Sermon: Faithful Witnesses

Acts 1:6-14

Faithful Witnesses

James Sledge                                                                                                   May 26,2020

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” It seems like it would be a good time. Jesus had been raised from the dead a little over a month earlier. He’d been hanging out with the disciples, talking more with them about the kingdom of God, and telling them to stay in Jerusalem awaiting the promise of the Father… waiting to be baptized with the Holy Spirit.

Something big was about to happen. Maybe now God was going to straighten things out, set the world right. And by the time the two volume set of Luke-Acts gets written, likely over fifty years later, the world looked like it needed even more straightening out. The Romans had completely destroyed the city of Jerusalem, its magnificent temple totally obliterated. Jews and Christians alike had fled to various parts of the Mediterranean world.

By that time, the break between Judaism and Christianity was pretty much complete. Christians were no longer a sect within Judaism, and so they no longer enjoyed the special religious exemption that Rome gave to the Jews for being an ancient religion. And then there was the problem with that basic faith statement, “Jesus is Lord.” Rome said Caesar was Lord, that the emperor was a god. Christians were clearly trouble makers, a threat to the social fabric that held the empire together.

Lord, this would be a really good time to restore the kingdom, to straighten things out, to make life easier for the faithful. It’s a mess, God. Do something! But Jesus answers, “It is not for you to know the times and periods that the Father has set… But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses…”

Fast forward nearly two thousand years, and it’s not hard to sympathize with those early disciples. Lord, this would be a really good time to do something. Many scientists are worried that we are perilously close to a tipping point on climate change, if it isn’t already too late. COVID-19 is decimating communities, sending countless people into poverty, and exposing our broken healthcare system. The partisan divide in our country has become so extreme that even the pandemic cannot overcome it, and wearing a mask in public, a simple act of loving one’s neighbor, has somehow been politicized.

Lord, this would be a really good time to restore the kingdom, to straighten things out, to make life easier for the faithful. It’s a mess, God. Do something! But Jesus answers, “It is not for you to know the times and periods that the Father has set… But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses…”

Witnesses. Most of us know what a witness is. Even if we’ve never been inside a courtroom, we’ve seen dramas on TV. “Your honor, I’d like to call the next witness.” A witness testifies to what she has seen or heard, and Jesus expects his followers to testify to others about him.

But Jesus doesn’t just say that we are to be witnesses; we are his witnesses. We are his emissaries, entrusted with a divine message about the way of Jesus. And our witness isn’t just about saying the correct words. It is about embodying the patterns and the way of Jesus, about caring especially for the weak and lowly, about favoring the poor over the rich, about loving neighbors, even when they are not the least bit loveable. It is a countercultural way that threatens the status quo, that speaks of a world turned upside down.

This sort of witnessing rarely sits well with the powers that be. It got Jesus killed, and a similar fate awaits many of the disciples in our scripture reading. And so the word in our reading translated “witnesses” gradually takes on a different meaning in those first centuries of Christian faith. This meaning becomes so predominant that it’s the only one associated with the English word derived from this Greek word for witness, “martyr.”

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my martyrs…” Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a martyr. Martin Luther King was a martyr. Oscar Romero was a martyr. There are still places where publically proclaiming Jesus puts your life in jeopardy, but for the most part the US and much of the West world found a different way to thwart the way of Jesus. They simply domesticated him, made following him synonymous with being good citizen and supporting the status quo.

We Christians who think of ourselves as more progressive easily spot this domesticated Jesus in our more conservative siblings who hold “bring your gun to church” worship services and see Donald Trump as a divinely chosen, true believer. But we are often blind to our own benign, domesticated Jesus who is not in the least bothered by easy our suburban lives made possible by exploitation of Asian laborers and migrant farm workers. A Jesus who cares only about our spiritual fulfilment and not about our ravenous consumption of the world’s resources while the climate overheats and much of the world lives in poverty. A Jesus unmoved by an economic system that lets many of us work comfortable from home while  the most vulnerable are laid off or forced to work in dangerous conditions.

Very often for us, the Holy Spirit exists primarily for our personal, spiritual edification, not to empower us for the world changing work of being Jesus’ witnesses, those who would give much and risk much and even become martyrs for the sake of the way Jesus walks.

But now, suddenly, the world has changed. Everything is different. Many of us are stuck at home. No restaurants, schools, concerts, movies, or theater, and a slowly evolving realization that nothing approaching “normal” will happen in the near future. No one knows when we will again welcome people to worship in this space, and when we do, it will be with social distancing, masks, and likely no singing allowed.

We are in pause mode, waiting mode, perhaps a perfect time to contemplate what it means to be church in a world where Jeff Bezos is on the verge of becoming a trillionaire while struggling small businesses go under, people who thought they were middle class suddenly need food pantries, and hourly workers face evictions. Perhaps this is a perfect time to be reflecting on and praying about what it means to be faithful witnesses. Perhaps it is a perfect time to hear anew Jesus’ words to his followers, to us, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses…”