Advoating customs that are not lawful

Scripture Lessons: John 14: 23-29 and Acts 16: 16-31, NT page 136 Sermon Title: Advocating customs that are not lawful Preached on: 5/8/16 Today is Mother’s Day and Mother’s Day reminds me that sometimes God’s greatest gifts are those that require us to change. That a child can turn your life upside down, but really, in doing so, a child turns things right side up. Mother’s often embody the ability to change then, and not everyone always does. Some of us are even resistant to it. As a 200-year-old church it’s good for us to remember that change can be good every once in a while, but we haven’t always felt that way about change. When there were finally enough Methodists to call themselves a congregation they went to the Session of our church asking permission to use our sanctuary for worship. Now think about how many people walk across 7th Street as though they were just going over to their neighbor’s house today. Think about how many friends we all have over there right across the street. Think about how the greatest obstacle for us in worshiping with all the saints at First Methodist Church is remembering to say “forgive us our trespasses” rather than “forgive us our debts” during the Lord’s prayer. Just think about all of that and listen to this: 200 years ago when that band of Methodists requested the use of the Presbyterian’s sanctuary the Session voted and denied the request. Is that not incredible? I’m all for beating them in softball, but denying their request to use our sanctuary seems a little cold, a little resistant, and when you think about it, how we partner to serve this downtown, work side by side at the People’s Table serving meals to the hungry, worship together as one body during Holy Week, not to mention all the friendships that connect our two churches today it seems strange to think that there’d ever be a reason to forbid the Methodists from using our sanctuary, but to understand the session’s decision you have to get into the mind of the 19th Century Presbyterian. The Presbyterians of the early 1800’s had three big problems with Methodism and wanted to resist the changes they might have brought us. One was the way they worshiped. Thinking of how the Methodists worshiped, what was strange about the Methodists back then was that the Presbyterians were still singing an awful lot of hymns out of the psalter (that’s what you call the book of Psalms in the Old Testament when you use it as your hymnal) but the Methodists were famous for writing their own hymns. To write your own hymns as John Wesley and his brother Charles, two of the founders of the Methodist Church were doing, well, that didn’t make any sense to the Presbyterians. If the hymn wasn’t in the Bible it was a little radical to sing it, and if it made you too excited when you sang, well that was just plain dangerous. Now some might say that’s still our problem. Every once in a while someone will come up to me to talk about my hymn selections and he’ll say, “Joe, the hymns today made me feel like I was at a funeral,” and if he had said that to a Presbyterian minister 200 years ago the pastor might have thanked him for the compliment. Back in those days the Methodists were considered emotional – but on this side of the street, we were stayed, reverent, cerebral. Back in those days the Methodists were signing new songs just written – but on this side of the street we were still singing the psalms right out of the Bible. And back in those days – now this is getting to the second problem our Session probably had with those Methodists who wanted to use our sanctuary – back in those days the Methodists were called Methodists because John Wesley claimed that there was a method to salvation, that you could position yourself through confessing your sins, repenting and changing your ways, and by dedicating yourself to prayer, Bible study, and worship – by doing these things or subscribing to this method, you could position yourself to receive the grace that only God can give. Now that doesn’t sound so radical, but let me tell you what was going on over on our side of the street – we were subscribing to this doctrine of election also known as predestination which held that there was nothing that you or I could do to receive the grace of God because it’s all up to God and whether God decides to save us or not. To say that there was a method to salvation, that there was a discipline that you could observe to receive it, now that just didn’t work for those hard shell Presbyterians because for them, and to some degree for us still today, the power of God is a force far too strong for anyone to harness with their method. The good thing about our doctrine of election which can seem so antiquated today is that it does a good job of capturing part of how our God works because it claims that our God is like the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts – it’s not something that you can control and it might not be something that you’d ever ask for – it’s like the hand of God that reaches down to make poor old Saul blind as he’s walking down the road minding his own business. It’s like the voice that calls Peter to go see Cornelius and leads him to challenge the very foundations of the Church. It’s like the wind of Pentecost that blows where it will and filled up all the Apostles leading them to speak in languages they had never spoken in before – it’s not in our control – it’s not ours to harness – it’s far too powerful to be bridled by any method. Again and again in the book of Acts, that’s the message. Last Sunday I preached from Acts chapter 1, the Sunday before it was Acts chapter 11, today it’s Acts chapter 16 we’ll continue in the book of Acts next Sunday as well, and the thing to know about the book of Acts that is not immediately apparent is that while there are plenty of human actors in the drama of the early church that is recorded in the book of Acts, without a doubt, the primary actor and the main character is the Holy Spirit who is often at work despite their very best intentions. So our Second Scripture Lesson begins this way: “One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we me a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” Now – there are many Fruits of the Spirit, many qualities that Christians should embody, but being annoyed is not one of them. Nonetheless, it is Paul’s annoyance that prompts this exorcism. It is because this woman is driving him crazy that he casts out the daemon, and “when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.” Next, they were brought before the magistrates of the city, accused of “disturbing the city” and “advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe,” they were attacked by the crowd, stripped of their clothing, beaten with rods, and finally thrown into prison, the innermost cell and fastened by the feet in stocks, and surely if I were Paul I would be thinking that this poor, annoying slave woman was hardly worth the trouble, but I’m not sure that’s how those early Christians thought. What keeps happening in the book of Acts is that the Holy Spirit keeps on interrupting the lives of the disciples. Paul – in his prior life as Saul, was a well-positioned Pharisee, but then the Holy Spirit came along, struck him blind and made him a disciple of Jesus Christ. Then he was on his way to someplace else when a vision of a man of Macedonia came to Paul in the night and Paul had to change course. Not long after that he’s walking along on his way to do something he probably thought was going to be productive when a slave-girl won’t leave him alone, so he casts out the demon within her and ends up locked up in prison – now a typical person would say that poor Paul needs to get his life back on track, but according to the narrative of the book of Acts it’s only now that Paul is finally positioned to actually do something constructive. Hardly discouraged, from the innermost cell Paul and his companion Silas sing, and as they sing an earthquake shakes the foundation of the prison, the prison doors were opened, everyone’s chains were unfastened, knowing that he had completely failed in accomplishing his charge the jailer prepares to hill himself – and here we see that in fact, Paul was perfectly positioned to save this man. Perfectly positioned to preach the Gospel to the one who needed to hear it. Perfectly positioned to do the will of God. Is there a lesson then for us in all of this? In a sense there is, but it’s not really a moral imperative so much as it is a call to reframe life’s many interruptions, challenges, and disappointments. Think about the person who set off the chain of events that led to this last conversion of the jailer and his household – it was the person who annoyed Paul the most. And what led to his conversion? It was the moment of his deepest shame, his biggest failure in life – the time when every prisoner in the jail could have escaped! So here is the lesson of Acts Chapter 16 and really the whole book – there is a more powerful force at work in our lives that is leading us to see that the annoying person who we would love to never deal with again is actually the hero who can make our life truly interesting. That when locked in the innermost cell God may be positioning us to preach the good news to the one who needs to hear it. But most of all – the slave owners who saw that their hope of making money was gone and the magistrates who said that “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe,” in saying so they got it exactly right, because what the Holy Spirit does is shakes life up so much that change starts to come. And that brings me to the third reason the Session of First Presbyterian Church may not have wanted those Methodists using our sanctuary – in the 1800’s it still wasn’t clear if Methodists were for slavery or against it and to harbor Methodists who might have been abolitionists in those days, well, that would have been a little too disturbing, and the Session may have been thinking that those Methodists very well may have tried to advocate customs that are not lawful to adopt or observe. Now that may not have been the reasoning at all – it might have had much more to do with the hymns, and still today I’m suspicious of any hymn with a tune that’s a little too catchy, but what still rings true is this: there are plenty of us who would rather keep things just as they are than advocate customs that are not lawful – but what if the Holy Spirit is disrupting our routines for a reason? What if our God is working in the one who annoys us the most because only we can set her free? What if our God is positing us in the most uncomfortable place because it is there that our voice needs to be heard? What if our God is calling us to question the customs, to advocate for a new law and a new way? If that were the case, it would not be the first time. Amen.