Sunday, May 3, 2015

Sermon: Freed for Ministry Together - The Upsrising of Partnership

Acts 16:16-34
Freed for Ministry Together
The Uprising of Partnership
James Sledge                                                                                                   May 3, 2015

Imagine for a moment that you are out for a walk on a nice spring day. As you walk down the street you hear something up ahead and you begin to smell smoke. You pick up your pace a bit and round the corner to see a house with flames lapping out several of the windows. It looks pretty bad, but there are no firefighters. Then you spot someone yelling from a window of the third floor. She sees you and yells more frantically. “Please, help! Save me!” In such a situation do you,
a.       Grab your cell phone and call 911?
b.      Take the ladder you see lying there and try to reach the window with it?
c.       Tell her about Jesus?
Now imagine an entirely different scenario. (Or maybe you won’t need to imagine. This has happened in real life to me a couple of times. ) Again you are out for a walk, but this time someone comes up to you and asks, “Have you been saved?” In this situation do you,
a.       Ignore them and keep walking?
b.      Tell them that you are already a Christian?
c.       Stop and tell them about that time you were rescued from a burning building?
Language is a strange thing. We like to think it provides us with a precise means of communicating, but the reality is that even the best communicators get misunderstood with regularity. Every pastor I have ever known has stories about someone coming up following worship and expressing thanks for a word that spoke directly to that person’s situation. But upon further conversation, it became clear that the person heard something the pastor had no intention of saying.
I know a pastoral counselor who is fond of saying that it’s a wonder that we manage to communicate at all.
One of the problems with language is that words pick up a lot of baggage over the years. Take that word “save” and its companion, “salvation.” Both show up in our reading from Acts. The spirit possessed slave-girl whom Paul cures had been going on and on about how Paul and his companions “proclaim to you a message of salvation.” And when a jailor realizes that his prisoners have not escaped after an earthquake opens the doors, he cries out, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And we hear these stories nearly 2000 years later and think we know what the words mean.

In one of his earlier books, not the one that’s been shaping our worship here in recent months, Brian McLaren uses a phrase that has become a favorite of mine. Speaking in part of his own, evangelical background, he says that very often the church has proclaimed what he labels a “gospel of evacuation.” In this gospel earth is not our true home. It is a terrible , “fallen” place that will finally have to be destroyed, and our only hope is to be evacuated, to be taken to heaven when we die.
Never mind that you can’t really find it in the Bible, but when a lot of people hear the words “save” or “salvation” in a religious context, this evacuation comes to mind. Even those who don’t come from evangelical backgrounds often think of evacuation when they hear these terms, one reason you so rarely hear Presbyterians speak of being “saved.”
Perhaps this explains why Brian McLaren decides to use a different word when he retells our story from Acts in We Make the Road by Walking. In his version, the slave-girl says of Paul and his companions, “They proclaim to you the way of liberation!”[1] And when the jailor cries out he says, “Gentlemen, what must I do to experience the liberation you have?”[2] A Greek scholar might quibble a little bit, but I suspect McLaren comes closer to the meaning of the passage than what many American Christians imagine when they hear “save” and “salvation.”
In the American religious context, save and salvation have also taken on highly individualized meaning, a personal salvation or evacuation. But biblically the image is more often corporate, speaking of  deliverance or rescue for a people, of healing and restoration that allows people to rejoin their community.  And that seems to be the case in our story today from Acts.
Those of us who are familiar with the story may miss the dramatic relational shift that occurs in it. Paul and his companions, who already know and experience liberation in Christ, stay in their cells following the earthquake and go out of their way to preserve the life of their jailor. The jailor in turn wants to share in this remarkable freedom they have, and as he begins to experience it, the jailor, an instrument of Roman oppression, transforms into a gracious host. He tends their wounds and invites them to his table where he serves them. He welcomes as though they were close friends, even family.
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Are you saved? But I’m not talking about whether your ticket has gotten punched for some impending evacuation. I’m asking about the liberation Paul knew, the freedom and life that God longs for each of us, a wonderful, new existence that transforms not only our relationship with God but with others, where, in Christ, the oppressed can seek the welfare of the oppressor, and the oppressor can transform into gracious host and friend. Imagine that at work in Baltimore, or in any of our communities.
That is why the table is so central to our worship. It sometimes gets lost in the mechanics of the ritual. It can get lost when we forget that this is supposed to be a communal table and not an altar. It gets lost because we no longer actually gather at table as the first believers did. But it is still here. In Christ, we are liberated and healed of our hurts, and we are freed to forgive one another. Experiencing the liberation that Paul knew and a jailor found, we discover the possibility of true community, unity, and partnership with one another, even with those we once saw as competitors, opponents, tormenters, or enemies.
Come to the table of grace. Come to be nourished for our life together in this strange partnership called the body of Christ. Come to be strengthened for our shared ministry of liberation and reconciliation. Freed by love for love, we continue the uprising of new life that began that first Easter morn.

We Make the Road by Walking. The practice begun in Advent continues through summer of 2015. Scripture and sermons will connect to chapters in Brian McLaren’s book. This week’s chapter is 37, “The Uprising of Partnership.”


[1] McLaren, Brian D. (2014-06-10). We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (p. 188). FaithWords. Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid. p. 189.

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