Sermon: "Talking to Strangers"

Second in the "Beyond These Walls" series.
Delivered April 30, 2006 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

Theme: We forget that the church exists for the people outside itself; the measure of our forgetfulness of this fact is the measure that we begin to diminish as a congregation, however imperceptibly. This message reminds us not to lose sight of this critical perception.

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Last week Pastor John began a seven-week post Easter series called "Beyond These Walls" and in order to help us remember the name of the series there is a beautiful purple banner out in the narthex there to remind us week after week why we are doing this series. It basically is because the church is one of the only institutions that does not exist for its members only. It exists for those who are not yet members. It exists for those who are out there and when a church forgets that fact, it's not good and every week, every month, every year hundreds of congregations close up shop because they have forgotten that fact. They have forgotten that the church exists for three reasons; to look up, which is to worship God; to look in, which is to care for one another in small group life and community life; and to look out to those who are not yet part of our community as well; and the degree to which people forget that, is the degree to which the church diminishes.

You know you wouldn't have to go too far back in to the history of Central Church itself to find out that this is true. The congregation was begun in 1853 and the reason that Central is called Central is because it was central to Baltimore over 150 years ago. The church went through all kinds of growth patterns. There was a congregation and then there was a fire and then there was another congregation built and I think the second congregation built was actually a 1,000 member church and it was having a tremendous impact downtown, but as decades went along, Central Presbyterian Church forgot why it existed and was unable or didn't know how to or something adapt to its surrounding environment, and so it got smaller and smaller and smaller until it eventually died in that location. In almost like a deathbed wish, one of the few remaining members of Central Church handed over I think it was $14,000 at the time and said three words, "Keep Central Alive." And the vision of the Baltimore Presbytery and the vision of Pastor John Murray Smoot in the late 40's: with that $14,000, the presbytery bought the land that we are sitting on now, and said "Revive or resuscitate Central Church" and that's what happened. Murray said that he was only going to be able to stay one year when he took the job and he ended up staying for 34 1/2 years and like Central of downtown since 1949 there has been an ebb and flow and a growth and pluses and all that and there has been a few blips on the screen, but it has been mostly good.

And now here we are on the threshold of a multi-million dollar building expansion. We are opening the size of the shoe as it were so that more people might be able to connect with God and Christ through this community of faith. It's hard for me to imagine as we embark on that campaign as that lawn disappears out there and a worship center goes up to think about the fact that if we repeat history we will be in the same boat as the downtown Central. I mean it's hard for me to think about that, I just don't see it. I can't comprehend it, but to the level that we forget that the church exists for the people outside itself, to that level we begin to diminish as a congregation, however imperceptibly and so this series is about reminding us about that third point of why the church exists. We exist for others beyond ourselves.

You know this has always been a struggle for the people of God. God called on a community called Israel and they forgot why they existed. They were supposed to be a witness to the nations and through self-centeredness and idol worship and all kinds of other things they drifted from God and they went to the ineffectiveness of exile. Even in the Book of Acts, which seems like the most powerful moment in the Church's history when the Holy Spirit came, even in that Spirit filled center of passion, those believers still did not understand what the program was. They did not understand the mission. They heard Jesus talk about going to the outermost parts of the earth, but basically they were pretty much confined in to a Jewish Christian religious reality in Jerusalem. And so the Holy Spirit starts to jump-start and kick the church in the pants as it were to get them beyond themselves. And when Chapter 8 of Acts opens there is a persecution and that persecution of Christians makes the Christians scatter. The passages that we are about to read, it's at this point that you never hear throughout the whole rest of the Book of Acts of any witness in the Jerusalem church anymore. It doesn't mean that it wasn't going on, it just meant that the whole point of the Book of Acts was to make the point, that the church exists for an enterprise that is huge, that is beyond these walls, that involves every nation, every people in the world. It's not just confined to our little holy huddle, our little happy place. It's about going beyond these walls and today's text really points to that theme. And so I want to ask you turn to Acts, Chapter 8 and Verse 26 and we are going to learn from the evangelist Philip how to be a spiritual Sherpa. Do you know what a Sherpa is? A guide, somebody who can take someone where they haven't been yet and we see some principles about how to be a good Sherpa of the spirit in Acts, Chapter 8, Verses 26 to 40. Let's pray.

Lord, we pray that your Holy Spirit will open our hearts and help us to understand your truth. We confess that we are blind and apart from your Spirit we will not be able to understand. And we don't just want to understand it historically or theologically Lord, we want to understand it as a point of transformation in our lives, that it would make a difference not just for us, but for all of those whose lives we touch. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Okay, if you would like to follow along in the Bibles, its on page 777 of the red pew Bible or you can follow on the screen.

"Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Go south to the road-the desert road-that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, "Go to that chariot and stay near it."

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked.

"How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:

"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth."

The eunuch asked Philip, "Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?" And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea."

If we are going to be a good spiritual guide for other people, we have to be people who express sensitivity at many different levels. And that is what the rest of this sermon is about, the levels of sensitivity that are seen in Philip's life and in this engagement with a person who is not from his culture. And the first sensitivity that we see is sensitivity to the Holy Spirit's guidance. Now there are some verses that are very clear; you can't hardly miss them. The Spirit said, "Go down south to this road." And the Spirit said, "Go up alongside this chariot."

But I want to stop for a minute and think about who is Philip? Who is this person Philip? Now every time, before I studied this, every time I have read this I just sort of assumed that it was one of the twelve apostles, but I assumed incorrectly, because if you go to Acts, Chapter 8, Verse 1, same chapter we are in and you will see this: "On that day a great persecution broke out against the church of Jerusalem and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria." The apostles felt like it was their role in charge was to stay in Jerusalem. So Philip the apostle was obviously in Jerusalem. If you turn over to Acts, Chapter 21 in Verse 8 when Dr. Luke is making his return trip with Paul back to Jerusalem he says, "Leaving the next day, we reached Caeserea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the seven." So you go back to Acts 6, do you remember the first problem that happened in the community of faith, called the Christian Church, that there was some Hellenistic widows being ignored and they started the Deacons and they said find some men who are full of wisdom in the Holy Spirit and Stephen was chosen and the next person on the list is Philip. So Philip was a deacon of the church.

Now this strikes me as very interesting, because one thing that I hear from Christians is that they don't think that they should have to talk about their faith or they say, "I am not good at talking about my faith" and one thing that they say is that "I am working over here in this corner of the church and that's how I am expressing my witness." Now I am sure you are, but here if anybody could have hidden behind the argument of "Well, I am doing deacon's work and so I express my witness through the work and I don't really like to talk about it," it would be Philip, but he was one of the strongest evangelists, he was ordained as a deacon and he became one of the strongest evangelists in the whole Book of Acts. So sensitivity to the spirit is not just about how we express God's love in our work, it's also how we express God's love in our words and all he did was just keep taking the next step. He was engaged in a powerful revival in the early part of Acts, Chapter 8 and now he is being asked to go one on one with somebody. You know the thing that also strikes me about this is that nobody was sitting back in Jerusalem thinking, "Now how can we have an outreach to the Ethiopians." They just worked. And what that is saying is that God is up to something even when we are lost in our strategic planning. See, church can get so far locked up in their strategic planning that they forget what God is doing right out there and if we will just listen to the Spirit, the plan will unfold. Now I am not saying that we shouldn't do strategic planning, but I am saying that we should be sensitive to the Spirit first and foremost, because people just don't plan to fall in love with Jesus anymore than anybody else plans to fall in love with anybody else. What creates a sense of impact in evangelism for a congregation is in those unrehearsed conversations, in those spontaneous moments in which the Spirit of God prompts us to speak to someone whose heart is prepared. And he just kept taking the next step, go south, okay. Go to this road, okay. Go to this chariot, okay.

You notice here that it stops. There wasn't a command from the Spirit that says, now ask him a question, because at some point there is this blend of the Spirit's guidance and our human abilities that somehow starts to come together and so Philip just comes up and naturally takes the next step under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So one question that I want to ask as far as application of all of us, and I will ask it this way. How many conversations have you had in the last week or two, work, where you live, where you play, how many conversations? I would say hundreds for most of us. How many conversations do you think you are going to have in the next week or two? I think the numbers are about the same. In all of those conversations and I don't always do this myself, but in all of those conversations, how many times do we say Lord what is your Spirit doing in these encounters that I am in? What is going on with this person that I am talking to? How might I be able to be used of you as leverage for your grace in another person's life?

I was listening to an evangelist who talked about how he engaged people; I was listening to a tape in the car and he said that sometimes when he tells them he is an evangelist that it doesn't communicate anything and so when they have this exchange of "what do you do?" "What do you do?" He says,

"Well I work for a global enterprise and we have outlets in every country in the world, engaged in so many institutions. We have schools. We have hospices. We have hospitals. We have publishing companies. We take care of people from birth to death and we major in behavioral alterations."

Now if the person you are speaking to has not an ounce of spirituality in them that conversation probably won't go any further, but usually if you say something like that they will say, "Wow, what is that?" And you get to say, "The Church. I work in a global enterprise called the church." Yesterday when we were looking through the nursery window at our beautiful little granddaughter, another guy came up alongside of me and he had an accent. I learned later that he was from Yugoslavia and I asked him, I said, "Is that your little girl in there or little boy?" And he said, "Yeah, a little girl, fourth daughter." I said, "Oh fourth daughter, wonderful. Are you going to go for the boy?" And he said, "Well I don't know. God has blessed us." Like all of a sudden the antenna went up. Now I thought maybe he was evangelizing me that he was thinking about dropping a little bit of bait there to see what I would say. And so I thought well wait a minute he said, "God has blessed us." He might not be a Christian. I don't know. So I said, "Well tell me, where are you from and where do you live and all that." One thing that I try to do is to just drop in to the conversation and I was able to because she was born at St. Joe's, I said, "Oh yeah, I just work up the road. I am just a couple of blocks up the road. I work in a church." He goes, "Oh, you work in a church. Are you a pastor?" "Yes" and I find out that he is a committed Christian and he goes to Messianic congregation in Olney and we had a wonderful time talking to one another. And so, what I am trying to get to is that I really wasn't zoned in until he said, "God has blessed us." And I thought to myself that was his opportunity and God reminded me of how easily we can slip in to the conversation about spiritual things. Now that doesn't always, I mean sometimes I will put those worms out there and people won't take them. I had a repairman come not too long ago and I was asking him you know if they had a church and I mentioned that I worked in a church and there was nothing. Just flat hit the wall. And so finally I was like okay then I won't be a bulldozer and I will just let it go and I just figured that somebody else will pick it up along the way. Again, the point isn't about evangelism being a program, it's about being a way of life. And so one of the sensitivities that we need to be mostly clued in to is the sensitivity of the Holy Spirit as we just go throughout our day in all of our conversations.

There is another angle of sensitivity to God's Spirit that goes back to Chapter 8, in Verse 4 and it says again that those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went and then Philip went down to Samaria. Philip was where he was talking to this Eunuch and Ethiopian and doing all he was doing because of stress, because of a struggle, because of the persecution of the religious authority. That stress created the reality that Philip found himself in. Now again, it was the Holy Spirit kind of jump starting the church to move beyond its boundaries, but it clearly shows that our witness can be carried even on the wings of difficulty, even when we are feeling like down in a hole. If we will let God go down in the hole with us, then that too can become a means of sharing our faith with other people.

The friend that I met yesterday at the hospital, I asked him "How did you meet the Lord? How did you come to know Jesus?" And he said, "Well as I mentioned I am from Yugoslavia, I played basketball there. I came over here to play basketball and I hit a terrible depression and so I went back to my home country and I was there for six years in a very difficult depression. I mean it was clinical. It was chronic and I didn't want to live, nothing. And I was really struggling. And apparently some people were praying for me because one day it was like a snapshot of my life, the window of depression lifted for that one day. It was like I never had it the day before and I was just in a totally different reality of thinking and then it left. Then I was depressed again. So I decided to take a walk the next day and I rounded a corner and there is this banner and it said "Easter Mass, Welcome." God just put it in my head to walk in the church and that's how I started to understand about God's love and Jesus Christ and how he died for me, how he rose the third day, how he reigns in power for me and I asked him in to my life and in to my heart." And I asked him this, "Let me ask you a question, after you came to know Christ, did you still ever struggle with depression?" He said, "Not as bad, but yes, every now and then I did." And yet he said, "I have discovered something very interesting, that it's because of what I went through, that the people that listen to me the most are the people who are also struggling with the same thing and that's my opportunity to tell them my story and about what I went through."

See many times we think that our witness stops because we are encountering difficulty. I would suggest that sometimes that is where it starts and that we can, if we are sensitive, that it's through those difficulties and those low points that we can have more of an impact for Jesus if we will continue to trust the Lord as we walk with him. God uses our trials to touch others and it doesn't disqualify us, in fact, it probably qualifies us even more if we will point people to how we got help.

That's another sensitivity: a third sensitivity. Philip was not a bulldozer. Even though God clearly told him to go down there, even though God clearly told him come up aside that chariot, he didn't say or the next thing out of his mouth wasn't "God told me to tell you", okay? If anybody could have said that and had the right to say it, it would have been Philip. What I am trying to say about sensitivity is let's not try to come down from up here like God told me to tell you, he just comes along side of him and underneath supporting says, "Do you understand?" because it was a common practice back in those days for people to read out loud. It wasn't like a weird thing; people just read out loud and so he here's this person reading. He sees that God is working. Do you understand what you are reading? How are you understanding what you are experiencing right now? I mean, isn't that just a common lead in question, how are your dealing with things? How are you doing? What do you need? I mean if you know somebody or starting to get to know them. He didn't say, "Well how long have you been a Eunuch?" He was bold, but he wasn't brassy, okay?

The sensitivity that Philip showed eventually resulted in a clear word about Jesus. That's where the sensitivity finally has to go. It's not just about us talking about our experiences or our commonalties, the conversation by God's Spirit eventually is designed, and it happens here in this text, to allow us to give the good news about Jesus. That's exactly what happens here. This text of scripture that the Eunuch was reading from Isaiah 53. What better place could Philip had started than from this scripture verse? You know, I am trying to remember when I watch sports events on TV if I still see people holding up John 3:16 signs. I think that is not happening as much anymore. But this Isaiah 53:7, back at the chariot races, that's the sign that they would hang up. They would hang up Isaiah 53:7 and somebody would go to Isaiah 53:7 and read, "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, as the lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth." Philip took that: the word of God and the Spirit of God and a sensitive heart carrying the message of life transformation. Dr. Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and he wrote the Book of Acts. This encounter is so much like the road to Emmaus when Jesus comes upon two disciples walking to Emmaus. By the way, Emmaus was a Gentile town as well. And think about the commonalities of Luke's road to Emmaus and this road to Gaza. There is a road. There is a stranger who joins travelers. There is scripture that gets shared that explains Jesus as the Messiah. There is a sacramental act, here baptism instead of the Lord's Supper when he broke bread and then a disappearance of the witness and then those who are witnessed to bursting with joy. I think that is Luke's way of reinforcing the goal of every human encounter possibility to help others learn about the good news of Jesus so that by word and spirit God will have an impact.

I remember when I was in the position of the Ethiopian in that I was a sophomore at Clemson University. I was in the ninth month of my spiritual gestation period and we were in a room where a guy was talking about the Lord and there was probably 75 kids in this room and he said, "You know there are some kids here who have a little yellow booklet in their pocket. Would you all take out your little yellow booklets in your pocket? And a guy sitting right next to me had a Four spiritual laws in his hand and I was so prepared at that moment to hear the good news that I said to him when the meeting ended and the guy said to get together with one of the people who had the book. So he was sitting right next to me and so I said, "Would you show me that booklet? Would you please tell me what was in there?" Because he was just talking about it. From the first word or the first syllable I was riveted to the booklet. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. God was preparing me for that moment. People were up and walking around. I lost all consciousness of the fact that I was sitting on a floor with people all walking around and this guy, I still think of it from his perspective as I look back on it, he was just walking me through it, but you know what, I don't remember his name. For all intents and purposes, he disappeared. Just like Philip, because Luke is trying to say that there is a divine and human engagement that God uses us, but we shouldn't be overburdened about our part in it. We should be prepared, but not overburdened. God is driving the whole thing if we will be sensitive to the moment.

The end of the text reminds us that we are so important to the process and we find Philip getting up and going to another Gentile town. He is whisked away and goes to another Gentile town called Azotus, that's Ash God of the Old Testament, you can't get more Gentile than that in that area in that time. And he goes to that town until he finally settles in Caesarea where he probably spent the rest of his life, just not too far from Jerusalem, because of what we read in Acts 21 and he raised four daughters and they were all prophetesses and God used him mightily. Whether he's on the move, whether he is settled in his house, every day becomes a possibility to be a midwife for someone else; to deliver them in to kingdom. Maybe we just plant the seed; we just mention it for the first time. Maybe we get to water the seed or maybe we get to be a midwife where we actually see somebody who is at the end of their gestation period and become a Christian. You know its possible that today some of you are in a gestation, most of you are believers here today, but some may be kind of along that process you know? God has been speaking and talking and you have been listening and here we are and I would invite you to do what the Ethiopian did, to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you haven't been baptized, we will baptize you sometime soon, not today, but we will baptize you some time soon, so that you can show your obedience to Jesus Christ. It was so wonderful last week hearing Katie sharing her story and seeing her be baptized as a work of God's spirit among us. So, beyond these walls. Go beyond these walls. In all of your conversations this week and trust God, trust God that he is preparing the way in going before you.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word of grace. We thank you for how this text teaches us about your heart for the whole world, how it teaches us about our part in that and how it teaches us about your power so that we might be equipped to do the things that you call us to do. Lord, we pray that our witness would be out of the authenticity of our hearts and lives and we pray for your forgiveness for the times that we get in the way of our witness, but thank you that you are bigger than that and pray that you would use us as a church so that we indeed might invite others to be a part of this community and find life indeed. We pray it in Christ's name. Amen.

© 2006, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org