What We've Got Here Is Failure to Communicate (Acts 13:1-3; 14:8-18; Mothers' Day, Teacher Appreciation, Senior Recognition; May 10, 2015)

What We've Got Here Is Failure to Communicate

Acts 13:1-3; 14:8-18

Mothers' Day

Teacher Appreciation

Senior Recognition

May 10, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

It was a pivotal moment for the early Jesus movement, but, of course, even more so for Paul and Barnabas. They had both been engaged in the work of Christian ministry in Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria, now in southeast Turkey. There was a large Jewish quarter in Antioch and Paul—or perhaps we should say Saul—would have felt right at home. Sharing his work with Barnabus, Simeon Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, Saul had the assistance and comfort of many co-workers and the broader support of the community of Jesus followers. The work wasn't easy, but we can imagine that Antioch was a comfortable place for Saul and he had learned a great deal. He would continue to learn, but there comes a time in every Christian’s life when without ceasing to be disciples of Jesus they become apostles—Christ’s representatives sent into the world to be the seeds of a new world. That time had come for Saul and Barnabas, so their community gathered together, blessed them, and sent them on their way, a little like we do today for our graduates, only more so.

So off they went on a grand adventure from one city to another in the Eastern Mediterranean world until their travels brought them to the city of Lystra in southern Galatia where a remarkable confrontation took place. Paul and Barnabus were working the streets when Paul saw a beggar sitting and listening to them. The man had been born with legs that would never be able to bear his weight, yet Paul saw that he was open to the impossible hope of healing. So Paul ordered him to do something he had never done in his life and the man did it: he got up on his own two feet and walked. The people were ecstatic, not just because the man was healed—surely they rejoiced in his good fortune—but because the healing was a literal epiphany, a word that properly refers to the recognition that a god or goddess has been or is present.

“The gods have taken human form and come down to visit us!” the crowds cried. Healing is powerful stuff and the people assumed that Paul and Barnabus were powerful gods: Zeus and Hermes.

The crowd was celebrating their own good fortune of receiving a visit from the gods. The priest of the temple to Zeus just outside the city gates heard the noise and quickly brought Zeus’s favorite sacrifical animals, garlanded bulls, and got ready to offer them to Barnabus and Paul.

At this point, Paul’s Jewish sensibilities kicked in: The people thought they were gods! Instead of being the instrument of the people’s enlightenment, he saw the danger that they would simply reinforce Lystra’s pagan religion. The sacrifice had to be stopped. And so he shouted, “People, what are you doing? We are humans too, just like you!” And then he went on to preach a very standard Jewish sermon against the worship of idols.

Paul comes off in this story as the ardent defender of the Jewish (and Christian) orthodoxy that there is only one God who is the creator of all who must not be worshiped in the likeness of anything made by human hands. Jewish (and Christian) orthodoxy always saw the worship of idols as the supreme foolishness: that we humans would take anything that we have made—a painting, or a statue, or in later years a flag, or even an idea—and worship it as if it were a god who had made us. For them this root foolishness was the source of all the world’s immorality and sin. Of course, Paul had to confront it when it threatened to turn an apostle of the one true God into a god himself. He must have breathed a sigh of relief when he managed to call off the sacrifices.

Paul wins this face-off, but his victory seems a little hollow, even tragic, to me. That’s because the Jesus movement was born in a time when the culture of the Mediterranean world was undergoing a deep cosmic shift.

Up until that time the cosmos was thought of as having three levels. One level is the one we live on: the earth that we see. We plant and grow our food on this level. We marry and have children, we go to school, we graduate, we celebrate special days, all on this level.

This level, the earth that we see, is supported on pillars. Don’t ask where the pillars end; it’s pillars all the way down. Other cultures have elephants or tortoises, but the Mediterranean world had pillars. Under the earth, amidst these pillars was the underworld, the place where the shades of the dead went after a person died.

Above the earth was the sky or the heavens, a dome across which the sun and moon and stars traveled in their regular courses, and the planets wandered irregularly. Above the dome of the heavens the gods lived.

Compared to later ideas this universe is cozy. And because these three levels are not completely separated from each other, the gods could and did rather often leave the heavens and travel among mortals. Every place you could go in the Mediterranean world had its stories of the gods who had been born in this cave, or had visted that mountain, or who had kidnapped someone from this field, or punished someone for a slight in that forest. The landscape of this three-story universe was rich with stories that suggested that anyone or anything could be divine. It was best to treat things with respect so as not to insult a god or gods who had gotten bored with life on Olympus and gone slumming, as Paul and Barnabus were suspected of having done. The three-story universe was small, cozy, and filled with places made sacred by the visits of the gods.

Before the Roman empire, each people had its own geography that gave special prominence to local places and local stories. The gods and their stories were everywhere in the Mediterranean, but in every place they were local gods and local stories. There were no gods or stories big enough to be for the whole empire. (This, I think, was the fundamental religious problem of the empire, a problem for which Christianity offered itself as the solution.)

A new view of the universe was emerging. It would eventually be put forth in comprehensive way by Ptolemy, a philosopher who worked in Egypt in the middle of the second century of our era. But the pieces were around before his work and they were disturbing: The earth was not a cozy disk with a solid dome overhead. The earth was a ball. Why, look at the moon during an eclipse of the moon: the shadow of the earth that is cast across it by the sun is curved no matter what part of the sky it appears in. The only shape of the earth possible was a sphere. Around the earth, the heavenly objects revolved: the Sun and Moon, the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond the orbits of these objects was the sphere of the heavens on which the stars were fixed. If there were gods at all—and this question was being raised by many educated people—if there were gods at all that weren’t metaphors of some kind, they lived beyond the heavenly spere.

If we move from the three-story universe to this new model that came to be called a Ptolemaic universe, we have to notice how barren it is, how far removed from the life of the gods. The gods grew to become cosmic in scope and size and their interest in mortals must then have shrunk. We are abandoned and forlorn, bereft of the cozy world we once felt at home in and bereft of its gods and holy places. The world is reduced to a thing filled with other things. And we are only a tiny, tiny, tiny part of it.

No wonder the people greeted the healing of the lame man with such joy! In front of their very eyes they saw the gods at work right here in Decorah, I mean, Lystra. In the form of strangers—quite strange strangers at that!—they had come to visit, to work wonders, and to receive the grateful response of the Lystrans. It all made sense to them. It eased their anxieties about a world too large to be home and gods too distant to care about humans. Of course they wanted to offer sacrifices! It was what such an occasion called for.

And Paul, of course, with his Jewish sensibilities about idols and the unity of God, had to talk them out of it. That, too, must of left his audience confused. Why don’t the gods want our worship? Why would they heal a man and then refuse our thanks? It must have been a painful puzzle. Paul certainly offered no help to them in solving it.

Paul and Barnabus had come to bring good news and instead had left them feeling anxious and bereft. The tragedy is that this wasn’t their intention, but the missionaries and the Lystrans never understood each other and so never found their way to a better place.

We don’t read this story very often, or, if we do, we read it as a hero story with the good and noble Paul and Barnabus demonstrating their character as humble servants of God and so bringing light to the ignorant masses and defeating the wicked priest of Lystra. Perhaps if we read it more often, we might see past the spin to the tragic tale we in the Christian movement have reinacted time and time again.

We went to Gaul and the British Isles. There we found Celts who regarded groves of trees as sacred places. We persuaded them of the good news that no group of trees is sacred, thus reducing the forests of Old Europe to mere sources of lumber and impediments to agriculture.

We came to North America and discovered there a group of people who lived in circular homes with the doors facing toward the rising sun. Their villages in turn were arranged in a circle with an opening toward the rising sun. All movement in their homes was counter-clockwise around the fire in the center of their home. They moved with the sun. In this way their daily lives were meaningfully connected to the sun and to the earth to which the sun gives life. We rounded them up, and gave them the good news of square houses built along streets facing any direction that seemed convenient, houses with rooms that broke up the sunwise movement that connected them to their universe.

We went to Africa and there we discovered chieftains with more than one wife, These wives we should say saw no particular need for wearing shirts. We gave the good news of wearing shirts to the women and of turning out of their homes all their wives except one to the men.

We simply failed to understand, because we failed to listen. People who are convinced that they have the whole truth don’t have to listen. So we didn’t. Sometimes our unwillingness to listen results only in the smallness of our own lives. Sometimes, when we are powerful, it results in death and destruction to the lives of others. Always, we miss opportunities to understand.

There is an alternative, suggested by the negative example of the story of Paul and Barnabus in Lystra, an alternative that might have something important to offer to us and especially to our graduates. Each of you is moving from a small town or a small college to a larger world; it’s sort of like moving from a three-story universe to a Ptolemaic one. The world becomes bigger and less cozy and the gods are far away and not very interested in your fate. In the confrontation of world views everyone has something to say, something about which they are absolutely certain and no one seems very inclined to listen and understand. They talk past each other. They walk away from each other anxious and bereft.

But there are other ways to engaged the world than with absolutely certainty or, on the other hand, a credulous willingness to accept the first ideology that seems to explain why the world is so broken. We could have real conversations instead. To do that we have to know our stories and listen to the stories of others. 

 

Knowing what our stories are and who we are gives us the confidence with which to treat others with respect and hope. This grounding allows us to understand and understanding allows us to find common ground. We need common ground because we have problems to solve that are bigger than any of us. Our world can’t afford another failure to communicate.

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