Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Acts 17:16-34, Philippians 3:7-14

Celebration and "So What?" of Faith in Action Weekend

This weekend we are reflecting and celebrating on all that we experienced from our Faith in Action Weekend. We made history for this church, took a risk, and chose to express our faith for one weekend serving outside these walls. One of the main goals behind this weekend was to give us something to motivate us, stir us, or wake us up. Why would we need to be woken up?

I attended a conference in Pasadena in the beginning of April, and a phrase I heard there has been rattling around in my head since. A guy probably in his early 30’s made a comment about growing up as a "church kid." I could relate, I did too.

Then he shared that it took something significant to wake him up from his "numbing self-righteousness." Having grown up in the church, believing he was good with God, he had grown numb to the world and to those far from God. Numbing self-righteousness. I could relate, that was me. Numb to what goes on in this world, numb to those far from God, even numb to the high calling of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

It reminded me of the first time I woke up to my numbness. As a freshman in high school, I went on my church’s Spring Break mission trip to Mexico. We went down to an orphanage south of Tijuana. On Thursday of that week, we had the afternoon off to rest or play. Ben, one of our leaders, one of my classmates, and I, decided to go on a short hike up to the water tower on the hill above the orphanage.

Of course, we were going up there to find a way to climb up on top of it. Not the smartest thing to do; but when we arrived at the top of the hill, it was obvious we were not the first ones to think of this. There was no way to climb up, everything nearby that could have been used to stand on had been removed. Even the ladder that would have normally been attached to the tower had been taken off. So we could not climb up, but we found something else of interest.

Once we got to the top of the hill, we found a small, rough, wooden cross held up by a pile of rocks. It could not be seen from the orphanage, but when we walked up to the place where the cross stood, we had a fantastic view of the orphanage and the whole valley in which it sat. As we stood there, taking in the view, Ben said, "Could you guys imagine what it must have been like to die on a cross?" As he said it, he lifted his arms out to his sides.

My friend and I took positions on either side of him; raising our arms out. I don’t know how long we stood there, but in that quiet moment, something happened. Something inside of me stirred. It was like God all of a sudden reached down and swirled my soul with his finger. It was an amazing sensation. I still have trouble articulating what exactly it felt like. I didn’t know it at the time, but some of my numbness was being stirred away. I was waking up. My story continues …

We stood there for some time, saying nothing, and eventually one of the others said we ought to get going. So we began our journey back down the hill, not saying much of anything.

That night, after dinner, the whole mission team was in our sharing time. One of the girls spoke up, and told the group that she had been reading her Bible during free time, "the part were Jesus was crucified on Golgotha," she said. She had read that account, then written something in her journal, and took a moment to think and looked up toward the water tower. In that moment, she thought she was having a vision of Jesus on the cross with the two thieves next to him. She began to weep. We later shared our stories of that day and discovered God had done something powerful.

In that moment, I realized that God was really alive. He could reach through time and space and stir my soul. I had been in the church my whole life, but that was the first time I knew what it meant to be "alive in Christ." I had to be shocked out of my numbing self-righteousness. When we are in a relationship with God, and we think we are OK because of it, it is so easy to slide into numbness.

I realized a few weeks ago that my awakening to God’s presence happened almost twenty years ago to the month. In the past twenty years, I have always had a believing faith in Jesus, but I have to confess, I have not always cared about it. I think the church tries really hard and does a pretty good job trying to change and inform people’s beliefs; recently I have been challenged to wonder if the church, us, ought to be as concerned about whether or not we really care.

In the book of Acts, there is great account of what happens to Paul while he is in Athens. It is found in Acts 17:16-34. [Read.]

Dominating the landscape of Athens is the mountain where the Parthenon stands. If you visit the Parthenon, you can still see the niches carved out of the ground where the temples and idols would have been. Thousands of them are visible as you approach the Parthenon.

Below the Parthenon is Mars Hill. This is the place Paul was brought to talk to the philosophers of Athens. From there, you can see the Parthenon in one direction and the ancient marketplace in the other. I can imagine Paul walking their city and visiting the Parthenon and speaking in the marketplace. I can see his strategy unfold. He starts in the familiar place, home turf, in the synagogue. Then he moves to the marketplace, the neutral ground of ideas and exchange. And finally moves to their turf, enemy territory, when he is invited to Mars Hill.

Then Paul does something amazing. He points out God’s truth in their world, he recognizes God already there midst, and he even quotes their poets. He tells them, "Look, the One True God is here. There are facets of him all around you. Let me lift these out so you can see God’s love and truth right here. And then to prove God loves us and is true, a righteous one has been appointed, and he was raised from the dead." So some followed, came to faith in Jesus.

What gets Paul to that point is he really cares about people. He cares about people who are far away from God. This whole thing in Athens happens because Paul is "deeply distressed" (Acts 17:16) by what he sees for the people there. In the original King James version, it read of Paul, "his spirit was stirred in him."

God reached across through time and space and stirred his soul. Something in Paul was awakened to distress because the people in Athens were far from God.

I wonder, do we really care about people far from God?

What Paul did, any of us could do. Maybe not with the same brilliance or eloquence. Maybe not with the same success. But what Paul did was not magic or good luck. And it was not simply caring for people. A lot of us care for people, but still don’t know how to talk about and see God at work.

Paul cared about people far from God, AND he cared about really being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

In Philippians, Paul wrote "I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." (Philippians 3:7) Everything else was loss compared to knowing Jesus. Paul was serious in his commitment to be a close follower of Jesus. Jesus set a high mark for being a disciple. Church is for anyone, it’s designed to be welcoming and inviting. It needs to be a place free to search and ask; it’s only healthy if it’s full of explorers and journeyers. But being a disciple is a high calling.

Do we really care about being disciples, close followers of Jesus?

Now, you could hear a whole sermon on caring for people far from God (and you probably have). We could file that under "evangelism" or "outreach." And you could hear another whole sermon about being a close follower of Jesus (and you have). That could be filed under "discipleship" or "uplift." But what we don’t as often hear is those two things are inseparable. Caring about people far from God and caring about being close to Jesus are two ingredients in the same loaf of bread. They can’t be pulled apart.

So, what do we care?

I remember one night some time in my teen years, I woke up with this horribly awkward feeling. I woke up enough to notice my arm was under the full weight of my chest. I rolled over, off my arm. As I did, I felt this strange, lifeless object drag across my face. I sat bolt upright in bed, and felt my right arm drop lifeless and numb beside me. I panicked. This was my throwing arm, my writing arm, I thought I had killed it! I began to forcefully rub it, praying to God that life would come back into it.

And then it hit. Those wicked pins and needles; that feeling of sensation coming back into my arm. Now that I was beginning to regain life in my arm, all I wanted it to do was stop. To move from numbed to awakened requires something dramatic, even painful.

If we do not care, the numbing self-righteousness of the Christian religion can be a great hindrance in us actually living the Christian faith.

Scripture…

Acts 17:16-34

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ "Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-- an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others. -

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ-- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. -

Philippians 3:7-14