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)