The Story Chapter 28 - New Beginnings

There came a point on Tuesday afternoon where I just had to push the chair away from the desk and go and pray for a while.

 

It’s been a hard start to the year for many reasons, and as I came to prepare for today my head was swimming with so many different things I just couldn’t get any kind of focus at all.

 

And a text that should have been inspiring me was weighing me down. Pentecost. The birth of the church. So many amazing things happening – the gift of the Spirit, the conversion of thousands, the healings and miracles, the dramatic turnaround in Saul’s life, Peter’s preaching to the Gentiles.  So much going on in this Chapter of the story. But what on earth was it saying to us in our wee church community?

 

I went round and round in circles for ages trying to settle on something and getting more and more frustrated as I went.

 

You’ll remember the story about the wee boy whose dad was a minister. One day he went into the study  while his father was doing his preparation and said “Dad, what are you doing?”

 

“I’m writing my sermon for Sunday” he replied.

 

“How do you do that?” said the wee boy.

 

“Well, I read the passages in the Bible, I think and I pray about them, and then God tells me what to say”.

 

“Oh right”, said the wee boy. ”If God tells you what to say, why’s everything on that page scored out?”

 

It was one of those days; so I took solace in two of my three preferred safety valves.

 

I took myself away and prayed for a while. I confided in Rhona over a cup of coffee. And I’d have allowed myself a reflective cigar, sitting out on the patio steps. But that only works when the sun’s shining, and it wasn’t on Tuesday afternoon.

 

But the prayer and the chat helped. And from them came the word I needed to bring this morning. A simple word for every single one of us. “You will be my witnesses” said Jesus to the disciples. And he says the very same to you and me.

 

You will be my witnesses.

 

Now if you’re anything like me, you’ll be sitting there hoping for a get out clause; maybe even doing a mental inventory of all the reasons why Jesus couldn’t possibly be talking about you at this point. Jesus only uses shiny, perfect, together people – folk who’ve got it all sussed, doesn’t he? So you’re automatically disqualified.

 

Think again.

 

I know I’ve read this to you before, but I think it bears repeating in this context.  This is an imaginary reply that Jesus got when he submitted

the CV’s of the twelve to the Jerusalem Better Business Agency.

 

Dear Mr Christ,

 

Thank you for submitting the CV’s of the twelve men you have picked for managerial positions in your new organization. All of them have taken our series of tests and we have now analysed the results through our computer software. After having arranged personality interviews for each of them with our psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant, it is the opinion of our staff that most of your nominees are lacking in background, education and vocational aptitude for the enterprise.

 

Your recruits seem to have no concept of teamwork. Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. Andrew has no discernable leadership skills. The two brothers, James and John, are impetuous and place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas shows a skeptical attitude that would tend to undermine morale. Matthew has been blacklisted by the Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, definitely have radical leanings, and registered a high score on the manic-depressive scale.

 

One of the candidates however, shows real potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness, meets people well, and has contacts in high places. He is highly motivated, ambitious, and responsible. We therefore recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man.

 

If it were left to the experts, only Judas would have been chosen as a disciple. The others were too bullish, too insipid, too cynical to make the grade. And yet they’re the ones in the room when Jesus comes calling after the resurrection. Not Judas.

 

And to the best of our knowledge, they were still more or less the same people. A little but older and wiser, maybe, but otherwise not much changed. It takes a lot for adults to change.

 

One of the disciples’ first questions to the risen Jesus is ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” which sounds very much like they’re still expecting Jesus to fulfil all those old Messianic expectations about getting rid of the Romans.

 

Most of their time, following Jesus, they kept getting it wrong, and  even now it looks like they still haven’t got their heads around what God’s doing. But they will.

 

The Upper Story was never about a political revolution, but a spiritual one. And these folk gathered around Jesus, with all their flaws, with all their doubts, with all their failings are the means to that end. You will be my witnesses, he told them. And that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is exactly what they became.

 

And for the truth about Jesus to keep spreading in our time, it’s what we too must become. Witnesses.

 

So what is a witness? Well according to the Collins English Dictionary, a witness is a person who can testify to events or facts within his or her own knowledge.

 

When I witness to something, I’m talking about my own experience of it. I was there. I saw it happen, or heard what was said.

 

And what the disciples had to offer the world, after Jesus’ ascension, was just that – first hand experience of the son of God. They’d seen the miracles, they’d heard his teaching, they’d watched the exorcisms, they’d gone out themselves in his power, two by two. They were his closest companions. And now, after the cross, they’d been in his company again – they’d spent 40 days with him on the other side of death and they knew what they’d seen.

 

I’ve always loved the beginning of the first letter of John because you sense that urgency in what John’s trying to get across. He’s desperate for you to understand that he’s writing as a witness – someone who’s experienced these things:

 

¹That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. ²The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

 

And in Peter’s preaching throughout the book of Acts, we hear the same kind of thing time and time again. God glorified this man Jesus. We saw his miracles. We heard his teaching. You took him and had him killed, but God has raised him from the dead. And we are all witnesses of that fact.

 

That was their firsthand testimony. And for it they were mocked, imprisoned and flogged. But the fear that made them run from Gethsemane, and hide in a locked room ‘til that first Easter Sunday, was long gone.

 

Why? Because at Pentecost they received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit. “I will not leave you as orphans” Jesus had said. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”

 

And on the day of Pentecost, just as the prophet Joel had said, the Spirit was poured out as never before.

 

Throughout the Story we’ve seen how God wants to be with his people. Now, through the Spirit, God dwells not just with, but in his people. The flames of Pentecost come to rest on the heads of the apostles as a sign of the Spirit who is now burning within them.

 

And this too, was part of their witness. Peter told the crowds: “Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and for your children and all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call”

They were still the men they always were – but strengthened by the Spirit, they found the courage to share what they had experienced of Jesus and their witness inspired others to believe.  The church was born, and the rest is history.

 

You will be my witnesses, Jesus said to them.

 

And he says the very same thing to us.

 

But what can we witness to, you may be asking? We weren’t there. We haven’t experienced the kind of things the disciples did.

 

No – but we have our own experience of God to draw on. It might not be as flashy, but it’s no less valid for that.

 

That time you found that unexpected strength that came out of the blue. That time you managed to ride things out, even though they seemed intolerable for a spell. That sense of call to a particular task or challenge that seems to have God written all over it. That momentary sense of peace or joy you hadn’t anticipated, but that raised a silent song of thanksgiving within your heart.

 

It’s all witness. It doesn’t have to be flashy. It just has to be honest.

 

I’ll always remember sitting with a parishioner who was very much the quiet type; very little speech out of him at the best of times, let alone God-talk. He was dying and he knew it. And out of the blue as we reminisced, he spoke about a couple of times in his life when he’d especially felt the nearness of God in difficult circumstances. He was absolutely convinced that God had been with him in those times and his eyes were moist as he spoke about them. Out of his quiet soul, he was witnessing to what he knew of God.

 

I think of a woman I knew in Wellington church in Glasgow. Single, quite straight-laced, in her 60’s. She came over as rather prim but she was a lovely kind woman when you got to know her. And it seemed like every 6 months she had a different foster child in her arms at the morning service. Dozens must have passed through her home over the years. The love of God in her, reaching out to these wee ones to give them the care they hadn’t got at home. Her life itself was a witness to the kind of God she believed in.

 

Jesus once said that the prostitutes and tax collectors were entering the kingdom before the Pharisees. I read an article a few months back by a guy called Chris Arnade who was a physics graduate and worked on Wall Street for 20 years. He was very vocal in his atheism, but three years spent visiting and photographing the homeless in the South Bronx challenged his worldview because he kept encountering people who maintained faith in the most desperate of circumstances. He writes:

 

In these last three years, out from behind my computers, I have been reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes. Or, in Biblical terms, we are all sinners.

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those with the comfort of having done well in life.

 

The homeless, evangelising a rich, sceptical intellectual who seemed far beyond the reach of the church.

 

These kinds of stories show us that you don’t have to be a superhero; a spiritual giant, to be a witness. You just have to know Jesus for yourself and be honest about it and live it out. Listen to what Paul says to his friends in Corinth.

 

²⁶Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹so that no-one may boast before him. ³⁰It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God.”

 

 

Come back with me to that upper room and that rag-tag bunch of men Jesus chose as his disciples. Not many of them looked like they had it all sorted. Far from it.  But the one thing they had in common – the one thing that really mattered – was that they had been with Jesus. They’d sought him out. They’d listened to him. They’d given things up to be with him. They were serious about following him.

 

Are we? Are we serious enough to be reading things that will help us grow in our faith? Or learn more about the life of prayer? Would we take our courage in our hands and come to a Bible Study or a course that the church is putting on so we can grow in our understanding and faith? Do we have something to say when people ask us what it all means. Why we bother coming to church?

 

Whoever we are; whatever stage of life we’re at; whatever our circumstances, every single one of us can be a witness

 

But the truth that goes hand in hand with that, is that the closer our walk with Christ, the more we’ll have to share from our own experience.

 

And share it we must. The people of this and the next generation are relying on us.

 

Paul, the great evangelist to the Gentiles, puts it this way in his letter to the Romans: “Everyone who calls out to the Lord for help will be saved. But how can they call to him for help if they have not believed? And how can they believe if they have not heard the message? And how can they hear if the message is not proclaimed? And how can the message be proclaimed if the messengers are not sent out? As the scripture says, “How wonderful is the coming of messengers who bring good news!”

 

Messengers. Witnesses empowered by the Spirit of Pentecost to share our experience of Christ. That’s what we’re called to be.

 

Amen