Main Event Worship Sermon

0:04 I am very humbled and grateful to be a part this weekend of the wonderful ministry of the Presbyterian Shepherds in Lapsley, an independent Presbyterian church, to be with old friends and new. But most of all tonight, I'm grateful to be in worship with you. Let's go to God in prayer. send your Holy Spirit oh God open our hearts so that we might hear what you want us to hear and be who you want us to be and do what you want us to do through Jesus Christ our Lord Amen As you probably know, Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke, also wrote the book of Acts. It's a two-part work.

1:02 The Gospel of Luke is about Jesus and his ministry, and the book of Acts is about the church and its mission. So creative and full of energy is the book of Acts that some scholars even say that Luke probably wrote the Gospel of Luke just as background so that he could write the book of Acts. and one of the things that Luke does in Acts is that every now and then he pauses and gives us a little snapshot, a little vignette of what life was like in the earliest church, almost as if he takes out his cell phone every now and then and captures what it looked like. Here in the fourth chapter of Acts is one of those snapshots. Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul. No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.

2:05 With great power, the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. There was a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas, which means son of encouragement. He sold a field that belonged to him and then brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

2:54 One of the problems with the book of Acts is that it insists on giving us these little snapshots, these little vignettes of what life was like in the earliest Christian community. And frankly, they can be rather discouraging. They're not discouraging because they're gloomy or bad news. Quite to the contrary, they're discouraging because they're so darn perfect. They're so blue sky, so blissful, so idyllic. It's difficult not to compare them with what we experience of the realities of the church today. The first of these, of course, came at Pentecost. You remember the story. the apostles are gathered in Jerusalem on the Sabaot, the great harvest festival of the Jews. And exactly at nine o'clock in the morning, there's a tremendous thunderous sound from heaven, like the roaring of a hurricane wind. And then the Holy Spirit falls down from heaven on all of them like feathers of fire. And they are filled with the Spirit and the gospel. So much so the gospel begins to spill out and everybody there hears the gospel in their own language as if it is spoken just to them.

4:11 So ecstatic and dramatic is it that some people think they're into other spirits and accuse them of being drunk. Peter stands up and says, people of Jerusalem, we're not drunk. It's nine o'clock in the morning. And then he proceeds to preach a provocative and powerful sermon, so powerful that 3,000 people present themselves for baptism, and a community is formed, and then Luke takes a picture. Awe was upon all of them. Great signs and wonders were being done among them. None had any need. They shared their possessions. They went to the temple every day. They broke bread with glad and generous hearts, praising God. everyone spoke well of them and the Lord added to their number every day those who were being redeemed. Gee it's hard not to compare isn't it? So many of us have been stressed and worried and discouraged about the church today. I mean you know the news just as well as I do. We Presbyterians have been hemorrhaging members for 50 years, just like our brothers and sisters in the Lutheran and Baptist and Episcopal and Methodist churches.

5:33 Those of us who were left seem intent on beating each other up over every hot-button cultural issue there is. We're getting smaller and grayer, and in some ways so unappealing, even our children and grandchildren are checking none of the above as their religion of choice.

5:55 For several years, my family and I vacationed at a delightful little barrier island off of North Carolina called Sunset Beach. We would rent a cottage on the backside of the island. It was cheaper than the oceanfront, but we also liked it back there because we could rent with a porch overlooking a canal, and we could sit out there at night and hear the tides moving in and out and listen to the sound of the night birds. One night, I was sitting out on that porch all by myself enjoying the solitude and the nighttime, and I noticed something strange. Down at the end of the canal, there was a ghostly light hovering over the water, and I noticed it was moving slowly in my direction. when it got close enough for me to see what it was I saw that it was a man walking waist deep in the dark waters of the canal in front of him was an automobile inner tube on top of the inner tube a piece of plywood on top of the plywood a car battery attached to a headlight powerfully shining down into the water when he got in hailing distance I said what are you doing down there I'm gigging for flounder geeking for flounder how do you do that it's too hard to explain come on down I'll show you well it sounded like a dare so I put on a bathing suit and a pair of old sneakers and I got down in the water with him now maybe you've done this what you do is you walk along in the dark waters of the canal and flounder hide themselves on the floor of the ocean covering themselves with sand but the powerful light can see the outline of the fish and with a sharp gig you can snag some fish.

7:48 The only problem is that light attracts everything in the ocean and as we walked along together swimming between our legs were sea snakes and eels and crab and shrimp and fish and it created intimacy very quickly. We started talking about our lives. He told me that he was a mid-level manager in one of the furniture plants operating then in North Carolina. He told me about his family and his job. And then he said, what about you? What do you do? I said, I'm a Presbyterian minister. Long pause. And then he said, yeah, I used to go to church. His name was Sonny, and the story was that they joined a Methodist church in their little town. The kids were in the youth group. The wife sang in the choir. They went every Sunday. And then they elected Sonny to the official board, and that's when the trouble started. He said, I got on the other side of the curtain, and I was shocked at what I saw, that there was so much petty bickering and so much infighting and so much anger and jealousy.

8:59 He said, you know, I get that at the plant. I don't need that at church. And so we quit going. I understand, Sonny, don't you? He wants a church like Pentecost, where there's awe upon everyone, and mighty works are done, and they break bread with glad and generous hearts, and everyone speaks well of them, and the Lord adds to their number every day. But you can't have Pentecost every week. or can you?

9:38 That may be the point of the passage that we just read tonight. This is not Pentecost. It's two chapters after Pentecost. It's not Pentecost. Things have happened. The church has collided with the culture. They've been in theological disputes. Two of their preachers have been put in jail. Fissures have risen up in the life of the church. This is not Pentecost. Now we're going to get a realistic picture. And all who believed were of one heart and soul. And the power of the apostles was great as they spoke of the resurrection. No one had anything in need because they shared all things in common, and great grace was upon them all. Well, I guess about the best we can say is that things have gone downhill since the book of Acts, unless there's another way to look at this.

10:34 One afternoon in one of my preaching classes, we were looking at these snapshots in the book of Acts. It was in the spring. Most of my class were seniors. They were about to graduate and take their first churches. And a sort of gloom was settling in on the room. Because most of them were not going to the large and successful churches. They were going to small and struggling churches, declining churches, some of them dying churches. And here was all this stuff about awe and wonder and blessing and 3,000 baptisms at the 9 o'clock service. And finally, the heaviness was so great in the room that one of them, a young Methodist, said, You know, this stuff reminds me of Eleanor Reynolds. I said, Who's Eleanor Reynolds? He said, oh, she's this old woman back in my home congregation. She's our church historian.

11:26 She wrote the little photocopied history of our congregation. We've got several copies in the library. I read it once, and that woman, I tell you, she could go to a Wednesday night family night supper, and when she wrote it up, it would sound like the heavenly banquet. Luke is a local church historian. You know how they write. They say things like, In 1932, Reverend C.W. Hawkins was called a Macedonia Presbyterian. He preached his first sermon on Sunday evening, August 23rd, and the whole town came out to hear him. So winsome and powerful was his sermon that every heart was moved. He and his beautiful wife Mary had a ministry of great fruitfulness that bore fruit in every area of our church and town and continues to bear fruit today. Really?

12:19 The whole town came to hear him. Every heart was, why do people write stuff like that? Because it's true if you know how to squint. What I mean by squinting is looking hard with the eyes of faith and when you do you will see even in the fragments and broken places in the life of the church that the Pentecostal fire still burns and that the risen Christ is present bringing life out of death. One of my pastor friends, Presbyterian minister in Tennessee, was at a family night supper one Wednesday and he was seated next to a member of his church, an old farmer, and in the middle of a meal, the farmer said, preacher, I think I need you to correct my theology. Correct your theology? What do you mean? Well, last Sunday when we were having the Lord's Supper, something happened to me. And all of a sudden, I felt Rebecca, dead two years now, was with me at the table. And the little girl we lost so many years ago now. She was there too. And my parents gone now many years. Preacher, I felt like we were all there gathered at the table. I think you need to correct my theology.

13:49 I said, oh no, I think you've got it. He'd learned how to squint. Sometimes young ministers in their first churches haven't learned how to squint yet and so they're bothered by the fact that people don't sit at the front altogether. There'll be a woman back there and a couple in the balcony and somebody over here and they will say, why don't we all come down and, I understand, but what they can't see is that she's sitting out there next to the husband that she sat with for 47 years before he passed away. And if they knew how to squint, they could be like John in Revelation where they would see row upon row upon row of the saints gathered. It's learning how to squint. A couple of years ago, I was doing a preaching workshop on the west side of Atlanta at a retreat center.

14:46 We had an afternoon off, and I didn't want to drive through all of Atlanta traffic to go back to my office, so I had to decide how to spend the afternoon, and I decided to get a haircut. So I went looking for a Great Clips or a Fantastic Sam's or one of those places you can just walk in. I found one, and when I was in the chair, the woman who was going to cut my hair looked at me and said, I don't recognize you. Have you ever been in our shop? And I said, actually, no. I'm a seminary professor, and I'm leading a pastor's workshop at the retreat center down the road. And she said, oh, I'm a Christian, too. I said, that's great. And she said, I'm a member of Creflo Dollar's church. And my heart sank. If you know Creflo Dollar, he's Atlanta's latest incarnation of the God wants you to be rich gospel. He's been investigated by Congress for fraud. He has a fleet of luxury cars and a collection of luxury houses all paid for with tithes and offerings and he has on order a 65 million dollar Gulfstream jet so that he can do his ministry efficiently. We call him cash flow dollar in Atlanta. I was already getting a bad a haircut and now I was going to get bad theology. But she had the razor so I went along with this.

16:12 I said, well, have you gotten your blessing yet? She said, oh yes, I've gotten my blessing. And I expected her to tell me about the diamond bracelet she had in the scissors drawer or the Jaguar she had parked in the parking lot. But what she said was, two nights a week, I get to volunteer at a shelter for abused women. I used to be one myself, you know, and they trust me there. I have a great ministry. And I thought, my Lord, Jesus is loose in Creflo Dollar's church.

16:46 Right where we think that the gospel is compromised to the point of death, he keeps rising from the dead. And the Pentecostal fire keeps blowing through the corridors and finds a $9 an hour hairdresser and ordains her to a ministry of the Lord God Most High. The power of resurrection is alive if you know how to squint. about 16 years ago when my wife and I moved back to Atlanta for me to teach at Emory we looked around for the Presbyterian church we would join and we decided on Central Presbyterian in downtown Atlanta it suited us to a T wonderful worship and preaching a long-standing ministry to the city it was our kind of church the pastor invited all of us who were joining or affiliating with Central to meet with the session one night for dinner, and so we did. We had a rectangular table in the fellowship hall, and after dinner, the pastor stood up and said, we are so glad that you are joining Central Church, and I'd like to just go around the table and everyone say, why it is that you have chosen Central Church? First person said, well, I'm a tenor. Music program is superb here and I'm looking forward to being in the choir. Second person said, we've got two teenagers and the youth group is hot, we understand, and we're eager for them to be involved in the church. And the third person said, frankly, I didn't like the preacher at the church I was at, but I like the minister here fine, so I'm transferring.

18:20 And it was like that around the table until it got to Marshall. Ponytail, metal studs in his ears and cheeks. And his story was that he was high on crack cocaine and stumbled into the outreach center of the church begging for help. And the director of the outreach center said, I am sorry, I am out of budget this month. I cannot get you in a treatment program until next month, but I promise you, if you will stay with us, we will stay with you. And she took his hands and they knelt on the carpet of her office and prayed and he stayed. I've been sober for three years he said I'm joining this church because God saved me in this church we all looked at each other sheepishly we're there for the music and the parking he's there for the salvation a few weeks later there was a little squib in the central newsletter that Marshall was an inmate in the DeKalb County jail we joined the church together we were brothers in Christ so I went to visit him. Three metal detectors later, I found myself on the opposite side of a plate glass window. I was on one side. There was Marshall in an orange DeKalb County jail jumpsuit on the other.

19:39 We had telephones. I had one. He had one. And I said, Marshall, how are you doing? By the grace of God, I'm doing fine. He said, I said, Marshall, what happened? he said I was in the outreach center counseling people off the street people like myself I was telling them that the power of God was real and they could have hope that they could do right and I realized that I hadn't done right entirely myself I had an old warrant out here it was so old it would never have caught up with me but I knew about it so on Christmas Eve I turned myself in but I will be out by Easter and I cannot wait to worship God at Central on Easter in the meantime I've got a little outreach center going here in my cell said a lot of these guys can't read or write and so I write letters to their wives and sweethearts telling them they love them and miss them and every night we have a prayer meeting in my cell not many come but we pray for ourselves for the other inmates and for the guards.

20:50 And I'm looking through a piece of plate glass at a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit. But then I squinted, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone.