Hold On

 

Revelation 22, selected verses; Acts 16:16-34

May 8, 2016

Paul and Silas was bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Paul and Silas began to shout, jail doors opened and they walked out. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Only thing that we did wrong, was staying in the wilderness a day too long. …

Only thing that we did right, was the day we rose up and started to fight. …

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

You have a right to the tree of life, and you can come on into the city of God by way of the main gate. No walls nor prison bars will hold you back. Neither your race, nor your gender, nor your sexuality, nor your economic situation will keep you out. The one who testifies to these things – the Alpha and the Omega, surely he is coming soon. Hold on. Hold on.

This is essentially the proclamation that Paul and Silas are making as they travel. Along the way, the text for today tells us, they pick up a fellow traveller who, it turns out, is annoying. Now this is interesting, because the slave girl who attaches herself to Paul and Silas is not contradicting them. In fact, she’s pretty much gives an “amen” to their testimony:

“These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”

I supposed that might have been alright at first, but, apparently, after several days, it got bothersome. The text is silent on the precise nature of the annoyance, but if we pay attention to the details of the story it begins to make sense, and, I believe, it begins to speak to us anew for our own time.

To begin with, the interruption comes from a slave girl whose owners are making a good deal of money off of her special spiritual gift.

As Luke A. Powery, dean of the Duke University Chapel describes it:

A gifted girl is enslaved for the economic gain of the enslaver. Her gifts produce profits. W.E.B. Dubois notes that such profiting stems from the gifts of the vulnerable and powerless, particularly the “gift of sweat and brawn.” And he asks the poignant question, “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” What he says of Africans in America is true for all of those oppressed under the mighty hand of pharaohs to build an empire in which they are deemed second-class citizens or perhaps not human at all.[1]

Paul becomes annoyed, the story tells us, after several days. In that time, apparently, he discerned the reality of the girl’s condition – a reality the Dubois would have recognized and understood well. Would that we might discern such realities in so little time.

The girl’s owners were clearly more interested in the profits than in the person. We know this because, as soon as Paul orders the spirit out of the girl, her owners turn on Paul and Silas, bring false charges against them, lie about them, turn the crowd against them by painting them as foreigners and aliens, and, then convince the civil authorities to imprison them.

Thus Paul and Silas are seen as disturbing the peace by interrupting an ancient tradition that remains an ongoing reality: the powerful profiting off the labor and the gifts of those who have no power within the economy or politics of their society.

As Powery goes on to say:

Paul and Silas resist the social status quo due to the “way of salvation” that they are following. Their resistance to the status quo, even unjust economic systems, is not cheap. They engage in costly discipleship. Their discipleship of resistance is serious risky business, a matter of life and death.[2]

As a result, they wind up in jail.

Somehow I imagine that their time in jail was not quite the same as my own. I’m guessing the civil authorities who imprisoned them did not ask if being shackled would hurt their shoulders, and the jailers probably didn’t take much care to not muss the prisoners’ clothes. Clearly, Paul and Silas were not processed in a couple of hours and set free with polite good-byes and promises to “be on your side when I retire next year.”

No, they are pretty much left to rot in jail. The cost of their discipleship was steep, and certainly a higher price than I have ever been called to pay. So what do they do?

They sing. I cannot hear that story of singing in jails without thinking of the freedom songs of the American Civil Rights Movement. Now obviously, Paul and Silas were not singing the songs that African Americans sang in southern jail cells in the 1950s and 60s. The chain runs the other direction, back to whatever songs of liberation were sung in the ancient middle east. But I like to think it went something like this:

O freedom. O freedom. O freedom over me; and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.

No more hunger. No more hunger. No more hunger over me; and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.

There’ll be singing. There’ll be singing. There’ll be singing over me; and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.

This too, of course, is part of the proclamation of “the way of salvation” that Paul and Silas are preaching. Their proclamation is, ultimately, an invitation. “Come, come within the gates of the holy city; come, come to the tree of life and rest in its shade; come, all you who are thirsty, and drink from the wells of salvation.”

A friend of mine is working on a book on the improvised life, under the working title Improvising with God. The key to improv – the first principle, as I understand it – is “saying ‘yes … and.’” In other words, whatever life throws your way – the given reality of the moment – is accepted, but only as the starting place for a collaborative project of moving ahead.

In improv comedy, for example, one player might say to the other, “that is a seriously hideous shirt you have on there.” To which the second player might respond, “yes … and it smells terrible, too.”

Improvising with God is about listening for the invitation, the intimations of the divine, that still, small voice that whispers, “come and follow me,” and responding with, “yes, and I’ll bring my best to this moment.”

It’s about holding out, holding on, and reaching for more. It’s about holding out a hand to receive an invitation. It’s about holding on to the given moment – though holding it lightly, because it’s ultimately about reaching for a transformed reality.

My writer friend put out an invite the other day for stories about such experiences, and I thought back to the summer of 2000, when, on a family vacation to the Florida Gulf Coast, I heard that still, small voice agitating me about speaking out on an overture then before the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Amendment O, as it was called, would have barred all Presbyterian clergy and elders from participating in any service that approximated a wedding for same-gender couples, and would have barred sessions from approving the use of church property or facilities for any such services.

While visiting Civil Rights historical sites in my birth-state of Alabama, I was pondering the issue – not how I would vote when it came to my presbytery, for that was a no brainer. No, I was pondering whether to cast a quiet vote and keep my mouth shut, or to stand up and speak my convictions.

During the trip we visited the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Dexter Avenue dates back to the immediate post-Civil War era. It’s exterior was constructed, in part, with bricks gleaned by freed slaves from the rubble of the former slave-holding cells just down the hill from where the church stands.

The founders of the church said, “yes, those were slave cells, and we will build from them a house of worship to the God of liberation.”

Dexter Avenue was the first congregation that Martin Luther King, Jr., served. It’s a small church, with a cramped fellowship hall in its basement, and, in 1954, the community gathered in that small space and said, “yes, one of our own has been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the city bus, and now we’ll all give up all the seats and boycott the whole system.”

Dr. King, himself, said, “yes, I am young, inexperience, frightened, and I will give my all to serve my people and our God.”

“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come.”

This is our invitation to a new way of living. It is the same invitation that Paul and Silas proclaimed. It is the same invitation that Dr. King proclaimed. It is the invitation proclaimed by those who have sought and made justice and peace in all times and places, in ways both grand in scope and deeply personal. It is the invitation that Jesus offered, and offers still.

So hold out your hand, and hold on to promise and invitation, to faith and to hope; and say, “yes.” Amen.

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[1] Luke A. Powery in Andrews, Ottoni-Wilhelm, Allen eds. Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: A Lectionary Commentary, Year C (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2012) 244.

[2] Ibid. 245.

Purple

Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29

May 1, 2016

Lydia could have made a bundle over the past couple of weeks, what with all the Prince memorials and tributes. I’m betting that the dealers in purple cloth have pretty much sold out in the days since the death of the great purple one.

We don’t like to think about such things, but the deaths of celebrities remind us of our own mortality. We’d prefer to remain distracted. That’s perfectly reasonable, and all the more so these days when we life such profoundly distracted lives to begin with.

Seriously: how many times in the average hour do you reckon you check your device? How often do you walk down the sidewalk checking e-mail or texts or Facebook or whatever other communication you check regularly? How often do you check your device while you’re watching something on TV?

I’m not even going to ask how often you check when you’re in the car. I’ll just hope that, at best, you only do that if you’re stopped, preferably pulled over to the side of the road. (Seriously, distracted driving is deadly – don’t do it. Nothing is worth it.)

I ask these questions because I’m pretty confident that most of us live pretty connected lives, and many of us are tethered to our devices practically all of our waking hours. I was on the bus the other day, and about half way to church I put my phone in my pocket to take a look around. Every other head on the bus was bent to a screen. Then I looked out the window and the first half dozen pedestrians we passed were also staring at screens, including one poor soul who started crossing an intersection in one direction while buried in a screen, only to realize midway across that she’d actually wanted to cross the other street. It was like a video game come to life. Heck, I’ve seen cyclists riding down the road checking their phones.

I actually kinda admire their coordination. I’d kill myself trying to do that, and it wouldn’t have anything to do with attention deficit.

But attention deficit is, of course, the point.

When I wrote that sentence last week – sitting upstairs at the Northside Social – I paused, and, swear to God, I moved the cursor on my Mac to the tab with Facebook open on it. Even in the midst of drafting a sermon that pivots on the question of what we pay attention to I was struggling to pay attention; to keep focused on the words and the moment and the process; to avoid the distraction presented by omnipresent media; to avoid the temptation of limitless social and digital connectivity.

I think it’s safe to say that we are the most connected generation in the history of the world. I cannot imagine that we are not also the most distracted and distractible.

Distraction is nothing new under the sun. After all, the great turn in the book of Acts – represented grammatically in the passage we just heard by the change in voice from third person to first person – comes about because Paul has a vision in the night that distracts him from the course he was on and sends him off in an entirely new direction: toward Macedonia.

This story recounts, or, at least symbolizes, a critical moment in the life of the church as it grew beyond its original community and spread out into all the world. Macedonia meant heading into the Gentile world. It meant that Paul, an observant Jew, would be breaking bread with all kinds of people who were outside of his normal circles.

The expansion of the Jesus movement depended upon the support and the leadership of women such as Lydia. Talk about moving outside of the comfort zone for a Jewish man of his time. Surely this was a stretch for Paul.

Not much is known about Lydia or the others, but the detail about the purple cloth is suggestive. Due to the costs of creating the color, purple cloth was exclusive to the wealthy, to the princes of the world, as it were. A woman in the first century who had her own business dealing with a wealthy clientele was, no doubt, formidable. Heck, maybe she even had her own “woman card.”

Conservative evangelicals are prone to quoting the Pauline letters to “keep women in their proper place,” but they would do well to pay attention to the actual story of Paul. When confronted with an obviously gifted and accomplished woman, he doesn’t try to mansplain to her about church, about her place in the world, or even about Jesus. Instead, he accepts her hospitality and honors her leadership in her community even as he shares his vision of the good news with them.

It is, in its way, an exercise in the art of leadership through powerlessness, or, better, through letting go of the power of privilege. It takes an incredibly careful attention to the present moment, the present human context, the relationships, and the personalities to exercise such leadership. It takes, that is to say, deep compassion, humility, and love.

We could use such leadership today, when what we seem to have, instead, is bombastic, self-centered, power-hungry people pretending to seats of power.

The present moment calls for the church as clearly as Paul’s midnight vision. “Come over and help us,” the broader culture says in all of its brokenness. The moment calls for the church not as an institution sitting in judgment, but rather it calls us to show forth a way of leadership from below, of leadership through letting go of power, of leadership through compassion, humility, and love.

It’s convenient for those of us in the Mainline tradition that we have seen our cultural power and position shrink almost to nothing over the past half century. We may not have wanted to let go of the position we occupied in the middle of the 20^th century when cultural commentators could accurately describe something like the Protestant Establishment that held sway over American social and political life in the 1950s. But, for all kinds of well-documented reasons, that consensus establishment fell apart in subsequent decades.

To be sure, the fall was accompanied by much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from the increasingly empty pews. Pastors lamented falling off of the front pages of the New York Times, who, true story, used to cover sermons from the large churches of New York the way they cover the Twitter feeds of athletes and celebrities today. Mainline theologians decried their ever-shrinking role as public intellectuals whose opinions on war and peace once mattered to policy makers.

There was a great deal of reaching and grasping as power slipped surely away from the church in the 1960, 70s, and 80s. But by the time I finally got around to going to seminary in the 90s, we were beginning to focus back on this original story of the church, and to see that, rather than mega-churches, Jesus did his ministry with a tiny group of followers. Rather than grand edifices, Paul did his ministry in the homes of women such as Lydia. And, instead of powerfully placed public leaders, the early church did its work through the uncontrollable, unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit.

Responding to the Spirit’s movement demands of us a humility based on our acknowledgement that the power to act with love in the world comes from beyond us and is not subject to our control.

Responding to the Spirit also requires of us focused attention to the present moment, because God is here, now, in this moment. Yet we spend so much of our own time absent. We are angry about something that happened yesterday, or last month, or when we were children. We are worried about something that won’t happen until tomorrow, or next year, or never. We are focused on screens that promise us – what? Something more interesting than where we are or who we are or with whom we are?

God is lord of the present time. If we want to grasp that – or, rather, if we are willing to be grasped by that – by that power of love in this moment – well, then, here is where we need to be, and now is when we need to be here.

I think part of the power of performers such as Prince – to tie this back to where we began – part of the power he tapped into came in his ability to create moments that were utterly, completely, sufficient to the present while being about more than the performance. That is to say – and if you watch footage from a concert you see this clearly – the audience becomes part of the show in their willingness to let go of everything for the sake of the dance, for the sake of the spirit of the moment.

Sure, that kind of ecstatic experience, in and of itself, is not much different than a drug-induced haze – and sometimes, to be sure, the two are mixed. But there’s also a lesson in letting go that gets enacted from the stage when generous performers let go of their control and the spirit of the song takes on a life of its own among the gathered congregation.

A concert is no more or less real than a worship service. The main difference is that, as church, we pledge ourselves to one another for more than this moment, and we trust that the spirit that binds us together also sets us free, and that in our freedom we are somehow bound back by the love of God who calls us together to serve the who grants us freedom to respond in love.

Or, as Jesus put it in John’s gospel:

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. […] Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

When we come to this table, we enact this invitation to love, and to the radical hospitality we receive when God makes a home with us. Come to the table of grace.

Amen.