‘A’  //  Easter 5  //  4-20-08  //  Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scripture     Acts of the Apostles 7:51-8:1

 

 

O God of Easter and Eastertide glory: Wasn’t it Toni Morrison who wrote in her novel Beloved, “The only grace that we can have is the grace we can imagine. If we cannot see it, we cannot have it”?

Prodigal and prolific God, we stand in grateful awe for your grace that we can have because it can be imagined … as well as the grace we can never have but can only receive because it is more than we ever dared imagine.

 

 

In the summer of the year of my birth – as many Protestant Americans struggled to imagine whether they could vote for a Catholic for President – Charlie Brown was lying on his back on a hillside, struggling to imagine what the skies overhead held for him.

 

Joining him were his friends Lucy and Linus. “If you use your imagination,” Lucy proclaims, “you can see lots of things in the cloud formations … What do you think you see, Linus?”

 

“Well,” Linus replies, “Those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean …” (An observation that certainly dates this comic strip.)

 

“That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor …”

 

“And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen … I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side …”

 

“Uh-huh,” Lucy muses. “That’s very good … What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?”

 

“Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind!”¹

 

 

Such is the state of our imagination, I’m afraid, when we attempt – on a surface level, at least – to discern out of the stoning of Stephen story what that story can mean for us today. Caught as the story is in the cloud bank of first century narrative.

 

Such is the state of our imagination when we confront the harsh and hidden promises that can only come when we die for faith.

 

Dying … for … faith. What can this phrase possibly mean? And what “promise” can dying for faith possibly hold?

 

 

 

 

Giving to and at: A phenomenon best expressed, perhaps, by the word charity. At one time, charity was often used as a synonym for love. More recently, charity has come to be known, per the Oxford English Dictionary, as “the voluntary giving of money or other help to people in need” – or as those materials themselves, or the organization that gives them.²

 

As Martha Stewart might put it about charity: “It’s a good thing.” Trouble is, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates about giving patterns in Canada, the U.S., and the United Kingdom, we are anywhere from 20% to 50% more prone to donate money to a charitable organization than to volunteer time to a charitable organization.³ More prone to give at than to give with. Not as large a difference than I would have anticipated, actually, but significant nonetheless.

 

 

Imagine what the church might have become if martyrs for the faith such as Stephen and Martin Luther and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King had said, “Look: I will give my ten percent back to God – do with it as you will –  and not trouble the world with my cries of injustice.”

 

Let’s take it a step further – from church pledge giving to the increasing popularity of designated giving: Imagine if the martyrs of the faith had forsaken the give-and-take of deeply relational conversation, living in their own controlled presentation of images and words without direct disturbance. Settling for the incomplete good of Facebook rather than face-to-faces, My Space rather than our space, text messages rather than actual phone calls.

 

Wait a minute. Imagine if we forsook the biblical calling for justice – “figuring out what belongs to whom and giving it back”⁴ – for charity – knowing full well it belongs to me, and yet I’ll give you some out of the goodness of my heart. And imagine if we fell back only on our generous individual selves, because that painful search for justice is just too daunting, just too demanding, just too … uncertain.

 

Friends in Christ, let’s turn our imagination elsewhere. Imagine that this is where being the Body of Christ comes in. Imagine an entire church dying for faith – setting aside our giving at for giving with, our individual proclivities for one communal activity. Imagine that dying taking us – and us means us – beyond the idolatry of our individualism and the safe confines of our charity.

 

Imagine us beginning to loose control … to let go … to even dare, in the example of Stephen’s dying prayer – “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” – to surrender our beings to the awesome and life-giving will of God. A life-giving will that aligns our will, that ends all of our resisting, and empowers us to forgive the inevitable resistance of others – “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”, Stephen cries out at the end.

 

Imagine.

 

 

Certainly. A sister pastor, Lillian Daniel, fetches us up here: “In the church we care less about getting the job done and more about the people doing it. We are not in the efficiency business. We are in the business of making disciples.”⁵

 

And, may I add, since we are more about the people doing it, we are also in the business of making partnerships of disciples. A dedicated … outreach … partnership. This is how our session has carefully and faithfully envisioned fulfillment of our fourth Northside goal for 2006-2009 – a goal to “(e)xpand outreach efforts to create a greater presence for Northside within the broader community with a focus on … connect(ing) … to organizations and demographics not typically associated with the church.”

 

Dying to faith – to allow it in. Letting go of something we may hold dear, that we may trust enough to let God hold up something for us to imagine into being. And something for God to hold when our imagination fails us, in the cup of this communion, that is infinitely dearer, if not clearer. We may see it as in the clouds, at first – but later: face-to-face.

 

 

I have lifted up the subversion of the gospel in this way before – and I will lift it up again now, in a slightly different yet similar way.

 

The dominant message of the world has taught us quite well that in the midst of life – looking good, feeling good, being a good person, even – there is death to be avoided at all costs.

 

God’s Eastertide news – spoken by one named Jesus, and carried out today by one named Stephen – subverts this for us. It turns it around for us. Not that in the midst of life there is death to be avoided at all costs. But that only in the midst of death – and our deaths we die daily, all around – can there be life … and life abundant!

 

So let us be duly turned around – the literal meaning of the word repentance.

 

So let us die to ourselves for a faith, a trust, in the One who calls us to be one, when our one-by-one efforts says yes to the making of what is good, but no to the miracle of what is grace.

 

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

 

 

News item from the Religion News Service:

 

“A United Methodist congregation in Washington, D.C., the church attended by President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton” – and, at one time, Senator Bob Dole – “has changed its policy to recognize – but not ‘celebrate’ – same-gender partnerships.”⁶

 

Friends in Christ: I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired, as a disciple in the body of Christ, of “recognizing” but not “celebrating” – “giving at” but not “giving with” – in outreach ministry.

 

Sometimes – alas – we have to settle for simple recognition. Limited little church that we are, we must simply give a nod to our serving and deserving neighbor, and let them go to God.

 

But sometimes … Ah, this is one of those sometimes, this lunchtime discernment before us.

 

Are we to celebrate?

 

Let us imagine!

 

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord. Amen.

 

 

¹From “Peanuts” by Charles M. Schulz, United Features Syndicate, August 14, 1960

 

²See www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/charity?view=uk. My emphasis.

 

³As cited in The Christian Century, April 8, 2008, p. 9.

 

⁴Universally attributed to Walter Brueggemann. Original source unknown.

 

⁵“The Pilgrim”, newsletter of First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, IL, March 11, 2008.

 

⁶As cited in The Christian Century, April 8, 2008, p. 17.