May 20, 2007 Des Moines

Acts 16:9-15

Prayers of the People:

You can be a challenge sometimes, dear God. That’s not to say we aren’t grateful for all the blessings you afford – the joys that you stir and use to brighten our days. That’s not to say that we don’t appreciate all the good things in life; we do. And it’s not to say that we don’t trust you to surround us and those we love with your healing, comforting, guiding mercies. Otherwise, we would keep to ourselves our concerns about the pressed in places of life.

We trust. It’s just that it would be so much easier if you simply gave us what we want – did what we say. It would be so much simpler if you would just wait quietly in your little room and come out only when we need you. Easier, perhaps; simpler, but then we would be reduced to our own imaginations, our own purposes and undertakings, and that would be to imprison us in our own little room. We give you thanks, O God, for the worlds you create – around us, to be sure, but within us, as well. We give you thanks for the ways you constantly stretch and nudge and redirect and enlarge; for the ways you persistently go beyond what gives us pain and what raises joy and paint whole new outlines of possibility and grace. We thank you that, despite our occasional desire to be, you, in reality, are God. We confess it, and offer our gratitude for it, through Jesus in whom we have seen you most clearly. Amen.

Stretching the Holes

This isn’t what was intended. I don’t mean this isn’t the sermon I intended, or this wasn’t the worship service we intended to share. I mean this experience that Paul enjoyed in the passage read earlier wasn’t what he intended. He had other plans, other dreams, other destinations. But then we know how that can be. Years ago, that great theologian Garth Brooks sang a song about the blessing of unintended eventualities.

Just the other night at a hometown football game
My wife and I ran into my old high school flame
And as I introduced them the past came back to me
And I couldn't help but think of the way things used to be

She was the one that I'd wanted for all times
And each night I'd spend prayin' that God would make her mine
And if he'd only grant me this wish I wished back then
I'd never ask for anything again

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers
Remember when you're talkin' to the man upstairs
That just because he doesn't answer doesn't mean he don't care
Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers

She wasn't quite the angel that I remembered in my dreams
And I could tell that time had changed me
In her eyes too it seemed
We tried to talk about the old days
There wasn't much we could recall
I guess the Lord knows what he's doin' after all

And as she walked away and I looked at my wife
And then and there I thanked the good Lord
For the gifts in my life

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers
Remember when you're talkin' to the man upstairs
That just because he may not answer doesn't mean he don't care
Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers
(words and music by Garth Brooks, Larry B. Bastian and Pat Alger)

Now, we can nitpick over the technicality of what constitutes an answer. I would have preferred the song to celebrate those times when the answer God gives is different – and ultimately superior to – the answer originally sought. But that is poetic quibble. The point is that sometimes what you want, and what is best, turn out to be two different things altogether, and that God is more interested in accomplishing the right than satisfying the wish.

Paul had not planned to go to Macedonia, in general, let alone to Philippi, in particular. If you read behind this morning’s story just a few verses, you’ll see what I mean. Paul and Timothy were traveling around from town to town, preaching and teaching and doing all they could to strengthen the churches they encountered. According to the story, they went “through the region of Phrygia and Galatia” because they had been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Furthermore, they wanted to visit “Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.”

It’s tempting, of course, to wonder what the Spirit had against those other destinations. After all, contained within that closed off territory were Ephesus and all the recipients of the letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation. Ultimately, it seems, the answer turned out to be less of a “no” and more of a “not now.” Timing, after all, is sometimes everything. But that is ultimately a different story.

The point of this story seems finally to be not about the doors that were closed, but about the one that was opened. “During the night,” says the narrator, “Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” It wasn’t where they wanted to go, but it was, they became convinced, where they were called to go. And so they went: obedient to the call instead of addicted to their desire, and offered themselves as instruments of God’s good news.

So what about this “open door”? The city of Philippi was named after Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. Once upon a time Philippi had been rich with gold mines, but by the time of Paul they had all been worked out. Philippi was a Roman colony – a strategic center – one, like other such designations around the Roman Empire that was designed to be a model of Roman culture. The military was there, Roman customs were the norm – dress, food, laws, language – and Roman pride was strong. It was a long way from Jerusalem, in every conceivable way. There wasn’t even a synagogue to provide Paul a place to start. This, in other words, would be virgin territory for the gospel that Paul had to share – outsiders by geography, by religion, custom and background. No wonder Paul had leaned toward easier destinations.

Last week we talked about the circles we are inclined to draw – those boundaries separating insiders from outsiders, acceptable from unacceptable, the welcomed from the excluded – and how such circles, while sometimes drawn with the lead of prejudice and bigotry, sometimes fear or misunderstanding, are also sometimes anointed with the oil of religious understanding. Some separations, in other words, we make because we have been taught to believe that God wants them that way. And we watched as God laid hold of that religiously enforced dividing line and ripped it full of holes, allowing inside those whom people of faith would never have imagined.

This week’s story goes, for me, one step further. It’s one thing to move aside and allow those previously excluded ones in; it is still another to step through those ripped open holes and seek those once-excluded ones out. If last week’s story is finally about tolerance, this week’s story is about affirmation and embrace.

In the familiar parable of the Prodigal Son, the older brother who had initially resented the welcome of the younger son’s return presumably got used to the idea eventually – accommodating it if not particularly thrilled about it. It’s possible to accept last week’s story in precisely the same way: accepting the inclusion of those previously blockaded – acquiescing, so to speak – but not really changing one’s opinion. Doesn’t that describe, by comparison, so much of what resulted from the civil rights struggle – tolerating the inclusion of various ethnic groups under the full protection of the law, making room for them in the commerce of everyday affairs, but never really viewing them as equals?

How different is that characterization of the older brother from the behavior of the father who, according to the story, went out along the road to meet his younger son; not satisfied to wait inside the house until the doorbell finally rang, but striding further and further down the road, in search of, scanning the horizon for sight of that beloved silhouette.

It’s one thing to slide over and make more room on the bench. It is quite another to leave the table in search of new companions. More than acquiescent tolerance, this is embracing pursuit. Not, “I guess you can stay,” but rather “won’t you please come?”

Stretching the holes still bigger, confident that yours is God’s own invitation.

“Come over here and help us,” the man in Paul’s vision pleaded, and suddenly after all those simpler doors locked closed to his efforts, one suddenly, provocatively, surprisingly opened. And Paul knew it was the voice of God. Because sometimes God answers prayers we haven’t yet had the faith or the imagination to pray.

Whose are the voices we hear calling in our dreams? What are the doors swinging open? And despite our preconceptions and preferences and social or spiritual inhibitions, will we stretch the holes bigger…

…and walk faithfully, not begrudgingly, beckoningly, lovingly through?