Weekly Introduction to the Revised Common Lectionary Readings (Pentecost)

Acts 2:1-21

Acts 2 begins with the disciples “all together in one place.”  This is not an ideal gospel situation. The gospel is more “free spirit wanderer” than “established homesteader.”  The gospel is more cosmopolitan than provincial. However, to traverse the world proclaiming something radically new was a lot to ask of Galilean fisherman–so God sends them a helping hand.

The tongues were divided. It was not a raging Spirit inferno. It was not a united flame. Each tongue rested on a disciple, and each tongue gave the ability to speak in a particular language. The Spirit of unity was not there to bring the disciples together—they were already together. The Spirit of unity was there to send out those who would bring the world together.  In order to do it, the Spirit came as divided tongues to wedge the insular group apart.

Before the Spirit’s coming no one had heard of international Galileans (cf. vs. 7). The gathered crowds hearing the many languages erupting from the disciples were amazed, “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own language?”

Luke is confusing, “All were amazed…but others sneered.” The “all” are the Jews of the diaspora who had come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). The “others” Luke identifies as “Men of Judea, and all who live in Jerusalem.” The sundry world outside of Judea accepted the miracle while the singular tribe inside of Judea denied the presence of the Spirit. God is not meant to respect borders, or to be contained by them.

The sneering crowd accused the disciples of being drunk with new wine. Peter denies this accusation, and tells the dissenters that the presence of the Spirit is the fulfillment of God’s word. The last days are here, the Day of the Lord has come. Nothing is the same. The Spirit of God is released and cannot be put back in its place. This is a full scale meltdown of the containment unit. The Spirit has descended on sons, daughters, young men, old men, male and female slaves–all flesh.

Pentecost begins in indoor seclusion and moves to public proclamation.  It is ironic then that we gather together indoors, clad in red, to receive the message once again to “get out there and do something!”  It is important to remember that this is exactly what is happening.  Pentecost is not a trip down memory lane where our task in worship is to memorialize the birthday of the church.  Pentecost is about now, not then.  Our Pentecost observances fail if they create nostalgia instead of equipping interpreters or prophets to go out in the world and proclaim the good news of the gospel.

Psalm 104:24-34; 35b

Our Psalm lection celebrates the Spirit of life. The Spirit of God animates God’s creation. When God takes away the Spirit, God’s creation dies (vs. 29).  Even the mighty leviathan (the somewhat mythical creature of the sea) is not self sustaining, but looks to God in due season for its sustenance.  Indeed, says the psalmist, these creatures would not even find life if it wasn’t for the creative power of God’s Spirit.  When God sends forth God’s Spirit, there is creation and renewal (vs. 30).

This is an important reminder for the church as we gather on the day of Pentecost. When we resist the Spirit, and act provincially about the gospel, we become sick and weak. When we act like God and send forth the Spirit with reckless abandon, then we see new creation and experience vital renewal.

Romans 8:22-27

Our salvation is sure, absolute, and total, but it is not yet finished within us.  We are in process.  Because the Spirit is changing our hearts in a deep and purifying sanctification we are continually in a state of awkward adolescence as we learn what it is that we are yearning for, and what a godly future kingdom means for us and our world.  During this awkward time when we and the planet we live on cry out for God’s presence and provision we often do not know how to pray.  We wonder what it means to follow the lead of Jesus and pray “may your kingdom come, may your will be done.”  Paul tells us that the Spirit of God intercedes for believers and presents to God the innermost workings of our hearts with “sighs too deep for words.”  There is comfort in the Spirit’s intercession in that even in our great human weakness we are not stumbling unaided into the throne room of God with our petitions.  The Spirit is at work in us, and the Spirit is preparing our hearts for the kingdom, even as we pray with great ignorance about the hope we all have within us.

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

In our gospel lection Jesus, in his so called “farewell discourse,” tells his disciples about the coming of the Spirit of Truth (aka the “advocate”) upon his departure.  The Spirit will testify on Jesus’ behalf along with the disciples.

Jesus is adamant that the disciples will not be poorer in his absence.  Jesus declares that at the coming of the Spirit the disciples will be at an even greater advantage.  There are things the disciples need to hear, but Jesus cannot yet tell them.  At the coming of the Spirit, however, the disciples will be led into “all truth.”

Celebration of Worship

As you prepare your hearts and minds for worship consider the gift of the Spirit’s presence.  The Spirit gives us life and sustains us and then frees us from our insular existence and makes us available as witnesses for Christ to the world.  When we suffer for lack of knowing how to pray the Spirit takes over our prayer life and pleads with the Father on our behalf.  Often we wish Christ had lived in our lifetime, so we could have heard his teachings and enjoyed his presence.  Seldom do we remember Jesus’ surprising statement, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

 

 

Weekly Introduction to the Revised Common Lectionary Readings (Ascension of Christ)

Note: The feast of the ascension is held 40 days after Easter (cf. Acts 1:3).  This year the feast of the ascension falls on May 17th, 2012.  Because of declining attendance at midweek services, many churches that celebrate the feast of the ascension opt to do so on the Sunday following the feast of the Ascension.  I have chosen to follow suit, replacing the readings for the seventh Sunday following Easter with the readings for the ascension.

The most detailed narrative of the ascension is found in Acts 1:1-11.  The ascension is also mentioned in the longer ending of the gospel of Mark (Mark 16:19-20), and briefly in the first volume of the Luke/Acts two volume work (Luke 24:50-53–see the gospel lection below).  There is controversy over whether or not Paul mentions the ascension.  If we include the letter to the Ephesians in the Pauline corpus (the majority of scholars attribute the letter to the “Pauline tradition/school”, meaning that some later disciple or student of Paul wrote it) then the ascension is mentioned by name (the Greek ἀναβαίνω) in Ephesians 4:8-10.  However, contextually it is debated if the Ephesian author is referring to the ascension into heaven in 4:8-10 or the ascension from Sheol (the place of the dead), i.e. the bodily resurrection.  What we do know for sure from Paul’s writings is that (1) the resurrected Christ is no longer bodily present with the fledgling Christian movement, and (2) that Paul and the Christian community are waiting the second coming of Christ in the clouds (cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:10, 4:13-18).

Acts 1:1-11

Acts 1:3 tells us that Jesus’ post resurrection appearances lasted 40 days–a symbolic number indicating sacred time (usually a time of preparation).  During this time Acts tells us that Jesus taught his disciples more about the kingdom of God (Jesus’ favorite topic in the synoptic gospels).  Jesus also commands the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they receive a “baptism with the Holy Spirit.”  The talk about the kingdom and the coming promise of the Spirit prompts the disciples to inquire of Jesus if the time is right for the kingdom to be restored to Israel (a political hope tied to the coming of the Messiah).  Jesus puts them off by asserting that it is not the disciple’s place to know the times established by the Father’s authority.  However, in the interim the disciples will receive power from the coming of the Spirit and will be witnesses in “Jerusalem, in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  The order of witness is important because it provides a chronological outline for the Acts narrative of the spread of Christianity to the known world.  It is also important to note that in asking about the kingdom being restored to Israel, Jesus points the disciples to their responsibility as witnesses not only to Jerusalem and Judea but also to Samaria and the ends of the earth, thereby deflecting the nationalistic tenor of their question.

After Jesus presents the disciples with a glimpse of their future as witnesses to the kingdom he is mysteriously lifted up and disappears into a cloud.  The disciples are then visited by two men in white who tell them that Christ will return in like manner.  This is likely an allusion to Daniel 7:13 which Christ himself quotes in Mark 14:62 and Luke 21:27.  The image of the Son of Man coming in power in a cloud in the sky had eschatalogical significance for the Jews of Jesus’ day.  It pointed to a future moment when God would supernaturally intervene in the cosmos and set the world to rights.

Psalm 93

Psalm 93 is one of the so called “royal psalms” that praise God as the great and powerful king of God’s people.  The psalm speaks of God in superlative terms as one who is majestic, girded with strength, and everlasting.  Even when dangerous floods lift up and the raging flow of water roars as it speeds its way across the ground, the Lord is more majestic and powerful (93:3-4).

The psalm is a fitting response to the ascension of Christ in that the ascension is seen as the final glorification of Christ in which he takes his seat at the right hand of God (Ephesians 1:20–see below) to rule forever and ever.

Ephesians 1:15-23

Both the authorship (see above) and the audience of Ephesians is questioned by scholars (the Greek ἐν Ἔφεσος “in Ephesus” is not found in the earliest manuscripts).  Because of this it is difficult to establish the circumstances that occasioned its writing.  Indeed, the letter reads as though it were meant for a general audience and talks of the God’s eternal plan for humanity being revealed in Christ who brought together both Jew and Gentile.

Our section of Ephesians contains a prayer for wisdom for all who read the letter, that they may know the inheritance of power they have received through their faith in Christ.  This power originates in Christ who God has “seated as his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named.”  The prayer has a liturgical feel (perhaps an early doxological hymn).  The point is that Christ is in charge, and Christ is the head of the church.  Therefore the church has power in the world to present Christ and to make Christ known.  The author of Ephesians wants his early Christian readers to know that they possess this power, and to take ownership and accountability in using it for good.

Luke 24:44-53

Luke wraps things up in a hurry.  When Jesus finally appears post resurrection to his gathered disciples there is only 18 verses before the gospel ends.  In those 18 verses Jesus passes along his peace to his disciples, eats a bite of broiled fish (dispelling noncorporeal thoughts of the resurrection), presents the crucifixion and resurrection as fulfillment of the law and the prophets, commissions the disciples as witnesses to the world, commands them to wait for the Spirit, leads them out to Bethany, blesses them, and then catches the holy elevator to heavenly places.  That’s a lot accomplished in a short amount of space.  The result is that the disciples worshipped him, and were continually in the Temple in Jerusalem blessing God and waiting on the coming promises.  Luke is setting himself up for the second volume to his amazing story (i.e. the book of Acts).

The ascension of Christ became an important element of the faith and found its way into the early creedal formations of the church (the Apostle’s Creed and then later the Nicean Creed).  The importance of the ascension was that it placed Christ at the right hand of God in a position of authority, and thus proclaimed him victorious over the powers of sin and death.

Celebration of Worship

As you prepare your hearts and minds for worship consider the authority of Christ as he sits at the right hand of God.  Christ is the head of the church.  The Church is the body of Christ.  We are the presence of Christ in the world, and we have an inheritance of power to be able to accomplish all that we need in world.  We are not helpless victims of lost “culture wars” or an oppressed group hanging on for dear life till the second coming.  We are a body imbibed with the power and majesty of the glorified Christ, unless we squander our inheritance in fruitless living, and tepid praise.

Charlie and the Wrecking Ball (Homosexuality and “all flesh”)

Standing by his bed in the hospital, I didn’t know what to say.  His skin was melting off him.  He looked like a cake that someone had frosted too quick out of the oven.  His breathing was labored, and when he talked it sounded as though he were gargling a square yard of gravel.  He hated the fact I was there.  I was a symbol of everything that pained him in life.  I hated the fact I was there too.

I was at that bedside because Charlie brought me.  Charlie is a person of deep faith, and he believed that I might say something of value to his alcoholic friend who had drunk himself near to death.  I had no idea what to say–and I couldn’t hide my shock when I first saw the man’s wasted body.  Still I had to say something, anything.  I paused, rubbed my sweaty palms together (the Churches of Christ version of adjusting the clerical collar), and stuttered to the skeleton in front of me. “God loves you.”  His weak eyes told me that I could save my God talk for someone who cared to listen.  He had heard plenty of God talk in his life, and none of it was pitched in the key of love.

Vermont, like most of the United States of America, is a deeply divided community.  On the one hand it is known for its progressive politics and it granola-like subculture.  On the other hand it is populated with salt-of-the earth farmers who work rural strips of slow changing farm land, and who cling to the way life is, or perhaps the way life used to be, with steely grips born from the hard work of steadying a plow and swinging and axe.  When in the year 2000 the state of Vermont passed a bill allowing civil unions for same sex couples, this dichotomous population could no longer live in harmony.  An aggressive counter campaign in reaction to the new civil unions was launched with the slogan “Take Back Vermont.”  Signs were printed by the thousands, and they were regular fixtures on farm tractors and barns.  The signs were most prominent in Washington County where the little church I ministered to set up shop in an old Grange Hall in the capital city of Montpelier.  One farmer, not far from the grange hall, copied the font and the color of the sign and had the entire side of the his two story barn turned into a billboard of protest (billboards are otherwise illegal in the state).  The tension was thick.  People got into arguments standing in line at the bank, or at the donut shop, or at high school basketball games.  The partisan bickering only worsened when the states Governor, Howard Dean, became a major player in the national democratic primaries for the presidential election.  The rhetoric on both sides boiled over.  Tempers exploded into mass eruptions of ad hominem and vitriol.  Families were divided.  Friendships were lost.  Our little struggling church stood on the sidelines of the quote/unquote “culture wars” with straight faces and our hands in our pockets–we didn’t want anything to do with the highly combustible issue.  So we sang songs, took communion, and prayed.

Any of that sound familiar?  I haven’t seen any angry billboards this past week since President Obama came out in favor of homosexual marriage.  But who needs billboards, we have Facebook.

It wasn’t just the combustible nature of the issue that bothered our church body.  We had a little family ‘secret’ that was only mentioned in hushed whispers, and always with the greatest of care.  Charlie was that secret.

Charlie was a son of the congregation.  His parents were much loved early leaders of the church.  They had started a successful small business and as the business grew the family, and the church, reaped the rewards of their hard labor.  They were good and responsible citizens and so their earnings were not squandered, and their hearts were bent toward benevolence.  Charlie’s father was well respected in the community, he purchased property and became a landlord to many, he was known as a fair and equitable man.  Charlie remembered to me one occasion driving with his father in Winter.  They happened upon an accident, and a man was lying in the road injured.  Charlie’s father removed his new full length winter top coat and gingerly laid it on the hurt and bleeding man, and knelt beside the man shivering until help arrived.  He told me the story with tears in his eyes.  Charlie’s mother was likewise respected, doing many charitable acts but never flaunting her philanthropy.

Charlie continues his parent’s legacy of kindness and generosity.  I have met few people like him.  He was dear to my family, and still is.  When Manny was an infant and had a seizure on a Sunday morning, but was half a State away being cared for in a distant hospital, it was Charlie who drove me in a blinding snowstorm across the dangerous Orange Heights to reach him.  When money was tight for a member in the church, it was Charlie that came to me with an anonymous donation.  When someone in the community was ill, like Charlie’s dying friend, it was Charlie that dragged me over to be at their bedside, it was Charlie that cooked and delivered a meal, it was Charlie that shoveled their driveway.  Charlie knew what was happening in the lives of everyone in the church and everyone of his tenants.  From what my father tells me, since I moved away, nothing has changed.  Every person Charlie meets is fully human in his eyes, and worthy, and deserving of human kindness.  It means a great deal to me, because when I left Vermont Charlie began caring for my parents like they were his own.

When I applied for the ministry position at the West Islip Church of Christ I needed references.  Charlie wrote me one.  When I sat in my first council meeting it was told me that his reference letter had sent my resume to the top of the stack.   I have been here for almost seven years now, I have completed my master’s degree, I have grown leaps and bounds in my understanding of the world around me, and it’s in large part because of Charlie.

Not one person, so far as I know, that Charlie cared for benefited Charlie in some economic way.  Indeed, many of his tenants took advantage of his generosity, and ruined his property, causing him more harm than good.  But Charlie kept being Charlie, which was why, on that day, I sat at the bedside of the dying alcoholic trying desperately to say something of meaning.  But there was too much pain for him to hear me.

The deep heart pain of the dying man was from a lifetime of rejection.  The dying man was gay.  That’s the reason Charlie knew him.  Charlie is gay too.  No, Charlie and the dying man were not ‘lovers,’ or ‘partners.’  They were just friends.  Friends who held a pain in common, and who understood each other’s wounds and fears.  I never did come up with anything good to say.  It wouldn’t have mattered.  The big sign on the two story barn was all the dying man heard when he thought of God and the church.  He’s not alone.  In her new book unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters Sarah Cunningham reports that when asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was not “loving” or “benevolent” or “forgiving” but “antihomosexual.” This was true for 91 percent of non-Christians and 80 percent of church goers.  Charlie was trying to do good in bringing me to the dying man’s bedside, but I never stood a chance.

When we read the first ten chapters of the book of Acts we want to clap.  The beginning of Christianity (i.e. ‘the Way’) is a great story.  The Spirit is so progressive and daring, and the early Christians are courageous and willing servants.  It makes us proud to be a part of a Spirit-led world-changing phenomenon.  But should the text of Acts make us proud, or a little nervous?

I need to warn you, be careful how eagerly you applaud the Spirit.  It’s a trap.  Our historical and cultural distance from the events of the book of Acts makes it too easy for us to bang out palms together in a Holy Spirit pep rally, and we have no idea what we are applauding.  The Holy Spirit is out of control and the Spirit is no friend of our ideas and understandings about God and the world.  Why?  Because those ideas and understandings are imperfect and in need of sanctification.  The Spirit is not interested one bit in protecting the way we are.  On the contrary, the Spirit is on continuing mission to deconstruct the parts of us that are not like God, and to rebuild us again.  The first ten chapters of the book of Acts is the Spirit as wrecking ball.  It bursts through the walls of the upper room in Jerusalem, and it spills debris all over the crowded streets of the Holy City of Jerusalem.  People begin yelling and screaming, and running for their lives.  The Spirit was out of control then, and the Spirit is out of control now.

When the disciples asked the resurrected Christ in Acts 1:6, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus answered, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  Jesus then ascended into heaven, the Spirit came slamming into the sides of buildings, and all craziness broke loose.

At first blush it doesn’t sound that drastic.  Jews from all over the ancient world, who did not share a common language, gathered at Jerusalem for the Pentecost, and heard the disciples speaking in Spirit-enabled tongues.  Peter got up on the day of the promised Spirit’s outpouring to answer a few naysayers and interpreted the event as a fulfillment of Joel’s ancient prophecy, “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”  Good, we say.  That’s how it should be–an all-inclusive God who gives liberally.  Pour it out God!  On everybody! On “all flesh!”  Let it be known how great and far reaching is the grace of God!

Really?  Are we sure?  We do know that all flesh means all flesh, right?  We do know it’s the Spirit’s initiative and not ours?  We do know that the Spirit is sovereign and what we say is not?  We do know the spirit is an out of control wrecking ball?

The friends of Peter could have stacked up hundreds of scriptures in protest, one upon another, when Peter went knocking on Cornelius’s door?  Are you a fool, Peter?  Haven’t you heard that it was said…?  In contrast the author of Acts does not once justify the inclusion of Cornelius in the people of God in Acts 10 with an appeal to Old Testament scripture.  Why?  Because then the naysayers would have sunk the quoted text in a deep interpretative quagmire.  The Old Testament is ambiguous at best in its message about the nations.  In some texts Israel was to be a blessing to the gentiles, but only as the gentiles were drawn to the Holy mountain Zion.  Nobody was going out to Caesarea, named after the Imperial throne, and knocking on Centurion’s doors.  Caesarea and its artificial harbor were built by the hated Herod the Great as a magnificent and strategic Greco-Roman city in occupied Judea.  Many Jews refused to acknowledge Caesarea as a part of Judea and called it “the daughter of Edom.”  It was ludicrous–the Christian mission went to the local symbol of Imperialism to offer the olive branch!  Someone was sure to point out that the oppression of God’s people was cause for vindication, retribution, and revenge in the Hebrew scriptures, not for inclusion.  God would pay the oppressors back.  The prophet Nahum writes to imperial Assyria, “A jealous and avenging God is the Lord, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies.  The Lord is slow to anger but great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.”  This centurion was guilty.  He was part of imperial Rome and a leading soldier in their war machine.  God would have his head on a spike! 

Peter himself can’t believe it.  He’s given three looks at the same vision and he’s still scratching his head.  After a whirlwind of events brings Peter to Cornelius’s house Peter admits to Cornelius that Peter’s presence at Cornelius’s house goes against Peter’s strongly held religious beliefs, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile…”  To the Jews of the second temple period, which the first disciples of Jesus were, Jewish distinctives, privileges, and separatism and the rules associated with them were of divine origin.  They could go to book chapter and verse to prove it.  And who could blame them for thinking so.  How could such a wide sweeping action as the full inclusion of Cornelius and family, that seemed to alter their distinctives, privileges, and separatism be justified?

Peter provided the answer, “…but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  How did Peter come to know this?  The wrecking ball brought a fresh vision!  The Spirit told him.  The Spirit gave him something new in life that led him to reinvestigate and reinterpret all that came before.  Even then he never dreamed he’d have to eat with them.  Peter had no idea what was happening.  He just knew and believed that God was active and alive, and was doing new things in the name of Jesus in his own day.   Peter opened the window of opportunity a mere crack, and with that a solid steel wrecking ball demolished the side of his house.  The Spirit poured itself out on all flesh, and there was nothing the ancient texts could say about it.  Nahum was old wine, and these were new wine skins.

When the Spirit came Peter had two options: deny it, or change.  The change came slowly.  After his monumental triumph of baptizing Cornelius and his family, Peter still needed to grow in his understanding of all that God had told him.  Peter still needed the sanctifying presence of the one ton wrecking ball.

You and I need it too.

I can’t speak for God.  I used to think I could.  But I know better now.  I can read scripture, and I can offer my testimony as a drop of water in a sea of our great tradition as I try to make sense of the divine presence we all feel in our lives.  But the Spirit is free to send a wrecking ball through anything I might say or anything I might believe.  Peter didn’t get a chance to finish his sermon to Cornelius and family before the Spirit crashed through the ceiling and the gentile Pentecost was in full swing.

I confess I don’t always know what to do with partisan tension and two story billboards.  I don’t know what do to with hell holes like Caesarea, and arrogant imperialists like Roman centurions.  I don’t know what to say to dying men.  Should I say with the apostle Paul in Romans 1:27, you are receiving “the due penalty for [your own] error.”  Or should I say, “God loves you.”  I confess to you that I believe I chose rightly.  I just wish he could have heard.

I confess that I also don’t always know what to do with little church secrets.  This I do know.  The Spirit is sovereign, and the Spirit is out of my control.  I can’t deny the Spirit’s presence, and I can’t gloss over the outpouring of the Spirit’s gifts in someone’s life.  And where the wrecking ball is so is the Father and the Son, and as Peter came to know, so are the people of God.

Weekly Introduction to the Revised Common Lectionary Readings (Easter 6b)

Acts 10:44-48

This week, in light of the season of Easter, we continue our ‘first lessons’ from the book of the Acts.  Our text from Acts 10 is part of the larger narrative of Peter’s encounter with the centurion Cornelius and the conversion of Cornelius and his family to ‘the Way’ (i.e. Christianity).  When Peter was in the midst of delivering his evangelistic sermon to Cornelius and company the Holy Spirit ceased the initiative and descended on all those who heard and believed.  The aggressive nature of the Spirit’s outpouring left little doubt about God’s feeling toward gentiles who turned to Christ–there would be no prerequisites for their acceptance beyond their reception of the Spirit.  Those circumcised Jews who were with Peter were astounded at the liberal acts of God’s Spirit–could it be that God is no respecter or persons?!  Regardless of their astonishment, the fact of the Spirit’s outpouring remained.  It was undeniable.  Cornelius and his gentile family were speaking in tongues in the same way the original disciples had spoken in tongues on the day of Pentecost.  In many ways the author of Acts present this as a second Pentecost–the gentile Pentecost.

Peter interpreted the events correctly.  He rhetorically asked those present how the waters of baptism can be denied people who have already received the Spirit.  Receiving no objection he ordered Cornelius and his family to be baptized.

The order of events is significant here.  The Spirit descended on the gentile believers before their baptism.  In other places in Acts baptism and the Spirit were received together, in yet other narratives the Spirit was not received until sometime after baptism.  In ALL cases, however, there was a link between baptism and the reception of the Spirit.  The two went hand in hand.  The point of the jumbled order is that God is sovereign over the justification and the sanctification of an individual (or group of individuals).  Therefore ‘salvation’ cannot be distilled into a simple pattern of steps that one takes in a ritualistic climb toward righteousness.  This reluctance of ‘salvation’ to become a possession we control means that we can never determine ourselves the parameters and limits of God’s favor and grace.  The Spirit goes where the Spirit goes.  It will astonish us in the same way it astonished Peter’s companions.  When faced with a bold move of the Spirit our options are to deny the facts (never a safe posture) or to reconfigure our own ideas about the Spirit’s presence and work in the world.

Psalm 98

The call to praise God in Psalm 98 is powerful.  Get out the instruments, says the psalmist.  We need to hear the lyres, trumpets, and horns!  Let the earth and its hills and the sea and its floods give praise to God!  Why?  Because as God’s favor and blessing are all inclusive so should be the praise of God.

The psalmist lauds God’s inclusive blessing and favor.  God has “revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations [i.e. the gentiles]” and has done so while remembering “his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.“  Therefore “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God” and we can be sure that “he will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.“

Psalm 98 is an appropriate response to the ‘first lesson’ in that as we welcome the gentile Cornelius into the new covenant we witness the victory of God extending to the nations and the very ends of the earth.

1 John 5:1-6

In somewhat circular reasoning John has already proclaimed that when we love God we love our brothers and sisters in the faith, now John doubles back on himself and runs the same track in the opposite direction declaring that when we love our brothers and sisters in the faith (i.e. the ‘children of God) we love God (John links the love of God with the keeping of God’s commandments, which in this passage is seen as love for others and proper christological belief).

It is important to remember that the johaninne community was in conflict with other Christian groups who were defining Jesus’  ‘sonship’ to God in different ways.  Some suggested that Jesus only became God’s son at Jesus’ baptism (this is referred to as adoptionist christology).  John’s community however had argued that the Christ was pre-existent and eternal (John 1:1).  Perhaps this is why John is so adamant about how sonship came to Jesus in the latter part of this week’s lection.  John writes, “This is the one [Jesus] who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.”  It is likely that John is speaking of the claim of the adoptionists that the Son of God was adopted at Jesus’ baptism (i.e. the reference to water).  John says that Jesus Christ actually came not only with water, but with water and blood.  Although there are varying interpretations it is certainly plausible that water and blood is a reference to Jesus’ birth.  John would be saying then that Jesus’ sonship did not originate at his baptism was present at his birth.

John 15:9-17

Our gospel lection is a continuation of the previous week’s lection about Jesus being the vine and his followers being the branches.  In the aftermath of that analogy Jesus enters into a didactic lesson on loving one another.  James Boyce at www.workingpreacher.org is helpful in pointing out the thematic switch and Jesus’ emphasis on love in vss. 9-17: “Though reference to love has been completely absent in verses 1 through 8, the repeated reference to it now (5 times as verb or noun in verse 9 alone; 11 times in the lesson as a whole) clearly gives love the center stage.”

Jesus says concerning love that what is true about Jesus is true about us.  Jesus has kept the father’s commandments, and thus has abided in the father’s love.  Therefore Jesus instructs his disciples to keep his commandments, and thus abide in his love.  Jesus received joy by following the commands of God.  Therefore Jesus instructs his disciples to experience this same joy in their own obedience.  Jesus has loved the disciples. Therefore Jesus instructs the disciples to love each other as he has loved them.  Jesus will lay down his life for his friends.  Therefore Jesus instructs his disciples emulate him in love.

Finally Jesus reminds the disciples of their special relationship with him.  Jesus tells them that they are not uninformed servants but initiated friends.  Servants are not always aware of their master’s grand plans.  Friends, however, have intimate knowledge of each other’s dreams and goals.  The dreams and goals of Christ are a new community where service and love create righteous justice.  It is in this new community that the disciples’s joy will be complete.

Celebration of Worship

As you prepare you hearts and minds for worship consider the all-inclusive Spirit that pours itself out with reckless abandon and is completely out of our control.  This is a great blessing from God, even if it makes us nervous.  The challenge for us is to recognize the great diversity the Spirit calls forth and love that diversity with a love that is self sacrificial and servant minded.  In doing so our joy will grow and worship will come forth from every corner of the earth and seas.

Christianity and the Perfect Tomato

My good friend George Dimidjian used to tell me that in America it was impossible to find a delicious tomato.  George was from Aleppo Syria where the agreeable climate effortlessly grew tomatoes kissed by the sun and fire truck red.  When he described them my mouth watered.  I wanted to grab one in my hands fresh off the vine and bite it like an apple, not caring if a cascading waterfall of seeds and juice went dribbling down my chin.

George was right too: it is hard to get a decent tomato in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  If you are like me then you buy your produce in the large grocery box stores.  The tomatoes you find there are picked while still green from fields far away from here.  They are then sent to ripening warehouses where they spend long days bathing in Ethylene gas.  Ethylene is a hydrocarbon gas produced by many fruits that acts as the molecular cue to begin the ripening process. Tomatoes ripened in this way tend to keep longer, but have poorer flavor and a mealier, starchier texture than tomatoes ripened on the plant.  You can usually tell the gas ripened tomatoes–they are pinkish or more orange than their vine ripened deep red cousins.

Because of customer dissatisfaction with tomatoes that have their culinary value somewhere between cardboard and sawdust many grocery box stores started offering  their version of ‘vine ripened tomatoes.’  But don’t let the name fool you.  If you have romantic notions of an overalls wearing farmer marching out in the dew soaked cool morning to the sound of a crowing rooster, ready to clip that cluster of tomatoes just for you then you could not be more wrong.  Box store ‘vine ripened tomatoes’ never ripen on a plant either.  They too spend their time soaking up the ethylene in the big produce warehouses.  The only difference is that they come neatly tied together with a bit of their stems(i.e. the vine).  The stem does help the tomatoes ripen red, and some say there’s a boost in flavor.  But George wasn’t buying it, and I’m not either.

You can’t fool me.  Every year of my youth my parents had a garden.  I know what a good tomato tastes like.  Maybe not a tomato from Aleppo Syria, but the best that a sweet Maine summer can offer, and that’s pretty darn good.

I had a love/hate relationship with my parent’s garden.  I loved eating from it; I hated working in it.  My greatest hate was for weeding; my greatest love was the delicious tomatoes.   The grocery box stores don’t even come close.  It’s a swing and a miss.  A big miss!  Where tomatoes are concerned, I don’t even think the box stores are taking their cuts in the right ball park.

So every spring my wife and I embark on a mission.  I select the best looking transplants I can find, she turns the soil by hand, and we carefully fill our 8′ X 16′ garden plot that we squeezed out of our size-challenged backyard with as many tomato plants as we can fit.  I’m a sucker for the large Beefsteak variety; the wife prefers the smaller Romas.

Unfortunately Shannon and I do not have a great success rate when it comes to tomato growing.  As I remember it, we’ve had one great year–one out of thirteen–but boy was it great!  That year I had the best sandwich I have ever eaten.  It was on homemade honey whole wheat bread (we had a bread maker), and between the slices were piled thick garden fresh sweet onion, warm cucumber, and generous slices of bright red beefsteak tomato picked earlier that morning and seasoned with a touch of mayo,salt and pepper and garnished with a thick square of American cheese.  I cried when that sandwich was finished.  The tomato was perfect (it was one of many in that exceptional season).

The rest of our tomato growing years have not been stellar.  We start well, but the growing season is long (especially for the large beefsteak variety which take half a century to reach maturity), and who really has time for gardening these days.  I’ll admit that along with the time crunch I still have my love/hate relationship with the garden: give me your delectables, but don’t make me weed.  Soon our garden resembles, in both plant density and species diversity, a wild patch of the Amazon Rain Forest.  Then come the bugs, and in some years the blight.  My hopes of the second perfect sandwich are dashed and I nod my head in agreement with George–in America it is impossible to find a delicious tomato.

Jesus uses a lot of interesting metaphors to describe his relationship with his disciples in the gospel of John: the bread of life for those that hunger, the shepherd to the sheep, the door for those who need entrance.  All of them are helpful in their own way.  Perhaps the most memorable, however, is his statement, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.”  Jesus wasn’t talking about tomatoes.  He had grapes in mind.  But the idea is the same.  If you want to bear sweet fruit, the kind that make perfect sandwiches, the kind that will rival anything grown even in Aleppo Syria, then stick with me and ripen on the vine, kissed by the sun and fire truck red.

The word Jesus used for ‘stick with me’ is ‘abide.’  Abide in the vine.  Abide is not a word we readily warm up to.  We all have twitching knees and nervous stares.  If we are staying still we are going backwards.  Frenetic life is the rule, not the exception.  Deep, quiet, soulful abiding on the vine, letting the morning dew evaporate in the tepid noon sun is a luxury few of us can afford, or are allowed to indulge in.  Instead we get picked green, sent to warehouses, and drenched in ethylene gas.  You’re ready, they say.  A bit pinkish, and orange around the collar, but ready.  Nobody asked you if you were ready.

Have you ever felt used by the forces that push you along?  Do you get the stinking suspicion that you’re a consumable product about to be served in up as a fixin’ in a limp ham sandwich.  You’ll be a disappointment for sure–like something posing for the right thing–but they got to keep the shelves stocked in the large box stores of life.  Everyone wants their pick of tomatoes.  Just throw another dab of fatty mayo on the bread, and an extra shake or two of the high blood pressure salt seasoning and you’ll taste alright–not perfect, but alright.  Honey whole wheat homemade bread?  You’re kidding, right?  Who has the time?  Just relax, this pull at your stem won’t hurt a bit, there’s no need to stay on the vine.  This isn’t Aleppo, and it’s certainly not Jerusalem or Galilee.  This is Long Island.  We eat on the run.

Lance Pape describes it as our growing sense of impermanence.  I found his helpful suggestions on preaching John 15 when I was compiling material for this week’s sermon.  In an article he wrote for Homiletics he illustrates our failing sense of permanence by telling this autobiographical story: “At an after-school tutoring program, I made the mistake of asking where one of the students ‘lives,’” writes Lance, “and received a blank stare for a response. When these kids ask one another about such things, they say ‘Where do you stay?’ The difference is more than semantic. Human disposability has so shaped their thinking that they are asking a different and less permanent question.”

In some ways I know what that’s like.  I moved around a lot as a kid.  My present stretch on Long Island is the longest I have ever lived in one place.  But in other ways I know nothing of the hard lives many lead with no sense of permanence.  I always had my parents as primary caregivers, always.  I moved with them.  We abided.  Jesus always came too, or maybe he led the way.  Perhaps sometimes he led and sometimes he didn’t.  It didn’t matter.   Whether he led or my parents led he was always at the new place.  He promised he would be there.  If you read John 15 carefully you note that abiding is a two way street.  “Abide in me” Jesus commands–stay on the vine–yet he adds, “as I abide in you.”  It is a two direction relational posture.  It is a reciprocal communion.  Jesus was better at it than I was.  Wherever I went Jesus went, that was his promise to me.

It wasn’t (and it isn’t) always easy.  Jesus does daring things with his own metaphor.  He talks about some branches that were cut away by the vinedresser because they were fruitless–they had ceased abiding, ceased taking nutrients from the source of life, and were dead on the vine.  Then he mentions some branches that stubbornly refused to meet their potential, and those branches were pruned.  That’s scary stuff.

Which reminds me–you better prune your tomatoes plants too.  Left on their own the fast growing plants become too large for their own stems.  You know how it is.  Bigger is better, they say.  Grow, grow, grow, they think.  Top heavy, the over-burdened plants lay over on their sides which increases their tendency to branch out.  Branch after branch after branch.  The solar powered sugar factories suck up nutrients only to produce an over abundance of inedible green leaves.  Without pruning, a vigorous indeterminate tomato plant can flop all about your garden with as many as 10 stems, each 3 to 5 feet long.   It’s an impressive feat of frenetic growth, to be sure.  But come harvest it will be an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle.  I know–it happens in my garden all the time.

When we see the clippers coming many of us would rather grow, become fat, and lay on our sides all day in a tangled mess.  God will have none of it.  He’s after the sun kissed, fire truck red fruit, not the tangle of aimless branches.  Which is to say that God has an end in mind.  There is a focus to life when one abides in the vine and receives pruning.  A focus to life.  Did you hear that?  Did it sound good?  Are you laying on your side right now, sprawled out in one great horticultural embarrassment?  What if you were a branch with focus?  Would life be different?

Still, the idea of pruning is counter-intuitive.  We want this church bursting at the seams.  If you read the journals they say the key to church growth is parking, not pruning.  Folks wont react well to this talk of clippers and trimming down.  Walter Wink gets to the heart of our fear in an article he wrote for the Christian Century, “There are times when the words ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love’ do not come as unmitigated comfort. Look at how God loved Jesus! From baptism to crucifixion, Jesus kept abiding, and the Powers maintained their menace.  Did Jesus have to undergo pruning?  Is that what the Temptation was all about? And Gethsemane? And how much more we never hear about?”  Walter Wink knows our deep concern.  Facing the master’s clippers we wonder if plants cry out when they’re ripped limb from limb.  We cry out.  I know we do.

For some of you, however, this is a tired refrain.  God prunes us so we can produce more fruit.  Good for God.  Bad for me.  Sometimes well meaning, but ill-advised friends, might suggest that this is the source of all our suffering.  It is just God, they say, making a person out of you, trying to get a succulent tomato for the perfect sandwich.  I prefer the idea of Elaine V. Emeth.  When she thinks of the great cosmic gardener going about his business, she imagines God as a plant lover who grieves while watching a violent storm rip through his beautiful utopian creation. Afterward, the gardener tenderly prunes the injured plants in order to guarantee survival and to restore beauty and harmony.  Without the pruning, the whole garden would die.  The gardener takes up his clippers to bring order out of chaos, and because you were never meant to be pinkish and orange and boring as sawdust.  You were meant to be sun kissed and fire-truck red.  Pruning is not to be confused with the tragedies that overtake us; it has more to do with clearing away the debris they leave behind.

I wish it was that way with my garden and my quest for the perfect tomato.  My lack of tending leaves the whole plot a helpless and hapless jungle after its storm of neglect.  God is not like me, however.  He knows the secret tricks to plump fresh produce.  For us then it is a matter of faith.  Will we abide as he prunes us for the ideal season?  I hope so, because our maturity in the spirit and our works of mercy in the kingdom, and a couple slices of honey whole wheat bread make for a delicious meal a starving world can ne’er do without.

Weekly Introduction to the Revised Common Lectionary Readings (Easter 5b)

Acts 8:26-40

The latter part of Acts 8 provides us the conversion narrative of the Ethiopian eunuch.  The eunuch is an important figure in the Queen of Ethiopia’s court.  It is likely that the conversion of the eunuch became a significant story in the early Christian tradition because of the eunuch’s status, and because the conversion of the eunuch served as a symbol for the extensive reach of the gospel.

The eunuch was traveling back from Jerusalem where it is said that the eunuch went to worship.  We assume that the eunuch was a proselyte (a gentile “God fearer” as they are referred to in Acts).  The participation the eunuch had with Judaism was limited because of the eunuch’s genital mutilation.  The Law of Moses forbade eunuchs from entering the assembly of the Lord.  Therefore the eunuch was a marginalized member of the worshipping community.

Even though marginalized the eunuch was devout.  The author of Acts says that while riding back from Jerusalem in his chariot the eunuch was reading out loud from the book of Isaiah.  Meanwhile, twice, the Christian evangelist Phillip was supernaturally prodded (once by an ‘angel’ and once by the ‘Spirit’) to come alongside the eunuch at this precise moment.  Phillip heard the eunuch reading and seized the opportunity to ask the eunuch if he understood the prophet.  The eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”  The response of the eunuch is telling.  Those who say that the task of biblical interpretation is a simple matter of reading and reasoning find no support in the experience of the Ethiopian eunuch who was lost without a teacher.

The eunuch was reading from the so called ‘servant songs’ in the portion of Isaiah’s text that scholars refer to as 2nd Isaiah (i.e. Isaiah 40-55).  The song quoted was from Isaiah 53 and is the most famous of the servant songs.  It describes one who “Like a sheep…[is] led to the slaughter, and…in…humiliation [is] denied justice.”  The eunuch asked who it was that the prophet was speaking of.  Phillip began a long interpretative tradition by claiming the prophet was speaking of Jesus.

After his education in the ‘Way’ (Acts name for the new Christian movement) the eunuch spied water along the road and asked for Christian baptism.  Phillip went down into the water with the eunuch and baptized him.  Immediately the Spirit took Phillip away to work another mission field.

Psalm 22:25-31

The fifth Sunday of the season of Easter sees us return to the Psalm of Good Friday!  Psalm 22 begins with the famous lament quoted by Jesus on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“  The section of Psalm 22 that is our reading this week, however, sounds a different tone.  This part of psalm 22 celebrates a God who is the deliverance of all (including the poor, the nations, and people not yet born).  It gives a benediction (“May your hearts live forever!”) to those who seek God, making this psalm an appropriate response to our lesson from Acts.  At the heart of the psalm’s message is the inevitability of the recognition of God’s sovereignty.  The psalm that begins in bitter lament ends in unequivocal certainty of God’s pre-ordained future.  The world will bow before the creator, of this the psalmist is certain.

1 John 4:7-21

The Johannine community (i.e. the community that produced and was the first audience for the gospel of John and the letters of John) was a community with wounds.  The recent split with their siblings Jews in the synagogue had left them a marginalized group in a hostile world.  Their battles with other Jesus traditions that differed in important matters of Christology (e.g. those that preached a docetic Christ for instance) had left them battle warn.  These internal and external skirmishes and the wounds they inflicted led the community to reflect deeply on Christian love.  1 John claims that love is the identifying characteristic of the Christian, and that in showing love the Christian proves that God abides in them.  Conversely those that say they love God, and those that claim God abides in them but do not have love for their brothers and sisters must be liars.  Love of neighbor and love of God are inseparably linked.

John 15:1-8

Abiding in Jesus (or Jesus abiding in the Christian) is also the subject matter of our gospel lection.  Jesus uses the image of grape vines and branches to illustrate his connection with his disciples.  Jesus is the true vine, and Jesus’ followers are the branches.  God is the vinegrower who cuts out the branches that produce no fruit and who prunes the remaining branches to increase their yield.  As the true vine Jesus is the source of all life to the branches.  Without the vine the branches can do nothing.  Without the vine the branches wither and die.  Therefore the fruit produced by the branches brings glory not the branches but to God who is the source.

Celebration of Worship

As you prepare your hearts and minds for worship consider the fruit you see produced in your own life.  Is God glorified in your life?  Do you feel the abiding presence of Christ in your love for your siblings and in the fruit you bear.  Are you listening to the supernatural leadings of the Spirit to enter the presence of the marginalized and show Christ to those who need a guide?

Christians Are All a Bunch of Idiots

Why are we gathered to hear a couple of idiots?  That had to be the question on the minds of Annas, Caiaphas, Jonathan, and Alexander.  According to Acts these four men were members of the high priestly family.  We know from extra biblical sources that Annas was a high priest and in charge of the temple complex from the year 6 C.E. to 15 C.E. and that he was followed by Caiaphas who held the same position until the year 36 C.E..  Annas and Caiaphas were high on Jerusalems’s “Who’s Who” list, so when we read about them in Acts 4 they are not new to the biblical story.  Both are mentioned by name in the trial narratives preceding Jesus’ crucifixion.  The gospel of John suggests that Caiaphas was Annas’s son-in-law, which made the succession of the high priesthood a family matter.  The familial connection is no surprise since five of Annas’s own sons will hold the position as well.  One of those sons was a man named Jonathan, the third person on Luke’s list of notables.  The fourth person, Alexander, is yet another member of Annas’s family–a nephew perhaps.  The mentioning of these four men together, linked by marriage and genetics, reminds us that in Jesus’ day the power of the temple as symbol and as an economic center was concentrated within a lone dynastic group.

The author of Acts says that all these members of the high priestly family were present, along with the rulers, the elders, and the teachers of the law–the text calls this collective group the “archons” (i.e. those with power)–to deal with two curious prisoners.  The previous day these now captive men had sauntered into the temple and caused quite a scene before the temple guards arrested them and held them overnight.  Their egregious error was the healing of a lame man at the gate called ‘Beautiful.’  The lame man followed the two into the temple on fresh strong legs and danced around praising God.  Crowds gathered, people whispered, energy seized the place, Spirit-led preaching filled the sacred precincts.  Then the guards came, arrested the two healers, and dispersed the astonished onlookers.

When the archons sized up their prisoners, two young fisherman named Peter and John from a backwater in Galilee, they observed that although these two had created quite a stir, and had gathered a good following in a short amount of time, they were nothing but unschooled and ordinary men.  The word for unschooled in Greek is “agrammatoi.”  The word for ordinary in Greek is “idiotai.”  Apparently Peter and John’s bad, home spun, “a-grammatical” Galilean speech made them sound “idiotic” to these ruling cosmopolitans.  The archons impressions of Peter and John confirmed their suspicions about this new band of messianic disciples who championed a crucified king–followers of Christ are all a bunch of idiots.

Our own ideas of what an idiot is should not be forced upon the text.  An “idiotai” was simply a commoner, a peasant–a salt of the earth, blue collar, dirt under the fingernails, laborer.  In that respect the archons assessment of Peter and John was not far off, nor was their assessment of the larger movement of disciples of Christ.  People throughout rural Galilee who decided to follow Jesus were by and large “idiotai.”  Our first ancestors in the faith were, almost to a person, idiotic.  Maybe one day we will come to terms with this, and understand what this says about the gospel.

It wasn’t just the two trouble makers rustic upbringing that led the archons to question the intelligence of Peter and John.  It doesn’t take Forest Gump’s mother to tell you that “stupid is as stupid does.”  Peter and John were preaching about Jesus and the resurrection of the dead inside the temple.  The archons of the temple were all  part of the Jewish sect known as the Sadducees, and Sadducees opposed the belief that one day a resurrection of the dead would occur.  That is why Peter and John were arrested in the first place, because they were preaching in the temple and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.  Of all the dumb things to preach, and of all the dumb places to preach it, Peter and John had picked the dumbest.   In seminary they tell aspiring preachers to know their audience and to mind the circumstances.  Which is another way of saying “play it safe.”  Peter and John were not playing it safe.  But what did you expect from a couple of idiotai?!

This led the archons to question the authority by which Peter and John did their ministry: “By what power and by what name did you do this?”

Sometimes life gives you a chance to redeem yourself.  When it does you better make it count.  Peter made it count.  It wasn’t long ago that Peter wasted a night away sitting around a charcoal fire in the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas while artfully dodging any connection with the Christ in order to save his own life.  Whenever the name of Jesus was mentioned by those circled around that fire Peter spat out, “I never knew the man.”  Three times he denied him before he ran off to wail into the darkness of the night.  This time Peter stood once again at the feet of Caiaphas, and likely felt a painful twinge of memory when the powerful archons circled around him demanding to know the name behind his proclamations.  This time things were different.  They had done their worst to Jesus, and he still came out on top.  Peter, not quite as afraid of death as he once was, and filled with the Holy Spirit, used his thickest Galilean drawl in reply, “Rulers and elders of the people!  It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

I suspect that when Peter started to defend himself with his dense Galilean accent, and his poor grammar, and his mispronounced words it was a head scratching moment for the archons that had gathered.  They must have looked around at each other and wondered why Annas, Caiaphas, Jonathan, Alexander, the rulers, the elders, and the teachers of the law were all present to deal with these two hill billy, red neck, trouble makers.  Couldn’t some low level temple guard or administrator handle the matter of two Jesus-followers who couldn’t figure out that their wannabe Messiah was butchered and buried?  Isn’t that what we do in our world?  Big people are called in for big problems.  Little problems are too minor to bother big people with, and there are so many of them that if we called a big person every time we had to deal with a little problem there wouldn’t be big people left to deal with big problems.  Let little people deal with little problems.  These men from Galilee had nothing!  They had no money, no connections, no Roman backing, no impressive edifices, no education–they were idiotai!  Just listen to them talk!  Who cared about them?  They had no clout!

Neither do I.  At least that’s what Klout.com tells me.  Klout.com (yes ‘klout’ with a ‘k”) measures your influence based on your social media networks.  It uses my facebook account and my twitter account to gather information on me:  how many people comment on my facebook status updates; how many people “like” or “share” a story that I post; how many people retweet a tweet that I ‘twittered’(?).  It also allows me to label other people who have Klout accounts that have had an influence on me, and in turn those who I have influenced can also label me.  Once all this data is crunched the site spits out a number from 1-100 that is your “Klout score.”  The owners of the site are quite proud of their product “When we’re measuring your influence there’s no room for error” says the site, “we have a killer team of scientists and engineers working everyday to ensure continued accuracy and make the Score clear and actionable.” 

What’s quite “clear” to me is that I’ve missed the clout band wagon.  My Klout score was a miserable 10.  My other friends had scores in the fifties and sixties.  The site gave their profile pictures captions which read “broadcaster” and “specialist” and “pundit“.  These are people who make a difference and who change the world around them. My profile picture was tagged with the pathetic caption “observer“–someone who watches the world drift on by.  How embarrassing!

You may wonder why a person should care what their laptop tells them about their own clout.  The answer is perks!  The good folks at Klout.com have convinced a whole slew of companies that if they give their products away in “perks” to those with the highest Klout scores then as those influential leaders use their clout to influence others there will be a trickle-down effect in their product’s popularity.  So, for instance, if I can raise my Klout score to a 30 then I can receive, as advertized, “ten free samples of Lipton Tea & Honey Mango Pineapple Iced Green Tea mix. Great on-the-go and perfect for sharing with fellow tea fans, Lipton Tea & Honey is a refreshingly new tea experience.  Happy sipping!”  That’s the way clout works.  Clout equals perks.  Perks equals privilege.  Privilege equals power.

I’m pretty sure if Peter and John surfed the web instead of the waters of the Sea of Galilee then their Klout score would have been negative five.   The men in front of them, however, had Klout scores through the roof–they had captions on their profile pictures that read “high priest” and “ruler” and “elder” and “teacher of the law.“  They had all the perks, which translated to all the privilege, which gave them all the power.

The Bible, however, is big on divine reversals and doesn’t seem to give a flip about Klout scores. The tiny tribes of Israel escape Pharaoh’s chariots.  The twelve foot thick walls of Jericho fall.  Scrawny David slays Goliath.  Something good comes from Nazareth.  Galilee holds its own in Jerusalem.  A crucified wannabe messiah continues to make waves in the realm of the living.  The once lame man dances in the temple on strong athletic legs.  The archons with all the dynastic clout and privilege gather in mass because they don’t know how a lame man was healed nor do they have an answer for a couple idiotai with bad grammar.  None of it makes any sense.  How do these things happen?

For Peter the answer was simple.  It was the name of Jesus.  The name of Jesus gives even the idiotai clout.  The name of Jesus means that folks with bad grammar can still proclaim with authority.  Jesus was the fulcrum for the divine reversal.  Peter, states it emphatically, perhaps famously, to the gathered archons in his often abused quote from Acts 4:12, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”  Many pull this quote from its context, and understand it as a sectarian statement of judgment about the bleak future of all those who do not wear the label of ‘Christian.’  Peter is not, however, referencing some future salvation of Christians who abide in eternal praise-filled worship somewhere in the deep azure.  The question asked of Peter was who gives you authority now, and how, yesterday, did you make the lame man walk.  The salvation the lame man received was the ability to get up and dance about.  The salvation the idiotai were receiving was the ability, in that moment, to stand up and proclaim, and to do so with authority.  The salvation of Peter, John, and the lame man was in no way a future hope, but a present reality.  Because of the name of the resurrected Jesus, Peter was no longer hiding his face from the light of the charcoal fire swearing he never knew the prophet from Nazareth.  Now this idiot was toe to toe and eye to eye with every archon the temple could boast, and his silver tongue, even with its Galilean accent, was razor sharp.

Do you have faith that the resurrected Christ can do the same for you, and that beyond you the resurrected Christ is at work in the world setting things to rights at this very moment, pouring out salvation on all people in ways that confound even those with the highest clout scores.  It takes great faith to believe this.  We see so much abuse.  Websites tell us that Jesus Christ will never get the free samples of Lipton Mango tea.  When you express your faith most people these days will probably take you for an idiot.  But there is nothing quite so satisfying as standing in a room full or archons, archons that have caused you to cower in times past, and not blinking an eye or stammering a word, but proclaiming loud the only name in the whole world that has a hope of making a lame man walk again.