"At the Intersction of Evangelism and Stewardship" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 30, 2023
Scripture:  Acts 16:6-15 (And yes, I did apologize to the scripture reader at each church for all of the place names in this week’s reading!)

 

 

I’ve got two different study bibles on my desk – one doesn’t include any titles for the stories, but the other one does, and it titles the story that we just heard, “The Conversion of Lydia.”  (I think that’s also the title given to it in the pew bibles.) But when I read this story, I wonder if Lydia is the only person who is being converted – I wonder if there is another conversion going on in this story.

 

Paul has already had his big conversion moment – if you were to flip back to before chapter 9 in the book of Acts, you would find him, named Saul at the time, as the primary persecutor of the early church. But then in chapter 9, he has a dramatic conversion experience where he is thrown to the ground by a blinding light and he hears the voice of Jesus calling to him. And in a few short verses, he goes from being the chief persecutor of the church to the chief evangelist, traveling around sharing the story and the good news of Jesus.

 

And so here we are, at the beginning of today’s story, and Paul has a vision where a man appears, begging him to come to Macedonia to bring them the good news about Jesus.  And Paul and his followers immediately set sail for Macedonia, landing in the city of Philippi.

 

I can imagine Paul, arriving in this new city, beginning to search for this man who appeared to him in a vision, but we don’t have any record of him finding him.  Instead, Paul stumbles on a group of women gathered by the river to pray.  This wasn’t what he was expecting, but he was open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and he joins their gathering, and speaks to them about Jesus.  I see this as another conversion moment for Paul – recognizing that women can be leaders in this new movement.

 

And then we come to Lydia’s conversion. The Holy Spirit opens her heart as well, and she hears Paul’s message, and then she and her whole household are baptized there in the river.  But then she goes one step further, and she opens her home to these travellers.

 

We don’t hear much more about Lydia.  She is a dealer in purple cloth, and since purple was the colour worn by royalty, this meant that she was likely moving in some pretty high-class circles.  Her house was big enough to host the visitors, becoming their home base for their time in Philippi, and essentially becoming the very first church in that city.

 

I love this story.  I love how Paul doesn’t question the prompting of the Holy Spirit, but just goes.  I love how he doesn’t question the unexpected presence of this group of women ready and willing to hear about Jesus… I mean, he could have passed them by, determined to find the man who had appeared in his vision, but he was willing to stop and engage in conversation with them.

 

I love this story.  I love how Lydia doesn’t hesitate, but opens her home to these visitors, and to anyone else wanting to hear about Jesus.  I love how she doesn’t resist the nudging of the Holy Spirit, but opens her arms with generosity to share what she has.

 

Because both Lydia and Paul listened to the Holy Spirit, and then, more importantly, allowed themselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, the message of Jesus – the message of loving God with our whole hearts and loving our neighbours as ourselves – this message found a new foothold in a new place.

 

When I e-mailed Bertis earlier this week to touch base about today’s service, I said that I think that this story sits at the intersection of evangelism and stewardship.

 

It is a story about evangelism because it is a story about the message of Jesus spreading in the world.  Now, contrary to popular belief, evangelism isn’t a dirty word!  At the root of the word, it simply means good news, coming to us from Greek, euangelion, literally meaning a good message or good news.  So it’s not a word to be scared of!  Paul is bringing good news to the people of Philippi – good news about a God whose very essence is love; good news about a God who loves creation so much that they chose to become part of creation in the person of Jesus; good news about a way of living that is grounded in love.

 

And as well as being a story about evangelism, it’s also a story about stewardship.  Again – not a word to be scared of!  Being a steward is all about caring for things that don’t belong to us on behalf of someone else.  Our church stewards care for the things that the church has, on behalf of the whole church as well as on behalf of God.

 

And in today’s story, we read about Paul using the gifts that God gave to him – the gift of preaching, the gift of teaching, the gift of explaining, the gift of being able to relate to people from different backgrounds.  He is using all of these gifts that God gave to him on God’s behalf, so that God’s message might spread.

 

And Lydia too – she is using the resources that God has given to her. She is a wealthy woman, well-connected in society, and with a house large enough to host visitors. And she uses these resources to found a church, so that God’s message might spread in her community.  She being a good steward of what she has been given.

 

I love this story.  I love this story… but it scares me just a little bit. Because when I think of what this story might be saying to me, might be saying to the church, there are some serious implications for us.  There are implications for evangelism – like Paul and like Lydia, all of us are called to share Jesus’s message with other people.  And there are implications for stewardship – like Lydia and like Paul, we are called to share freely the gifts that we have been given, recognizing that we didn’t earn them, but that it is only by God’s grace that they have been loaned to us to care for on God’s behalf.

 

What if Paul hadn’t taken the opportunity to share his message with Lydia and the other women?  Would the church have gained a foothold in Philippi?  And what if Lydia had worried about saving her money for a rainy day rather than offering what she had to Paul so that a church could be founded?  Would the church have been able to grow in that corner of the world without a home base?

 

And so like this story, I think that we too are called to live our life as the church at the intersection of evangelism and stewardship.  And I don’t think that this necessarily has to be a scary thing!  Evangelism can be as simple as inviting someone to join you here on a Sunday morning.  Stewardship can be as simple as figuring out which part of the work of the church your skills are the best match for, and offering to share them, whether that be through joining a committee or singing in the choir or organizing a fundraiser or leading a bible study.

 

The life of the church depends on all of us sharing our different resources and gifts so that the church can continue to church, as well as extending the invitation to others to come and see what we’re all about.

 

I do love this story of Lydia and Paul.  And maybe – just maybe – it isn’t as scary as I used to think that it was.

 

 

“Saint Lydia Purpuraria” (Saint Lydia the Purple-Seller)

by Akelda

Used with Permission

(I have only just learned that St. Lydia’s feast day

is coming up this week – August 3!)

"Mother of All Wisdom" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 23, 2023
Scripture:  Genesis 2:18-25

 

 

This week, in our exploration of the stories of women in the bible, we heard the story of the first woman in the bible who is named… only did you notice that we didn’t get to hear her name this morning?  It turns out that we only heard half of her story this morning, and she doesn’t receive her name until the end of the next chapter – I just didn’t think that our reader would have been very happy about being asked to read a chapter and a half of the bible!

 

We also have part of the story happening before the part that we heard. In the first part of Chapter 2 of Genesis, we read about God shaping the first human out of the dust of the ground – an earthling created of the earth; a human created from the humus. This earthling was then brought to life by the breath of God and placed in a garden and given instructions to tend and care for the land.  In the centre of this garden grew both the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and our earthling was told that they could eat freely of any tree in the garden except for the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with the warning that if they eat of that tree, then they would die immediately.

 

That’s what came before today’s story – the story of the human, lonely without a companion, the story of God causing the human to fall into a deep sleep, and the story of God splitting the first human into two humans, a man and a woman.

 

And then the story continues from there in Chapter 3, and it’s a story that might be familiar to some of you.  We have a crafty snake who approaches the two humans for a conversation.  The snake asks: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’”  The woman replies:  “We may eat of the fruit of the the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”  The crafty snake answers back, “But you will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

 

And with that, the woman looked at the tree with fresh eyes – she saw that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil delighted her eyes. She saw that the fruit of this tree was good to eat.  She saw that the wisdom that the fruit would bring to her was something to be desired.  And she picked the fruit, shared it with the man, and the two of them ate.

 

Almost right away they were ashamed of what they had done. Together, they sewed fig leaves to cover themselves, and when they heard God approaching, they hid in the bushes.

 

This next part of the story reminds me of when my youngest cousin was little. The rest of us were still sitting at the dinner table, and she wanted to take a chocolate from the side table.  We watched her come in to the room, one hand held up beside her face so that she couldn’t see us, grabbed a chocolate, and left the room the way she had entered… the rationale being that if she couldn’t see us, then we couldn’t see her.

 

So here we have the two humans hiding in the bushes, and in walks the all-knowing, all-seeing God.  And God asks, “Where are you?” as if God doesn’t know where the humans are.

 

The humans are compelled to confess what they have done – the man blames the woman, the woman blames the snake, and nowhere do they say that they are sorry for what they have done – to say that they are sorry for disobeying God’s instructions and for damaging their relationship with God.

 

I have lots of questions for this story.  The first one is:  Were they sorry?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if the power, the lure, the appeal of the wisdom that they had gained was stronger than their desire to be in relationship with God.

 

And then what follows is expulsion from the garden. Rather than being able to freely pick from all of the trees that God had planted there, they would have to work for their food, work for their living.

 

It’s interesting to note that God doesn’t carry out the threat of immediate death for eating the fruit – they are about to lose access to the tree of life which means that they are going to die one day, but not today.  This is where we hear the well-known words, “you will return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Which raises another question:  Because the humans didn’t die as soon as they ate the fruit, does that make this a story about grace, about unearned forgiveness, rather than a story that is just about sin?

 

And only then is the woman named – Eve – her name meaning “Mother of All Living.”  She isn’t named for the wrong that she has done, but rather for the life that she will bring as the mother of us all.

 

I have more questions for this story.

 

My next question is a foundational question.  When Eve, the Mother of all Living, and Adam, named after the “Adam” or dust from which they were made – when they chose to listen to the snake and eat the fruit of the tree that God had forbidden to them, they hadn’t yet eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Which sounds like a circular statement. Before they ate the fruit, they hadn’t eaten the fruit.  But this means that they didn’t yet know good and evil.  They didn’t yet know what was right and wrong.  And so can they truly be blamed for eating the fruit? How could they have understood that it was wrong, until after they ate it?

 

And so I wonder if the expulsion from the garden was a consequence of their actions rather than a punishment.  To have free access to both the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make humans like God – in the garden, we had access to the tree of life, outside of the garden we have access to the wisdom that comes from knowing good and evil.

 

Interestingly, access to the tree of life which humanity loses so early in the story of the bible returns at the very end of the bible, at the end of Revelation, with God’s re-creation of the earth, and there in the centre of the new creation stands the tree of life.  But that’s a story for another day!

 

Instead, the story of Eve essentially ends as they leave the garden. She is mentioned again only in relation to her children, Cain and Abel.  She goes on to live the rest of her life carrying the memory of the garden and the memory of what they had done, but the story of the rest of her life isn’t recorded.

 

I wonder if she regretted her choice?  Did she regret choosing the path of wisdom and knowledge and insight, longing for the days when she was ignorant and unaware?

 

The expression, “ignorance is bliss” is popular for a reason!  I don’t know about you, but I often think that life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t aware that there was a war going on in Ukraine; if I wasn’t aware of gender-based violence and child abuse; if I wasn’t aware of climate change; if I wasn’t aware of racism and homophobia and transphobia.  Sometimes it feels like I are having so much doom and gloom thrown at us every day that I just want to curl up under a blanket with my cats and a novel and a cup of tea and pretend that none of that is happening in the world.

 

But I can’t.  I can’t do that, because if I pretend that none of the bad stuff is happening, then I wouldn’t have the motivation to try and change the world a little bit for the better.  Or, more accurately, I wouldn’t have to motivation to let the Holy Spirit work in me, empowering me to change the world a little bit for the better.

 

If all of us are ignorant, or feign ignorance, then the evil in the world will be allowed to flourish.  We need to be aware of the evil in order to be able to stand up to it.  We can’t just put our collective heads in the sand.

 

Even in the overall story of the bible, again and again, God pleads for us to seek wisdom rather than ignorance.  We hear this most pointedly in Proverbs, where Woman Wisdom is running through the streets, shouting at people who seem to be choosing ignorance over wisdom.

 

Which brings us back to Eve.  What if, instead of blaming her for the loss of the garden life, what if we could instead thank her for opening up the option of wisdom for us?  What if the Mother of all the Living is also the Mother of all Wisdom (for I think that life and wisdom are very much connected), and we seek to follow in her ways of the fullness of all living, and the seeking of wisdom and knowledge?

 

And may this be so.  Amen.

 

 

“The Temptation and Fall of Eve”
(Illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton)

William Blake

Used with Permission

 

It is interesting, with this story and others, that so many of us

remember, not necessarily the story, but what we have

been told about the story. The words “temptation,”

“sin,” and “fall” do not appear in the story of Eve.

"Martha vs. Mary vs. Both" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
July 9 and 16, 2023 (Annual Flower Services)
Scripture:  Luke 10:38-42

 

Today, as well as being our annual Flower Service, is also the first Sunday of our summer exploration of stories in the bible about women.  Each week we will be looking at a different story, and to kick things off this week we have a short story about two women, sisters Mary and Martha.  (And my apologies to anyone who was here last week/two weeks ago and is now getting two services in a row about the same story!  I planned out the summer back in May, and I had no idea that Linda Watson was going to be reading the same story with you just a week ago!)

 

So here we have Jesus and his disciples, his followers, his students, travelling through Galilee, teaching and healing as they go.  They are on their way to Jerusalem at this point in the story, and if you are familiar with the Good Friday and Easter story, you will know that Jesus’s death and resurrection aren’t too far in the future at this point in time.

 

They enter an unnamed village, and a woman named Martha welcomes them into her home as a guest.  This is the first detail that makes my ears prick up.  There is no mention of a father or a brother or a husband – Martha is welcoming Jesus into her home, into the home that she shares with her sister, Mary.  In a time and a place where women were the property of men, this is an interesting detail.

 

So Martha and Mary welcome Jesus into their home, and then they take on very different roles.  Martha bustles around the kitchen, getting a meal ready to serve to Jesus and to his friends.  Mary, on the other hand, has joined that group of disciples and is sitting on the floor with them at Jesus’s feet, listening to his teachings.

 

Two different women, each taking on a different role in welcoming Jesus to their home.  One serving, the other listening and learning.  It is the difference between these two sisters that many writers and preachers like to grasp on to – are you a Mary or are you a Martha?  Do you feel called to serve the world, or do you feel called to quietly listen and learn?  Show of hands – who feels more like a Martha, living your life to serve others?  What about Mary – who feels called to a life of quiet contemplation?

 

I remember a decade ago, when I took the Licensed Lay Worship Leader course back in Ontario, we spent one of our weekends exploring this story of Mary and Martha.  One of our activities was to make a mask – we were told to make a mask that would express either our Martha-ness or our Mary-ness.  And I remember sitting there, looking at the blank page, not quite sure what I was going to do with it, because there are times when I feel more like Martha, and there are times when I feel more like Mary.  I am both Martha and Mary.

 

Like so many things in our world, I don’t think that this has to be an either/or question.  You don’t have to be either Mary or Martha, pigeonholed into an expectation about how you are going to live your life.  I suspect that most of us would find ourselves somewhere on the spectrum between Mary and Martha, with a bit of both in us, or maybe even moving to different points on that spectrum depending on the day.

 

I suspect that the same is true for all of the loved ones we are remember today at our Flower Service.  Maybe he was a do-er, always willing to lend a hand to a neighbour the way Martha did, but he also appreciated a quiet time of prayer.  Maybe she was someone who never missed bible study or a UCW gathering, and loved talking about her faith like a Mary, but when sandwiches were needed for Romero house, she was always willing to make a loaf.

 

The thing is, the church as a whole needs all of us, Marys, Marthas, and all of us who find ourselves somewhere in the messy middle.  Keeping the church being the church isn’t the responsibility of one person, but depends on all of us sharing our gifts.  In order for the church to be a community in which we can grow in our faith AND a community that serves the needs of the world, we need all of us.  We can’t have the Marthas in the church complaining that the Marys aren’t helping to stock Ida’s Cupboard with food for our neighbours, or helping with the Mission and Service fundraiser.  But at the same time, we can’t have the Marys complaining that the Marthas aren’t coming to bible study, and are missing worship more often than they are present.  Because in order for the church to be the church, it takes all of us.

 

And I also wonder if, as we spend time in a community that values both the gifts of Mary and the gifts of Martha – as we spend time in a community that values both spiritual nurturing and serving the world – as we spend more and more time in a community like this, maybe all of us will shift closer to the middle of the Mary/Martha spectrum and find ourselves identifying with both of these women.

 

And may it be so, in our individual lives.  And may it be so in the life of our church.  Amen.

 

 

 

“Martha and Mary”
JESUS MAFA
Used with Permission