Imprisoned by Caesar; Working for Jesus

We are at the end of our “Summer of Acts”. We’ve heard seven sermons so far – starting with an introduction in which I stressed the nature of Scripture as story and suggested that the stories of Acts are the kinds of stories that we want to shape our lives.

Consider the stories that we have heard since then:

·         Lee spoke to us on the healing of the beggar at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, in Acts 3. He encouraged us to put ourselves in the beggar’s place and listen for what unexpected action God is ready to take.

·         Lee preached again the next week from Acts 4 on the trial that resulted from Peter and John’s action in healing the beggar. Lee called this trial the “Gamaliel Principle”: Gamaliel’s idea that God’s presence is defined by growth, when in fact he did not understand when God was at work.

·         Toni and Rachel then brought the message from Acts 7 about Stephen, who died as the first martyr, bearing witness to Jesus before the Jewish ruling council. Stephen’s self-giving readiness to love, even while being stoned, seized their imaginations.

·         Eric followed with a reflection on Philip’s interaction with the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8. He noted that Luke has a particular concern to help the church relate in love with people from a wide variety of backgrounds holding a wide variety of beliefs – but centred on the person of Jesus the Messiah.

·         Two weeks ago, Karen wondered how we can apply Paul’s example responding to the hardships of our lives, those times when we are beaten up and left for dead in Lystra.

·         Finally, Jeremy Janzen spoke about the nature of mission – a radical application of God’s love to family, friends, and our world – reminding us of the way that Paul and Silas acted out of God’s love while in prison in Philippi. They embraced God’s path leading to beating and prison because they loved God and they loved the people of Philippi – including their jailer – with God’s transforming love.

Today, we meet Paul again in prison, now in Rome, and we look for the clue to all of these stories, which we want to take shape in our own lives. I suggest that the clue is found in the texts we heard this morning, especially in Acts 28, as Paul waited for his trial, under house arrest in Rome. Listen to the texts with me.

Isaiah 6

This well-known passage pictures God calling Isaiah to ministry in a powerful scene full of angels and glory. “In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and his glory filled the temple!” (Note that I take “the hem of his robe” to signify the Shekinah Glory of God.) As the “seraphs” (angels of the highest order in Heaven – signifying that we are at the centre of God’s Reality in this scene) fly about the glory of the Lord, Isaiah falls down in fear, aware that he does not belong here. He is a limited sinful weak human being, and God is God. Then God sends a seraph to cleanse Isaiah with a burning coal from the fire that burns in God’s presence. Cleansed, Isaiah can hear God’s call, “Who will go for us?” and respond, “Here I am Lord, send me.”

Note: There are of course specialized prophetic calls, like Isaiah’s, but this passage presents us with God’s call to each one of us – as we are all God’s witnesses in today’s world (Acts 1:7f).

The actual sending is ambiguous. God sends Isaiah to preach so that the people will not understand. Comprehending this passage is another sermon; for this morning, I note simply that God called Isaiah, and that responding to God’s call meant that Isaiah had to give himself, to lose himself in God’s overwhelming glory and grace.

Acts 28

We read verses 17 to 30, describing Paul’s house arrest (verse 16). He lived in a house that he rented (verse 30), waiting for his case to come before Caesar (verses 17-19). One of his first acts as he waited was to communicate with the local Jewish leaders (verse 17) to make his case to them. They said that they had not been told anything about Paul himself (verse 21), but they knew that “this sect”, as they called it, was controversial (verse 22), so they invited Paul to give them his views.

Paul gave them his basic message – that the coming of God’s reign and the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets were fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. He closed by quoting the verses from Isaiah 6, which we heard earlier, as a description of the Jews’ failure to heed his message. That failure, said Paul, leads to the inclusion of all people in God’s reign.

The last two verses serve as a summary of the whole book of Acts:

For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ – with all boldness and without hindrance!

This dual focus, “he preached God’s Reign and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ”, is the central piece that all our summer’s stories revolve around.

The Central Story

What is this story, the story of God’s Reign and of the Lord Jesus Christ? Paul writes it out in full in the first eight verses of 1 Corinthians 15:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

You hear what is at the centre: “Christ died for our sins”, “Christ was raised on the third day”; “Christ appeared to Cephas … to the Twelve … and finally to Paul himself.”

The self-giving sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, dying and rising for us – for all people, is the central story of all human history. This is the story we want to shape our lives. This is the reason we have spent the past two months telling the stories of Acts. God’s self-giving love transforms us and shapes us to live out of the same self-giving love.

We all love stories and that those stories shape how we act and think. Advertisers know this, and they create wonderful short stories in their commercials. We resist their message at the conscious level, but underneath our conscious thoughts they teach us to want more things, to feel inadequate without getting the latest smart phone, to feel better about ourselves when we have a new car or truck, and on and on.

Our culture also tries to shape us through its stories. One such basic story is that everyone should maximize their personal benefits in life, even if it means that other people get hurt. The current fear of immigrants – stronger in the USA but growing also in Canada – reflects this story. We think that we must make sure that we are strong, even if what benefits us hurts other people. Another of our stories is that life is dangerous, and that we should attack the other before they attack us. “Hit the other guy first and harder!” In place of all these stories, Paul tells the story of Jesus.

Telling the Story of Jesus

The story of Jesus is the story of human rebellion against God and of God’s constant quest to reconcile humans with God. God came in the person of Jesus – the God-man – and died on the cross in our place. [I make no comment here on how this self-substitution works; my concern is simply that the gospel tells us that Jesus died “for us”.] This same Jesus rose from the dead, showing God’s love and power for all humankind.

What does this mean in our lives? We use terms like “forgiving our sins” to suggest that Jesus ends our rebellion against God, so that we can be reconciled with God. We also use terms like “Jesus is our Lord” to suggest that we live the same way Jesus lived. When our culture says that we should live for ourselves, we listen to the story of Jesus and live for the benefit of others. Not “she/he who dies with the most toys wins”, but “she/he who loses their life for Jesus and for others wins”.

This self-giving model is only possible for people who have met Jesus and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Whatever does that mean? It’s hard to explain it. “Meeting Jesus” is a bit like meeting any other person. If I ask you, “Do you know our pastor, Lee?” you may say, “Yes.” But how you know him depends on your own personal interaction. We all know Lee in different ways. Just so, we all meet and know Jesus in different ways. However we meet Jesus, my point is that we really do need to meet him personally.

My own story: Encounters with God in my earlier years led to a life of daily prayer and an intention to listen to God and follow wherever he led Lois and me, then 11 years ago, I had a particular time of darkness, which even now I don’t fully understand. I remember waking up at night and feeling something like a heavy weight holding me down and squeezing everything inside of me out. Again, I remember in another dream walking through a jungle, hot and oppressive. I wanted out. Then I came to the edge of a cliff on the edge of the jungle, and deep in the valley before me fires were burning and heat rising.

These dreams came to a resolution one morning as I was in my morning prayers. I remember an inner voice – I believe it was the voice of Jesus – which said, “I want nothing between us.” I had an immediate response, “Neither do I!” I knew that more than anything else I wanted to be united with Jesus. I felt as though all the stuff inside that the weight in my dream had squeezed out was the stuff that Jesus didn’t want in my life.

Since then, I have sometimes walked more closely with God and sometimes less closely, but the clear commitment remains: I want to belong to Jesus. I want to be like Jesus. I want to walk with Jesus. This is what I am trying to describe when I talk about meeting Jesus. We will all experience this meeting differently, but of this I am sure: We all need Jesus. Without God’s presence in our lives, made possible through the cross, we cannot live cross-shaped lives and we cannot tell the story of the cross.

A Closing Thought

I have one more thing to say about this story. Our world has many stories it wants to tell us to make us in our world’s image. One problem with these stories is that they are not true; that is, they do not match the deepest reality of the created universe. They lie, and in their lies, they would cheat us if we believe them. So, how do we know that the story of the cross is “true”? Truth matters, as we see from the way that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (formative in the beginning of the Vietnam War in the 1960s) has been found to have been built on a misunderstanding at best and a deliberate lie at worst. Truth matters!

Answering this question requires much more time and explanation than we can take this morning. I will say this much only. Unlike any other story about the nature of reality, the way that things really are, this story is rooted in simple historical fact. Jesus lived. Jesus died. Jesus rose. We may think that these assertions are no more than the ravings of old authors who can’t be trusted, but in fact these truths rest on historical fact. The science of reading old texts and assessing their accuracy is well-established in historical study. The best historical study validates the accuracy of the New Testament documents as history.

I referred earlier to 1 Corinthians 15, and in that chapter Paul makes the fact of Jesus’ resurrection central to Christian faith. If you want to go deeper into this subject, I can give you the sources I am relying on for my comments here.

Meanwhile, we live out the resurrection in our lives today. We live cross-shaped lives based on the reality of the resurrection. As Mennonites, we jump quickly to the question: “What should we do?” I will not answer that question now; I will make two final statements. One, our ability to live a cross-shaped life comes from the reality of the cross and resurrection in our lives. We immerse ourselves in the story of the cross. Two, the only way most people around us will ever know the story of the cross is from our words and our lives. As we tell the story of the cross – in word and in deed, people read it, over and over again. That’s what Paul was doing in Acts 28. That’s what God commissioned Isaiah to do in Isaiah 6. That is what God calls you and me to do today.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

25 August 2019

Isaiah 6 (NRSV)

Acts 28: 17-30 (NIV)

Vacation Stories: Special Events

We went to two special events while we were in Melbourne. The first was a special speaker in the Melbourne Convention Centre (a wonderful huge building), and the second was a musical play in a downtown theatre.

I’ll start with the theatre. As we drove into the city on our first morning, Lois saw the advertisements for “Come from Away.” She immediately started campaigning for us to go see it: “The remarkable true story of the small town that welcomed the world.” Gander, Newfoundland is a small town, the furthest east on the North American coast as planes fly across the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of about 10,000 people, they become hosts to 6,700 passengers and 38 civilian aircraft forced to land when the USA and Canada closed their airspace following the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 in 2001. “Come from Away” tells their story.

It is perhaps ironic that we left Canada and went to Australia to watch a play set in our eastern-most province, but I have to say the play was superb. A blend of humour and the ordinary struggle of daily life set in the unique context of Newfoundlander hospitality and outsider wonder. As the population was almost doubled overnight, the people thrown together discovered resources they may not have realised were buried within, and together they worked out a deeply human and powerful response to great tragedy.

One small vignette: I enjoyed watching the passenger from New York billeted with a Gander family, as he moved from suspicion that everyone was ready to mug him to suspicion that they would just steal his wallet to a recognition that they were simply ready to be his friends. Our family is in debt to Lois for insisting that we go to see this delightful comedy-drama. I know that I am relatively unsophisticated in theatre, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

The special speaker was Jonathan Haidt, professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU. An organization called Think Inc brought Haidt to Melbourne for a lecture on July 21, “Moral Psychology in an Age of Outrage”. Haidt has taken on a number of “moral leaders” in North American culture, from religious leaders to progressives, in an effort to help us suspend judgment while hearing the other.

I resonate with Haidt’s thoughts, although I may be one of those leaders in a church setting (as an associate pastor in a local church) he is seeking to rein in. In the many difficult conversations we need to have in our society (from sexual ethics to creation care), I have watched in dismay as people dismiss those with whom they disagree as moral reprobates. The cry “Lock her up” comes from one particular political context, but it expresses the way people all across the spectrum respond to those “on the other side”. Such “moral outrage” is counterproductive and often simply wrong.

One of his observations in the question and answer time struck me. Progressives generally have championed being open to people of all kinds and conservatives have generally wanted people to stay in their own place. Surprisingly, then, Haidt observed that he has been vilified by progressives and treated respectfully by conservatives when disagreeing with them. Current political currents in the USA make this observation a surprise – the Republican Party does not specialise in respectful interaction at the moment. Haidt’s observation of his own experience reminds us that highly public figures are not necessarily a good measure of the totality of any movement. I think he was asking for more of that respectful response from both sides.

Two very different events, both enjoyed and appreciated, and both part of a wonderful trip down under.

Vacation Stories: Churches

Today is a Sunday, so here are some stories of the churches we went to.

Our first Sunday, we attended St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “mother church of the Archdiocese of Melbourne”. We had noticed the cathedral in our walks, often with tourists taking pictures. Beautiful grounds with some lovely magnolia flowers; a striking steeple, which became a landmark for us to find our way back to Nevin and Ali’s apartment; uncomfortable pews (designated by our hosts as the most uncomfortable they had experienced).

The morning mass was led by a Palestinian priest. Notable in our worship experience was the closing prayer – the Ave Maria chanted in Arabic, sounding similar to the Arabic I have heard used in the mosque in Winnipeg.

Our second Sunday, we attended St. Francis’ Church, billed as the oldest Catholic church in the Province of Victoria. The cantor was a woman, which our daughter-in-law told us is unusual. The priest reminded the parishioners to carry their belongings with them when they took communion – a reminder that this is a downtown church and one’s stuff is not safe left in the pew. We went to the church hall for tea and coffee when the service was done. One has the impression of a vibrant community in the heart of the city of Melbourne.

Our last Sunday was at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, more fully, “St. Peter’s Eastern Hill”. We realised immediately that we were not in a low church Anglican setting, as the trio of clergy wended their way to the front, scattering incense as they went. This is not a church for those with scent sensitivity!

St. Peter’s is definitely “Anglo-Catholic”, with some elements that would be unusual even in other high Anglican churches. The New Testament Scripture and Gospel were chanted rather than simply read – giving me a sense of connection to the way that Jews read the Torah using a set chanted melody. The responses included an excellent choir. Someone else might have found the music “too highbrow”, but I found it deeply stimulating. It was a wonderful time of worship.

St. Peter’s was also the scene of another serendipity. The sermon was given by a visiting preacher, Dean of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He turned out to have been Associate Dean of Tyndale UC and Seminary in Toronto, one of Providence’s sister schools in Canada, about 15 to 20 years ago. So the preacher knew Providence, and in this high Anglican scented setting with the chants of the psalms and scriptures in our ears, I found a colleague from the Canadian seminary scene.

We enjoyed our church contacts in Melbourne, but it was good to worship at home this morning. Steinbach Mennonite Church is home, and we are glad to be home.

Vacation Stories: Walking

I could title this “transit stories”, but so much of our “transit” was on foot. Melbourne is a large and densely populated city. Not so densely as some, since Australia has lots of room, but there are people all over the place. Nevin and Ali walk everywhere, so we did to.

Time to go to work: A 10-minute stroll down to their office on Victoria Parade. Let’s go grocery shopping: A 15-minute walk either to Aunt Maggie’s (organic groceries) or Woolworths (a larger grocery store). To the Royal Botanic Gardens: 30 minutes through the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the tennis courts where the Australian Open is played, across the Yarra River, and into the gardens. A cup of coffee on Lygon Street (lovely Italian cafes): 45 minutes down Victoria Parade and through the Carlton Gardens, into the long street of cafes and restaurants and shops. Just lovely. Another 15 minutes on to Trinity College, University of Melbourne? Sure! Why not? Only an hour’s walk back to Powlett Avenue, where we stayed.

Is it too far to walk? The trams and busses run regularly and take you to your destination quickly. We learned to use the Myki card, which gave us access to the trams and busses (and also to the trains, which we did not use). Is transit going to take too long? Or are there four of you, so that transit costs more? We learned about Uber. I was surprised at how convenient and quick Uber is, at least in a city like Melbourne. I doubt it would work as well in Steinbach.

Uber in Melbourne had the advantage that it introduced us to a wide variety of drivers – a Greek Australian who had moved to Greece as a young man and was now back home; a young Somali man who lit up when I asked if he was from Somalia; a Pashto from that part of Pakistan closest to Afghanistan. I learned from him that most of the Afghani are Pakistanis like him with family ties in Afghanistan. They came close, so close, to beating both India and Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup this year. It would have been their greatest coup!

I also enjoyed using the few words I have in other languages: “Assalamu alaykum” to the Muslims; “Efcharisto” to the Greek Australian; “Asante sana” to the Somali (OK – Swahili belongs next door in Kenya, but hey!). I am no linguist, but I enjoyed the multiplicity of cultures and languages around us in the city.

Melbourne and Australia as a whole are in the Asian orbit, so our walks took us into and through many little pieces of Asia, from Indonesia to Korea and from China to the Middle East. I was struck with the relative absence of Black people. Africa is more in the orbit of North America than it is of Australia.

The overall impression of life in Melbourne, then, included walking – to church, to eat out, to worship, to shop, to play chess; whatever it was, we walked to it. Now we’re back in Steinbach, and the garage door rolls up and down and the car carries us where we want to go. Almost makes me miss the civilized patterns built on walking almost everywhere.

Vacation Stories: OM Australia

In this and the next few blogs, I will tell some stories from our recent trip to Australia. We flew to Melbourne to visit Nevin and Ali, our son and his wife, who have recently taken positions there at the Australian Catholic University.

We spent three weeks in Melbourne, arriving on Tuesday morning, 16 July, and leaving on Tuesday morning, 6 August. On the first Friday there, Lois and I were fairly well acclimated. On our second Friday there, we [I] decided to go on an excursion. For the past 20 years (or just under), I have been on the board of OM Canada. Operation Mobilization (OM) is a worldwide organization that focusses on five primary goals: evangelism, church planting, relief and development, justice, and mentoring and discipleship. I have seen how OM Canada works in these areas and have relied often on OM to keep me in touch with the subjects I teach.

With this appreciation in mind, I wanted to see the head office of OM Australia, which is in a suburb of Melbourne. A quick Internet search showed that we could take the 906 bus 30 minutes east of Nevin and Ali’s apartment, and then walk for 10 minutes to the office. The weather promised rain, but we decided to head off to Blackburn, Victoria and find the office.

About 40 minutes later, we reached the office, just as the rain began to come down. My watch read 1 pm, which in Australia means lunch time. We ducked under the roof and tried the door. Locked. I thought we might go for lunch in a nearby café, but first we rang the doorbell. After a short delay, someone came to the door. She opened the door and looked at us doubtfully. “I’m sorry, we’re not actually open today. The Australian OM Board is meeting today and they’re at lunch.”

That piqued my interest for several reasons. One, my connection to OM is through the Canadian Board. Two, OM is divided into several administrative layers – from the International Director to Area Directors (in charge of administrative areas) to Country Directors, and so on. Australia and Canada happen to be in the same administrative area, so I asked, “Is the area director here?” She replied that he was, so I asked if I could greet him. She took us in to the room where the board had just sat down to eat, with the administrative staff of OM Australia.

When Harvey saw us, he was (I think) surprised. “Daryl and Lois! What are you doing here?” “Visiting our son and his wife,” I replied. “Well, join us for lunch!” Which we did, gratefully. We enjoyed the Nando’s peri-peri chicken with fries, and we enjoyed the chance meeting even more. Then Harvey said, “I fly back to Canada tomorrow, but I’m free this evening. Would you like to join me for supper?” So it was that Nevin and Alison and Lois and I joined Harvey that evening at an Indian restaurant named Ish in East Melbourne.

When the board returned to their meeting, Lois and I spent another hour talking with some of the staff over a cup of coffee, a delicious cappuccino. It was good to see a bit of what God is doing in and through OM Australia. The staff wondered how we knew that Harvey would be there. I told them that we had no such idea; we had come by the office because we were visiting our son and his wife. Coming to the office was a bonus, with no idea of who might be there. God’s arrangement, not ours!

That evening, Harv hosted us at Ish. My farewell dinner to the OM Board. I have finished my team with the board because I’m ready to release various responsibilities, especially those that conflict with acting as the associate pastor at Steinbach Mennonite, our home church. Travel to Ontario for Saturday board meetings come into that category.

I leave the board with real regret, since OM Canada has been so valuable to my own spiritual and intellectual development, so I appreciated Harv’s gesture. Our May board meeting was my last. Sometimes (not always) we go out for supper after a board meeting, especially to say goodbye to someone. Thanks to God’s timing, Harv was able to give me (and Lois and Nevin and Ali) a farewell dinner for my time on the OM board. A special twist to a trip taken to visit family.

Anniversary on the Great Ocean Road

On our anniversary, number 42 -- 30 July 2019 -- we drove the Great Ocean Road. More accurately, we were driven. With 43 other passengers and our driver, James, we bumped and swayed an expressed our amazement and delight at the sights and stories (from James) of the Australian coastline.

From Melbourne to Port Campbell, then inland to the A1, and back to Melbourne (some 550 km or so in about 12 hours). A good overview and introduction to life in Victoria.

Some impressions.


The Ocean. Waves rolling in from the south, so that surfers are often seen there. We saw none.

Koalas. Almost immobile, so that when one person found a koala sitting in the crook of a gum tree, reaching out and taking some eucalyptus leaves, then munching them before going back to sleep, the rest of us could find it too. Not bears, we were told -- they lack the koala-fications.



The coast. Rugged. Cliffs broken by occasional bays and beaches, with the road cut out by hand through the difficult countryside.

The relentless surf has shaped soft rocks into a razorback, into the 12 apostles (or eight apostles and two sisters), into wonderful shapes pleasing to the eye and dangerous for ships. James kept up a stream of stories, one shipwreck after another, especially from the days of sailing vessels before the advent of steam.










Tourists -- like us. I would like to find one of the places we stopped at to sit and watch patiently when the crowds are gone. The surf and foam are patient. They keep their rhythm, an endless sound and sight of water and wind and rock. We are impatient, on a mission to see the next sight. I would like to mimic the patience of the ocean and sit in Port Campbell watching and listening. Life beyond the stream of tourists breathes in the surf and wind left behind when the last bus is gone.

Villages dotted along the coast, shaped by place and by tourism. Anglesea and Lorne shaped irrevocably, Port Campbell touched more lightly -- living dual lives: their own and ours. Port Campbell is the smallest and quietest at the end of the line for our bus.

Back to Melbourne on the A1, a slice of Victoria that deserves its own exploration, passed through too quickly in the darkness as we watch the story of "Oddball", a dog in Warrnambul who saved the little penguins there from extinction by fox. (A true story.) Written down here in an attempt to remember and keep alive in the pathways of my heart and mind.

P.S.: This was indeed our 42nd anniversary, a unique and good celebration. I wish I could give Lois such a day whenever she wanted it. Too small a gift in return for all that she has given me.