Unbinding God

Acts 17: 22-31

Easter 6A

May 21, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Fade in on busy street.   Narrow alleys lead off from the bustling thoroughfare lined with barking merchants.
People of all ages come and go in the hurried rush of the day.
The sun beats down relentlessly on the stone pavement and dust hangs in the air.
The shot follows the main thoroughfare toward an open-air marketplace.  Beyond the open space, towering over the people and standing on the highest point in the city is a temple surrounded by sweeping stairs toped with massive columns with statues of the gods and goddesses standing guard.
Close-up on a man dressed as a leather merchant.  He stands next to one of the God like statues.
We join him in mid-sentence.
That is my ham handed attempt to write the opening scene of the movie of Acts. 17.  I still don’t have a good name for the movie yet.  “Paul Preaching to the Atheneans before the Statue of the Unnamed God” seems a bit clunky.
There are not many biblical stories I wish had a movie remake.  In fact, there are not many bible story movies I can abide at all but this is one I would give a pass because to really understand what is happening with Paul in this moment, you have to have a picture of what is happening around Paul in Athens.
Paul is preaching in the heart of the greatest political and military power on earth.  The Roman Empire is not the ONLY powerful nation in the world, but there is none greater in political and military might.
He is preaching in a society that gives lip service to religion and freely coopts religion to suit its purposes but when it comes to living up to the broader ethics of their religious beliefs, well, that’s another story.  Rome’s is a civil religion.  It is the religion of citizenship rather than religion of devotion.  They use the same words and even some of the same symbols, but the overlap stops there.
It is also a place where that civil religion has begun to be defined by a sense of moral and philosophical nihilism.  Woven into the fabric of daily life was a sense of the inevitability of inevitability; a sense that not much that we do can really impact the direction or the realities of the political and economic behemoth that was Rome.  So most people lived lives not so much of hope for the future but of tolerance of the present.
Paul, in the midst of this militaristic world power where two dimensional religion rooted in nationalism rather than devotion has given way to a sense of daily resignation, stands up to preach the gospel of the Prince of Peace who repeatedly calls us drop everything and follow him and all the while preaches a message of hope and new life.
This sermon at the Aeropagus is one of the most famous in the history of the faith.  Paul’s bold apologetic is held up as a model of how we can share the message of Christ in a multi-faith environment; how we can share the gospel of Christ with those who believe differently; how we can make Jesus make sense to people who have not yet heard or need to hear again the Good News.
It wasn’t until I spent some time with this text that I began to realize that what Paul does here is both much greater and much simpler than we often assume.
At first glance, Paul seems to use a combination of;
flattery, “I can see that you Athenians are very religious people;”
cleverness, “Among the objects of your worship, I found a statue with the inscription ‘to an unknown God’…what you worship as unknown  I will make known;”
logic, “from one ancestor, God made all nations;”
and invitation, “God commands all people everywhere to repent…”
At first glance, the sermon at Athens seems to be theologian Paul at his rhetorical and apologetic best.
And it is.  There is no arguing that all of those ingredients- flattery, cleverness, logic, and invitation- are mixed with a heavy dose of Paul’s deep and rich theology to make for a monumental sermon and a transformative moment for the early church.  This sermon is all those things.
It is also much much more.
There is something going on here, I think, with Pail’s motivation to deliver this sermon.
I couldn’t name that sense of motivation in the text until the middle of the week when I was in Little Rock and took a little time to check the news back here in Jackson.  I went to the Clarion-Ledger website and staring back at me from the screen was a headline about the death of 6 year-old Kingston Frazier taken from a Kroger parking lot in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The details were scarce but what was clear was that a child not yet old enough to have given up on Santa Claus was dead.
There is no rational or readily comprehensible way for a child to die, but for a little boy’s life to end so violently chips away at even the most steel-hardened sense of hope in the world.  The news of a child’s death, especially at the hands of violence in our culture, takes the wind out of our sails.
Children were no less frail in Paul’s day than in our own and no less immune to tragedy.  I am sure that stories like this and tragedies like this were not foreign to the great evangelist to the Gentiles, so our experience in this community is not wholly different than Paul’s. At least not in this one narrow tragic way.
But Paul didn’t have Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or the anonymous comments on news sites.
In Paul’s Athen’s, the philosophical resignation that he confronted was the logical nihilism of the Stoics and other schools of philosophical thought.
What faces us today is something much more insidious; the willing neglect of our connection to one another.
Let me say here that I am no foe of Facebook.  I have wasted as much and probably much more time on it than just about anyone in earshot this morning.  I’ve benefitted from its platform to connect with old friends, get to know new ones better, and stay connected over distance and despite busy lives.
But if we have learned one thing in recent years it is that social media does not always bring out the best in us and opinions that would never see the light of day in face to face conversation all to easily creep in from a digital distance.
It might be fair to rob the old cliché and say, “in Facebook veritas.”
Whet I saw in the hours after Kingston Frazier’s death showed the ugly side of that revealing truth. It did not take long for the conversation about a little boy’s death to come around to assessments of blame on the parents and judgments about the judgment of his mother.  I read, with no small sense of disgust, the freely shared opinions that the child’s death was somehow the fault of a grieving mother rather than the men who took a little boy’s life.  The death of this innocent child turned into a feeding frenzy for vitriol and bigotry and judgmentalism that reduced a little boy’s life to the status of a pot hole; political football for the anger of the moment.
Reading those comments it was as though compassion died in the back seat of that car with little Kingston.
I was shocked at some of the things I read and, I confess, more than a little bit angry at it.
In Facebook veritas, indeed.
On December 5, 1950, Margaret Truman, only daughter of the President, sang at Constitution Hall.  The next day appeared a review of her performance that was anything but flattering.
Having read the review of his daughter’s performance, Harry Truman penned one of the most famous letters in presidential history in which he referred to the reviewer, Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, as, “an eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay,” “a frustrated old man who wish[ed] he could be successful,” and promised that should they meet face to face, Hume would need, “a new nose, [and] a lot of beefsteak for black eyes.”
Reflecting on her days in the White House and that event in particular, Bess Truman later said that she regretted not taking away the president’s stamps.
The sermon I am preaching this morning is not the first draft of this sermon.  Let’s call the first draft the Harry Truman draft.  My initial foray in to this morning’s text in light of this week’s events was less a model of pastoral sensitivity and more an example of frustrated venting.  Paul might have preached with vigor and thoughtfulness, but I was ready to come with the fire and brimstone.
To try to make sense of the senseless death of a child is difficult enough.  To do it in a world where the kind of unceasing judgment and uncharitable callousness shown toward a grieving family is considered acceptable was frustrating and infuriating me beyond any helpful or hopeful words.
So I put the sermon aside and went back to the text to live with Paul’s words a little longer.
It doesn’t happen often, at least not for me, but this week a text I had read dozens of times- that I could quote by almost entirely from memory-changed in an instant.  
When I went back to Paul’s words to the Atheneans with my anger for many in my own community still keeping my blood up, I saw something I had never before seen in Paul’s words, or, more accurately, in Paul.
I saw the impassioned preacher.
I saw the theological tactician.
I even saw the evangelist reaching the unchurched.
But I also saw something I confess to seldom seeing in Paul or hearing from his challenging words.
I saw a brother in Christ hurting for a hurting world.
Confession being good for the soul, I confess before God, you, and every biblical studies professor I ever had that I know that it is dangerous to ascribe motives to moments like these, but I believe in my heart of hearts that part of what led Paul to preach that day was a desire not just to convert the Atheneans but to comfort them.
We so often view Paul as a theologian unlocking complex puzzles of historical and philosophical importance and he is surely that, but he is also a man who saw a world in need of hope.  And hope is something that purveyor’s of the Gospel have in ready supply.  So Paul shares the hope he knows in Christ.  And that, I think, is where the real power of this sermon resides.
When Paul stood up to preach that day he was not merely trying to overcome an argument or persuade people’s thinking, he was unbinding their understanding of God and throwing hope out in to the world like Johnny Appleseed.  He preached Christ resurrected because Paul saw in front of him a world where hope- deep, rich, life altering hope- was in short supply and where seeds of hope might take root and grow into faithfulness.
If there is s lesson for us here it is, I believe, this;
When we see a place where there is room for hope, there the Gospel must be preached.
Preaching hope is the Christian faith at its most eloquent..
Hope is what we do.
It is who we are.
It is how we live.
Or at least it should be, because friends, make no mistake about it ours is a world crying out in anguish for a word of hope and the one whose name we praise as “risen, risen indeed!” is same Lord who calls us to arise and go making disciples and proclaiming hope.
It took a little time, a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit, and a renewed encounter with Paul’s sermon in Athens for me to really understand it, but beneath the rhetoric of division, and judgment, and hate, and blame, and fear, the soul of our community is really crying out for hope.
When Paul preached that morning, he knew that the next day Athens would still be Athens.  Like Sisyphus pushing his rock up hill, only to have it roll back at night, every day when Paul awoke the world was still the world.  Yet every day, he got up and he went to work pushing that rock called hope up the hill because Paul knew that while Sisyphus’s punishment was eternal, our work is for but a season.  And every day the Gospel is preached in the world is a day when the world knows just a little more hope.  And every day with a little more hope brings us another day closer to God’s promised tomorrow.
Paul went to Athens and proclaimed Good News.
Now it is our turn.
And, friends, as much as the Athenians needed it then, we really need it now.
Let us pray.
God of hope and promise, we hear the voices of our community cry out.  Shadowed in the language of lamentation, the vocabulary of vitriol, the dogma of division, is a still small voice crying out for hope. Make us, oh God, proclaimers of that hope.  May we listen past the words hurt and hear past the world’s fears so we might truly know the world’s pain. And knowing it, have the courage to share the abundance of hope we know in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

Stones

Acts 7:55-60

Easter 5A

May 14, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Donald McLeod, longtime professor at Princeton Seminary, enjoyed telling the story of a prayer offered in one of his classes.  Each class gathering he would ask a student to offer an opening prayer and one day he invited a prayer from a young Chinese seminarian who came to Princeton after fleeing his family and nation under threat of persecution.
The seminarian shocked his classmates when he prayed, “O God, give us something to die for, for if we have nothing to die for, we have nothing to live for.”
I heard that story in a sermon during a conference at Princeton a few years ago.  After that chapel service we went to lunch and were confronted with witnesses to three lives that lived up to that prayer.
Outside the dining room of the McKay student center there is a plaque inscribed with the names of three Princeton graduates who died for what they lived for.  It reads:
Walter Macon Lawrie – Thrown overboard by pirates in the China Sea, 1847.
John Rogers Peal – Killed with his wife by a mob at Lien Chou, China, 1905.
James Joseph Reid – Fatally beaten at Selma, Alabama, March 11, 1965.
They lived for the gospel and by all accounts died for and because of their allegiance to the gospel.
The story of Stephen in Acts 7, commonly referred to as the “Stoning of Stephen” or the “Martyrdom of Stephen,” tells the story of another of Jesus followers who was willing to put his life on the line for the gospel.  
The book of Acts tells us precious little about Stephen.  From his name we can infer that he was likely from the Greek speaking part of the community.
He was a deacon.  The church realized early on that they were becoming neglectful in caring for the widows in their midst and appointed Stephen and six others to ensure that the widows and orphans were cared for.
Though it does not give many specifics, the text goes on to tell us that Stephen was, “full of faith and the Holy Spirit (6:5),” and “full of God’s grace and power (7:8),” and that he did “great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. (7:8)”
That Stephen’s story made the cut to be included in the Book of Acts suggests that when it came to his great wonders and miraculous signs, he was probably doing more than making the Sunday fellowship meal stretch to fit the crowd or making the benevolence budget last until the end of December.
It was more likely that Stephen was healing people physically and spiritually.  He was reaching into people’s lives and, the text tells us, with the power of the Holy Spirit making people whole again.
It was that ministry of passion and compassion that aroused fierce opposition among the religious elites.
Stephen was upsetting the settled way of things.  He was disrupting the order of religious life and with it the power of the priesthood.  He was disrupting the settled way things were and were assumed to supposed to be.
In the end, it cost him his life at the hands of a mob that, the text tells us, stoned him to death.
Stoning is not something we hear about in daily life.  A quick Google search reveals one verified case in recent memory.
And martyrs?  We can all likely name some, but they seem fixed in the past fixed and memorialized like the adornment over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey where statues of Martin Luther King Jr., Maximiliian Kolb, Oscar Romero, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer join other 20th century martyrs to the faith.
As is often the case with biblical stories remote in history and context, the story of Stephen is frequently romanticized in art and narrative.  Stephen becomes a character of the faith whose death is no more real than a movie; remote and almost too much to be believed.
But Stephen’s story is true. It is real.  And it is ours to wrestle with.
And if we are to really encounter this story we have to wipe away the Hollywood veneer, unmoor it from the past, and see it for what it is; a witness to the power and danger of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A careful reading of this text not merely in its own context but in ours as well reveals a dimension that frighteningly recasts this ancient tale into our own world reality.
Stephen did not just die for his faith.
He was lynched for it.
This was a lynching.
My guess is that word brings some very specific images to mind.  It was images like those that prompted some very well meaning colleagues to warn me against using that term this morning.
Too loaded.
Too charged.
Too harsh.
Better to leave this one in the storybooks; remote, distant, easily put away until it rolls around three years from now on the fifth Sunday of Easter.
That may all be true, but it does not change the fact that Stephen was the victim of an extrajudicial killing carried out under the watch and with the tacit permission of the powers of the community.
Paula Fredrickson, Boston University Professor Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture (isn’t that the greatest job title ever!) wrote,
“[C]rucifixion was a Roman form of a public service announcement: ‘Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.’  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.”
The means of Stephen’s death may have been different, but the message was the same; keep your mouth shut and keep your head down.
Stephen, by giving his allegiance to the Gospel and rooting his compassion in the work of the Spirit threatened the structures of the world and for that he paid a price.
When we keep stories like Stephen’s safely tucked away in distant memory, it becomes tragically easy to forget that we serve a Lord who encounters us and the world at a cross-current and whose message of how things may be is all to often anathema to the way things are.
That is why Stephen met his end at the hands of the same baying crowd as Christ.  Both were killed not primarily to punish them for crimes committed but as examples to the audience of both their lives and their deaths.
The cross of Christ stands at the center of our theology precisely because of and in active opposition to this reality.
James Cone, Emeritus professor of theology at Union Seminary and widely regarded as the first great African-American liberation theologians wrote about the fundamental relationship between the cross and the lynching tree in his book of the same name.  Cone argues that there is merely a division in time between the terror of the crucifixion and the terror of lynching.  Christ, Cone argues, was lynched for the same fundamental reason as John Heath, George Meadows, and scores of others whose deaths served the purpose of terrorizing the audience into obeisance to the way things are and silence about how things ought to be.
The lynching of Emmett Till and the subsequent publicity surrounding his death shook the consciousness of the nation and had the opposite effect his murderers had hoped.  Refusing to bow to the hate that took her son’s life, Till’s mother insisted that his casket be left open for the entire world to see what had been done to her son.  She pulled back the curtain and revealed that the rhetoric of the order of the world was nothing more than a veneer of fear and hate.  Rather than paralyze the black community in fear, Till’s death came to galvanize action and passion and a sense that the fight for equality was a fight worth dying for.
The death of Stephen had a similar effect on the early church.  If the hope of the authorities was that with the stones heaped on Stephen would serve as a warning to the fledgling Jesus movement, they were in for a surprise.  As our text from today in chapter 7 closes with Stephen’s death, chapter 8 begins with acknowledgement of the harassment of the Jerusalem church and the defiant preaching of the gospel in the city and beyond.  Even in the face of Saul’s persecution, the early church would not be deterred from their mission and ministry.
They had found something to die for and because they had something to die for, they had something to live for.
So they preached and they taught and they served the poor and they built community and they shared the meal and they celebrated the resurrection and they bore witness to the kingdom of God and the power of the Holy Spirit in the world and 2000 years later…
… the cross of Christ and the stones of Stephen have been replaced by the lynching tree and nothing seems to have changed.
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect justice of Christ, yet injustice continues to infect and inflict us;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect love of God, yet hate and intolerance continue to divide us one from the other;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect truth of the Spirit, yet the false narratives of violence and might continue to be the refuge of the powers and principalities of the world.
It is 2000 years later and it is as if the stones are still striking Stephen.
I spent a few hours in Thursday down at Stewpot. We are fortunate to have in Jackson such an impactful and important ministry as Stewpot. From the St. Dominic clinic in the basement, to the art program, to the daily meals, Stewpot’s ministries seek to reach into our community’s troubles and touch God’s children by transforming lives and bearing witness to hope.
Stewpot and ministries like it are not single handedly changing the world, but tangibly and faithfully refusing to surrender the promise of a better tomorrow to the troubles of today.
That is the work of Jesus Christ in the world.
It is the work of hope entrusted to the people of God.
It is the work begun 2000 years ago in Jerusalem and continuing today in Jackson.  The same Lord who called Stephen and the earliest disciples calls us today.
And so, we preach.
We teach.
We serve the poor, build community, share the meal, and do all the things we have done as the body of Christ because we trust in the one who calls us to our work and we have faith in the promises of God.
We have faith that though, as Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime,” we are nonetheless saved by hope.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he was buried, rolled away the stone and declared that death has lost its sting.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he died, lives.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he came into the world in the innocence of a child, lived with the humility of a servant.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who is the true rock of our redemption.
We are saved by a hope that is worth dying for precisely because it gives us life.
Let us pray.
God of all courage and hope, you have given us something worth dying for; the promise of your kingdom and the hope of Jesus Christ.  Move us toward a more perfect faith in which we do not count the cost but instead live out our salvation with courage and love.  Amen.