Eternity in the Human Heart

I feel almost guilty picking up just one verse out of such rich texts and using it as a springboard for what Neil and I will say. Ecclesiastes 3 is perhaps the best-known chapter of that enigmatic book, and the beginning of this chapter has been immortalized by the Byrds (among others) singing, “To everything – turn, turn, turn …” I wish that we could reflect on what the editor of Ecclesiastes is saying by quoting this extended message from Qoholeth (“the teacher”), but we just don’t have time. 

 

Similarly, Romans 2 is part of a remarkable argument in which Paul develops the insight that God has come to all people throughout the world, bringing grace and truth to set us free from the power of sin. Probing that argument also must wait for some other day. Today we focus just on this one verse from Ecclesiastes: “God has set eternity in the human heart.” 

 

Eternity in their Hearts 

What does Ecclesiastes mean by this phrase, “Eternity in their hearts”? We live in time, moment by moment. The natural world around us moves through the seasons of the year and the seasons of our lives, past, present, and future. “Eternity” is a concept almost beyond our imagination. Eternity is where God is. Eternity is what God lives in. A basic Jewish prayer refers to God as “Melech ha olam” – the king of Eternity (or king of the universe, or eternal king). 

 

The NRSV takes this phrase, “eternity in their hearts”, to mean God “has put a sense of past and future into their minds”. This is an effort to find a meaning that fits the outlook of Qoholeth in the rest of the book, but it runs against the sense of the words. Most other translations keep the idea of “eternity in their hearts”. 

 

It’s a difficult verse: “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Here’s what I think it means. God has placed something of God’s own self in every human heart and every human culture, but we are not able to see God clearly or understand what God is doing in our world. 

 

That second step is where the gospel comes in. We know something of God, but God remains hidden from us. Then Jesus comes, preaching the Gospel of God’s Reign. Jesus comes, showing what God looks like. Jesus comes, opening our eyes to God’s presence already with us. 

 

Don Richardson 

Don Richardson was a Canadian missionary who went to West Papua, part of Indonesia in 1962. At that time, it was called Dutch New Guinea. He and his wife and their seven-month old baby went to a group of people known as the Sawi and began to learn their language. This was a first contact situation: Neither group knew anything about the other when they began their relationship. 

 

The Sawi lived in the jungle, separated from other people by their geographical isolation and by the fierceness of their culture. They especially valued people who could appear to be your friend, but then at the crucial moment could turn and betray you. So when Don and Carol told them the stories of Jesus, they laughed at Jesus. They thought that Judas was the hero and Jesus was just a fool. 

 

So difficult did the Richardsons' life become in the jungle village that they decided to pull out and leave. The villagers were engaged in constant fights with a neighbouring village. Life was hard and dangerous. And worst of all, they thought Judas was the hero of the story. 

 

Then Don and Carol told them that they were leaving. The villagers were upset. They valued these outsiders and wanted them to stay. The Richardsons said they could not stay in such constant fighting and warfare. Finally, the villagers called a meeting with their fiercest enemies from the neighbouring village. Someone from one village picked up his son and ran to his enemies. He gave them his son and ran back to his side, while his son was taken in to his enemies. Richardson asked what had happened, and they told him. 

 

The boy was a peace child, they said. As long as the child lived, the two villages would be at peace. “But what if someone betrays him?” “That person would be cursed. No one dare betray the peace child.” 

 

Even in their culture, “eternity” – a revelation of God’s presence was already there. Don and Carol told them that Jesus was the peace child, and the people saw the truth. Judas was no longer the hero; Jesus was. They turned to Christ in remarkable numbers and embraced the fuller revelation of God in Christ. 

 

Transition 

This is an extreme example, but it is not as unusual as you might think. In his book, Eternity in their Hearts, Richardson tells many more such stories. God never waits for the missionaries to show up, because God is a missionary God. Wherever people are, God is there, reaching out to them to heal our brokenness and bring us back to God. 

 

I think Richardson is right – that God has placed bits of the gospel in every culture – and so I assume that First Nations cultures also show evidence of the gospel, present in their culture long before White settlers came to North America. God has always been here, and we can learn about God from those who lived here before we did, even as we tell them the stories of Jesus. 

 

Neil, can you pick up from this point and give us some idea of how God was already here before the explicit preaching of the gospel?

 

At this point, Neil and Edith von Gunten, our guests for the morning, took over with the teaching of the tipi, from the Ojibwe First Nations people. I cannot replicate their presentation; I don't know enough. But they made the point effectively, showing how their hosts had taught them about God and God's relationship with us as they lived among First Nations in Canada. 

 

Steinbach Mennonite Church 

5 September 2021

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)

A Summer of Acts

We are planning to spend the next eight Sundays in the book of Acts – eight different episodes or stories, one for each week. This morning, I want to describe briefly how to read and apply the book of Acts, and then I want to practice what I preach, using chapter 1.

How to Read the Bible

These opening comments apply to the whole of Scripture, and especially to Acts. Remember this basic rule: The Bible was not written to us; the Bible was written for us.

Not to us: Acts was written to Gentiles (non-Jews) who were interested in who Jesus was. They were also interested in the group of Jewish believers who came into being as followers of Jesus. In Luke 1:1-4, the author tells us that he is writing so that “Theophilus”, who represents these non-Jewish seekers, can know the truth about Jesus. In Acts, the author continues the story [“The Story by Luke, volume 2”), so that they can know what happened to the followers of Jesus in the first 30 years or so.

The fact that Luke wrote to these particular people is important. He dealt with their issues – such as their concern that only Jews could become Christians. [Luke says: No! The gospel is for everyone!] He refers to events that we don’t know about and could assume that his readers did – such as the way that Paul can appeal to Caesar, the way that we appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. [Except, of course, that Paul, as a Roman citizen, knew that Caesar would hear his appeal.] This is the story of the first church in Jerusalem and Antioch and Rome, not of the Mennonite Church of Manitoba.

Written for us: Nevertheless, Acts was written for us. This is not an obvious point. The fact that the Bible is an old book, a very old book, means that we may wonder why we should read it so carefully. It is written to people who lived a long time ago and in a very different culture than we do. Why should we read it at all?

Luke-Acts claims to be the story about the Creator of the Universe coming into human existence. Jesus is God incarnate, the one in whom God comes to earth. The story of God’s coming in Jesus and of how humankind received Jesus and of how God transformed their lives is worth knowing.

My specialty is the study of culture. Sometimes we wonder if people from other cultures have anything in common with us, then I remember a quote from anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt: “People are more alike than cultures are different.” The fact is that the people in Acts are like us, and their experience of God’s presence is a lot like ours.

The Function of Story

We read the Bible as a whole – and the book of Acts in particular – as a story that shapes our lives, not primarily as a rule book that tells us what to do. Of course, the Bible has some prescriptive statements, such as “God has shown you what is good and what God requires of you: to do justice and love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” Similarly, Jesus gives us teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that may not be rules per se, but they are prescriptions about how to live. The point is that these prescriptions come in a story, and we don’t apply the “rules” without recognizing the larger story that shapes us into the kind of people God wants.

Our society also has a number of big stories that it tells us repeatedly. These stories shape us, even when we don’t realise what they are doing. Lois and I enjoy “Murdoch Mysteries”, and I find it interesting to listen to the subtext that comes through. There are ideas such as “People 100 years ago might have been decent people in their personal lives, but in fact as a whole they were prejudiced and bound by the rules of society in the 1900s. We are so fortunate to live in the 21^st Century, when we know what is really good for everyone.” I really like the series, but it is not obvious to me that our society is better or worse than other societies. We are better in some ways today and worse in others, so I resist the story’s shaping effect.

Nevertheless, we live with our culture’s stories, shaping us and moulding us even when we resist them. It is important, then, to pay attention to God’s story – not to ask, “Do we copy them in the way they acted?” but to allow God to shape and mould us into the kind of people God wants in this world. So we ask over and over again, “What kind of people was God shaping in Acts? How can we be more like them in God’s image?”

Acts 1

In the passage we read this morning from Acts 1, the disciples gather together in Jerusalem, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come as Jesus had instructed them. Listen to the story for its overall themes, not for specific things we should do.

An Example

My forebears in the Brethren in Christ Church thought that this chapter tells us how to choose ministers. A hundred years ago, they used a lottery for ministers based on Acts 1. When they needed a new minister to join the team that led the church, the elders would choose a slate of men they felt were qualified. In the selection service, then, each of the candidates would walk to the front and choose a Bible from the Bibles that had been placed there. Then they would open the Bible they had chosen. The one who found the piece of paper that had been placed in one Bible only was the new minister.

These dear brothers and sisters were sincere and full of faith, but I think they misread Acts 1. Even the New Testament did not hold to this model in other places. The only sense in which Paul won the lottery was that he was struck down on the road to Damascus. We have no suggestion that the deacons were chosen in Acts 6 by any form of lottery. Rather, they were simply chosen. It seems as though the precise form used is secondary to something deeper.

Finding that “something deeper” is what we want to do this Summer. We listen for the deeper matters that shaped the disciples’ lives. That deeper reality takes expression in new forms in our lives today. What is the “something deeper” in Acts 1? Two basic thoughts seem clear to me:

•          Jesus says, “Wait for the Spirit”, and the disciples wait in prayer.
•          Jesus says, “You will be my witnesses”, and the disciples become witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection throughout the rest of Acts.

 Bringing This Home

Two basic thoughts then: 1) We live in the presence of the Holy Spirit and by the power of the Holy Spirit; and 2) We are witnesses of what it means to express the reign of God in our lives in this world. This life in the Spirit is life in the kingdom. We are the ones whose lives show what Jesus looks like in today’s world. We are witnesses to the reality of the resurrection in Canada today. Let’s explore these two thoughts briefly.

Living in/by the Spirit: When we read the story of Jesus in the four gospels, that story continues in the world through the Holy Spirit. Jesus makes it clear in Acts 1 that he continues to be with the disciples through the Spirit. So we seek the Spirit of God. We open ourselves to the Spirit of God. We ask God continually for more and more of God’s Spirit.

That’s why the disciples spent so much time in prayer in the book of Acts. Someone has said that nothing important happens in Acts without the presence of the Spirit and without prayer. Do we want to know how to live in community? Pray about it. Do we wonder what shape our worship services should take? Pray about it. Do we wonder how to relate to our brothers and sisters at Manigotagan? Pray about it. We are used to making our plans and carrying them out. We’re Mennonites, and Mennos are into doing things and doing them well. Add prayer to the doing. Seek God’s Spirit in the doing. Recognize that as the poet says, “new occasions teach new duties” – that is, we ask again how God wants us to live today in the situations we face today.

Being Witnesses: In Acts 1, the apostles are to bear witness specifically to the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection was the manifestation of God’s kingdom in the world. As one commentator puts it: “In Luke, Jesus came preaching the kingdom, and in Acts, the apostles came preaching Jesus.” The coming of Jesus is the coming of God’s reign. We are witnesses to the reality of God’s Reign in our lives in this community. No matter how flawed we are, no matter how inadequate we feel, we make Jesus present as the body of Christ in our community.

Look at the book of Acts for a moment. Who are these apostles? Acts 1 names them: Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They choose Matthias to make out the Twelve. Later in the story, we meet Stephen and Barnabas and Phillip and Paul. Do you notice something? No women! Where were the women? After naming the Eleven, Luke adds these words: “They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Why are the women not named?

I know that the whole book does name some of the women in the story – Lydia, Dorcas, Sapphira, Priscilla, but the point is clear: The story gives more names of the men, even though the writer knew that the women were also there.

First Century Israel was a patriarchal society. The Roman Empire in the First Century was even more so. Becoming Christian elevated the status of women within the group somewhat, but it did not overturn the basic fact of the way that women were second class citizens. Paul tells us that in Christ there are no men or women – all are one in Christ Jesus [Galatians 3:11], but the lesson took a long time to percolate through. Even when it did take effect, male privilege reasserted itself. Yet God worked through these men and women! A flawed society, with a basic structure that contradicts our own egalitarian commitments deeply, yet God worked through people who had accepted the norms of their own time and place. Similarly, we are part of a flawed messed-up world, and we ourselves have our own problems. These do not disqualify us from being witnesses to God’s presence. The only requirement is that we open ourselves to God’s presence in our lives. God is ready to work in us, no matter how inadequate we think we are.

Conclusion

There you have it. We will spend a Summer of Acts listening to stories of God’s work in our world. These stories shape us, because the book of Acts is still being written in you and me and in this church. When God’s Spirit moves in us, and we act in our community and in our world, we become God’s witnesses to the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Part of what I am saying is that we are witnesses: We tell our stories. I want to finish with a memory from my own experience. Back in 1981 or 1982, we lived in Lancaster County, where I was a new pastor at Speedwell Heights BIC Church. I remember working on a sermon based on Psalm 1: “Blessed is the one who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly … That person is planted by rivers of water, and they shall not wither, and whatever they do will prosper.” I was struggling with the sermon, because I knew that not everyone in my congregation who loved the Lord was prospering. I went to a chair in our living room (which was beside my study) and sat down to think about this. I had some sort of out-of-body experience. I can’t describe it better than that. I was standing on a hillside, from where I could see three crosses. It wasn’t a vision. I was just there.

That was the only answer I ever had – to see Jesus hanging on the cross and know that whatever the people in my church were hurting with, Jesus was hurting with it too. Stanley Hauerwas has said that the only way the world can know the gospel of the cross is true is by reading the life of the church in their community.

This example from my life was a private and personal experience. We need communal and social examples as well. The life of the church is communal, and it is our life together that is the most powerful witness for the reality of Christ’s reign on earth. We model our life on the life of Jesus, witnesses to the truth of God’s coming into our world. If the congregation has a cross-shaped life, people can know the gospel is true. That’s what Jesus was saying. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses.”

Steinbach Mennonite Church

7 July 2019 

Texts

Psalm 78

Verses 1 to 7: My people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth with a parable; I will utter hidden things, things from of old—things we have heard and known, things our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.

He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.

Acts 1

Jesus Taken Up Into Heaven

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” 

...

Matthias Chosen to Replace Judas

Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said, “Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. He was one of our number and shared in our ministry.”

With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.) “For,” said Peter, “it is written in the Book of Psalms: ‘May his place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in it,’ and, ‘May another take his place of leadership.’ Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”

So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

A Bit More About Missions

Throughout the past year we have been reflecting on a recent sermon. Usually, our morning speaker goes back to the previous Sunday’s sermon and presents ideas and questions that occurred to home. I’m going back three weeks to my own sermon – on the way that God calls us into mission. I emphasized the comprehensive nature of God’s call. It includes everyone, what John the Revelator calls “all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues”.

Near the end of the sermon, I made an important point – that we cannot give away what we don’t have. We are witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection only if we have experienced Jesus’ resurrection ourselves. I want to reflect a bit on this thought, as we come to the end of our Men’s Prayer Breakfast Year. To do so, I’m going to read an extended excerpt from the Break Point commentaries, started by Chuck Coulson. This commentary was written by Dustin Messer.

“I’ll say this for you, you’re not a jerk.” That comment changed the way I thought about my faith and the way I go about sharing it. Some context may help. I was sitting across the table from a friend who was exploring the Christian faith. She had no background in Christianity except for a fire and brimstone style evangelist she’d occasionally hear preach on the quad of her college. The conversation started around the difference between the Christian understanding of grace, but quickly moved toward the Christian sexual ethic.

She politely but firmly told me that she found the ethic I hold … was regressive, oppressive, and otherwise morally bankrupt. The up side: she left thinking I wasn’t a jerk. The down side: my “unjerkliness” made no difference with regard to her faith, or lack thereof. … Our winsomeness won’t carry the luggage we think it will because people aren’t rejecting the faith because they don’t feel welcome, but because they don’t want in. …

… Let’s go back to the conversation that got me thinking about this. By saying I wasn’t a jerk, my friend was telling me I wasn’t the obstacle. The reason she wasn’t interested in Jesus wasn’t because of who I was, it was because of who He was. In his brilliant little book Indispensable, David Cassidy emphasizes this very point:

Whoever Jesus was, he was not a ‘nice’ person spouting lofty platitudes about peace; no, Jesus was a threat, despite his goodness—or, rather, precisely because of his goodness. Jesus was good but was considered as good as dead by his opponents, both religious and secular, because he was everything they weren’t and the people knew it. For those leaders, it was ‘Jesus or me,’ not ‘Jesus for me’! …

Our kindness comes from our love for God and neighbor, not because we find it to be an effective strategy. In this way, the post-Christian world in which we find ourselves in today isn’t that different from the pre-Christian world of yesterday. Now, like then, people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as deficient, but because they view Jesus and the church as deficient.

You hear that critical line: “people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as deficient, but because they view Jesus and the church as deficient.” To put it another way, if we people around us think that Jesus has nothing to offer them and that the church is irrelevant, we’re wasting our time inviting them inside.

So, are we the problem? Is Jesus the problem? Sometimes the deficiency in the church is just that we don’t follow Jesus well. We aren’t any different than people outside the church, and they rightly wonder why they need to become a Christian to be just like they are now. The cure for that deficiency is to follow Jesus. That’s the idea behind my saying earlier, “We can’t give what we don’t have.”

There’s another more serious problem though. Sometimes the problem that people see is what Jesus wants, indeed requires, of us. Jesus says over and over again, “Follow me.” We use words like, “Jesus is Lord of my life.” Really? Well, who wants that? We call ourselves “slaves/servants of Christ.” That feels like a problem to people in our society.

The watchword of our society is “Look out for number one.” Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone push you around. The idea that we should be “slaves of Christ” is not attractive to a self-confident inner-oriented society. That we should give our lives on behalf of others and on behalf of someone who died 2,000 years ago just is not attractive at all.

What’s the cure to this deficiency? How do we reach out to people who don’t want what we have? Let me suggest two simple and vital steps.

1)      Be good. Be kind. The way that the writer I quoted begins is good: “I’ll say this for you. You’re not a jerk. Given that many people around us think Christians are jerks, it’s worthwhile when we develop relationships in which they can learn to know us and trust us. If we have strong relationships, we may even be able to make the case for Jesus.

2)      Being good is not nearly enough: Be vulnerable. Be honest about yourself. Life is hard, and everyone – sooner or later – experiences the brokenness that goes with being alive. If we have been good and kind, and if we have shown that following Jesus is intellectually credible, and if we are honest about our doubts and hurts and our own broken times, then, when a friend falls under the wheels of life, they may hear what we’ve been saying and check us out. Then they find that Jesus and the church no longer appear deficient. Then we can give what we have.

Being honest and vulnerable about our experiences of life and of God’s presence is the more important of these two steps. You don’t have to be a good apologist to tell admit your brokenness and to tell your story. You just have to have a story. “You can’t give what you don’t have.”

1 June 2019

Men’s Prayer Supper

Steinbach Mennonite Church