THE SPIRIT IN ANTIOCH/APPLETON

Scripture Reading: Acts 11:19-26, 13:1-3

Reverend Stephen Savides

I want to talk about the hero of the book of Acts this morning. But first, I have to complain to all of you that it was very unfair of you to have had such a Search Committee. Each one of these people – John Toussaint, your chair, and Mary Haller, the Vice Chair, and Pat McConnell who was my contact with the committee, and Jann Kostecke, your Church Moderator, and Curt and Anna and Katy and Steve and Carol and Joan and Paul and Sue – each one of them is so bright and committed and capable and thoughtful and sweet and, of course, made me fall in love with this church before I had even set foot in the building. I hardly think that was fair. I thought to myself, there have to be some mean people in this congregation. They can’t all be so terrific. And then I met your Church Council. Why are you laughing? What I was going to say is they were just as wonderful as your Search Committee. And last night at the reception I was again continually impressed, touched, and delighted by the kindness and loving hospitality shown me and my family.

So I enter this Sunday with deep appreciation for this wonderful congregation and genuine praise for God, who, I hope, trust, and believe, has brought us together this morning.

I also want to reassure you that I won’t burden this congregation or any one of you with expectations of perfection. The church is a human institution and we do ourselves no favors by not facing up to our humanity openly and honestly. Maybe we could make a deal – I won’t think you’re perfect if you agree not to think I am. In the United Church of Christ we call Pastors, not heroines or heroes.

And our reading reinforces that fact to us. The Apostle Paul, on the road to Damascus, was visited by the Spirit of Christ, transformed, converted, and commissioned to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles. Paul makes his way to Jerusalem, meets James, the head of the church, and Peter, disciple of Jesus Christ. There he tells his story, confesses his faith, and shares his Spirit-given commission to reach out to the Gentiles. James and Peter and the Jerusalem Church, alarmed at the heated passion Paul arouses in the Jews in Jerusalem, send him to Tarsus, back home to his tent-making, his old life. Paul’s mission is unfulfilled. The Gentiles awaiting the Gospel message receive only silence. The Spirit’s hopes are thwarted. The church, even the early Jerusalem Church headed by Jesus’ brother and guided by Jesus’ favorite disciple, tells the Holy Spirit, “No – we don’t understand – it’s too dangerous - we can’t – we won’t –no.”

Not a very heroic picture, is it? As much as we yearn for heroic leaders to inspire us, often they do just what James and Peter did: they don’t take the risk; they take the safe way out.

So there sat Paul, stuck at Tarsus. But the Holy Spirit wasn’t done. As our Epistle Reading begins, Luke suddenly transports us to Antioch of all places. In the whole of the Bible, we had only heard of Antioch once before and only in passing. Antioch was an administrative capital, built up to maintain the Roman hold on Syria. It wasn’t the biggest city around. It wasn’t the most important city in the area. But it had a vigorous arts, intellectual, and religious scene that made it a melting pot and marketplace of ideas. Sounds a little bit like Appleton, doesn’t it?

And there, in Appleton, I mean, Antioch, something incredible happened. The Christian Church took a quantum leap forward. Luke tells us: “… they spoke to the Hellenists, proclaiming the Lord Jesus. The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number became believers and turned to the Lord.” They spoke to the Gentiles. They spoke to the Gentiles! Oh my God, they spoke to the Gentiles!

It wasn’t Paul who first spoke to the Gentiles. It wasn’t Peter who first brought them the Gospel. It wasn’t James or John or Mary or Johanna nor any other heroine and hero of the early Christian Church. It was some folks at Antioch whose names we are not even told.

Now this is the bold gospel move the Spirit has been working toward since the day of Pentecost. And who did it? Who started it? Not Paul. Not Peter. The people, the congregation at Antioch.

Why did they do it, those folks in Antioch? Who gave them permission to do such an incredible and ground-breaking thing?

Well, like most major bold moves forward in Christian history, it probably happened because somebody was reading their Bible:

- Maybe those folks in Antioch were looking through the Torah and saw where it was written that Israel was to be a light unto the nations and they took that to mean ALL the nations – that God was looking for a relationship with everybody, not just Israel.

- Maybe they read in the Isaiah scroll where God says that even foreigners and eunuchs are welcome in the holy temple and God’s loving heart.

- Maybe they listened to that strange and marvelous story of Jesus encountering a Syro-Phoenician woman, a gentile, who pleads for the healing of her daughter. And that woman’s faith is so tenacious that Jesus does it, Jesus himself reaches across the great religious and cultural divide and God’s healing power of love flows out – to a Gentile.

They were probably reading their Bible. And that’s when the miracle of church happens – when these three things are brought together: community, scripture, and Spirit.

That’s what happened in Antioch. Community, scripture, and Spirit came together, God’s love was allowed to break down boundaries, the church was changed, and the world was changed. It was the Spirit through the people at Antioch.

And that’s the same Spirit we claim here today in Appleton.

We believe that the Holy Spirit is here, right now, in all of you, in each of us. And that it is the Spirit that makes all the difference.

How many of you ever seen the movie The Lion King, the animated Disney classic? I really liked it when it first came out, especially sitting next to my then little boy and watching him watch the movie. Something I’m sure very few know about is that they actually converted the movie into a stage musical. How many of you knew that?

Paul, my son, and I were both older when we went to see it on stage, Julie Taymor’s revolutionary revisioning of The Lion King. And it was breathtaking, not just because of the costumes, not just because of the masks and drums and movement. I think it was because the actors were telling their story, a story of African pride and identity. There was something spirit-breathed about it, something that made it live and reach and rise in each of us.

That’s what the church is like when the Spirit breathes in us. And we believe that the Holy Spirit is here, right now, in all of you, in each of us. But the question is, “How we will react to it?” Will we react like Peter and James and seek to control, to squelch that Spirit? Or will we react like those unnamed members of the congregation in Antioch? Like them, will this community gather around the scriptures, and, powered by the Spirit, allow God’s love to flow through us to break down the boundaries of this world?

On occasion, the word you hear thrown around to describe this age we’re living in is “post-Christian,” as if our society and culture has grown so sophisticated that it has simply outgrown Christianity, leaving our quaint and antiquated beliefs behind. But, of course, that’s exactly wrong. We actually live in a pre-Christian culture, a culture that lives in tremendous ignorance of the Gospel. Forgiveness, nonviolence, self-sacrifice, individual responsibility, social conscience, conversion, transformation – these are things largely unknown to the larger culture.

- We lock up sinners in our culture – we don’t seek to transform them or, heaven forbid, forgive them;

- In our culture we get what we want by force, our outflanking our competitors, by beating down our enemies, by returning evil for evil so the evildoers know they’re in for a fight;

- And the way we achieve our personal goals here is through blind luck - by the lottery or by winning American Idol or getting the others voted off the island - not by hard work and relentless dedication;

- And because in this culture we believe the world is ruled by chance, we needn’t concern ourselves with justice. So when we hear about inequality or children starving or world poverty or global warming, we’ll just turn the channel and watch something else.

You get my point - so many people in this culture are not post-Christian, they are PRE-Christian. For if they don’t know about forgiveness and nonviolence and self-sacrifice and personal and social responsibility, they don’t know the first things about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

That’s why it’s so important for us to remember these stories of the book of Acts about the early church being led by the Spirit to encounter the Pre-Christian Greek and Roman world. They remind us of our evangelical purpose; they remind us of the spiritual power flowing through us; they remind us of the true hero or heroine of these stories – the Holy Spirit – who finds us, fills us, and sends us out.

Julie Johnson just quit her job. About two months ago it was now. It’s partly my fault. I got her involved in the Haiti partnership supported by the Southeast Wisconsin Association, taking my place on the partnership board. She traveled down to Haiti several times, mostly on medical missions, but a couple years ago she helped lay the foundation for a new building in Artibonite. The building would be used as school, church, medical clinic, and community center.

After the U.S. helped with the ouster of Aristide, the violence in Haiti got so bad none of our mission teams could go down there. Things finally settled down to such a point that, a couple months ago, Julie returned to Artibonite. The foundation of the building was still there but nothing else. Apparently our Association simply stopped paying attention and so the project languished. You can imagine her outrage. She took a walk up the road and came across an orphanage. She got there right about nightfall. There were over 40 infants and young children there and only one nurse. The nurse was so exhausted that Julie found her in a closet, asleep. Dysentery was making its terrible way through the orphanage. There were few cloth diapers. Many of the children were laying in their own filth. So Julie went to work, cleaning up the kids the best she could. That’s how she spent the night. The next morning was when she decided to quit her job.

After two months she has raised about $25,000 of the $50,000 required to finish the building in Artibonite. Soon she’ll be turning more of her attention to the orphanage.

Frederick Buechner tells us that “calling” is when our deep joy meets the world’s great need. What can you say about what happened to Julie but that the Spirit called her, that the Spirit is flowing through her to reach out in mercy and justice. The Spirit is breaking down the barriers between Haiti and Watertown just like the Spirit, through this congregation, has been breaking down the barriers between Appleton and Kenya.

Of course the Spirit is not just sending us out far away but close to home as well.

A few days after hearing that the Search Committee wanted to bring me up here for a face-to-face interview, our whole family came up here to Appleton to have a good look around. We agreed that if God truly was calling us to come to Appleton, then God was calling all five of us, not just me. So we came up here to look around, check things out, to ask the question: “Holy Spirit, is THIS the place?” Like just about everybody who comes to visit, sooner or later we ended up at the mall. And walking around there with the rest of the Gentiles, we suddenly stumbled across a sign board: “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton.” As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t just a sign, but THE sign. I still don’t know the names of the people who put up that sign, who decided to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. But I know their community. THIS one. You had me at “God is Still Speaking.”

We believe that the Spirit who was at Antioch is the same Spirit who is here with us today in Appleton. So this morning we gather together as community, we listen together to our scriptures, the story of our faith, and we ask the Spirit to speak; to speak to all of us together and direct us as a church; to speak to each one of us and call us to God’s specific mission and purpose for each one of us.

What will it ask of you? And how will you respond? One last thing – the Bible tells us it doesn’t take a hero or a heroine to change the world. Just a willing people. Just an open heart. Just somebody like you.

Amen.

Sermon preached by Reverend Stephen Savides at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on June 10, 2007.