May 13, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Acts 14:8-18

All over America this morning you might be able to hear
thousands of preachers cranking up their Mother’s Day sermons.
possibly reminding their flock that the tender love that God bears for us
resembles the love of a mother.
The more adventurous of these Mother’s Day preachers
might even risk using language that suggests
that God is our Mother as well as our Father.

But I have to say that this week,
when my head has been aswirl with thoughts of Mother’s Day,
and the founding of Jamestown,
and Carleton’s sabbatical,
I’ve been persistently visited with a memory of one of Carleton’s sermon-stories,
I think from two weeks ago.
You recall he was at a retreat a beloved mentor (who’d written x number of books). Carleton had made such spiritual progress over the last couple of days
that when the retreat ended, he gave the mentor a big bear hug,
and thanked him effusively.

No, the man said, it wasn’t me. You had it in you.

So, no matter how industrial-strength this week has been,
it was with great relief and even delight
that I turned to today’s lesson from this book of the Bible
I find so rich and useful, the book of Acts^†
that unfolds in detail the consequences of Christ’s resurrection.
These stories of what God’s Holy Spirit does in the early church
seem to range from the eyebrow-raising to the downright astonishing.

What happens in Lystra is that a man who had never walked,
never stood on his own deformed feet,
was present when Paul was preaching the risen Christ.
The man said nothing, but Paul detected his faith, and said,
“Stand upright on your feet.” And, by God, he does it.

The onlookers are, to say the least, very impressed.
They take Paul and Barnabas to be gods.
They’re getting set to deck them with garlands,
and they’ve ordered out for oxen to sacrifice to them.

Wait! Don’t do it! say Paul and Barnabas.
I imagine they could barely restrain the crowd
in the pandemonium of their enthusiasm.
We are just human beings, Paul says, and to God be the glory.

There is so much that is interesting here, even ironic.
Note, for one thing, that Paul and Barnabas
were only doing what Jesus also did, healing the sick.
But when Jesus does it, it is correct to identify him
as the Messiah, the full expression of God on earth.
But here a crowd, equally eager for heaven to touch earth,
makes a mistake. How are they to know?

I am also drawn to Paul’s specific command,
“Stand upright on your feet”
Which may have both a literal meaning and a figurative one in the story.
Yes, a man unable to walk has feet that are healed.
But the command may also be to everyone there,
to stand on their own two feet, use intelligence and judgment,
and stop looking for random or novel gods.
Instead, under the sovereignty of the one God,
through his Son Jesus Christ,
take up your responsibilities grown-ups
who know the difference between humans and gods,
and the difference between human responsibility to do good,
and what lies in the hands of God.
I think this story is both about a healing, and about being a grown-up.
Or to use the church’s language, borrowed from St. Paul and the Baptismal service --
we are invited to “grow into the full stature of Christ.”

All of us here have been children,
and many of us have been parents.
Some good experiences, of course, and some bad.
But I think we’d all agree
that there is a tension in child-rearing between two poles.
On the one hand is the warm, nurturing, guarding function of being a mother or a father, tending and tucking in, consoling and welcoming home.
But tugging in the other direction is the parents’ instinct and obligation
to launch their children as competent people in this world,
to encourage them to be strong and resourceful and good and confident,
literally and figuratively able to stand on their own two feet.
Watch any parent helping a child learn to walk, and you will see this tension,
these equally good and natural but contradictory impulses, in a nutshell.

It’s always a little bit dicey
to make the metaphorical leap between our own experiences with parents or as parents,
to our relationship with God,
because some people’s experiences have more pain to them than others’.
Moreover, there are unquestionably times in everybody’s lives
when they cannot stand up,
and are wholly dependent on the nurturing and protection of someone else.
Sometimes we fill these roles for each other in surprising ways, I might add.

But there are indeed other times, even when we think we can not stand,
when God asks us to do it anyway,
and we are surprised by grace.
We take up responsibilities we imagine are impossible, wildly beyond us.
We become unexpectedly grown up.
Despite a natural urge to retreat to childhood,
we shoulder the load, do what we are called to do,
and by the grace of God we do it
without whining or blaming,
without anger or resentment,
and without seeking glory or thanks.
In short, we refuse to indulge in a whole array of child-like tricks,
and act like grown-ups.
In the process, we discover we are not alone
we find we have support, from God and people,
that otherwise we’d never have known was there.

How often I have seen this extremely mature behavior in so many of you,
as I get to know your stories.
For some, it means commending those you have loved to the mercy of God,
and continuing to live, finding good work to do
and occasions for your broken heart to be joyful.
For others, it means getting therapy, having an operation,
or overcoming the legacy of trauma or an abusive relationship.
It could mean making a difficult decision and sticking to it,
or accepting a job that is less than perfect, but doing it well anyway.
You can fill in your own blanks here,
as to what ways you have been called be stand on your own feet,
and the ways you have found God standing beside you in it all.

It is our privilege here at Grace Church
to support our rector during his sabbatical,
and to carry on the work of the parish while he is gone.
It won’t be the same without him.
Hey, I miss Carleton already.

But he’s raised us well, hasn’t he?
We’ll all pitch in, to do the church’s work – to be the church,
as best as we can and with God’s help, to be Christ in the world.
We’ll support each other,
pick up a little more of the work, each of us,
all the while (in Paul’s words)
trusting that the living God who made the heaven and the earth
and the sea and all that is in them,
will keep us standing upright.
To him be the praise and glory. Amen.

^†This book should probably be called The Acts of the Holy Spirit, not the Acts of the Apostles, because the chief player in this Luke-written history book, is the Spirit, as this lesson today so clearly insists.

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