Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
© Alexander P. Floyd Marshall
April 19, 2015
Scripture: Acts 3:1-19
In the church where I grew up, a mid-sized evangelical Bible church just outside of Memphis, we took communion by passing a plate of crackers and those trays with the little shot-glasses of grape juice down each row of seats.
We also, like most evangelical churches, put an especial emphasis on personal conversion: the choice of “salvation.”
When I was a young child, the most striking thing I gathered from the stories I heard about older people’s journeys to that choice was that, it seemed to me, when you “were saved” you were supposed to feel really different because something had really dramatically changed inside you. Some of the adults I heard tell their stories really had been dramatically saved from things like addiction, but as a six-year old I didn’t really comprehend that: I just understood that whatever this salvation thing was, it was “different” feeling. And anyway, the real benefit of being an “official Christian,” in my six-year-old head, was that it meant I got to eat the little crackers and drink the juice on the first Sunday of every month when we took communion.
For a while after I decided to “accept Jesus” for myself, I did feel different, probably because so many adults in our church went out of their way to congratulate this little six-year-old “new believer.” But after a while the feeling faded and I started to have some doubts about whether or not it had really worked.
That first Communion Sunday after I started to doubt I got very nervous when the communion plates were passed around, convinced that I might be about to commit a grave sin by taking communion under false pretenses. To try and assuage my fears, I prayed to accept Jesus again while sitting in my seat waiting for the plate to reach me. But this time I didn’t feel any different. I tried a few more times and still nothing seemed to happen.
That’s when I started to panic. By now I already had the little saltine cracker that we used as bread in my hand and felt like I couldn’t reveal my doubts or else I would become the center of some sort of spectacle, which was about the worst thing imaginable in my mind at the time. So I quickly ate the piece of bread along with everyone else so that no one would notice anything was amiss.
Then a wild idea entered my head. What if every other time you prayed for salvation it negated the previous time? So the first time second time I had been saved, but the second time I had become unsaved. Then the third time I had gotten saved again. But then the fourth time I was unsaved again.
This thought of course then led to a terrifying question: how many times was I at now? Was it an even number or an odd number? Which of course, I couldn’t remember, and so now I was having a full-on six-year-old existential crisis: how can I ever know if I’m really a Christian or not!
And then the little cup of grape juice reached me and I had to make a choice… was I going to drink it or was I not?
As we acknowledged earlier in this service, we all have choices to make every day of our lives. Some are very small, others seem really monumental. Some are extremely concrete: what am I going to eat for lunch? Others are a little bit more abstract, but still fairly tangible: where am I going to go to college? What job should I take? Still others are really intangible: what should I believe about God? What “values” should I hold? What do I want to be remembered for?
And sometimes they seem like they aren’t choices at all, instead they feel like things that just happen to us, that just organically grow out of us. Like the lame man in our scripture reading today, a man who has been sat outside the temple every day for years to collect alms from those coming and leaving. His expectation when Peter and John approach him has nothing to do with healing: he doesn’t even ask for them to heal him. His expectation is for money. Now did he choose to set that as his expectation? Hard to say… I mean, if you had been in his shoes, would your expectations be any different?
But then there’s Peter and John’s decision to engage with this man. They certainly didn’t have to do that, they could have simply put their heads down and kept on walking. Especially since, as Peter says, they have no money to give him. But instead they choose to walk right up to him and offer him a gift he had never thought to ask for.
They choose to engage and to heal because of a more basic choice they’ve already made: a choice to have faith in God and in Jesus Christ.
Now, in a way, we might say that this wasn’t really a choice for them: After all, Peter and John had, just a few weeks before this, seen a man that they watched die on a cross walk right up to them, as alive as the flowers that are finally starting to poke their heads through the ground outside. “How could they not have faith?” we might ask. If we had seen the risen Jesus with our own two eyes, would we be any different?
That’s a tempting way to think. It certainly seems like faith would be easier with that kind of evidence in our back pockets. And perhaps Peter thought that the sight of the healed man jumping and leaping and praising God would be the evidence the people needed to choose faith in Christ themselves— it certainly got their attention! But my own experience, and I suspect the experience of others in this room, is that at the end of the day faith isn’t about what we believe might or might not be true, it’s about how our life is different because of the way we’ve experienced God at work for ourselves. And I think that’s true even of Peter’s speech to the people.
The book of Acts was probably written at least 40 years after this incident would have occurred. And in those intervening 40 years, a really major turning point in the history of both our faith and the faith of our Jewish brothers and sister’s happened, which is that the Roman Army attacked the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple where Peter and John healed this man. For the Jewish faith, which many of the early Christians would still have considered themselves a part of, this would have been cataclysmic. Without the temple, the sacrifices that the law required to maintain the covenant between God and the people became impossible. And so the people would have faced something of an identity crisis: how can we even know who we are if we can’t do any of the central acts of our faith?
In response to this disaster, Judaism would reinvent itself to be what we know it to be today, and along side it Christianity would really step out on its own as a unique faith community. This in part explains the tone of Peter’s message. As these two communities were really parting ways and separating from one another, there was a very active and live debate going on, which is absolutely present in the way Peter’s sermon has been recorded for us. And that debate centered around a choice that was being put before the people, a choice about what direction their faith and their communities would take.
Two thousand years later, that choice still stands before us.
Yesterday, many of our leaders gathered for the day as part of a retreat to talk about what our vision for the future of this church might look like. We talked about a lot of really exciting ideas, and I’m sure that those conversations will continue to bear fruit in the weeks and months ahead. At the core, though, the question before us was this: what is it that defines who we are as a church? What defines our faith? Who even are we? We discussed values like dignity, empathy, and love that guide us as Christians. We discussed the call to engage our broader community in service and to work in partnership with others. We discussed the incredible enthusiasm of this community for exploring creative and artistic expressions of faith and spirituality. And those visions and ideas are really exciting and I can’t wait to see what grows and develops out of those conversations.
Two themes in particular came up in a couple of places during our conversation that I think form something of a foundation for the rest. One was the notion that what makes church distinct from anything else is that everything we do is grounded in faith in Christ. And the second was the notion that in our community we connect with one another and grow together as a family of faith.
It’s worth grappling with both of these for a minute as we think about who we are as a church family.
Faith in Christ is what Peter called the crowd to in his sermon. His tone, coming out of a time of conflict between the early Christian community and it’s Jewish brothers and sisters, is a bit more accusatory than I suspect most of us are comfortable with. I suspect I am not alone, but I’ve seen Christianity, both in its more conservative and in it’s more progressive varietals, used as a bludgeon and a barrier instead of as an invitation to community and to love. And part of my personal wrestlings with faith, dating all the way back to my six-year-old identity crisis during communion, is about understanding and expressing my faith in a way that reflects the values of dignity, empathy, and love that we hold onto.
But I think that keeping faith in Christ at the core of what we do is essential because it is what makes us not just another service organization but a community of faith. And to me, that is important because when we persistently remind ourselves that we are a community of faith, a community brought together not just because we have some common values and some common interests but because we share a common experience of God being alive and at work in our midst, when we continue to remind ourselves of that, it makes it possible for us to learn and grow together, the way that a family lives and grows together, even as its many members change and their roles and needs fluctuate.
Today we know that our society is changing. And part of that change is that, for better or for worse, the institution of the church is becoming less and less important for much of our society. And that can be a challenge for us, it could trigger an identity crisis like the loss of the temple triggered for the community in the days of Peter and John or like I felt when I had my first doubts about faith. But I think it can also be a great opportunity. Because, without being tied down to an old model, we have the chance to refocus, to choose together those things which are most important to us, those things which most reflect our identity as followers with Christ, and to choose to build together a ministry around those things, because, more than anything else, we are a family of faith and what we do we do with and for one another.
We can choose to do this together, but to do that we have to choose to embrace an identity that is grounded in Christ and is shaped by our relationships with one another. The foundational choice has to be our choice to have faith in God and in one another, and just as Peter and John were motivated by that choice to walk up to a lame man and offer him the healing he had not asked for, so we can be motivated by that choice to do many incredible things together. We need not be thrown into a crisis of identity by the changing culture around us. Unlike my six-year-old self who felt sure he would never know whether or not he was really a Christian, we can lay claim to our identity and look boldly toward the future that we choose together, because we can choose to ground our lives in faith.
Scripture
Acts 3:1-19, Common English Bible
1Peter and John were going up to the temple at three o’clock in the afternoon, the established prayer time. 2 Meanwhile, a man crippled since birth was being carried in. Every day, people would place him at the temple gate known as the Beautiful Gate so he could ask for money from those entering the temple. 3 When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he began to ask them for a gift. 4 Peter and John stared at him. Peter said, “Look at us!” 5 So the man gazed at them, expecting to receive something from them. 6 Peter said, “I don’t have any money, but I will give you what I do have. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, rise up and walk!” 7 Then he grasped the man’s right hand and raised him up. At once his feet and ankles became strong. 8 Jumping up, he began to walk around. He entered the temple with them, walking, leaping, and praising God. 9 All the people saw him walking and praising God. 10 They recognized him as the same one who used to sit at the temple’s Beautiful Gate asking for money. They were filled with amazement and surprise at what had happened to him.
11 While the healed man clung to Peter and John, all the people rushed toward them at Solomon’s Porch, completely amazed. 12 Seeing this, Peter addressed the people: “You Israelites, why are you amazed at this? Why are you staring at us as if we made him walk by our own power or piety? 13 The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of our ancestors—has glorified his servant Jesus. This is the one you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence, even though he had already decided to release him. 14 You rejected the holy and righteous one, and asked that a murderer be released to you instead. 15 You killed the author of life, the very one whom God raised from the dead. We are witnesses of this. 16 His name itself has made this man strong. That is, because of faith in Jesus’ name, God has strengthened this man whom you see and know. The faith that comes through Jesus gave him complete health right before your eyes.
17 “Brothers and sisters, I know you acted in ignorance. So did your rulers. 18 But this is how God fulfilled what he foretold through all the prophets: that his Christ would suffer. 19 Change your hearts and lives! Turn back to God so that your sins may be wiped away.”