Scriptures: Acts 3:1-9; 2Corinthians 8:8-15
This is a two point sermon. Many of my colleagues in ministry think that sermons are supposed to have three points, although I’m not really sure where they got the idea. In my schooling I was never told that sermons should have three points, and I always felt that the only thing really to worry about is a sermon that didn’t have any point at all. In any case, this is, in my own mind anyway, a two-point sermon, or a sermon with two focal points.
The first focal point comes from scripture. I was unsure what direction I wanted to go in the sermon this morning, so I did what I frankly don’t do too often, which is look at the lectionary scriptures. One of them was from the book of Acts, though not the passage that was read just a moment ago. The passage that is recommended by those mysterious people who decide what gets in the lectionary is about Peter giving a sermon, and I was, forgive me, not too inspired by Peter’s sermon. But I have always liked the story that precedes his sermon, and which gives rise to his sermon, and that is the story you heard this morning. It is a story that doesn’t even make it into the lectionary, which makes me sort of scratch my head, and which also made me decide to pay some attention to it. (It’s my rebellious tendencies saying, “If you’re not going to pay attention to this passage, then I am.”)
So here we are, here Peter and John are, outside one of the gates to the temple in Jerusalem. It’s the very earliest days of the Christian movement, movement because it’s not a church yet, just a group of people gathered loosely around Jesus, still very much Jewish in their identity, which is why they were at the temple in the first place: they were going to take part in daily prayers.
At the gate of the temple is a man asking for money. He is lame, the scripture says, has been all his life, and therefore he has never seen the inside of the temple because who are physically impaired are not allowed inside the temple. But every day his friends bring him to the temple at prayer time so he can appeal to the people going inside. It’s probably a pretty good spot to ask for money, since at least some people might feel a little extra embarrassment, or guilt, or hypocrisy if they turn a cold shoulder to someone in need just as they are going into church. How can you open your heart to God and not open your heart to people? That kind of thing, you know. In any case, there he was. And most people probably were just walking on by, some of them paying no attention, and some of them pausing just long enough to find a few coins and drop them in the coffee can, and then moving on.
Peter and John, on the other hand, the story says, stopped, looked intently at the man, and asked him to look at them, in the eye. When he did this, Peter said, “You know, I don’t have any money, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And, of course, as we know, the man did. Not only walked. Ran and jumped and shouted and took himself right into that temple, because nobody now could tell him he didn’t belong there.
I said before that I have always liked this story. It has seemed to me to be a story not about miracles being done in Jesus’ name, not about how we are supposed to deal with people who ask us for money, but about empowerment. It’s significant to me that the first thing Peter and John do with this man, before they even say a word to him, much less do any miraculous healings, the first thing they do is just look at him. Intently. Really see him, and ask him to look back into their eyes, not to be looking down in shame and cooperating in not being seen. So, the first thing they do is treat this person as a human being rather than as an object of charity. I have a New Yorker cartoon on my bulletin board at home that has someone in tattered clothing dogging the steps of an obviously rich man with his nose in the air, and the man has his hat out and an angry expression on his face, and he’s saying, “Come on. After all, it’s not like I’m asking you to acknowledge our common humanity.”
Anyway, that’s the spiritual part of what Peter and John do, which of course is followed by the physical part. Again rather than treat the man as an object of charity, giving him a handout of some kind, they give him what we can all see that he really needs, a kind of healing where he doesn’t have to ask for handouts any more. In a way, it’s just saying in different words what the African proverb says about if you give people a fish, they will eat for a day; if you teach them to fish, they will eat for a lifetime. And it drives home the point that what we all need is not just help, though God knows we all do need help often and in many ways, and many of us probably need help in admitting that we need help, admitting it to ourselves and then to others, but that’s a whole other story and I digress. We need not just help. Also respect, dignity, the acknowledging of our common humanity.
That’s more or less the way I have always interpreted this passage, as a message that what we are to be about as church, as individuals, is always a lot more than charity. What Peter and John do is free this man from the definitions and the categories that others have used in order to be able to file him away under some label, definitions that maybe he has learned to live within his own mind: the poor, the have-nots, the homeless, victim, underprivileged, needy. The point is not that those are bad words. The point is that when those words are used not just to describe a person, some part of a person, and are used instead to define a person, that’s when they become something that a person needs to be free from. And that’s what happens in this story. I continue to read the story that way. A man receives not just a new ability but a whole new being.
I noticed something else though as I reflected on the story this time around. When Peter encounters this man at the gate of the Temple, he does not launch into social analysis. He does not say, “You know, what we need here is not charity but social change.” He doesn’t say, “We need to teach this man to fish and stop giving him fish all the time.” He doesn’t say, “What this man needs is more than money. He needs to be empowered.” He doesn’t say that charity is bad because it has the effect of keeping people in a state of dependency. He doesn’t say that this is a systemic problem and we should be working instead to change the system. He doesn’t say any of those things and, at least from what we are told in the story, he doesn’t do what he does because of his penetrating social analysis or his deep insight into what the man really needs. What he says is: I don’t have what you are asking me for, but what I do have, I give you. The focus, in other words, is not, in this instance, only on what the man needs but also on what Peter has to give.
This thought led me to recall a time I went to see the Nobel Prize winning author, Toni Morrison. There was, of course, a large crowd—hundreds, maybe thousands—many of them young people who had been studying her books in high school or college classes. She was dignified and gracious and beautiful and eloquent and she had all of us, me included, eating out of the palm of her hand and ready to follow her anywhere. During the question and answer session one of the students asked Toni Morrison what her involvement had been in the civil rights movement of the sixties, expecting to hear, I suspect, of some heroic deeds she had performed. She was seeming pretty heroic to all of us.
She said, well, yes, she had been old enough to know what was going on in the sixties and she had admired those who demonstrated and boycotted and sat in and registered to vote under the threat of death. She had admired all that but she had done none of it. She hadn’t marched with Martin or anyone else for that matter. I am a writer, she said essentially, as I remember it. I have always been a writer. When I wasn’t yet a writer, I was working at becoming a writer. That’s who I always felt myself to be. And during the sixties I was finding my voice so that I could tell the stories of my people. That is who I am. That is what I have to give.
It could have been Peter speaking. I don’t have what you’re looking for, but what I have I give you. And as I read Peter’s words this week and then recalled Toni Morrison’s, it struck me that this is just a little bit different way of looking at things. A way that sometimes we can be pretty clear about but other times maybe we lose track of. We do often find ourselves thinking about things from the perspective of what is needed. We respond to requests that may come at us from every direction. Or we respond to our own insightful analysis of what’s needed. And some of us know that we need to learn to say no a little more often, though when we do, we may feel a little guilty or at least uneasy. It’s not fun to say no, at least if we do it often, and we want to be helpful and all that. And whether we do or don’t say no, it can all be a bit discouraging because there’s always so much to do, things other people want from us and things we come up with all on our own that we think we ought to be doing. And this kind of thinking is necessary. What does the church need? What’s needed if we’re going to work at dismantling racism or combating heterosexism? And so on. Those are important questions to be asking. But it’s also important, just as important, maybe more important to be asking ourselves a different question: What do I have to give? It’s a different kind of a question. It comes from a different place. It has a different frame of reference altogether. Sometimes what we have to give will be quite different from what is being asked of us. Sometimes what we have to give will be more important than what is being asked of us or that any given situation seems to require. In any case, this is the direction the scripture nudges me in this week. It suggests to me that I spend some time with myself reflecting less on what it is that’s being asked of me, what it is that I need to say no or yes to, less on what the answers to the world’s problems might be and more on what it is that I have to give. That’s one focal point of the sermon.
The other I guess I have to be more brief about. It’s from a different source. On the recommendation of Beverly Seng, Ava and I went to see the movie “Amandla” this last week. I know others have seen it because we saw May there and we’ve talked with others who have gone. It’s about the freedom movement in South Africa, but specifically it’s about the role of music in the movement of resistance to apartheid. It suggests that the freedom movement there gave birth to a tremendous wealth of music, that was sometimes the only way people had to express themselves, that comforted people in distress, that gave energy and hope and community and sometimes just made it possible to go on. This music was indigenous, much of it not composed, growing very much from the moment and movement, and some of it of course has found its way into church in all parts of the world including Sojourners. The movie also suggests that the reverse may have been also true, though it’s harder to see, many people felt it to be true that the music also gave birth to the movement. The life in the music came from the movement, but the real life of the movement also came from the music.
I reflected on this afterwards in connection with church. A question that comes up often at Sojourners, at least in my mind, is what relation our worship and spiritual life here has to do with our social concerns, which thankfully are very much alive and very much a part of the congregation. Thinking about the integration of music and spirit with social change as portrayed in Amandla, and asking myself the question what we have to give as the church to the quest for a more just and loving world, it struck me that there is a vision for the church that is suggested by the theme of the movie and by the question of what we have to give.
What if the songs we sing in church were not just the hymns of the church, what if they are not just songs about God or our relationship to God, but were also freedom songs. What if we began to see every hymn we sing as a freedom song? What if we, as the church, were to become a movement again, a movement toward a world of shalom? What if the Bible suddenly became not so much a book of sacred writings, instructions, teachings, lessons, philosophies? What if we began to see the Bible as a book of freedom stories and writings for seekers after the reign of God? The movie Amandla reminded me that the so-called spiritual concerns of the church and the social concerns of the church are not two separate categories that we try to keep somehow in healthy balance but that they are part and parcel of each other. The church, in the view I am suggesting, does not have social concerns. It is social concern at its very heart. It is other things too but it is that. And our songs and our prayers and our stories are the songs and prayers and the stories of people journeying toward God’s reign of shalom. And so too is communion bread for that journey, not just bread for our individual journeys in search of communion with God, but bread for the journey we share as we seek a new creation. May the bread and cup of communion strengthen us for all the journeys we need to make as God’s people. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 4, 2003