AUG. 10 1997: THE POWER OF SUFFERING (ACTS 8)

If you were asked how it comes about that you are a Christian today, you would probably give some personal testimony, mixed with talk about your family, friends and cultural background. Let me give you the historical answer: next to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus is the event which has most changed the world. If you and I are Christians today it’s because Saul of Tarsus became a Christian. Without him the Christian faith might have lived and died like a pot-bound plant as a Palestinian Jewish sect. It might never have reached us Gentiles. God quite literally reached out and grabbed him, made him His chosen instrument before he was born or thought of by anyone but Himself. He equipped him with extraordinary natural gifts for an extraordinary task. As the risen Lord said to him when confronting him on the Damascus road, he was like a dumb ox: a huge, clumsy, clever-stupid beast, violent and destructive to itself and others when it resists its master, wonderfully serviceable and productive when broken to the yoke. Today’s sermon on Acts 8 will be a case study of how Saul of Tarsus fought God, and how God won, how Saul become Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. There will be things for us to learn about how we too fight God and about who wins and how.

I once had a chat with a man who responded to a biblical reference by saying that he couldn’t see how there could be any modern relevance in the fables of the primitives. We are right in the middle of the fastpaced docudrama which is the Acts, and we are at the moment getting one instalment a week. The book of Acts, like Luke’s Part I, his Gospel, is based on the accounts of eye-witnesses, and sometimes he was present himself. It is neither fable nor primitive. Just a few details taken from the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles suffice to show that the people, give or take a bit of technology, inhabited a world as sophisticated, and as corrupt, as ours. There was a unitary Jewish state, which made no more distinction between religion and civil life than was made in Québec before the Quiet Revolution. The authorities had their own police, including the thought police who watched Our Lord’s activities in the countryside, their own powers of taxation and arrest. The occupying Romans being jealous of the power of capital punishment, their authority possibly stopped short of that, even for what would have been capital offences under the Mosaic law, for instance blasphemy. Their control was otherwise much like that in modern Iran. Religious toleration was not even an idea to them. The Jewish state was occupied by a vast tyranny centred in Rome, which covered most of the known world. The religious leaders were factionalised: the top of the Hierarchy were collaborationist, interested in salvaging what they could for themselves, like Mr. Quisling in occupied Norway. In the same spirit of “If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em”, their smaller editions bought the tax contracts from Rome and screwed what they wanted out of the common people. Pilate had enjoyed, when they threatened him in career terms, manipulating these ecclesiastical politicians into saying publicly, “We have no king but Caesar”. While they did not seriously think that the charismatic Jesus, or anyone else, could be Messiah, they wanted the lid kept on all disturbance and thought it fine to offer Him as a scapegoat. The Pharisaic party really believed in God: for them national spiritual renewal would bring liberation, and the local freedom fighters, called Zealots, were prepared to push it along by force of arms. They were the experts in God’s law and will, all for consistent Jewish living. With some honourable exceptions, they were subject to the occupational hazard of all earnestly religious people, and so were long on condemnation but short on self-knowledge. They had hated the way the common people had flocked after the Nazarene instead of themselves. They were uneasily allied with the priestly party, or Sadducees, whom they despised, in a Supreme Council called the Sanhedrin, an Aramaised form of the Greek word for an assembly. Their way of relating to Rome differed from that of the Sadducees roughly as Taiwan’s relating to Beijing differs from that of Hong Kong. They looked for a Messiah, but not one like Jesus. The idea of a suffering Messiah horrified them. There being no love lost between Pharisee and Sadducee, not much united them but the desire to bury Jesus for good and all. Their collective reaction to rumours of His having been raised from the dead as He had predicted was simple fury.

But this was exactly what was being said everywhere. In the first few weeks after Pentecost the disciples had made thousands of converts. Those who had been closest to Jesus in the days of His flesh did spectacular miracles as though He was still walking and talking among them. The new movement had virtually taken over the huge temple complex on weekdays. There had been an extraordinary lull before the storm, when they had enjoyed all the familiar delights, festival and weekly Sabbath worship in the magnificent temple put up by Herod the Great, plus daily communion and constant fellowship in house-churches and an overwhelming sense of God’s presence. There was no problem in those honeymoon days about being a Jew and a Christian: that was just the modern way of being a Jew, since Jesus was alive again and proved to be Messiah, and every last man, woman and child in the Church was Jewish born or an adult convert to Judaism. Those relatively few days must have been truly wonderful ones to be alive in. Then the arrests and intimidation began. Life became more complicated, but still the Church grew. At the one year mark a high proportion of the population of Jerusalem, many of the ruling priestly class, many of the Diaspora Jews who lived in the city or had stayed on after the coming of the Spirit, believed in Jesus and were living in His power. You couldn’t go a step in the city without falling over someone who didn’t just think or hope that Jesus was alive, but knew that He was alive, for he had seen Him alive, talked with Him, eaten with Him. At the core of the Church were several hundred people who were like this; it was much more than the fact that the corpse had never been produced, or that the hush-money to the Temple guards who had witnessed the supernatural opening of the empty tomb at dawn on the Sunday hadn’t worked, though these were certainly factors. The priestly authorities now had, not one popular itinerant preacher to stop, but a fire out of control. The movement was completely public. Even if Rome were not soon alerted, and down on them like a ton of bricks, their own position was nearly gone. Gamaliel, Saul’s old teacher, urged caution, but prevailed only briefly. He warned his colleagues that if they weren’t careful they might find themselves fighting against God.

Enter Saul. What a useful person in a crisis! He was a superb blend, a pretty unique combination, of strategist and tactician. He enjoyed the freedom, mobility and legal immunities of being a Roman citizen born. He was a religious careerist, with any amount of drive and energy, and was prepared to give himself without scruple to doing the dirty work of his seniors. He would do anything for God. It must have been of his mentality that Pascal was later to say that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it in the name of religion. He had never met or heard Jesus, so his fine theological judgment was not clouded by any sentimentalism about Him. He had all the advantages for a rising young Pharisee. His natural gifts were outstanding. He was brilliantly clever and eloquent. His education made him fluently bilingual and wholly enculturated in the best circles, both Jewish and Gentile. He knew the Jewish Scriptures backwards, both in the original and in Greek. If any young man was marked to become a famous Rabbi in record time, he was. He led an outwardly blameless life, give or take a couple of little things like love for God and neighbour. He could be said to have everything but what he really needed.

We were hearing about Stephen, his character and the way he died, last Sunday. He doesn’t seem to have been a young man in a hurry. He was probably neither young nor inexperienced. There is no reason to suppose that he was stupid, quite the reverse. But it’s true that the nearest he’d got to a theological college was waiting tables for old ladies, and as for homiletics, his sole instruction had been hearing the Apostles preach. He had served the Lord in quiet ways long before he talked for the Lord. We sometimes encourage people to do it the other way round in our church life.

When the Sanhedrin wanted to lynch Stephen (this was not judicial murder, for Stephen never had a fair trial), guess who was second-in-command after the official stoners? Guess who thoroughly approved of the lynching? Guess who heard close up Stephen’s prayer for his murderers, which echoed so uncannily Jesus’ own word? And guess who led what was intended to be a final blitz against the disciples in Jerusalem?

Saul and Stephen were quite a contrast in lots of ways. Saul almost certainly had a chance to repent and believe when Stephen did. But he had gone down a different path. Saul throve on conflict, Stephen contributed to peace. Saul made a job for himself, Stephen let himself be designated to a job. Saul was fuelled by ambition, Stephen by the Holy Spirit. Saul was impulsive, Stephen wise. Saul trampled over people, Stephen was gentle with them. Saul relied on his own good works, Stephen was full of faith. Saul worked alone, Stephen operated relationally in a team. Saul sought to control, Stephen served. Saul pursued and imprisoned even women, Stephen was not too proud to care for and liberate them. Saul tried to stop evangelism, Stephen set others free for it. Saul was hostile, Stephen full of God’s grace and power. Saul was destructive, Stephen did wonders and healings. Saul relied on his own analysis, Stephen on the divine wisdom. Saul exuded the stench of his own wilfulness, Stephen the fragrance of obedience to God. Saul tried to change people’s thinking by violence, Stephen used reasoned persuasion. Saul used Scripture as a weapon, Stephen had submitted his mind to it. Saul was zealous for external niceties, Stephen had been transformed from the inside out. Saul was ruthless in inflicting pain, Stephen was willing to suffer any pain for the name of Jesus. Saul was for punishing heresy, Stephen witnessed to the truth. Saul was blind to the person of Jesus, Stephen saw right into heaven where He was. Saul was sure that Jesus was dead, Stephen knew that He was alive. Saul thought of Him as a nobody, Stephen knew that he was God’s son. Saul discounted Him as powerless, Stephen looked to Him as all-powerful to save and protect. Saul despised Jesus, Stephen worshipped Him. Saul was complicit in murder, Stephen wanted his murderers forgiven. Saul threatened, Stephen blessed. Saul was deeply mistrusted and feared, Stephen deeply loved and mourned. When I look back at the churchy, righteous, priggish young maiden that I was on the eve of my own conversion in the late fifties, I know which of these two I resembled: already expert in the smooth handling of the outsides of holy things, but I did not know God. I did not like Him either, and I envied and loathed anyone who seemed happy in Him. What would you say about yourself?

So what was to be done with such an unappealing personality? That Saul was like this, and then some, we learn, not from psycho-analysing him at this distance in time, but from his own account of himself. We might have said, “Well, it takes all sorts, and everybody knows that you can’t change human nature.” The Lord might have said, “Well I did once hope for big things out of Saul, but it seems he won’t play ball, and that’s just too bad. You win some, you lose some.” What happens in Act 8 is that God is not either surprised or disappointed, any more than by the way we imagine that we determine our lives. God’s chosen can make himself the toughest of all nuts to crack, but cracked open he will be. How was it done?

If you will take your pew Bible and open it at page 1063, we shall trace what happened. I want you to note two remarkable facts: every move Saul makes to suppress Christian preaching causes it to spread further and faster, as though he stamped out the Gospel fire in one spot only to see flames spring up all round him in two dozen new places, and every move he makes to suppress Christian preaching serves to bring his own conversion closer.

Chapter 8 starts with a very pregnant sentence: “And Saul was there.” That means that he knew what Stephen had been saying to get himself lynched, knew that he had died lit within with something supernatural. However nice and sincere a man Stephen was, such a prayer as he had prayed for his murderers was not to be expected unless there was something more to Stephen than Stephen. This Saul had somehow seen without seeing. He was there, says this verse, “giving approval to his death.” Saul is thoroughly complicit in murder, and he sees the murder as completely justifiable. This is only logical if the teaching that Jesus of Nazareth is risen from the dead is false: if it is false, those who promote it, and are now progressing to pushing their peculiar doctrine down the throats of the Sanhedrin itself, are religious blasphemers and politically very dangerous. But what if it’s true? That it might be true still does not cross Saul’s mind. So he is in major denial both of his sin of murder and his sin of what his old teacher had called fighting against God. Before he’s done he will have lots more blood on his hands. Sometimes when we are in similar denial we disguise it from ourselves by vicious behaviour towards spiritual leaders. In this state of mind we will go in for character-assassination of clerics and lay people sooner than face ourselves.

Still v. 1: “On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem”; and it’s strongly implied that Saul’s energy and determination are behind it. This was the first public attack on the believers as a community, and it was a heavy one. “...and (reading on) all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judaea and Samaria.” The suffering of the Lord’s people must have been very great. Stephen ranked as just a deacon; the Apostles were marked men, but they bravely stood their ground, though they were next in line to get themselves killed. The ordinary members and the rest of Stephen’s team were scattered all over the Roman province, liable to get arrested by the occupying army any moment for being out of their legal domicile, and displaced right up the coast into hostile Samaria, where the country was swarming with substandard Jews and hereditary enemies. Scarcely any of them had much at all to start with: by our standards they would never have had much freedom of choice, certainly no right of mobility or inviolability of the person. They were violently uprooted, as far as they could tell for ever, from their familiar jobs, home, friends, culture, a tradition of worship going back a millennium, their property and all security. Families will have been broken up, children removed from parents. They lost all the religious and social forms in which they had grown up. They became for all practical purposes destitute refugees for the name of Jesus.

V. 2: “Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him.” These were powerless, vulnerable people who honoured the freshly stoned corpse. Perhaps they were devout unconverted Jews, wanting to right a wrong; if they were disciples, this public act took courage and faith in the power of God which is amazing.

V. 3: “But Saul” (not a sign of repentance in this cold, hard, zealous man) “...began to destroy the church.” This was war, and no quarter was given. “Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison.” Saul is capable of sheer brutality. Luke’s narrative, which has already documented one radical difference in the Christian Church from traditional Judaism, that women are full members and women too receive the Holy Spirit’s graces and gifts, now shows that women were full partakers of the suffering which took place. Hauling women away from hearth and home to punish them for their faith was inordinate cruelty, in a world where prison was not a sanitary place for anyone.

V. 4: “Those who had been scattered”. They might have sat weeping and wailing about all they had lost. They might have said, “We were having such wonderful church life in the city, so many people were getting converted every day, it’ll never be the same again. We’re just too bruised and battered to go on. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? The Church can’t survive this.” But the verse goes on to say of these shattered and leaderless Christians that “...(they) preached the word wherever they went.” Actually a more accurate translation would be “Went all over the place preaching the Gospel word.” In other words, instead of spending time licking their wounds, as you and I might do after all that, they dusted themselves off and saw to it that the Gospel of Jesus’ resurrection spread anyhow, and far beyond where it had gone till now. Yesterday we celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary, and my spouse suggested just in fun that this should get a mention in a sermon on the power of suffering. Well, no doubt I have been won more closely to my husband by his patient sufferings at my hands, just as he has been to me by my lesser sufferings at his, but to be serious, we are not talking about the ordinary work of sustaining a long marriage, nor of everyday illness, disappointment, frustration and sorrow. We will be used by the Holy Spirit as these first Christians were when we are much less comfortable than most of us are. These were people who in the face of the completest devastation of their lives chose the one way we have of altering the past, that is to forgive, and the one way to alter terrible circumstances, to serve the Lord in them. I don’t know about you, but in their place I might never have risen even to preaching the word wherever I went.

So in v. 5 we see that Philip, who was not the Apostle but one of the Greek-speaking deacons on Stephen’s team, quickly gets his eyes up off himself and his own grief. He loses no time in penetrating Samaria, which was a hard target and not at all friendly; in verses 6-8 we see that he is given spectacular healings and exorcisms to help open the people’s eyes and ears. This seems to have been a new way of operating to Philip, but when he opens his mouth to speak, God pours out all that is needed. In verses 9-13 we read (and for the details you should catch up on the whole chapter by yourself this afternoon or evening, so that next Sunday’s episode doesn’t catch you out) that he has a confrontation with the local spiritist, Simon, whom he displaces with stronger magic. The man himself is so impressed that he believes, up to a point, and is baptized into Christ. Philip is doing some of Jesus’ works, even those “greater works” which the disciples had been promised. This is the first great evangelistic breakthrough. So special is it that the two senior Apostles come north (verses 14-16) to inspect and put their seal on the phenomenon in person, conferring the Holy Spirit on the converts after baptism, by the laying on of their own hands. In case anyone with a magical background should suppose that these two or anyone have the Holy Spirit in their pockets, you can read in the next few verses how Simon, who still understands very little of what has happened to him, gets a bloody nose, spiritually speaking, from Peter and John. He thinks that the Spirit is a commodity, while the Spirit is the sovereign Lord let loose in His world. By verse 25 Saul’s efforts at suppressing the Christian preaching have resulted in the evangelization of a large chunk of Samaria right up to the edge of gentile territory, and he’s not even converted yet. Philip still doesn’t stop: by the end of today’s chapter there is at least one highly-placed black Christian on his way home to the North African hinterland. In the start of ch. 9 we shall see that the fire has jumped as far north as Damascus and is well on its way into Europe.

So it’s a double whammy for Saul: his atrocities are countered with forgiveness and hope, his mopping up the Gospel by the spreading of the Gospel far beyond his very worst nightmares. By forcing the Christians out of house and home, even body, by fighting against God, within a couple of years of the Resurrection Saul managed to bring about the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise that in the lifetime of the Apostles the witness would go way beyond Judaea and Samaria.

An early Church leader, Tertullian, said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. He did not mean by martyr any old Christian who had died violently, because, say, he had been silly, naughty, or had actively courted such a death, or someone who died raging against his killers. There had to be testimony in the death, not chiefly verbal but of attitude and character. My father, who was all his working life a parish priest in the Church of England, sat with very many people as they lay dying, and often held their hands as they passed over. He said that he never saw a deathbed conversion: rather people died as they had lived, those who had lived however imperfectly for God and others, sorry only for their inability to do anything more in the way of good, and the nuisance they must now be, those who had lived for themselves complaining only of their own losses in death. Stripped of their veneer of civility and inhibition, personalities are nakedly themselves. This applies a fortiori to a violent and painful death. What we really believe will come out, and the testimony to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ will be given or not according as we bless God and forgive, or curse God and those who hurt us. Saul had heard all the arguments. He saw the Lord Jesus alive in a way that couldn’t be argued with in Stephen and the others whom he caused to suffer for His sake, above all in their attitudes. This knowledge of the truth of what he wanted so intensely to deny worked and worked in his mind over weeks and months, until he was ready to meet the Jesus Whose body he had been mutilating, in his very own personalised resurrection appearance. Through their sufferings the missing piece of the jigsaw at last fell into place in his clever-stupid mind with a very loud clunk.

As I said at the beginning, this sermon is about how God gets His way with us. I don’t mean to get into some big theological discussion about predestination and free will, or whether any of us here are reprobate. The fact is that God’s own people are His chosen instruments, and often themselves the chief hindrances to their own usefulness in His hands. Work on the assumption that you are going to be made serviceable, you are going to be used, not necessarily in comfortable or predictable ways. Personally, as someone who goes through anguish over major decisions, I find it both a challenge and a comfort to know that if we fight Him, He is going to win. We may well be most fruitful when we are really going through it, and wonder how we are going to keep going from day to day. Again and again I have had my faith confirmed by seeing Jesus in the character of some Christian who is suffering pain. The only predictable thing is that the Lord will get His way, and with economy of means: He will kill any number of birds with one stone, bringing people to God through us while refining us into the better selves whom He insists that we become. The power unleashed when He raised Jesus from the dead is unstoppable.

Every one of us here, if we are at all serious about our faith, is one of two kinds of personality. I am either still a Saul or being turned into a Paul. There is a before and after; it’s entirely possible to be a lifelong churchgoer and stay stuck in the before. Here are some simple tests for us to apply to ourselves; not, I beg you, to one another, for if we regularly do that our spiritual danger is very great. Do you just hope that you are serving God, or do you know after examining yourself thoroughly that you are serving Him? Do you depend for your personal validation on the impression which other human beings have of you? Do you oscillate between being afraid of God, as though He were always angry with you and had to be appeased with work, and congratulating Him on having such a fine person as yourself on His side? Do you believe that you have to be the best, or God won’t love you? Do you try to atone for past sins by present activity? Are you sure that God has nothing more to for you to learn about Himself? Do you rationalise as a seeking of God’s glory or some form of ministry what you are really doing to advance yourself in this world? Do you prefer ideas to relationships? Are you sure that you are very spiritual, but find all other real-life Christians so intensely irritating that you wouldn’t want to see any of them hereafter at any price? Do you find that people and their individuality get in the way of your practising your religion? Is love for neighbour an act which you have to turn on, because it doesn’t come from the heart? Do you need someone to hate? Does it make you envious when other people are admired or make converts? Do you regularly compare your own character, spirituality and relationship with God favourably with that of others? Are you a spiritual snob who would prefer the knowledge of God to be limited to a few? Do you want people to see and admire you, or to see and admire Jesus in you? Are you vengeful? Do you bear grudges? When someone else goes wrong, do you feel pleasure? Would people generally say to you, “What you are speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say?” Are you better, wiser and kinder than you were five years ago? Do others see in you when you are under real stress the unanswerable testimony of a transformed personality? Is Jesus alive and real to you, indeed more real than yourself? Have you made yourself small in relation to Him? Is He bigger to you every day? Do you worship Jesus as God?

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,

I am your husband, but you turn away,

I am the captive, but you do not free me,

I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,

I am the city where you will not stay,

I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,

I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,

I am the lover whom you will betray,

I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,

I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,

Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

[From a Norman crucifix of 1632]