You Are My Witnesses

Acts 1.1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1.15-23; Luke 24.44-53

The passage from Acts 1 we have read just now seems to make four basic points about our lives as Christians:

1. that we are called to be witnesses to Jesus and his kingdom
2. that we receive the power to become his witnesses by waiting, together with our brothers and sisters in Christ, for an empowering that comes through the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit
3. that we are called to be witnesses not only in the comfortable, familiar places where we live most of our lives, but also in uncomfortable, unfamiliar places – like that of another nation or ethnic group
4. that we are not alone in all of this because while Jesus might have gone from us in the flesh, he is still very with us ‘in the Spirit’.  The work we do as witnesses is therefore his own work as well.

This morning I have time to say something about only the first of these points.  The others will have to wait for another time.

I want to challenge you to take this calling very seriously.  Being a witness means being willing to testify, in both word and deed, to the difference that knowing Christ makes in your life.  Since I joined the Uniting Church in 1995, I have observed that Uniting Church people are very good at witnessing to Christ with their deeds.  And that is to be applauded! But many Uniting Church people seem very poor at witnessing to Christ with their words.  How many of us actually talk with our friends or our families about Christ?  How many of us invite our friends and family along to worship, or to a bible exploration, or to a lecture or workshop in which the Christian faith is being discussed? Not many, I suspect. And why is that so?  Well, let me guess at a few of the most common excuses we make to ourselves.  (1) ‘I don’t know what to say’; (2) ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’; (3) ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live’.  Let’s take a look at each of these excuses, one by one, and see how they look under the pressure of a bit of scrutiny.

What of the first excuse, ‘But I don’t know what to say’.  It is certainly true that many Christians do not know what say by way of bearing witness to friends and families.  So I won’t deny the truth of the excuse.  It is an excuse, nonetheless.  For if we don’t know what to say, then surely there is a reason for that:  either that we do not know our faith very well, or we are not confident in that faith.  In either case, the solution is certainly not to remain unknowledgeable, or to remain unconfident.  It is certainly not to remain an infant in matters of faith, a little baby Christian who can say nothing of Christ to anyone.  It is to seek the kind of help that will enable us to become more mature, more grown-up in the faith, so that we know who we are in Christ and can speak confidently of what we know, believe and feel.  Such help is ready at hand – in the personal counsel of the more mature members of one’s own church, in spiritual directors and mentors from other churches, in courses, seminars and bible-study groups, and in books, videos and websites by the bucket-load.  The resources are everywhere about.  So what are you waiting for?  Take the initiative.  Go our there and get yourself some decent spiritual food.  Grow up in the faith, and start to bear fruit!

What of the second common excuse for not bearing witness to Christ:  ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’.  Again, I actually believe the people who say this.  I don’t think they are telling a lie.  They do, indeed, worry that bearing witness to Christ will endanger their friendships.  There are two things to be said in response.  The first is that our allegiance to Christ and his commandments will indeed endanger our friendships sometimes.  That is because, as Christians, we are called to listen to Christ first and others second.  If there is a disagreement between what Christ asks of us and what our friends or family ask of us, we must of course do what Christ asks, even if that means offending our friends of family.  That is what it means to follow Christ as our only Lord.  Of course, having said that, we should also remember that amongst the commands that Christ has given us are these:  ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ (Mt. 22.39); and, ‘so far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone’ (Rom 12.18).  What that means in the context of bearing witness is pretty clear, is it not?  That in speaking about Christ to our friends and family, we should do so in a way that is as gentle and respectful as possible.  ‘Speak the truth in love’ say the Letter to the Ephesians (4.15).  That is how we are to bear witness to Christ.  If our witness, a speech that shares Christ with our friends and family, is not couched in a respectful tone and in the context of respectful relationships, then we are not being Christian when we speak.  Word and deed fail to match up.  Yet, we are called to speak.  Even at the risk of being rejected - even as Christ spoke, and was rejected.

And so we come to the third common excuse: ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live.’  What makes this an excuse is the first part of the sentence, the ‘I don’t believe that it is the words that make a difference to people’.  I’m quite o.k. with the second bit, the bit about the quality of our lives, because I certainly agree that the character and quality of our lives bear witness to Christ in very powerful ways.  But that is no excuse for not talking about Christ with our friends and neighbours.  There are several reasons for this apart from the obvious fact that the New Testament understands ‘bearing witness’ as a unity of word and deed.

The most important of these is that speech is the mode by which we make sense of what we do; or, to put it another way, words and speech are the means by which we interpret what we do to ourselves and to each other.  There is a fundamental problem, you see, with assuming that people will always see our behaviour as a manifestation of Christ or the kingdom; or even with assuming that they will interpret our actions as manifestations of a desire for love or justice.  For most people know longer know anything of Christ or the kingdom.  They do not know that Christ, justice, peace and love all belong to a mutually interpretive field of meaning.  Therefore, it is rarely clear to others that what we do, we do in the name of Christ, in imitation of his love.  What we see as an act of faith in God, others may see as a gamble with chance.  What we see as diaconal service, others may see as an unhealthy ‘need to be needed’.  What we see as an act of redistributive justice, others may see as ‘rewarding the lazy’ out of a sense of unhealthy guilt.  See what I mean?  The meaning of what we do cannot enter the public realm, the public realm of a discourse that we share with other people, unless we are able to articulate an horizon of meaning for what we do, first for ourselves, but then for others.  In this sense, the witness to others can perhaps be characterized as a public act of worship.  For it is in worship (as ritual, or 'embodied story) that we articulate the meaning of our Christian lives most profoundly and holistically.  But when the worship of the community comes to a close, the Spirit drives us out into the world to share both who we are, and what we are becoming, with everyone else - in speech as well as in action. Worship is again the model.  In worship we do things, but we also say what we do, we bring its meaning to speech.

SO . . .  there is, is fact, no excuse (if we are Christians) for failing to share our faith with the world in speech as well as in action.  Of course there will be hesitancy. Of course there will be a little fear and trembling.  Indeed, I’d be a little worried if there wasn’t!  But speak we must.  Not, first of all, because we are commanded by Jesus to do so.  No, even before the command there ought to be (surely!) some sense in us that the good news of God’s love is so good that we would be selfish indeed not to share it with our friends and neighbours.  Besides, God has promised that (a) we are not given this task as isolated individuals, but as a community, and (b) we are given this task in the power of the Spirit, who will help and encourage us to say and do what Jesus has called us to say and do.  So, if you are not sharing your faith with others, I encourage you to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask the question:  ‘am I a Christian or not?’  I hope you will answer ‘yes’ and I hope you will join with your brothers and sisters to share our common faith with the world in which we live.

The Authority of Love

Text:  Deuteronomy 18. 15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8. 1-13; Mark 1. 21-28

According to Mark’s gospel, when Jesus began to preach in Galilee the local people were astonished at the authority with which he delivered his teaching.  They made a particular point of contrasting the authority of Jesus with that of the scribes, who were the official theologians of Judaism at the time.  Now the scribes were not stupid or ignorant men.  On the contrary, they were very well educated; and literate not only in the theology of their own faith, but also with regard to the Greco-Roman culture in which they lived their daily lives.  They knew the philosophers, they knew their history, they knew their politics.  Consequently, they could always be counted on to say something intelligent about being a Jew in the first century.  But for all their study, and all their knowledge of the faith, it seems that the ordinary people of Galilee were not particularly impressed when the scribes opened their mouths.  Somehow their words lacked the authority which they now discerned in the message of Jesus.

So what is this authority thing, anyway?  How does one person have it and another not?  Well, in the Greek of the Mark’s text, authority is a kind of power.  It is a power which is given to one person by others - because they see in that one person, Jesus in this case, a distinguishing integrity between who that person is what that person does.  Let me tell you a story.

Beginning in the 1930s, someone began writing the word ‘Eternity’, in perfect copperplate script, all over the footpaths of inner Sydney.  For a great many years, nobody knew who was doing it.  The word simply appeared.   People saw the word unexpectedly, as they stepped off their trains in the morning, or as they left a coffee-shop, or a business meeting.  Everyone wondered what the word meant.  And, in wondering, many considered questions concerning the meaning of life, questions they had never given their attention before.  After many years, the identity of the author was revealed.  His name was Arthur Stace, who worked as a cleaner at the Red Cross.  His story was compelling.  Stace grew up in squalid poverty, sheltering under other people’s houses and stealing food from their doorsteps.  His sisters were prostitutes and his father an alcoholic.  For many years Arthur himself had wandered the streets of Sydney in a drunken stupor.  But one night he staggered into a men’s meeting at the Church of St. Barnabas in Paddington.  And there he heard a sermon about eternity.  It changed his life.  From that moment he gave up the grog, because he felt that God had called him to a special task.  To write the word Eternity.  And that is what he did for the next forty years. 

TODAY, in Sydney, Arthur Stace is a legend.  He name commands great respect from people at every eschalon of society.  His one-word sermon was traced onto the harbour bridge in lights at the close of the new year’s fireworks display at the turn of the century.  And the city of Sydney has inscribed the word permanently onto the footpath of Martin Place.  Why?  Because people can see that there was an integrity between who Martin Stace was and the message he proclaimed.  He was a simple, uneducated man who was saved from dereliction by his hearing a single word.  Eternity.  And he dedicated his life to placing that single word before others.  Not in a pushy way.  Not in a preachy way.  But in the way of a simple, uneducated man who knows, from the depths of his own life, what Eternity means. 

Authority, you see, comes from deep within a person’s life.  It comes from their experience of an encounter with Jesus Christ, and from the integrity Christ creates in them between who they are and what they do and say.  This is the kind of authority which the people of Capernaum saw in Jesus.  Here was one who acted and spoke not as one who had no personal experience of the promise he proclaimed.  He spoke not theoretically, but existentially.  He spoke about God and about life as he knew them to be in his own life and experience.  The people of Galilee saw that, and so they listened as to one who speaks with the authority that comes from integrity.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he upbraids them for mis-locating their authority in mere head-knowledge.  These were people who believed that it was the complexity of their theology which would save both themselves and their hearers.  But this is not the case, says Paul.  What empowers our lives is not what we know, but how we love:

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.  Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him . . .

Paul’s point is this.  If you love God, then you will love other people.  You will build them up and support them at that point in their lives where they need support.  Why?  Because that is what God does in loving us!  And it is only out of that experience of being loved by God, most usually at a point when other loves fail, that we gain the authority to act with love in the lives of others.

If Paul is right, friends, then we have no authority as Christians to tell others how it should be for them.  Because we don’t actually know how it is for others, or should be, not at least with any degree of certainty!  Our only authority is that which comes from our particular experience of being known and loved by God.  In that authority we are called to love and support and serve, and to bear witness to God’s love in our lives.  But no more.  Beyond that we have no authority.  Beyond that we are pretending.  And people see through that.

Thomas Merton wrote that the point of our Christian journey is not to know God in the abstract – in general, as it were - but to love God with our entire beings - even as God loves us, and knows us by that loving even more than we can ever know ourselves!  People of God, because God loves you, and because you have known that love in your life and experience, you now have the authority to love other people.  That is your calling, that is your vocation as God’s children.  That is your special dignity in life.  It is no more than that.  But it is no less either.