Easter 6 Sermon

Power and blessing and wisdom and strength be to the Lamb forever,
and blessings to those who bring glory and honor
to the Lamb
as we worship at the throne and table of our God.
Alleluia and Amen.
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"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

When Paul was given the vision to go to Macedonia,
Paul went.

Paul went with
at minimum
Silas and Timothy.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy went to Macedonia
because there was a vision that said:
‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’

There was no feasibility study done first;
there was no long-range financial forecast
with projections of income and expenses,
no five-year strategic plan to see if it was cost-effective,
if there would be sufficient pay-back,
no concern if there was a prudent financial return on investment for expenditure of capital and labor;

no committee to put the project on hold
while they examined a budget
worried that this mission to Macedonia
would put the early Church over budget
because if it were over budget
it would be postponed until some possible future date
because we all know
that God values adherence to a human-created budget
more than God values adherence to Christ’s mission.
Or not.

No.

None of these things.

Paul had a vision:
"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Paul had a vision.

A vision!
Not even an actual invitation,
not a written proposal in proper grant form,
with suitable attachments and schedules
approved by the appropriate sub-committee
before it went to the board for formal action in accordance with the accepted protocol for initiating a new activity deemed subject to existing policy per the prior approved plan of action.

No.

Paul had a vision.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

And so Paul, Silas, and Timothy went to Macedonia.

Vision.

President Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting
the King James rendering of Proverbs 29.18:
‘where there is no vision, the people perish.’

If we as the Church operate without vision,
without vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then we do perish.

If we as a congregation operate with vision,
vision that we are given to see and embrace by the power of the Holy Spirit,
then we are living in the call of the Risen Christ.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

That was a revolutionary, radical vision.
It was a vision that led to profound –
dare I say it –
profound change.

Now today I want to kill once and forever the power of the “c” word,
I want to eradicate permanently the pejorative power of the word “change,”
a word that is used to attempt to intimidate others,
a word that that is intended to have a nasty, negative meaning.

Change is life
and life is change;
without change we would not be human,
without change we’d be one-celled amoebas dying a certain death.
because in fact we would not even survive as a single celled amoeba;
the very process of life involves ever-constant change,
be it respiration, ingestion, digestion, metabolism, elimination, reproduction.
When change ceases, the organism dies.

When change ceases, the living organism dies.
This is how God structured life.

A definition of death is when an organism ceases to process change.

A simple Mother’s day illustration:
a task of the mother
and father and all who love the baby
is to change the baby;

an unchanged baby is not a pleasant thing

a baby that is not changed will soon lie in a pile of its own waste,
a classic definition of abuse,
which will lead to the baby’s inevitable death.

A mother
and all who love the infant
consistently measure its health by change:
ounces and pounds gained,
inches grown,
new skills developed.

And what is school but the community’s attempt to promote particular guided and intentional changes in the knowledge, values, and skill sets of a child.
Teachers are change-agents;
a teacher who fails to change the lives of students is (to say the least) not an effective teacher.

And in the church,
so it is with those who are pastors
and lay people with vision.
A pastor who allows a congregation to be unchanged is useless and a travesty to the calling of ordained ministry,
and an accomplice to the death of that congregation.

When change ceases, a body dies.

Never again let the word “change” be used as a weapon to cudgel and badger,
never again let the word “change” be used as a club to obstruct the vision of the Spirit,
to block the ministry of the Gospel
and the life and work of the church.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Jesus was an agent of revolutionary change,
the Risen Savior is the most profoundly transcendent Change in human history,
the Spirit at Pentecost calls us into community to be the on-going dynamic force for change in the world,
we are called to be transformers of the world with our witness to the Gospel.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

That vision changed your life and mine.

More precisely,
because Paul, Silas, and Timothy acted on the vision,
they totally and completely changed our lives.

Today’s account is written in the 16th chapter of the book of the Acts of the Apostles
which is a record of one revolutionary change after another
in the lives of the people who were called by the Spirit to be the first generation of Church in the world.

Last week’s First Lesson was from the 11th chapter of Acts,
the vision of Peter,
a vision of change,
a call to open the doors of the Church to everyone.

Peter’s vision was that no longer would there be an a church of the insiders
that kept its door closed to the outsiders,
closed to those from not around here,
closed to those not of our kind,
closed to those that were “different.”

Peter’s vision was totally revolutionary,
a mind blowing portent of enormous and irretractable change,
of openness and inclusion for which there was no going back.

No longer “us” and “them”
but only “all of us as God’s children.”
Peter’s vision was that no matter who you were
or where you were on life’s journey,
you were welcome in the Church as one of Christ’s own people.

Peter’s vision of inclusiveness of all of God’s people being welcomed in Christ’s Church
was so revolutionary
that by Acts chapter 15 we have the first great Church Council where the very issue of openness was put before the whole Church.

By the power of the Spirit,
Peter’s God-given vision
prevailed,
a tremendous change in the Church.

Now in Acts chapter 16 comes the next step in the revolutionary sea changes that made the Church:

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Up until this moment,
where we are at today in Acts chapter 16,
the Gospel was geographically confined
to what we know today as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel.

When Paul received his vision, he was in Troas,
on the northwest seacoast of Turkey.

Macedonia,
from where Alexander the Great came forth to rule the world,
is just north of Greece,
in Europe.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy sailed across the Aegean Sea from Troas to Samothrace to Neapolis to Philippi.

That journey is somewhat of a reversal of the Trojan War,
Troas from where Paul sailed being the 1st century name for Troy;
in our story from Acts instead of Europe bringing war to Asia Minor,
it is Asia Minor importing into Europe the Gospel of Peace.

This trip across the Aegean Sea changed history,
and even more,
it changed the course of Christianity.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy brought Christianity to Europe,
where all of our ancestors were worshipping idols and trees.

The author of Acts notes that Philippi was a Roman colony;
thus in this account we have both Macedonia, representative of Greece, the center of eastern Christianity, the Orthodox Church,
and Rome as Rome, center of western Christianity for the first fifteen centuries of the Church’s experience.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Obeying that vision changed your life and mine,
because Christianity came to our ancestors;

because our ancestors communicated the faith to the generations that came after them,
we received the gift of the Gospel
which we are called upon to convey to the generations that come after us.

We are the heirs of that journey that Paul, Silas, and Timothy made in response to the vision,
"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

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What is our vision today?

Right here
right now
in Spencerville, Ohio
at Spencerville United Church of Christ,
what is our vision?

Do we exist as just kind of a community center
where people can have their showers and receptions
and from where people can borrow chairs and tables?

Are we here as a closed community,
where any new or differing thought is treated as an insult,
where anyone who is not from here is an outsider (if not a threat),
where we gather only to reinforce our self-images worshipping a god that we ourselves created,
a god made in our same self-image who never challenges us,
who never makes any claim on us,
who never asks of us anything other than what we have already decided?

Or do we have the Spirit’s vision?

Are we open to the Spirit’s vision?

What and where is our Macedonia?

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

What calls us to get up and come over,
to move,
to make a journey across whatever sea lies between us and the place where God is calling us to be?
What is our vision?

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’

If we as the Church operate without vision,
without vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then we do perish.

If we as a congregation operate with vision,
with a vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then our ministry thrives.

We have so many good and faithful people in this congregation,
people who inspire and bless us by their love for our God,
by their placing the Gospel first and foremost in their lives.

And we have the promise of these words of Jesus from today’s Gospel lesson:
The Advocate, that is, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

In one week we will gather at 5:00 pm to share in a meal
and discuss values for this congregation,
with special attention to the word “acceptance.”

“Acceptance” is perhaps something that we can name as our first value that comes from our now four-month long and continuing discussion on our values.

Determining our values is part of the Visioning process,
the conversation whereby together we seek discernment as to where the Spirit envisions that we go as a congregation into God’s future.

In two weeks we celebrate the festival of Pentecost,
the day on which the Spirit, the Advocate,
gathers us together to be the Church,
creates and re-creates us,
renews and empowers us again to be the Church
in this time and place.

Whatever the values are that we discern by the Spirit’s guidance,
if they be Christ’s values,
they will be values that involve our care for and service to others.

Our values will not be about ourselves.

Our values in Christ cannot be about taking care of ourselves and serving ourselves and reinforcing ourselves and thinking about our needs.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Paul, Silas, and Timothy did not place their needs first;
it was the needs of the other,
of the other person,
the need of others,
that came first.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

In Christ it is never about helping our own selves;
Christ will take care of us.
In Christ it is always
always
always
about helping others.

Mother’s Day.
You cannot be a parent without a child.
You cannot be a Christian and have it be about yourself.
You are only a Christian when there is love towards others.

What for us is Macedonia?
What for us is service to all of God’s people?
What is our vision to serve others
in our community,
in our region,
our nation,
in the world?
How do we discern our call to serve others
which is how we serve Christ?
What is our vision?

These are questions that I cannot answer alone.
These are things which together we discern as community.

Join us next Sunday at 5 as we share a meal and together discuss our values and the Spirit’s vision.
Join us next Sunday and every Sunday at 10 am as we gather as Christ’s family to worship and encounter our God.
Join us in two weeks at 10 am as we celebrate Pentecost, God’s creation of the Church and tthus he re-creation of our congregation,
join us every Sunday as we come to be strengthened by the Spirit to live out the Spirit’s vision:
Come to Macedonia, and help us.

As your pastor I have authority to promise you this:
as we serve Christ by serving others,
as we live out the vision that the Spirit gives to us,
we will never have to worry about our own situation and needs.

Go to Macedonia, and help them.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.