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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Tying Up Our Loose Ends” Sunday, October 25,
2009 |
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Acts 16:1-10
Rev. |
I’ve
done something a little different in this short series on “The Life of a
Thread.” I
wanted to focus on the images of weaving and knitting, so I did a New
Testament study on the Greek words that are translated “weaving” and
“knitting.” I found they are used only a few times in the New Testament, but they
are sometimes translated into English in such a way that you would never
guess they were the Greek words for “weaving” and “knitting” unless you were
studying the Greek. Last
week the Greek word epichorogia, which means “weaving” was translated “help” in almost all the
standard English translations. In Philippians 1:19, Paul is in prison and some
of the other Christian preachers and teachers are undermining and criticizing
him but, in spite of all this, he writes to the Philippians: “I know that through your prayers and the help of the
spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance.” The
word translated “help” here is really epichorogia. Literally what Paul is saying is that he
knows everything will turn out okay as a result of the prayers of the
Philippians and the weaving of the spirit of Jesus Christ. Paul is
confident that the spirit of Jesus will weave events together in such a way
that things will turn out for the good. Christ will be exalted. So, in Philippians Paul used the Greek word for
weaving as an image of the way the spirit of Jesus Christ works in our lives
and in our world. This morning we want to look at the Greek word
for knitting sumbibazo. And we particularly want to look at the way it
is used in the 16th chapter of Acts. But again if you did not look at the Greek,
you would not guess from reading almost any English translation of the Bible
that it is the word sumbibazo that is being used. So I want to start back in Acts 15 and review
what is happening in the story leading up to Acts 16 because we won’t get the
full significance of this unless we start back earlier in the book of Acts. The first Christian congregations were entirely
Jewish. Jesus’ disciples were Jews. They understood Jesus to be the Jewish
messiah. Shortly after Jesus’ death and resurrection, an odd thing began to
happen. Non-Jews, gentiles, began to accept Jesus and join the communities of
Jesus-followers. Gentile conversions became more and more common. The first
congregation we know of where the gentile presence began to equal or maybe
even exceed the Jewish presence was the congregation in the city of Gentiles appeared to be especially responsive to
the teaching and ministry of the Apostle Paul and his ministry team, but all
this was very uncomfortable and unsettling for many of the Jewish followers
of Jesus who had been taught all their lives, actually for generation after
generation, for centuries, to keep themselves separate from gentiles…not to
socialize with them, not to eat with them, not to eat the same food they eat.
It was very hard for Jewish followers of Jesus to
make this transition in their thinking and practice…that gentile followers of
Jesus could be part of their congregations, and eat at the same table they
ate at, and share communion with them. This issue colors everything you will read in the
New Testament. The issue of Jewish/gentile integration is either in the
forefront or the background of all of the Gospels and all of the epistles and
all of the books of the New Testament. During Paul’s first missionary journey which was
in Then some Jewish Christian preachers began
visiting the churches Paul had established during his first missionary
journey and began teaching that gentiles had to be circumcised in order to be
saved…gentiles had to convert to Judaism, be circumcised, keep kosher laws,
worship in the synagogue as well as the church, and all the rest, in order to
be saved (Acts 15:1). Paul asked the church council back in The church council ruled that gentiles did not
have to be circumcised or follow kosher dietary laws or any of the rest. The
council simply asked gentiles not to participate in certain activities which
Jews found particularly distasteful, like eating food that had been part of
ceremonies of idol worship, or eating animals that had been strangled (that
means animals that had not been butchered but died some other way, like road
kill), or drinking or eating blood, or sexual promiscuity (Acts 15:22, 29). So with this issue finally resolved Paul wants to
revisit all the churches that he and his team had established during their
first missionary journey. This is when Paul begins to have a whole series of
problems. First, he has a serious disagreement with his
associate pastor, Barnabas. Acts 15:39 says: “The disagreement became so
sharp that they parted company.” Donna Schaper has an article in the latest Congregations
magazine about how hard it is to be an associate pastor. The only thing
harder, she says, is being an associate pastor’s senior pastor. Her point is
that when you get senior and associate pastors who work together well it is
both rare and an occasion of great joy. Senior and associate pastors working
well together has apparently been a problem for the church from day 1. So we
here at Foundry are very fortunate.[i] I’m not sure we are always as aware of this
as we could be. This is Paul’s first problem. Suddenly he needs
another associate. The person he finds is a young man named Timothy, whose
mother was Jewish and whose father was a gentile, and who had obviously been
raised as a gentile because he was never circumcised (Acts 16: 1-3). Because his mother was Jewish, Timothy would be
considered Jewish. You became Jewish either by having a Jewish mother or by
converting to Judaism. So Timothy was considered biologically Jewish but, as
an uncircumcised male, he could not have been active in the synagogue or the
Jewish community in any way. He was biologically a Jew but culturally a
gentile. In order not to offend the Jewish Christians in
the churches he would visit, Paul had Timothy circumcised. Do you know that when God changes cultural norms,
during the time of integration, we do awkward things? From the perspective of later church
history, Paul having Timothy circumcised doesn’t make sense. I don’t know any
Christian after Paul who would require someone whose mother was Jewish be
circumcised in order to become a Christian. Even James Dobson would not
require this. Paul probably would not have done this later in his ministry. But during times of social transition we do
clumsy and awkward things because we are trying to figure out the full
implications of the new truth we’ve discerned. It happened during the civil
rights movement, it happened during the time when the role of women in
society began to change, it is happening today. We do clumsy things. So Paul has a new associate minister who is
biologically Jewish but culturally gentile. His intention is to revisit the
churches of But it doesn’t work. The Holy Spirit blocks them.
Acts 16:6 says: “They went through the region of Phrygia and Acts 16:7
says “When they came opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into The Holy Spirit kept blocking their efforts to
retrace Paul’s first missionary journey throughout Some scholars speculate that Paul may have had
visions and drams. He was very big into visions and dreams. Others speculate
that it was as a result of Paul’s thorn in the flesh, whatever weakness or
illness he had that he talks about in 2 Corinthians (12:8). We don’t know. I know how the Holy Spirit usually
blocks things I want to do. Jane says “Over my dead body.” Something blocked Paul’s plans and he believed it
was the Holy Spirit. Or at least Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, believed
it was the Holy Spirit. So Paul and his team end up in the city of Acts 16:10—the verse after Paul has the vision—says
this: “When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Here’s what I want you to know. Listen to the
verse again: “When he
had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to The word translated “convinced” in that verse is
the Greek word sumbibazo – the Greek word that means “knit.” None of the translators know how to translate the
word in this context. Here are the most common translations: “And after he had seen the vision, immediately we
endeavored to go into “As soon
as Paul had this vision, we got ready to leave for “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at
once to leave for Here’s what I think it literally says: “When he had seen the vision, we immediately
tried to cross over into Paul and his team suddenly saw in the course of
events what had been frustrating them—that God was knitting, weaving, things
together, in such a way as to call them to introduce Christianity into Look at what had happened. Paul lost the
associate who had worked with him so closely and well during his entire first
missionary journey. A small
disagreement between them so escalated that they parted ways. This opened up a position on Paul’s team and the
person they found to fill it was culturally a gentile. He grew up as a
gentile. He fully understood gentile ways, gentile philosophies, gentile
habits, gentile quirks. Then the Holy Spirit blocks Paul’s plans again
and again, until he has a vision of a Macedonian man asking him for help. And then everything suddenly makes sense. Paul
knows that in all these frustrations, he was actually being knit. He was a
thread being knit for the purpose of introducing Christ to The only translation that gets even close to
capturing this is the Eugene Peterson paraphrase The Message, that
says: “The dream gave Paul his map. We went to work at
once getting things ready to cross over to All the pieces had come together. A more accurate
image would be “all the loose ends were tied up.” That captures the sense of
the Greek word sumbibazo. I confessed to staff this week that I am having a
bit of a hard time with these scriptures. I am always nervous that we will
look for God too much in the supernatural and miraculous and miss God in the
ordinary. Our faith says the holiest moments in our life are washing a baby
and eating bread and drinking wine together. Teach us, O God, to find you in
the daily wonders of life. When I was sharing my hesitation about the
theology of these passages, someone at the table said, “But strange things
happen every day.” And that’s very true. I wrestle with this. I don’t want to miss the signs of God’s
providence and care in our world. I don’t want to say the coincidences and
synchronicities aren’t God things. On the other hand I don’t want us to need
them. Signs and wonders can be like crack. This is why Jesus says, “An evil
and adulterous generation asks for a sign” (Matthew 12: 39). We don’t want to
become hooked on signs and wonders. We walk by faith, not by sight. But there is no denying strange things happen in
our lives. Past frustrations and past disappointments can suddenly make
sense. When I was in charge of congregational
development for the conference and we’d invest conference money in starting a
new church, I used to make a joke that we ought to require two miracles of
every start up to continue funding, like the So the start-up pastors would try to come up with
miracles for me. They usually came up
with splashy miracles. A big newspaper article about their church out of the
blue. A sudden influx of new members. The right musician showing up when they
hadn’t even advertised for one. OK, I’d say. Whatever. But every once in a while there would be a story
that was much more subtle, and it would make me stop and wonder. There was a
new church start that rented a store front in a mall in southern It made no sense at all. They were in a mall,
nowhere near a lake. Instead of They kept growing, and the storefront became too
small; they decided they needed their own building. They went looking for
land, and someone in the community heard about it and offered them a piece of
land at a great location at a greatly reduced price, and the land was right
next to a lake. Those were the kinds of miracles that impressed
me. I think God is very subtle. I think God’s
movement in the world is very intricate and complex like a woven tapestry or
a knit multi-colored blanket. I think we can very rarely see the big
beautiful picture. But I do believe that somewhere down the line our
frustrations and disappointments are redeemed and made part of an elegant
pattern. I believe even our failures and sins will be redeemed. Even the
failures and sins of others will be redeemed.
Occasionally, like Paul, sometimes we may get a
glimpse of the way we are being knit and things we’ve not understood will
begin to make sense. But God grant us the faith to believe it and trust it,
even when we can not see it. www.foundryumc.org |
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