April 15, 2007
Acts 5:27-32
Witnesses to These Things
Words. More than simply vocalized toe-tapping to
fill the silent spaces; more than random humming interrupted occasionally by
glottal stops and aspirations. Words are
the precious, potent raw materials – the silver and gold and gemstones and
clay, the threads and dyes – with which we form and cohere meanings and then
get them out where others can sift and stew and juggle and exchange them. With words, ideas and emotions and dreams
and passions take on color and texture and form and shape. With words, according to Genesis, whole
worlds are created. It was that same
creative word of God, according to John, that became flesh and dwelt among us
as the light of the world that the darkness cannot extinguish.
Words – the
paints of the mind that have the capacity to convey impressions of the heart or
the weather or the way to get from here to there or the truth of life as one’s
mind has come to comprehend it. Words
are the descriptive oral currency with which we convey the ardor of our love or
the fervency of our faith. And words can
also be the pebbles in our social shoes that get us into trouble.
Thomas Long begins his recent book
called Testimony with the observation
of someone he describes as a “shrewd New Yorker” and “person of faith” who
comments that, “At fashionable dinner parties in this town, you can talk about
anything. You can talk about politics,
you can talk about sex, you can talk about money, you can talk about anything
you want. But if you mention God more
than once, you probably won’t be invited back.” (p. 3)
Well,
that’s New York, but I wonder how different that would be in Des Moines. The truth is, we don’t talk all that much
about God, either. Iowa native and newly
minted Masters golf champion Zach Johnson had scarcely gotten his Easter
gratitude to Jesus out of his mouth than someone was writing in to the Register’s “2-Cents Worth” column
wondering if Johnson’s comments implied that Jesus wasn’t walking with any of
the other golfers on the round that day.
In other words, “don’t talk like that!”
We can’t seem to stand too much “God talk,” either.
The Apostles, according to the story recorded
in the book of Acts, ran into something of the same reaction. But more than just not getting invited back,
the Apostles were actually thrown into jail and ordered to shut their
mouths. “Don’t speak of such things
again,” they were told. When we were together in worship last, the focus of our
attention and faith was on an empty tomb.
In this story, the focus is on an empty jail cell. From both emerged voices the authorities
thought they had silenced, demonstrating that no matter how long and with
whatever force it is held down, the truth has a way of pushing itself back to
the surface. When the Jerusalem
officials discovered the Apostles back in the Temple, and once more telling
their story, they were hauled back before the ones who believed themselves to
be in charge.
“I thought we had an
understanding: you were going to keep
your beliefs to yourself, and we were going to let you live. And yet despite all that, here you have
filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are trying your best to blame us for
the death of this man."
To which Peter responded, “We must obey God rather than you.
And these things about which we’ve been speaking – we are witnesses to
these things.”
In the
class I teach at Simpson College, we were studying Joseph’s decision, in the
Gospel of Matthew, not to report to the religious officials his fiancé Mary’s
illegitimate pregnancy, even though such a report was legally required.
“Sometimes,” I observed, “one has to break the law to honor it.” Jesus’ entire
ministry, after all, was characterized by breaking one law or another. So with Martin Luther King, jr. and countless
other soldiers in the battle for civil rights.
Sometimes truth is against the law.
And so it was with Peter and the other apostles: preaching, despite the legal injunctions that
sought to silence them. “We must obey
God rather than men,” Peter asserted.
“We are witnesses to these things.”
Witnesses – irrepressibly so. And the report of their determination makes
me feel a little flimsy. Perhaps you, as
well. That sort of thing is not, after
all, our style. Even though the consequences
of our testimony are likelier to be of the New York social variety rather than
the apostolic jail variety, we still tend to keep our mouths shut. The late comedian Flip Wilson used to reply
when asked about his religious preference:
“I’m a Jehovah’s Bystander. They
wanted me to become a Jehovah’s Witness, but I don’t want to get involved.”
(Long, p. 4)
And we sort of have the same
response. Perhaps the reason is that we
don’t have very good role models. We
know fairly well what kind of God-talk makes us uncomfortable, but not what
kind feels positive – spiritually enlarging rather than confining. To be sure, we have lots of experience with
the “confining” sort – that which prescribes a particular kind of conversion or
religious experience; that which raises whelps from being bludgeoned with a
scripture baked so hard as to become a club.
But what
might we say, by contrast, that might encourage instead of intimidate or
suffocate? Who are we to think we might
manage to cobble together some words to tell a story that would bring about any
better effect? “Besides” we demur,
“there isn’t anything particularly special about my faith story. Why bother
to bore anybody with it?” What, after
all, would we say?
“In Lynna Williams’ touching and
hilarious short story, ‘Personal Testimony,’ a twelve-year-old minister’s
daughter at a Southern Baptist summer camp earns hundreds of dollars running ‘a
ghost-writing service for Jesus,’ composing for the other campers the personal
testimonies of conversion and repentance they are expected to give, amid tears
and hallelujahs, at evening worship each night of camp. The story plays off the anxiety of many
Christians that we lack the words to describe our faith in public, that we need
somebody else to create the language.” (Long, p. 4)
Repulsed, then, by so much of the
religious discourse we hear, and reticent to proffer any of our own hand, we labor
under a self-imposed “gag” order on the soul.
But with any luck, it won’t hold.
I remember doing a science fair project as a teenager that grew out of
Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a man who commits the perfect crime, but can’t
stand it that, because no one knows who did it, he can’t get any recognition
for it, and so ultimately confesses.
Like I said, the truth has a way of seeking the surface.
Of what, I
wonder, in the story of God’s movement among us and around us, are we
witnesses? What of God’s saving and
transforming work have we seen and heard and felt and experienced, the truth of
which is pushing against our silence? What
is your story to tell – perhaps as a way of making sense out of it for
yourself; perhaps as a gift to a curious and hungry family member or
friend? How have you seen Jesus living
and alive and compellingly present in your life and experience, despite all
that has taken place?
Ø For the disciples, it was
direct encounters in the days and weeks that followed that first Easter
morning.
Ø For Paul it was a blinding
light on the road to Damascus that knocked him off his horse and his previous
course and drew him into powerful missionary service.
Ø For Francis of Assisi, it was
a compelling voice in a tiny chapel that pried him away from a life of
indulgent leisure and into a life of blessing and inspiration.
Ø For scientist and former atheist Francis
Collins, who directed the Human Genome Project, it was an intellectual
awakening in the course of mapping DNA’s basic double-helix code of life that
led him to map, along the way, a fresh perspective on the compatibility between
faith and science.
Ø For me it was – well, it has
been lots of things – a home whose sails were regularly opened to the Spirit’s
wind and whose faucets virtually ran with conversations of the divine; mentors
who regularly dropped spiritual bread crumbs along the path to help me find the
way; a moonlit evening and a lakeside vesper area at church camp where my very
skin somehow came alive in proximity to the holy; and the companionship and
inspiration of congregational witnesses who could not keep silent. Just to hurry by a few summarized high
points. The concretes of those
experiences I look forward to thinking more about as we talk more in the months
ahead.
For we are
witnesses of such things. In this next
part of our life together, we will be creating opportunities to reflect on just
such questions, and to answer them – even the recognition that for some us,
faith stories are only just beginning and include, just now, more questions
than experiences. We will respectfully
honor the personal dimension of our faith stories, but we will steadfastly seek
to push against the privatization of them.
For, as the
apostles later asserted in this same book of Acts, God has “…not left himself without a witness…
If they came and ordered your
silence, what would push irrepressibly to your surface? We have not seen for ourselves an empty tomb
nor touched his hands and side, but Jesus is risen and alive and acting in our
midst. And knowing it, we cannot finally
say nothing…
…for we are witnesses of these
things.