be open to them. Allow yourself to feel with them. Listen to what they say and listen to how God prompts you to respond. Trust God to lead you and say what you feel your heart leading you to say. Usually you’ll listen more than you will talk. People in pain first need to know someone is listening to them and cares about them.

Sometimes it will feel right to share a word of faith; a simple phrase of God’s truth can be a beam of hope for them that will guide them to the next step. Often people need to hear something like: You are not alone. God hasn’t given up on you. God cares about you. God loves you.

Give a word of hope. Give it honestly and then listen. Sometimes a simple phrase about God’s love unleashes a flood of doubt, or grief, or hurt, or longing. Be ready to hear uncomfortable things. Listen to them, patiently, lovingly. Don’t listen like you’re waiting to respond; listen to really hear what the person is saying. Listen for the words and the meaning behind the words. Let them know you are listening.

justice and extravance, 2.10.13

Mark 7:24-30

²⁴From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, ²⁵but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. ²⁶Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

²⁷He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁸But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” ²⁹Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” ³⁰So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Mark 14:1-9

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; ²for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.”

³While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. ⁴But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? ⁵For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

⁶But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. ⁷For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. ⁸She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. ⁹Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

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            I’ve been struggling this week with how to preach these passages. They’re very different, and in a way, the only thing that joins them is that they are stories of women in the New Testament. They’re stories of women who spent time with Jesus.

            The story Susan read is always a hard one for me. I love Jesus, and one of the things that’s always attracted me is his welcome, his concern for people on the margins, his preference for the poor, vulnerable and excluded. But in this story he calls the gentile woman and her daughter dogs. He shows the strong tendency of some Jewish men of his time to feel that everyone who wasn’t religiously “pure” was a lesser kind of person. It’s funny because he just finished condemning the Pharisees for their obsession with religious laws, and now he’s acting like a Pharisee.

            It’s tempting to smooth it over. Some people believe Jesus is testing the woman to see if she’s faithful enough. I guess that’s a more comfortable way to read it, but I don’t really buy it. Luke doesn’t include this story at all, and I don’t blame Luke for leaving it out; each writer has their own version of the story to tell. Each version of the story of Jesus gives us a different angle on Jesus, and that’s a blessing.

So when we read Mark, we are stuck with this story. And in some ways, the story fits just fine. The truth is, Jesus left heaven, left the glory of being divine, behind to join the human condition. When Jesus chose to take on human flesh he could have been born in a palace, but he chose instead to be born in a stable to a working class family. And Jesus could have chosen to be born the son of a philosopher or a rabbi, but he chose to be a carpenter’s son.

Jesus chose to be human, really, actually human. He chose to be limited, to be imperfect, to be vulnerable. Often we have the idea of Jesus as a perfect man, and there’s truth to that. He is a great example of faithfulness to God in a human life. But it is human faithfulness. In his human life, Jesus was limited by his circumstances, by his upbringing, by his culture, his time period, his family, his experience. In his wisdom and in his miracles, he often seems more than human, but maybe it shouldn’t surprise us if his limits show through from time to time.

Maybe he was having a bad day and didn’t want another conversation. God chose the people of Israel to be especially close to God, so it makes sense for Jesus to put his own people first. And maybe Jesus feels like he has so many people to heal, so many lives to change, so many outcasts to welcome within the people of Israel, that the time is going to run out before he finishes. The practical, budgeting side of Jesus knows that there are only so many hours he has to spend, so he needs to spend them well.

If Jesus was really human, he must have felt overwhelmed sometimes by the scope of his mission, by the human need that surrounded him and constantly pressed against him. Maybe this was one of those times.

But the woman in the first story is a mother. Maybe she could have lived with Jesus saying “no,” if she was seeking healing for herself, but it’s a different story when we’re talking about her daughter. When it comes to her daughter, she is not going to leave without trying everything. And here’s the lesson for the life of faith, perseverance is part of it, but not the only part. Our culture is all about getting what we deserve, but that’s not the main message of the Bible.

When you read the Psalms, which is the song book and prayer book of the Bible, one thing you notice is that most of the time when the writer asks God for something he or she doesn’t ask based on what they deserve. There are a few psalms where the writer says, “God, be good to me because of my righteousness,” but that’s the minority. When the Psalms ask for God’s kindness the two reasons they give most often are God’s love, or the need of the person asking. It’s much more common for the psalmist to say, “Grant my request, Lord, because I’m desperately in need,” than for the psalmist to say, “Grant my request, Lord, because I’ve earned it.”

I don’t know if the woman in this story had ever read the psalms, but it fits. When Jesus says it’s not right to give the children’s food to dogs, she doesn’t argue or protest. She says, “Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” It’s not about what she and her child deserve, it’s about what they need and about what Jesus can give.