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Text: Acts Unconventional Means In the name
of him who is the Lord of the Church, dear friends in Christ: You may have noticed that during the season
of Easter we suspend the conventional Old Testament readings in favor of ones
from the book of the Acts of the Apostles.
As unsettling as that is for an Old Testament exegete like myself, I
have to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense. Throughout most of the year, in the Old
Testament readings, we see how the Lord planned, foreshadowed, and prepared the
way for the great salvation accomplished by Jesus in his sacrificial death and
resurrection. That having been
completed, during the Easter season, we see how that already achieved salvation
is delivered to dying souls … how it is communicated and spread out, and how it
begins to grow in people all over the world.
It was a different kind of
salvation than most people were used to thinking of back then. In the ancient world, people prayed to their
gods primarily for rescue in this life.
They wanted their gods to give them victory over their enemies in
battle, to give them enough food to eat, and to grant them freedom from
sickness and disease and so on. They
prayed to their gods for a good life now – that was salvation – without
a whole lot of thought about the afterlife, which in most religious systems was
pretty much “one size fits all”; that is to say, the same shadowy underworld
awaited everyone. The Jews were an
exception, but even they tended to think of salvation primarily in the physical
here and now because in their thinking, the eternal paradise was already theirs
simply by virtue of having been born Jews.
They didn’t need God’s help to get to heaven; they needed him to save them
in exactly the same ways the pagans sought their gods for help. The Christian concept of salvation
was something new. It has really nothing
to do with winning wars, having enough food, or getting healed from
diseases. And yes, it’s true that on occasion
people find healing and a better earthly life for themselves in Christianity;
but that’s not the general rule, and it certainly isn’t the kind of salvation
that Christianity promises. No, the
Christian concept is that the goal lies ahead in the next life, that what
happens here is only preliminary, and that the sufferings of this life will be
counted nothing when compared to the glories that await. Salvation is rescue from eternal damnation
for having offended the holy and righteous God – and the means of this
salvation is something that no one could have guessed. It isn’t about what you have to do to make
amends with the wrathful God. It isn’t
about what you need to do to reach Him; but rather what God did in his Son to
reach down and save you. And now that
great and gracious God reaches down and takes hold of you with the message
itself. His salvation is encapsulated in
the very words he uses to tell you about it – and through the words his Spirit
opens your mind and heart to trust in the salvation he has achieved for you –
and by this trust you are saved. It’s a
totally unconventional view of salvation:
not now, later; not you, God; not works, faith; and this faith is a gift
that is delivered by God’s power through his message. But by God’s power it was a message that took
root and spread … very often through unconventional means. We have
good examples of some of these unconventional means in this morning’s reading
from Acts. This was still very early in
the history of the church. The majority
of Christians were still concentrated in the city of Jerusalem, and they were
still using the Temple there as a place to spread the Gospel to people who were
coming to worship. But there was growing
opposition and antagonism from the Jewish religious leaders. By this time they had already arrested some
of the disciples, and they had Peter and John beaten with whips. They warned them not to teach about Jesus any
more, and they threatened them with worse treatment if they continued. Of course, that didn’t stop the
disciples and others from talking about Jesus and the Gospel. Doing God’s will and teaching his truth was
far more important than obeying the civil and religious authorities. But this put the early Christian church on a
collision course with those who were increasingly trying to stamp out the new
movement. It finally came to a head in
the stoning of Stephan, the first Christian martyr. Opposition to Christianity turned to murder
sanctioned by the Jewish religious leaders.
Now it was open season on all Christians in Jerusalem, and people in the
church suffered terribly. Some
decided to stay and weather the storm of violence and persecution; but a lot of
others chose to flee. And we should not
think of them as cowards for running away in the face of adversity. Quite the contrary, what they did took a lot
of courage – though perhaps of a different kind than those who stayed
behind. Those who fled abandoned their
property and their businesses, they left their extended family and friends,
they gave up the places they knew and loved – because confessing Christ
mattered to them more than the things of this world. No doubt also many of them had dependent
children whom they hoped to shelter from the violence – we cannot fault them
for fleeing Jerusalem – and as it turns out, we see that it was all part of
God’s plan to spread the Gospel. That’s
because wherever these people fled, to Phoenicia, Cyprus, Antioch, and all
places in between, they took the Gospel with them. Naturally, as strangers in the cities to
which they fled, they would have sought out the ethnic Jewish communities. They would have been drawn to the people who
shared their language and customs – and they would have fit right in. And they joined the local Jewish synagogues
where people were used to hearing week after week the Word of God concerning
the promises of the coming Savior and Messiah – and there the refugees shared
the Gospel: how God had fulfilled the
promises in the Lord Jesus. And so we
see that the biggest evangelism campaign since the day of Pentecost was
launched not by the Christian church, but by the enemies of the church. It didn’t happen because mission executives
sat down and studied statistics and begged for funds, or because
self-proclaimed church growth experts developed a new technique. It happened because people were being killed,
beaten, imprisoned, and robbed by the enemies of Jesus. I’d say those are unconventional means. And yet we know that this was part of God’s
plan because our text literally says that these improvised evangelists were scattered
by the persecution. And the word
“scatter” there literally means to “cast seed”.
We should see that behind this dispersion of refugees was the hand of
the divine Sower casting the seed of his Word into the field of the world of
people. And that shouldn’t surprise
us: God’s greatest triumph, the
redemption of the world, came about by the greatest of all tragedies, the death
of his Son; so it’s only natural that he continues to operate in the same way
in the lives of his people – bringing triumph from tragedy. And this is true even today. The Lord uses adverse circumstances, say a
sickness, an injury, a loss of a job, a war, a synodical conflict, yes, a
church fire to spread his word and bring salvation to people. But going
back to the story from Acts, we see that bringing victory from an apparent
defeat was not the only unconventional thing about this wave of
evangelism. We think of most early
mission efforts as being done by the apostles or St. Paul, or by trained
missionaries; but this one was done almost entirely by laypeople. We know for a fact that the apostles of Jesus
and the other church leaders stayed in Jerusalem during the persecution. So the folks who fled were, for the most part,
not trained theologians, not pastors and teachers, but people from other walks
of life. And I’m just guessing here, but
something tells me that they didn’t have special training in pagan sensitivity
and evangelism techniques before they left.
This we do know: they went out
and planted Christian congregations, spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ to
their new neighbors wherever they went.
And one of these churches, the one planted by refugee laypeople at
Antioch in Syria, was soon surpassing the church in Jerusalem for the claim to
“most communicant members”. And I think it’s imperative that
we recognize this. Today we train
missionaries and send them all over the world – we often pray for their
success, as we should; but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of
mission activity is done by laypeople, people like you, who without special
training or commissioning, talk to your family, friends, and neighbors about
the faith you have in Jesus your Savior.
By far, most mission work is unconventional. And at
Antioch, the church with an unconventional birth, there were other
unconventional things going on; and that had to do with who was being
evangelized. As I said before, fleeing
Christian Jews naturally sought refuge among fellow Jews, and it was primarily
to them that they shared the Gospel. And
this may be a little difficult for us to relate to, but first century Jews,
even Christian Jews, had very much of a “we are God’s chosen people” attitude. They grew up thinking of everyone else as
inherently inferior. Most of them did
not think of God’s salvation as being something that was for everyone. For the Jews, yes … and maybe for a
very few particularly worthy Gentiles, but even then only in a very
second-class status. But Antioch was a very
cosmopolitan sort of place. It was a
real melting pot of nationalities and races.
Upon hearing the Gospel, many Gentiles came flocking to the faith. And it wasn’t long before the Jewish
Christians were a small minority of the congregation – and nobody there seemed
to think it was a problem. But when word of what was
happening at Antioch reached the church at Jerusalem, it caused a major
flap. Some were astonished that Gentiles
were coming to the faith in such large numbers, and they doubted that it could
be authentic. In their minds, God simply
didn’t work that way. Others felt that
they needed to rein in this rapid growth among Gentiles lest Jewish Christians
lose their privileged status; “after all, it’s our church”. But, you see, the real problem was that they
let their prejudices and feelings of superiority blind them to the wonderful
work God was doing. From their point of
view this unconventional growth of God’s family was wrong. And I wonder if we too don’t
suffer at times from the same sort of tunnel vision. We have in our minds what the perfect
opportunity for evangelism is, or we look at people at think, “Here’s a
potential convert: this person is kind
of like me; but this other person, definitely not. Too … too what? Worldly?
Poor? Uneducated? Boorish?
Old? Dark skinned? What makes a person not look like a potential
covert to you? Or to state it way that
gets to the root of the problem: what
does a person who can’t or shouldn’t be saved from hell look like to you? I wonder if we don’t let our prejudices or
“conventional thinking” restrict or limit what God is doing. Well,
apparently in an effort to exert some external control on the situation at
Antioch, the Jerusalem church sent a man named Barnabas to investigate. It’s likely that some of them wanted him to
do a damage assessment and report back so they could decide how to manage this
“crisis”. But if that was the case, they
sent the wrong man, because Barnabas was a rather unconventional fellow. When we first hear of him in the book of
Acts, it’s to tell about a large donation he made to help the church. No one approached him or asked for anything;
but he saw many fellow Christians who were in need of food and clothing and other
basic necessities. On his own initiative,
motivated by Christian love, he sold some property he had and gave all the
money to the apostles to help the poor.
It’s the kind of guy he was; or rather, it’s the kind of guy the Spirit
of God in his life made him be. A little
later in Acts, we hear about Barnabas again when Paul shows up in Jerusalem and
wants to meet with the apostles. You may
recall that before his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul had been
leading a major crusade to stamp out Christianity. The leaders of the Jerusalem church
remembered all too well how they had suffered from Paul’s relentless
attacks. They were extremely suspect of
him, and weren’t willing to give him a hearing.
It was Barnabas who stepped into the gap and spoke up for Paul. He was willing to see what the Lord was doing
by bringing even the worst of the church’s enemies to faith and salvation – and
he saw too what a great help Paul might be to the cause of Christ. And perhaps because he understood
the Lord’s unconventional message and means as well as he did, he was able to
see what God was doing among the Gentiles in Antioch when he arrived
there. Far from being worried about
things getting out of Jewish hands, he saw the Lord’s fields ripe and ready for
harvest. It thrilled him to see that
God’s salvation was growing among the very people many considered to be
hopelessly lost. More than that, Barnabas was
willing to see what could be done to help.
And here he broke with convention again.
Instead of reporting back to Jerusalem right away, he saw that the
church at Antioch really needed direction and sound theological instruction to
keep growing in the faith. He knew that
without deeper study into God’s Word, the church might easily be diverted into
all kinds of errors. He knew they needed
a steady, well-trained hand on the tiller, someone thoroughly committed to the
Gospel of Christ to shepherd this flock.
And he knew just the man to do it:
Paul, the former persecutor of the church. Going to Tarsus, he got Paul, brought him
back with him to Antioch, and the two of them spent a year teaching and
preaching to set this mission church squarely on the true foundation of Christ
Jesus. And as it
turns out, Barnabas did make it back to Jerusalem to file his report. But he did it in an unconventional way. When the Lord revealed that a famine was
coming to the region of Palestine, the church at Antioch organized a relief
fund to help out their brothers and sisters in Christ in Jerusalem. When Barnabas returned, he brought the
much-needed money with him. And so,
instead of asking for funds to support the mission effort at Antioch which some
might have been critical or suspicious of, he was able to bring them concrete
evidence of the Lord’s love working in the lives of the Gentile saints
there: positive proof of God’s hand in
the unconventional enterprise that no one would be able to argue with. I think
it’s safe to say that the church today needs more people like Barnabas: Unconventional people who understand the
Lord’s unconventional message of salvation, and who are willing to see his
unconventional methods for getting things done.
May the Lord make each of us like that.
May he fill us with his own Holy Spirit and open our hearts and minds so
that we eager to do his will and spread his message of salvation through
whatever means he may provide. In Jesus
name. Amen Soli Deo
Gloria! |
