Philippi: Spellbound by the Jesus Faith: Sermon on Acts 16:10-40

Last we left our intrepid missionary team – Paul, Silas, and Timothy – they listened as the Spirit of the Risen Jesus blocked them from continuing ministry-as-they'd-always-done-it. Their time in Asia was drawing to a close. Their first foray into Europe – their pathway to Rome itself – was dawning. And the Macedonians – people yet unreached with the good news – were calling for help, whether they knew it or not! So, once Luke joined them in Troas, they set sail for Macedonia and made their way to a city – a Roman colony – called Philippi (Acts 16:6-12).

They look for a synagogue – but there isn't one. To have a synagogue, you'd need ten Jewish men. And in this whole city, there aren't any. Instead, there are a few admirers of the Jewish faith – women who aren't really full converts, but who are interested. They pray out by the river, outside the city (Acts 16:13). 

So the four missionaries swing by, and they sit down, and they do conversational evangelism. Paul doesn't stand up and preach at them. Paul doesn't wield his apostolic authority with a heavy hand. Paul and friends sit down with these women, and they talk about Jesus – the Way to meet Israel's God – the Way of Salvation. A God-fearing merchant woman called Lydia – not a native, but a homeowner in Philippi – well, she believes. She believes because the Lord opened her heart. God took the initiative, and the gospel begins to take hold (Acts 16:14-15).

Paul and friends made a regular habit of visiting that prayer group along the river. Luke doesn't tell us how long this went on – certainly weeks, possibly a couple months. But then something unusual started to happen. “We were met by a girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, 'These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you a way to be saved!' She kept this up for many days” (Acts 16:16-18). They try to put up with it – they really do – but it gets to be a problem. So it's exorcism time.

See, for all Paul's tolerance in his letters of people who spread the gospel with impure motives, he does not believe our saying that all press is good press. It might be tempting to think, “Hey, what's wrong with what this girl's doing? This must be a friendly spirit who came to help get the mission moving along, right?” That's what the last Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church apparently thought, when she preached in Venezuela that Paul was the bad guy in this passage who destroyed her spiritual gift out of jealousy because this demon-possessed slave-girl was maybe closer to God than the Apostle Paul was. (Yes, she really taught that nonsense!)

What's going on here was obvious to Luke's readers. The Greek literally says that this slave-girl had a “spirit of Python.” The most famous fortune-telling oracle in Greece was at Delphi, where a priestess called a Pythia was possessed by the Greek god Apollo once a month to give riddles telling the future. That's what we have here: this girl is being used like that, to staff a local oracle-shrine and say whatever the demon wants her to say – Luke may be suggesting that the demon here is Apollo himself, even – and the whole business is very, very good for making money.

Still, wouldn't you think Paul might find it helpful to have a local authority going around and shouting that they've come to preach God's message of salvation? Wouldn't that speed things up? Maybe that's what we'd be tempted to do. Endorsements welcome from anybody, right? But that's not how Paul is seeing things. When we're out spreading the good news, there's only one Spirit we can trust and rely on. It isn't a demon. It isn't even our own spirits. It's God's Holy Spirit – the Spirit of the Risen Jesus. That's the only Spirit who consistently and perfectly leads us into all truth, the only one who always has kingdom interests in mind.

The problem with this python-spirit's testimony is that it's meant to mislead. What the demon wants to do is get everyone to hear Paul's message the wrong way. Have you ever had some important news to share, and somebody else beat you to the punch and gave people the wrong expectation? When I was in college, I founded a Christian campus group called Mars Hill, and one of the events we put on every year was an orientation to help Christian freshmen be mentally and spiritually ready for college. One year, a new professor – an ardent atheist – advertised the event to his classes, offering them extra credit to come to it. We had more people there than ever! Wasn't that so generous of him? Except when he told them what the event was, he told them it was something very different from what we meant. So a lot of people came, and a lot went away disappointed or with ideas we hadn't meant to get across. To this day, I don't know if that was intentional sabotage or just his own misunderstanding. But for some students, it poisoned the well against what we were there to do on and around campus.

That's what the python-spirit is up to. Through this girl, it wants people to hear Paul's message and interpret it differently than he means it. When she says “servants,” she means for people to think about the pagan priests who interpret Apollo's oracles. When she says “Most High God,” she wants people to think about Zeus or about one of the local mountain gods. And most of all, when she says “a way to be saved,” she wants people to think about the kinds of 'salvation' pagan religion offered – good health, worldly safety, prosperity – and not about salvation from sin and the promise of eternal life in the resurrection. If people get drawn to Paul through what the python-spirit says, they'll end up going through Christian motions while keeping pagan eyes; they'll toss Paul's God alongside all the other gods they serve. They'll see his religion as just one more compartment in a big pagan house with tolerant room for everybody.

You know, to look around us at this world – even at the church world – you'd think many professing American Christians first heard the gospel from a python-spirit. Because that's exactly the style of religion you'll find a lot of places – that we can serve God at the same time we serve values contrary to him; that 'God' is a generic thing who is whatever we believe him to be; that as long as we go through the motions, it doesn't matter what we really think or believe; and that all that matters is getting a 'good life' of safety and prosperity and health. 

And friends, this passage makes it clear: that's pagan! And as soon as it's clear the effect those lies will have on his ministry, Paul acts – and he cuts through all the watered-down words with just one name, one authority: “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her” (Acts 16:18)! 

Jesus is the cure – the real Jesus who lives and reigns and whose Spirit inspired the Scriptures. For every prosperity preacher who talks about 'God' this and 'God' that, Paul says clearly: “Jesus!” For everyone who wants to reinterpret God, to put him on a shelf beside this culture's multitude of idols, Paul banishes all our Zeuses and Apollos with the overwhelming name, “Jesus!” May we never have pagan minds or pagan hearts. May our view of the gospel never be filtered by a python-spirit. May we answer all these muddled, mixed-up misconceptions with one name: “Jesus Christ!”

So with those words, Paul sets the slave-girl free from the demon. Knowing that she might be less protected against her masters' cruelty, maybe he hesitated before. Luke doesn't tell us what became of her, but now that she means less profit to her owners, they might be looking to sell her – and maybe the Philippian church aims to pool some cash together, pay the sum, and set her free. Luke doesn't tell us, but that's how I imagine it. 

But Paul has another problem. The owners are furious that Paul just let loose a landslide right across their revenue stream. So it's time for legal action (Acts 16:19). Now, they could accuse him of property damage in a civil suit. They might even win a little something. But they've got a vendetta. They want to make Paul pay! So they accuse him of disturbing the peace and of spreading customs it wouldn't be lawful for a Roman citizen to follow (Acts 16:20-21). In other words, Paul's gospel is unpatriotic!

That sells well in Philippi, because if there's one value Philippi holds above all others, it's patriotism. Philippi was just a small city until about ninety years earlier, when Octavian – the future Caesar Augustus – and Mark Antony caught up with two men named Cassius and Brutus and made sure they died. Cassius and Brutus had been pretty busy two-and-a-half years earlier on the Ides of March, when they stabbed Julius Caesar to death. And here at Philippi, Caesar's blood was avenged. 

In honor of the victory, Augustus enlarged Philippi and made it a Roman colony – one of only four in all Macedonia. In several waves, he settled it with Roman army veterans – many of the people there in Paul's day would've been descended from military families. And as a Roman colony, Philippi got special privileges, and its two magistrates, the duumviri, were appointed from Rome itself. In other words, Philippians took everything Roman very seriously. Patriotism mattered above all else.

There are places in this country like that, aren't there? There's even a risk, in some churches, of making patriotism a higher value than the gospel. I read a story once of a frightening object lesson. One communion Sunday, a pastor had the American flag next to the altar, and while serving communion, he spilled the cup onto the flag. A man barged into his office afterward and threatened him if he ever disrespected the flag that way again. He said nothing about disrespecting the cup of the Lord God Almighty, the Savior of his life.  That, the man didn't notice.  He only noticed disrespect to what he saw as most sacred: the American flag.

Which one do we see as holier: the flag of our country, or the cup we receive as the very blood that redeems us from our sins and welcomes us into a higher kingdom? That man in that one pastor's church valued the flag more than he valued Jesus. And there's a word for that. The word is “idolatry.” We need to be seriously on-guard against elevating the emblems of our country, the signs of any civic allegiance, to the level of the sacred symbols and realities of the gospel.

But that raises the question: To follow the gospel, do we therefore have to be unpatriotic? Do we have to totally give up being American to be a Christian? Some of my old seminary friends said yes. But that's not quite what I see here. 

As Luke sets up this story, we find out that Paul and Silas are both Roman citizens, just like everybody in Philippi. What's more, when push comes to shove, they abide by Roman law – while the accusers and even their judges break it by badly mistreating them. Luke wants to show us that it isn't true that the gospel can't be accepted by Romans. Paul and Silas are Romans; they're about to convert some more Romans; and the whole book is about how their mission takes them to preach the gospel to the Roman emperor himself. They've got no problem with Caesar; they just want Caesar and all his subjects to know that Jesus is Lord and Caesar ain't – that the kingdom of God isn't under Caesar's jurisdiction, and that Christ's values correct Roman ones.

The gospel isn't unpatriotic. You can be a good Roman and believe it – even if some of your Roman neighbors don't see that yet. You can be a good American and believe it and practice it – even if the Supreme Court isn't so sure. You can be a good Liberian, a good Russian, a good Syrian citizen, and still accept and practice the 'customs' of the gospel. But Jesus is Lord of Lords, King of Kings, President of Presidents. The Supreme Court of Heaven outweighs the Supreme Court of the United States. The banner of the cross means more than the stars and stripes. The values of Jesus correct and clarify American values. 

When we gather as the church of God, we aren't here as Americans, or as Pennsylvanians; we're here as members of a kingdom purchased “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). When we ascend the heavenly Mount Zion, the flag no longer flies over us; it carpets the firmament beneath our beatified and beautified feet. We honor and respect everything it means to be a good Roman or good American, but we do it beneath the Lordship of Jesus first.  Every Caesar, from Imperator to President, and every Caesar's symbol, from the purple toga and laurel wreath to the stars and stripes – it all pales as second-rate next to Jesus, but so long as it forswears the rivalry, it can bask in his righteous glory.

Paul's magistrates and accusers will learn that the hard way (Acts 16:37-40). They don't take time to even hold a trial. The magistrates just assume these outsiders aren't citizens; and since the slave-girl's owners are wealthy citizens who own land there, their testimony is all the evidence needed. Paul and Silas are stripped naked, beaten brutally until half-dead, and finally thrown in jail under the malicious eyes of a pagan Roman jailer. That prison was no pleasant place. Compared to a Roman jail, our county prison would seem like paradise. Paul and Silas were in the innermost cell – filthy, no ventilation, no light. Their feet are put in stocks, possibly spread too far apart as a way to torture them – a punishment reserved for serious crimes. They get no food; their bleeding injuries go untreated; and as night falls, all the other prisoners get stuffed into the same inner cell (Acts 16:22-24).

And that's where things get interesting. No one can sleep – not like that. So it's no surprise they're all awake at midnight. And Paul probably has some words from the longest psalm on his mind: “I will hasten and not delay to obey your commands. Though the wicked bind me with ropes, I will not forget your law. At midnight I rise and give you thanks for your righteous laws. I am a friend to all who fear you, to all who follow your precepts. The earth is filled with your love, LORD; teach me your decrees” (Psalm 119:60-64). Even though the wicked have bound him, Paul refuses to forget the message he's come to bring. Even at midnight – especially at midnight – he'll give thanks to God. So Paul and Silas turn to prayer and song.

“About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25)! It can't have been easy for them to pray and sing. They're hungry, they're cold, they're hurt, they're barely clothed (if at all!), they're crowded, they're swatting away rats... and they sing beautiful praise to God. In their prayers and in their songs, they bear witness to the truth and majesty of the gospel. They share the good news with the prisoners who share their chains. Maybe those prisoners heard what happened with the slave-girl – heard that Paul and Silas were servants of the Most High God, who came to teach the way to be saved. Whatever background they've got, they're a literally captive audience – but, more importantly, they're a captivated audience. Hearing Paul pray, hearing Silas sing – it moves them, it entrances them, it makes them want more!

If there's one thing these prisoners have in common, it's that they know they've got no direction to go but up, in an earthly sense. They have no pride, no public honor, nothing else to crowd their heart. And when they hear something beautiful burst into their lives, they're spellbound by this Jesus faith Paul and Silas are singing into their lives. All the convincing they need is in the movement of the song, the passion of the prayer, set against the backdrop of the missionaries' unjust suffering. Imagine what it must have been like, in the dead of night, to hear these two men pray and sing! It draws out the yearnings of all those around them.

Can we say the same thing? Is our faith attractive to people? Is there enough truth and beauty in our lives to make them want to listen? That's not the same thing as asking whether our faith gives us a 'good life,' the kind the python-spirit wanted people to look for. Paul and Silas aren't singing because everything's coming up roses. They're singing because, even after a beating – especially after a beating – when everything around them is ugly and scary and painful and shameful and dark – then especially is Jesus beautiful. His strength is magnified in our weakness. And because Jesus is so beautiful, he makes our faith beautiful through our trials, so that in our beautiful faith, we can lift high the beauty of Jesus Christ, so that the prisoners around us can be spellbound for their own good.

That's the big question I want to ask you this morning. If nothing else, wake up for these next moments. Is Jesus beautiful to you? Does your faith show off his truth and beauty to others? Does it draw anyone? And what would it take to make your faith a beautiful witness? 

Friends, dive deeper into Jesus! Throw yourself into him. Draw near to him. Let his glory overtake you. When you least feel like talking to anyone, pray. When you look around and see nothing worthwhile, sing a song to God! Let Jesus be your all in all. Let him be all your hope and stay. Because if our faith is in Jesus, then our faithful prayers and faithful songs can show off the splendor of the King. We are God's people – we are the denizens of his Zion – and doesn't the Scripture say that “from Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth” (Psalm 50:2)?

Sadly, the chief jailer wasn't inside the cell. It was just prisoners there. The jailer may have gone back to his personal dwelling, leaving some lesser guards in charge outside. They couldn't hear the songs. So God did something dramatic. “Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone's chains came loose” (Acts 16:26). 

Good news for prisoners! Bad news for prison guards. Worst news of all for the chief jailer! He was ready to kill himself rather than face the magistrates' wrath over letting everyone escape (Acts 16:27). But Paul stops him: “Don't harm yourself! We're all here!” (Acts 16:28). We know what stopped Paul and Silas from running. What about everyone else – plenty of ordinary criminals, guilty of real crimes and offenses?  Why didn't they make a break for it when they had the chance?  They were spellbound by the Jesus faith – that's why, that's what. They didn't want to run away from what they'd seen – not even escape prison, if it means losing what they're seeing and hearing.

The jailer knew what Paul and Silas were imprisoned for. He'd heard the stories, maybe heard the slave-girl himself. He knew these men had come to show a way to be saved. But not until now – as he saw in the earthquake the wrath of God; as he felt in his bones the fear of his situation (Acts 16:29); as he considered his death and what it all might mean – not until now does he ask them, “Lords, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). 

They turn it around – it has nothing to do with Paul and Silas being 'lords,' and everything to do with Jesus being Lord of everything. The beauty, the earthquake, the salvation – they don't come from Paul and Silas. They come from Jesus! “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved – you and your household” (Acts 16:31). It isn't a complicated message. It isn't a to-do list. It isn't a long and elaborate creed. There's time for further details later, when Paul and Silas “spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house” (Acts 16:32). It can all be summed up in this: look to the beautiful Lord Jesus; call to him to rescue you; turn to him to beautify you; depend on him for all you've got; join up with what he's doing even today!

Does the jailer do that? Just look how he turns from fear to fearlessness! Once worried about Paul and Silas escaping, now he escorts them in his personal custody, cares for them, feeds them at his own table – risking death to do that – and he entrusts them, formally and legally his prisoners, with his life (Acts 16:33-34). He and everybody he can reach get baptized right away – because they believe in the Lord Jesus, and through all the risks, that brings them joy. 

Take this with you this morning: Just trust Jesus. Trust him to save you. Bury yourself in him, and rise anew to sing joyfully to God – not the generic paganized 'god' announced by the python-spirit, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who pours out his Spirit onto and into us so we, too, can share the good news – so we, too, can be windows into the beauty of Jesus – so that others around us might be spellbound by the Jesus faith. Go forth and have beautiful faith through the gospel. Amen and amen.

Macedonia Cordially Invites You: Sermon on Acts 15:30--16:12

Good morning, brothers and sisters! It's good to see you all here this morning! It was wonderful to see everybody last week on Easter Sunday – this church sure did feel packed! And it's great to see you now. 

Easter isn't over, you know. Today is the Second Sunday of Easter, as a season in the church year. We're celebrating a whole season of resurrection. Now, all of us know the story of the risen Jesus – how he walked the earth with his disciples for forty days before returning to the right hand of the Father in heaven. The Gospels tell us that much. 

But what comes next? What follows in Easter's light? To find that out, we have to turn to another book: Acts. For the next few months, we're going to be exploring what Acts has to say to us. It's the story of what went on after Jesus rose from the dead. Some have called it a history of the early church, but it actually isn't. It's not a history of the church; it's a history of the mission, a history of the gospel's movement.

We could start from the beginning, in Acts 1. But you might have noticed that that isn't where this morning's passage was from. We're not starting at the beginning. We're leaping feet-first into the middle. After the gift of the Spirit. After the preaching of Peter. After the stoning of Stephen. After the conversion of Paul. 

In chapter ten, Peter introduces a Roman centurion named Cornelius to the faith, after God gives the okay through a vision. In chapter eleven, some of the scattered believers – Jews from Cyprus and Cyrene – began sharing the good news with Greeks living in Antioch. Paul and Barnabas minister there for an entire year, discipline all the new converts and seeing that God's hand was at work in this. Stirred by what they see God doing, they go on a first missionary journey – to Cyprus, to Pamphylia, to other pagan cities, and back to Antioch. 

And once they reached home, “they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27). The mission had burst out of its Jewish bounds! It was still for Jews – for Jews first, in fact – but now the Gentiles weren't an afterthought. They were welcomed into God's people on equal terms: through faith.

Not everyone in the church was happy, especially not the groups Paul liked to call Judaizers. Some of them, we see in Jerusalem, were converted Pharisees – like Paul was – but they had a different outlook. In those days, a lot of Jews thought Gentiles could be 'saved' through keeping the few rules God gave to Noah, but to be a part of God's people, to have fellowship on equal terms with God's chosen Israel, you had to convert and become fully Jewish – obey the whole Law, be circumcised, the whole shebang. 

Paul and Barnabas knew better. They saw that God was leading the way. So the apostles and elders met at the Jerusalem Council to make the call: Is faith in Jesus enough to make anybody part of God's people? Were Paul's new converts second-class strangers, or were they citizens of the kingdom? We know how things turned out: Non-Jews in Jesus – all or most of us, I'd guess – belong to God's people through faith and faith alone; we're only asked to behave well, like visitors to Israel always were, and not to throw up obstacles to the fellowship Jesus started (Acts 15:20). God had already “purified their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9), full salvation as part of God's people comes “through the grace of our Lord Jesus” (Acts 15:11), and that settles that. If they – we! – get the Holy Spirit, that's no second-class salvation!

And that brings us to this first important scene in our passage. When the Jerusalem Council draws to a close, the apostles and elders have put together a letter to send to the Gentile believers, carried by a pair of head honchos and prophets named Silas and Judas Barsabbas (Acts 15:22-29). They head to Antioch, the center of the whole controversy, where everything spilled over into the smoldering mess that ignited the trouble. All the people of the church come together to hear the letter (Acts 15:30). Paul and Barnabas stay stationed there for a while, but Judas and Silas are there as visitors – guest preachers – conference ministers or district field directors, if you will – and they “said much to encourage and strengthen the believers” (Acts 15:32).

Later on, Paul and Barnabas have a “sharp disagreement” about Mark – Paul doesn't want to forgive him for deserting them earlier – and so Barnabas takes Mark, and Paul joins up with Silas, and they go around to revisit the churches they've started (Acts 15:36-41). After picking up a convert named Timothy (Acts 16:1-3), what do Paul and Silas do? “As they traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey” (Acts 16:4). In other words, they brought news from headquarters. But it doesn't sound like it'd be good news, does it? I mean, the letter tells them what to do! Who wants a new set of rules? Who wants to be reminded that somebody's in a position to boss them around?

Well, it is good news. It lets them know they aren't alone. It lets the churches know that the Judaizers are wrong – they really are saved – and the people who know Jesus best say so. They don't need to throw themselves into a complex faith, full of legalistic intricacies. These churches Paul and Silas visit are getting news of the gospel all over again – that when they first believed in Christ, first entrusted themselves to Christ, then they were in – no extra hoops to jump through! 

And yes, some things are expected of them in the aftermath. They can't give in to idolatry. They can't give in to sexual immorality. They need to avoid bloody and strangled food – the kinds that reek of pagan religious practices. They shouldn't put any unnecessary obstacles between them and their Jewish brothers and sisters in the Christian faith. But neither will extra obstacles be tossed their way in return. So this letter from HQ really is good news to them. They aren't alone. The leaders in Jerusalem are thinking about them all the way up here in Cilicia – the south coast of Turkey – and northward into Lycaonia. Folks like Peter and James are praying for them and looking out for the best interests of Gentile believers they've never met.

And so what's the outcome of Paul and Silas traveling around to bring this word back to the churches? “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers” (Acts 16:5). That's an echo of what happened in the Jerusalem church after Pentecost, when “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). In other words, because of this word of encouragement from HQ, the churches way up in Syria and Cilicia and beyond were feeling bold and confident and strong – they were dedicated to the mission they had in their own backyards – and God granted the growth (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:7). Church focus and church growth were spurred on by the impact of hearing this good news from Jerusalem.

And you might be thinking, “Well, what could that possibly mean for us, here at Pequea?” Here's the takeaway. Churches do not live alone. No more than Christians live alone. We who've gathered here know the second truth. The Christian life isn't a walk we do by ourselves, from the comfort of our own homes, watching televangelists on a screen, and thinking that's enough. The Christian life requires involvement in one another's lives! 

There's a reason the words “one another” crop up so often through all Paul's letters. When the Holy Spirit's handing out spiritual gifts, he spreads them throughout the church. If our Christian lives are each jigsaw puzzles, you're missing most of your pieces, and you've got plenty that other people need. When we hold apart, when we lose touch, then our growth is stunted and stalled. God made us to need each other. His design for the Christian life is life together, life as the church. That's why we meet together at least once a week. It's not just to feel better about ourselves, as if our private lives were the main thing. Church services are for refocusing and strengthening ourselves for the church's kingdom ministry. Whatever we do, we're meant to do as members of the church.

Just the same, churches don't live alone. We aren't meant to have all the resources for kingdom ministry here within these walls, here in this group of great people God's gathered. The ministry of Pequea EC isn't about us – it isn't about meeting our needs, or fulfilling our wants. The ministry of Pequea EC is about nothing less than the kingdom of God! We are inviting and leading people into a new world where Jesus is King; and we are helping that world to crash down on this one. We serve Christ's invasion. 

And when we set our eyes and minds and hearts on the kingdom and not just on our local church, then it sets us free to do things we never dreamed we would! It sets us free to work selflessly side-by-side with other local churches – whether Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Mennonite, you name it. So long as those churches are really churches, where the word of God is faithfully taught, where Jesus is lifted high, where the common faith is confessed – then if we lead a thousand people to the Lord and every single one of them goes to one of those churches as God leads them, then we've served the kingdom, and that is all that matters. Our church lives best when we're not so much Pequea-minded as kingdom-minded – when we have “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).

But there's more. For the churches in Cilicia to band together, to cooperate, was not enough to spur the kind of growth Luke portrays here. What these churches needed was to hear from Jerusalem – from headquarters. That gave the encouragement they needed. They didn't just need to hear from their local pastors; they needed a visit from Paul and Silas; they needed the letter from the apostles and elders. The churches in Syria and Cilicia had to realize they were part of something bigger than themselves, and that there were leaders in the Church who were thinking and praying about how best to support those little distant churches way up in Cilicia. Wouldn't it be great if we had something like that?

And we do! At Pequea, we belong to a denomination. It's called the Evangelical Congregational Church. It's more than just a string of letters on the sign outside. We have a bishop, Bruce Hill. You've met him – he preached here just a few months ago, and most of you heard him a few weeks ago too. Right now, we have a conference minister, Gordy Lewis; soon we'll instead have a district field director, Keith Miller. Once a year, our National Conference meets – just like the Jerusalem Council met, gathering leaders and elders together to make big decisions and refresh each other. And words of encouragement are constantly coming from Church Center in Myerstown – messages to help us keep our focus, keep our confidence, and move forward. 

And I can assure you that we gain more from being in this denomination than we would by breaking off on our own. We can always find things to complain about. But think about this: not only do we get plenty of encouraging words from them, but they pray for us all the time, they make resources available, and they take an active interest in helping us when we let them know how things are going with the ministry here. In our post-denominational age, it would be easy to resent them, to think of them as a burden, to miss out on what they offer. But if we instead love and welcome them, if we pray for them like they pray for us, if we receive their encouragement, then we – you – can be strengthened in faith, too.

So back to Acts. What happens when the churches of Cilicia have all gotten the news Paul, Silas, and Timothy came around to bring? “Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to” (Acts 16:6-7). Those verses always struck me as weird. Is it just me? Or did it ever seem weird to you too that the Spirit put the brakes on Paul's ministry in those places? I mean, isn't the Spirit's aim to take the brakes off? Well, sometimes. As it turns out, somebody will plant churches there – Peter tells us that in one of his letters – but that isn't what Paul's meant to do now. The Spirit wants to send him somewhere with greater need.

We'll get back to that in a bit. But let's slow down here and recognize what's happening. When Paul goes out to spread the good news in new places, he does not get to decide to go where he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Oh, he can try. I mean, he tried to go preach in Bithynia. That was Paul's plan. But he got different marching orders from up above. Specifically, he was stopped in his tracks by “the Spirit of Jesus.” 

Here's the big takeaway: Jesus has not left his church alone! He has not left the mission alone! Last week, we celebrated Easter. We shouted hallelujah to the news that Jesus did not stay in the grave; that death could not hold him, can never touch him again; that Jesus is alive forevermore! Jesus came back to earth; Jesus returned to heaven; but Jesus is not now a spectator, munching popcorn on the throne of grace. The risen Jesus is actively involved in what we are doing. Jesus is still King of the Kingdom. Jesus is still Head of the Church. Jesus never took his Spirit away. Jesus remains the star of the show. Easter – Resurrection – isn't a day of the year. It's the new title for the story of the world. We live in Easter's light.

Maybe there are times when you feel like you're running under your own steam. Maybe there are times when you don't know what to do, and worse, you're not sure anybody cares. But here's the promise: Jesus cares, Jesus knows, Jesus gives strength. When he asks us to follow him, he doesn't mean to get to work while he watches! He means that he's leading us, going on before us, shouldering the brunt of the burden. He doesn't call us his servants; he calls us his friends. If Jesus were dead – if Jesus had gone the way of every other religious leader before or since – if he were nothing more than Confucius or Buddha or Muhammad or Zoroaster – well, then he would be on the sidelines now. He'd be in the bleachers. 

But Jesus isn't dead! Jesus got back on the field with us. And he may not be physically on earth, but what do you think he meant when he said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)? It means he's our living, active, present Leader. Not just in the Acts of the Apostles, but in the Acts of Pequea... the Acts of Carl and Grace, the Acts of Wilmer and Mary Jane, the Acts of Joe, the Acts of Bill, the Acts of Bobbie, the Acts of Mike and Wanda and Julie. Our lives could all be retitled The Acts of the Risen Jesus! Don't rely on your own steam or your own wisdom. Let the Spirit of the Risen Jesus stand in your way, let the Spirit of the Risen Jesus turn you around.

Back to Acts again. The third scene is what happens next: “So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night, Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, 'Come over to Macedonia and help us!' After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:8-10). Jesus didn't stop them just to have them sit around. When it became clear that Jesus was keeping them out of Bithynia, they did the best thing they could do: they got in a position for whatever he might have in store next. They went to Troas, a seaside settlement near the ancient battleground of the Trojan War. It was the perfect place for launching out to sea.

Too often, we miss what's going on here, when Paul makes the move to Macedonia. This is actually a big shift. A few hundred years before, a man made the opposite trip – from Macedonia to Troas – but for very different reasons. That man was Alexander the Great, and he came to bring war. Here, Paul retraces Alexander's route backwards from Troas to Macedonia, bringing not the invasion of troops of war but the invasion of the gospel of peace. 

And so Paul travels from what's now Turkey to what's now Greece – from the continent of Asia to the continent of Europe. Paul's never been there before! And although some believers have already been living in a few places in Europe by then, the point is that the mission is spreading into new territory. Specifically, when he sets foot in Macedonia, Paul will soon find himself on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that leads to the capital city of the empire. With this passage, we flip to the second half of the story, as the kingdom mission makes its way from Jerusalem to Rome.

In other words, Jesus wasn't content to let Paul keep doing the same kind of thing in the same kind of place. Jesus did not want Paul to keep retreading old ground. Jesus gave Paul a new setting and a new ministry. That must have been an uncomfortable moment for Paul. Ministry in the Middle East – Paul knew how to do that. He had networks of churches just a province over. He knew what he was in for. It was – so far as Paul's sort of dangerous life goes – comfortable. He was in the zone! But Jesus asked him to leave the Middle East, to leave Asia, to go to that strange continent called Europe. That's trailblazing. That's new ground. That's a frontier – no other churches around, no believers at first outside his team.

Sometimes, we're in the same boat. We want to keep treading the same ground. We want to keep doing the same kind of thing. We've settled into our routines. We're comfortable with the kind of people we've got in our lives. But Jesus has other plans for your lives. And I believe Jesus has something new planned for this church. We are here in this place to spread the gospel, to make Christ's invitation known. That's always why we've been here. But we live in a rapidly changing world. We know that. The world is plenty different now than it was when I was a kid, and most of you would say that's recent history. I believe God is calling us from our Asia – our happy, safe, familiar ways of 'doing church' – to our Europe – a new kind of ministry.

I don't believe it'll be easy. We don't know the terrain so well. It will ask changes of us. It won't be all different – it's the same gospel, after all, and we'll meet familiar kinds of faces along the way. But 'doing church' the same old way, ministering like we're still in Asia – that won't cut it. 

I don't know what our Macedonian ministry will look like. But I do know that, just as Paul dreamed a Macedonian man desperate for the gospel, so all over Salisbury Township and the neighborhoods around it, there are plenty of “Macedonians” – people hungry for the gospel of Jesus Christ, people we are not reaching by doing the same things we've done before!

Friends, we have the leadership of the EC Church behind us; we have the fellowship of the saints beside us; we have the Risen Jesus above us; we have his Spirit among and within us; and we have the Macedonian invitation before us. Our community cordially invites us, and Jesus sends us: “God has sent us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:10). 

If you aren't sure what you're doing in life – if it all seems like just a routine – then let me suggest this is what you need to hear. We – all of us – are on a mission from God. All around us, people silently cry out in their souls, “Come over and help us!” Macedonia cordially invites you. Please don't say you'd rather stay in Asia.

The Strange and Dreadful Strife: Sermon for Easter Sunday

Christ is risen! Let all God's people shout, “He is risen indeed!” Isn't that wonderful? Isn't it beautiful? The resurrection of Jesus isn't just some pretty story we tell ourselves. It's the truth of history – he really did die on the cross, he really was buried in the tomb, he really got up again with new life, he left the tomb behind, he appeared to his disciples, he appeared to his unbelieving siblings, he appeared to hundreds of people, he went back to heaven, and he even appeared one last time to a persecuting Pharisee to change a life around (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). 

Friends, if that isn't true, then everything we do here on any Sunday morning is completely pointless, and we're the most foolish of all who've ever lived, wasting our lives on a fantasy (1 Corinthians 15:14). But if it is true – and that's where the evidence points with great, big neon signs – then it changes everything (1 Corinthians 15:20)! Because it means that two thousand years ago, Jesus snapped the Grim Reaper's scythe like a twig. It means that, in the war between Life and Death, Jesus wins! It means that, though he tasted death, he de-fanged Death and walked away. And Jesus is free permanently – like Paul writes, “Since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has any mastery over him” (Romans 6:9).

Early in the 300s, there lived an Assyrian monk named Aphrahat – yes, the Persian Empire had its share of believers, too. During Aphrahat's later life, he saw his emperor, Shapur II, begin to persecute the church, putting thousands of Christians to death. In times like that – times that, sadly, have once again come to the turf Aphrahat called home – it seems like it would be easy to despair, like the disciples were thrown into despair on Good Friday. In a series of sermons, Aphrahat tried to reassure believers that the violence, the chaos, the fear all around them wasn't the end of the story. In short, he wanted them to remember Easter. And this Easter morning, I really feel led to share with you a short passage this “Persian sage” wrote in the year 344, nearly 1700 years ago, imagining what that face-to-face meeting between Jesus and Death must have been like. Here's what Aphrahat has to say:

The upright, the righteous, the good, the wise, neither fear nor tremble at death, because of the great hope that lies before them. And they are always mindful of their death, their exodus, and the last day when the children of Adam will be judged. … When Adam transgressed the commandment whereby the sentence of death was passed on all his children, Death hoped that he'd bind fast all the sons of man and would be king over them forever. 

But when Moses came, he proclaimed the resurrection, and Death knew that his kingdom would be made void. … From the hour he heard God saying to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,” Death trembled and feared and was terrified, for he learned that God is King of the dead and of the living, that that it was appointed to the children of Adam to come forth from his darkness and arise with their bodies....

And then Jesus, the Killer of Death, came. He clothed himself in a body from the children of Adam, and was crucified in his body, and tasted death. And when Death saw that Jesus had come down to him, he was shaken from his place, and was agitated to see Jesus. And Death closed his gates and was unwilling to receive him. 

Then Jesus burst Death's gates, and entered into him, and began to plunder all Death's possessions. When the dead saw light in the darkness, they lifted up their heads from the bondage of death, and looked forth, and saw the splendor of Christ the King. Then all the powers of the darkness of Death sat in sorrow, for he was degraded from his authority. Death tasted the medicine fatal to him, and his hands dropped down, and he learned that the dead would live and escape from his clutches. 

And when Jesus had afflicted Death by plundering him, Death wailed and cried aloud in bitterness, and said, “Leave my kingdom!” … He had no power over the Holy One. … And Jesus left with him, as a poison, the promise of life – that, little by little, Death's power would be done away. … So Jesus, who died, was the annihilator of Death – because through him, life rules supreme, and through him, Death is abolished – the one to whom it's said, “O Death, where is your victory?”

Hallelujah! Centuries later, Martin Luther wrote a hymn – we'll sing it in a few minutes – based on a Latin chorus used in the church. It's a strong, defiant hymn, and the fourth verse goes like this: “It was a strange and dreadful strife / when Life and Death contended; / the victory remained with Life; / the reign of Death was ended! / Stripped of power, no more it reigns; / an empty form alone remains: / Death's sting is lost forever!” 

Amen? That's biblical stuff, right there! That's what Jesus really, truly did: he “destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). All death's power was tied up in sin and the curse it brought down on us; but for those who believe, whose sins are buried in Christ's vacated tomb, death's grasp is broken (1 Corinthians 15:56-57). So believers don't so much 'die' as take a long nap: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). “If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8).

The war against Death is won in advance – it's a sure thing! “The reign of Death was ended” that first Easter morning. Only “an empty form alone remains,” without its sting (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:54-55). Jesus told us that he came so that we “might have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). The Life of God has invaded this dark mud-ball of ours – all that's left is clean-up in the here and now and the final coup de grace at Christ's return, when he raises the dead to bodily life that never ends. Now, that's good news if ever I've heard any!

But here's the truth. If we want to 'get in on' the victory of Life, we have to 'get in on' the kingdom of God – and Jesus is the Door (John 10:9), and Jesus is the King (Revelation 19:16). We can't muscle our way in with the merits of our works. We have to trust the King. We have to stoop down, let him unload our sins and deal with them, and humbly shuffle through the Door. 

That means faith – but I'll share with you this promise: “If you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9)! And that salvation means the sovereignty of God's Life in your life, breaking Death's power. “God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57).

I'd like to challenge you this morning. Do you believe? Do you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and does your heart latch onto the truth and power of resurrection – the beauteous light of Easter's dawn? If so, the hand of salvation is outstretched to you – trust and follow him. But what does this mean: “follow him”? It means to “live a new life” (Romans 6:4) – to live an Easter life, the kind of life that Jesus Christ died and rose again to win for you in his “strange and dreadful strife.” On the other side of death – the death of our old selves in his death – we live in his resurrection, which means being “set free from sin” and from all the places in our days and hours where we let Death boss us around.

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11)! “If Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you” (Romans 8:10-11). “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). 

God calls us to live an abundant life by following the Spirit of Life. After we refuel this morning with the true Bread of Heaven, the true spiritual food, let's get out there – let's live the abundant life Jesus opens for us – let's win our little battles against sin and death, in the light of Life's victory – and let's share the news, in word and in deed, that the Prince of Life is risen indeed!  Amen and amen!

The Seventh Word: Homily for Good Friday 2016

It was now about noon,

and darkness came over the whole land

until three in the afternoon,

for the sun stopped shining.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

Jesus called out with a loud voice,

'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.'

When he had said this, he breathed his last.

(Luke 23:44-46)

And so the scene draws to a close. We've heard already about the six other sentences Jesus uttered while suspended on the cross. They all lead here, to this moment, this climax. And I'd like to suggest this afternoon that there are four key truths we need to see about this last sentence, this string of eight words – four things Jesus wants you to know.

First, Jesus knew death was not the end of the story. That seems like such a simple point, but it's an important one. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, when he thought about what it meant to die, he knew that the story continued on – that the Gospels would not end with the words, “He breathed his last” (Luke 23:46) – literally, “he expired,” he exhaled and didn't inhale. No, such a Gospel would be no gospel at all. Jesus knew there'd be plenty more to tell, that he would breathe again. 

In today's pop culture, death is usually treated as a mystery: “Ooh, is it the end, or isn't it? Nobody can know!” Well, Jesus knew: It isn't the end. His “spirit” does not disappear; it does not dissipate; it does not die out. He sends it to the Father for safekeeping – and so the story continues. Nor, when the cross was hoisted off the ground, was it the last time the warmth of his feet would meet the coolness of this earth. Death was not the end of his earthly story. Jesus's plan wasn't to shift permanently from earth to heaven; he knew he'd return in resurrection, bodily resurrection, and ultimately would be back to stay someday. 

Nor is death the end of our earthly story. When we breathe our last, when our bodies return to dust – well, start the countdown! “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven … and the dead in Christ will rise first. … For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14, 16).

Second, Jesus displayed his deity by exercising sovereignty even over his own death. In these last words from the cross, Jesus does not say, “Oops, I guess I'm dying now.” He says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). He takes an action – that, at this particular point in time, he chooses to enter the state of bodily death. Nailed to a cross, that isn't a choice we'd get to make. We would die when our body gives out. Not Jesus: he dies when he says he dies, not a moment sooner or a moment later. 

Remember what he himself said earlier? “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father” (John 10:17-18). Jesus has that authority, because he's the divine Father's divine Son – he does the things that only God can or should do, says the things that only God says, is what God is. You cannot point to God, cannot try to identify God, without Jesus in view. And so, after hours on the cross, with his atoning work complete, the worship-worthy Jesus chooses to lay his life down – for now.

Third, Jesus cherished the Bible. Jesus had a deep and profound love for the Scriptures – so much so, he quoted them with literally his dying breath. Did you know that? This line actually comes from Psalm 31: “Into your hands I commit my spirit; deliver me, LORD, my faithful God” (Psalm 31:5). Think about that for a moment: the very last thing Jesus said on earth before being taken to the tomb, and he chose to make his last words a quote from the Bible – not something new, not some deep thought, not some aphorism or proverb all his own, but a verse sung by Jews for nearly a thousand years – because Jesus literally loved the Bible to death.

Can we imagine that Jesus loves the Bible less now than he did on the cross? And yet how does our attitude to the Bible stack up? There are church leaders, Christian celebrities, even whole denominations, where the Bible is treated more as an inconvenience or an embarrassment than an authority. It needs to be demythologized, or deconstructed, or corrected, or brought up to date, whenever it gores our sacred cows, whenever it ignores the lines of today's cultural orthodoxy. 

But that's not the mindset of Jesus toward the Bible! Jesus, the living Word of God, didn't share our modern or postmodern disdain for the written word of God. The Bible is relevant in life and death, all on its own terms.

Those of us from churches that extol ourselves as “Bible-believing” – we might be tempted to pride ourselves on this point. “Oh yes, we're plenty better than them,” we might say. But hold your horses! Jesus meditated on Scripture day and night (cf. Psalm 1:2). From youth to adulthood, Jesus went regularly to the synagogues where he could hear the words of the Bible and talk about them with people. Jesus quoted the Bible in every circumstance, and handled its words faithfully – unlike Satan in the wilderness, who twisted them out of context. And Jesus lived every aspect of his life in conformity with what the Bible says. 

For so many of us, the Bible is a dust-collector to keep on the shelf, or to read alone, or to keep for Sundays, or to project our fantasies onto – loved in theory, neglected in practice. But in these words, Jesus shows how highly he prioritizes the Bible in life and in death. May we do likewise.

And fourth, Jesus trusted God even when God seemed most absent. Hanging there on the cross, Jesus entered our darkness. He took upon himself the burden of our sin and its consequences – including our frequent sense that God is distant. When Jesus quoted Psalm 22 in his fourth word from the cross, he meant to evoke a message of deliverance – that, in the end, he'd be rescued and restored to life; that he'd be vindicated from humanity's judgment leveled against him. But Psalm 22 begins with an outcry against God's absence for a reason. Sometimes, we do go through those dark places, where we look for God and can't find him – when, in a practical way, from our perspective, we live as though God-forsaken. On the cross, Jesus went to all those places with us and for us – into the valley of the shadow of death, where faith meets its breaking-point.

And yet – and yet Jesus didn't lose faith, not even in his darkest hour. He didn't say, “God, I give up on you.” Even when God seemed most estranged, Jesus didn't address him as, “Stranger.” Jesus called him “Father.” The relationship, obscured with the hidden sun, drowned out by the roaring mob, was not over. In the most trying time, when Jesus was stripped naked and held up for mockery and reckoned as nothing, when Jesus was at death's door and facing the grave – still, to him, God was “Father” – the same Father he's always been. 

The Father who loved him from eternity past, the Father who sent an angel army to announce his birth, the Father who was pleased at his baptism, the Father who met him in the spoken words of Scripture, the Father who was in constant communion with him on Hanukkah and Purim and Shavuot and Yom Kippur, on Palm Sunday and Spy Wednesday and Maundy Thursday, was still the same Father amidst the lethal agonies of Good Friday!

And Jesus willingly – not out of desperation, but out of a Son's love – trusted himself into his Father's hands. The wording here suggests the image of placing something closer to someone than it is even to us. Jesus puts his spirit in the Father's safe-deposit box and tosses the key at the foot of heaven's throne. He entrusts his spirit to the Father – completely, without reserve, without hesitation. Jesus has faith even when everything visible before his human eyes seems so godless. 

I'm not saying it was easy to have that kind of faith. I'm not saying it feels natural to exercise that kind of faith. But it was the kind of faith that led Jesus to the cross, and that was his constant theme on the cross, and that could not be extinguished by the cross. That kind of faith – not faith in ourselves, not faith in our faith, but faith in the Father – is Psalm 31 faith.

Psalm 31 isn't about giving up hope, about resigning ourselves that God is forever distant. Psalm 31 is a patient cry for help. Listen: “Keep me from the trap that is set for me, for you are my refuge. Into your hands I commit my spirit; deliver me, LORD, my faithful God. … As for me, I trust in the LORD. I will be glad and rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. You have not given me into the hands of the enemy, but have set my feet in a spacious place. … They conspire against me and plot to take my life. But I trust in you, LORD; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hands … In my alarm, I said, 'I am cut off from your sight!' Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help. … Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the LORD” (Psalm 31:4-8, 13-15, 22, 24).

Psalm 31 is about trusting God – even at that lowest point – to set things right. Jesus wasn't bitter over the cross, over what was happening to him. He entrusted himself to the Father's care in faith, trusting that the cross and the crowds would not have the last words. And as we'll all celebrate this Sunday, Jesus was right! He really was and is the Son of God. The Father didn't reject his Son's spirit. The Father hadn't surrendered the Son into the hands of the enemy; the Son ended in the Father's hands, not the crowds'. The Father did hear the Son's cry on the cross – and answered it, for our sake, on Easter morning, when the gloom of the grave gave way to the unquenchable light of life.

But for now, suffice it to leave the story where it pauses – with the surrender of Jesus' spirit up to the Father. It pauses, not to hold a doleful note of defeat and loss, but with the suspenseful certainty of hope. “And hope does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5). Jesus faced his suffering with a faith that refused to lapse into hopelessness or turn away from the Father. 

And in that, he provides a model for us. That's why his disciple Peter could later encourage Jesus-followers by telling us to celebrate when we face “the fiery ordeal,” and that those suffering in obedience to God should “commit” – same word Jesus used – “commit their souls to the faithful Creator in doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). In ease, in suffering, in wealth, in poverty, in sickness, in health, into the Father's hands we too commit our souls, through the reconciliation Jesus made possible on the cross, with the same hope of deliverance in the end: the hope of Easter.

This afternoon, if you find you aren't free from the trap sin has set for you – if you realize you aren't trusting in the LORD, and you haven't been serving him as your God – if you don't know that God is your Father through your union with Jesus Christ – if hope and life seem far away – if you haven't been committing your soul to the faithful Creator in doing good – then whatever you do, do not leave this sanctuary until that changes! There are plenty of pastors here this afternoon who can meet with you, listen to you, talk with you, pray with you – provide whatever help you need to commit your heart, your soul, your whole life to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Don't put it off to some other day. “I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).  

This day, Good Friday, Jesus submitted to the whip, the crown of thorns, the nails, the rough wood, the mockery and shame, even the cup of the wine of God's wrath – for you. So that he might bury your sin and shame in his tomb, and leave it behind when he rises Easter morning. Don't let the third day's dawn find your life and soul in your own safekeeping – which ain't at all safe. Commit yourself to the Father through the cross of Christ – today.

Don't Drop Your Branches: Sermon for Palm Sunday 2016

Can you hear the roar of the crowds? Can you feel the excitement in the air? Think of that scene from the first Palm Sunday! Have you ever wondered what this meant – why the crowd got palm branches when they heard Jesus was riding toward the city for Passover (John 12:12-13)? I mean, of course what Jesus does is a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Zechariah – riding into town on a donkey, at all (John 12:14-15). Jesus wants them to know that, yes, he's the one they've been waiting for. But to really understand the scene, let's turn back almost two hundred years.

In the second century BC, a Greek kingdom based in Syria held power over the Jews. For a variety of reasons, the king Antiochus – the great-great-great-grandson of Alexander the Great's general Seleucus – decided that the Jews needed to stop practicing their religion. So he banned circumcision, commanded the Jews to eat pork, banned ownership of the Law of Moses, and slaughtered a pig as a pagan sacrifice in God's holy temple in Jerusalem. 

A band of brothers – sons of the priest Mattathias – took up arms and led a revolt. They were called the Maccabees. Judah was their first leader: he took back the city of Jerusalem and had the temple purified – remembered each year ever since by the festival of Hanukkah. Antiochus died, but his nephew Demetrius kept fighting, and Judah died in battle. 

Judah's clever brother Jonathan took up the fight and pressured the Greek general into a peace treaty. Jonathan went on to become high priest. Years passed, he fell into a trap and was executed, and his brother Simon took the lead. Simon secured the Jews' freedom from Greek meddling. The book recording these things tells us that Simon – now deemed high priest – set his sights on Jerusalem all over again. It tells us:

They entered [the citadel] with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel. (1 Maccabees 13:51)

There it is – the palm branches. That's what may be in the crowds mind here, as they see Jesus riding their way. Their song means, “Jesus, be our new Simon! Set us free!” They cry out, “Hosanna – save now, save now!” Simon's descendants down throughout the Hasmonean Era claimed to be both high priests and kings, holding power until a new David might come. 

Well, here he is! Jesus is on his way: “Your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zechariah 9:9-10).

Finally, no more Greek rule, no more Roman rule – finally, no more oppression – finally, the king who can turn back the tides and set the world at peace – finally, the promised Messiah! Jesus is the king in triumph, the king in victory – Jesus is Savior and King, coming in the name of the God of all Israel! “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD!” (John 12:13; cf. Psalm 118:26). Here is Jesus – “the king of Israel” (John 12:13). 

That's the word the crowd is spreading – this is Jesus, who raises the dead; this is Jesus, who works wonders we've never seen, never even dreamed could happen; this is Jesus, the true Son of David, the King long foretold – let's welcome him, let's celebrate him, let's be on his side (cf. John 12:17-18)! No wonder the Pharisees fret and worry: “Look, the whole world has gone after him” (John 12:19).

Now, fast-forward five days. Jesus has come into the city and stirred things up. His greediest disciple sold him out for a slave's price. At night in the garden, soldiers come to take Jesus away. He doesn't resist – we know that (John 18:1-12). A show trial before the Sanhedrin goes the only way show trials ever go. The next morning, the priests and nobles of the people haul Jesus to the courtyard outside Governor Pilate's fortress (John 18:28). Pilate investigates, but he doesn't see a threat in this Jesus, who proclaims a different kind of kingdom (John 18:36).

So Pilate goes back out and calls everyone back – the chief priests, the rulers, and now the people, the crowd. Pilate proposes to give Jesus a slap on the wrist for the sake of peace, and then set him free (Luke 23:13-16). Herod agrees – there are better things they can be doing with their Friday morning. This is no time for nonsense. 

You might expect the crowd to cheer. “Blessed is the king of Israel,” after all. But that chant is gone with the wind. That was five days ago – get with the times! His fifteen minutes of celebrity are over, they say. No, Jesus isn't the one they want back. Jesus is no longer “king,” in their eyes – now, he's “this man” (Luke 23:18). “Away with this man! Release Barabbas to us!”, they cry. Barabbas is a rebel leader (Luke 23:19). The Romans would call him a terrorist, and with good reason. To the Jewish crowds, he's perhaps a freedom-fighter – the kind of leader who'd fight the Romans – who might be bloody, but he'll get the job done, if you don't care what gets lost along the way.

Pilate doesn't like the thought. “Please, here, Jesus is no real criminal – he's one of you, take him back, he doesn't deserve to die this way.” The crowd has turned dark, malicious, cruel. “Crucify him!”, rings out a cry from somewhere in the crowd – maybe the instigation of one of the priests. It catches on. “Crucify him!”, we hear again (Luke 23:21). The shout travels like a virus, infecting the whole crowd, everyone swept up in the chant. “Crucify, crucify, crucify!” 

Pilate tries to shout over them, pleading as a voice of reason, insisting that Jesus go free (Luke 23:22). But the crowd can't be appeased by anything but bloodshed. “Crucify, crucify, crucify, crucify!” They won't stop until Pilate gives in. He doesn't want a riot on his hands. What the crowd wants, the crowd gets – and the crowd wants a crucifixion. So Pilate sends Jesus toward the cross (Luke 23:23-24).

What happened to the loud hosannas? Where did all the palm branches go? Left by the wayside in some back alley? Tossed in the trash can? Stored on the shelf? In less than a week, the crowd turned from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” – from, “Blessed is the king of Israel,” to, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). How can that happen? How could the crowd turn on Jesus so fast – from adoring worship to froth-mouthed condemnation – from waving the palm branch and calling him king to wanting him flogged, beaten bloody, harsh nails hammered through his hands and feet, thorns slicing his forehead to ribbons, and hung naked 'til his heart gives out or he suffocates under his own weight?

But this is Jerusalem, not Athens. As Chesterton said when paying a visit there a century ago, “This is not a university town full of philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges, raging with religions; not a place where resolutions can be voted or amended, but a place where men can be crowned and crucified.” And crowned and crucified he was, thanks to the turning hearts of the mob. And I can think of four main reasons why this happened – why the crowd handed Jesus over to be crucified in Barabbas' place.

First, Jesus proved to have a different idea of what a Messiah looks like. When he came to them, they thought, “Now here's Simon Maccabeus all over again, but with power to work miracles.” They wanted a Messiah who'd give them what they wanted: rule by Jews for Jews (and over everyone else), so they could turn the tables on the Romans – have Romans wait their tables, have Romans clean their floors, have Romans look on them with servile awe. They wanted to lord their worldly supremacy over the Romans, as the Romans had done to them. “Do to others as they've been doing to you” – that's not the Golden Rule, but it is what the crowd is hoping for. But that just isn't Jesus' style.

In fact, do you know the first thing that happens after Jesus gets welcomed into Jerusalem with all the palm branches? “Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. 'Sir,' they said, 'we would like to see Jesus'” (John 12:20-21). Yeah, Greeks – as in, the people of Antiochus. As in, the people Simon kicked out. And now here they are, and Jesus welcomes them in. 

The crowd wanted a messiah like Simon – a warrior-king who'd make 'peace' at the expense of the nations. But Jesus is a king who wants peace for the sake of the nations – peace, not through war, but through worship. He insists that the corrupt temple regime topple: what's now a “den of thieves” was meant to be “a house of prayer for all nations” (Mark 11:17; cf. Isaiah 56:7). The crowd realizes that the problem with Jesus is, he doesn't hate all the people they hate. He doesn't sign onto their agenda. He makes radical demands – if they want a messiah in him, he gets to define what that looks like. And so they drop their palm branches, and they stop singing hosanna.

Second, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because, in their disaffection and weakness of faith, they let their usual leaders lead them away from him. They buy into what the Pharisees and the chief priests and the scribal class say – and they say, “Don't trust this Jesus, you never know what he's up to.” The crowd lets themselves be talked out of blessing Jesus as king, because they listen to all these other voices – not just give them a hearing, but they give in to them. They deny what they've seen, what they've heard, what they've experienced, what the Voice of Truth has told them, all for the unreason of those in power.

Third, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because, once enough people are doing it, everyone else feels the need to go with the flow. Imagine being in that crowd on Good Friday. To your left, to your right, in front of you, behind you, people shout, “Crucify! Crucify!” You could speak up and shout out, “No, hosanna! Hosanna!” But will it make a difference? And at what cost? What's the price of breaking lockstep with the angry mob all around you? Will they turn violent? Will they shun you? It's safer to go the path of least resistance: to shout, or at least mumble, “Crucify! Crucify!”

And fourth, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because the crowd is fickle. That's just what they are – fickle, deceitful, prone to waver with the shifting of the winds. That's the mob mentality. And crowds are fickle because we're fickle – all of us. We like to give in to our impulses and desires. Self-denial is hard and unpleasant. We'd much rather do what we want, when we want, how we want. So we teach our children for generations, “Just follow your heart.” Do what feels right. Never mind what Jeremiah says: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The crowd follows their impulses, first to crown a king, then to get rid of him on a cross.

For all their failings, the crowd starts out by doing the right thing – maybe not in thinking the right way, but doing the right thing when they wave the palm branches and shout their hosannas. The priests, the Pharisees, Pilate – they didn't shout hosanna in the first place. But that crowd did. Can you imagine if they'd clenched their palm branches tighter? If they'd stuck it out with Jesus, shouting hosanna on his terms and not theirs, resisting the priests' influence? See, that's where they failed: the moment they dropped their palm branches.

We may not have physical palm branches in our hands this morning. But our hearts still wave them, all the same. If you're a believer, with hearts and hands and voices we, as God's holy crowd of his very own children, are waving palm branches, welcoming Jesus into our lives as the one and only Savior-King. He's the one who sets us free! He's the one who makes real peace! And all authority in heaven and on earth has been given into his hands, and his kingdom will have no end. 

Every day of our lives, we're called to sing our hosannas: “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We look around at danger and evil, we look at the avalanche of our sin rolling out of control – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We're blind to our own pride, our greed, our selfishness – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We lay our loved ones six feet under topsoil – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” The world is broken, twisted as a tornado, breaking all we hold dear and leaving debris scattered messily through our lives – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We're sad, we're angry, we're scared, we're alone and desolate and desperate of heart – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!”

In the face of it all, it might be tempting some days to give up hope that Jesus will ever answer that prayer and make all things right. Instead of singing hosannas in faith, we surrender to fear and despair. Instead of clinging to our palm branches and waving them high 'til he comes, we set them aside. Maybe we go looking for our salvation in some other name (though “there's no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” [Acts 4:12]). Maybe we resign ourselves to having no salvation, no rescue, no liberation at all; we just settle for where we are. 

Throughout the centuries, professing believers have tossed aside their palm branches in all these ways: by giving up hope, by leaving the faith, by trusting in other kings, even by imagining that “religion” is just a nice compartment of life for Sunday mornings, and we can check our palm branches at the door when we leave.

If there's one lesson to learn from the crowd in the Gospels, it's this one: Don't stop singing hosanna! Don't drop your branches! Keep waving them, loud and proud! Hold fast, cling tight, to what's good! Our hearts may be fickle and deceitful in this sinful world, but disciples discipline themselves to wave the palm branch, no matter what their hearts whisper. And as King Jesus is welcomed deeper and deeper into our lives, well, God sends “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'” (Galatians 4:6), and so “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). And we live for “singing and making melody to the Lord in [our] hearts” (Ephesians 5:19) – putting hosannas there to stay.

If the larger crowd of culture insists on shouting “Crucify!”, still we sing, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the king of Israel!” (John 19:13). “Hosanna to the Son of David! … Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9). We refuse to be peer-pressured or manipulated out of our commitment to celebrating Christ. 

Don't drop your branches. Keep them waving, even when Jesus does what you don't expect. Keep them waving, even when Jesus takes up his whip and causes a ruckus, knocking over tables left and right. Keep them waving, even when the kingdom makes demands and when the King tells you to die to self and store up treasure somewhere less earthly. Keep them waving, even when King Jesus tells you to love and welcome your enemies. Hail King Jesus on his terms – even when his salvation comes in the shape of a cross, beyond which lies resurrection. Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna!