Barnabas

Barnabas

Acts 9:19-31

Earlier this summer in Minnesota, the day was winding down and dinner was on the table.  We lingered over our food the way that you do when you’re sharing a meal with dear friends.  The conversation was lively with everyone responding to someone’s spontaneous question:  “Hey, what’s the best concert you ever attended in person?” The answers varied wildly:  Lady Gaga, Yo Yo Ma, the B-52’s, Springsteen…and some group called, “Trampled by Turtles,” which made me laugh and then feel very old.

As we all sat and chuckled, my friend Sue said, “I’ve got a question…” (Sue tends to speak a little less so when she speaks, we lean in and listen.) She said, “Do you think that Christianity is under attack?” I answered, almost reflexively, “No, I don’t!”  My friends, who are tuned pretty similarly, all fleshed out their own answers. 

Still, as a thinking people of faith, we should ask ourselves, “Why are there people who feel this way?”  Certainly, there is a perception that America is becoming a more secular society.  The number of folks who participate in mainline Christian Protestant denominations and in Roman Catholic Churches have been declining for decades.  This is just a fact.  What is not necessarily true is that there is an “attack” behind this.  A great many people have become disillusioned with the church as a result of clergy corruption and abuse.  As people have become more open about their experiences as members of the LGBTQ community, the church has been far more likely to judge those people than to welcome them.  Women, who have often been the backbone of churches have also often been excluded from ordination and from other leadership roles.  Looking at racial issues, Sunday morning remains the most segregated morning in America, even as more and more people choose not to attend church at all.  These are the kind of things that make people feel like the church can be terribly hypocritical.

In short, part of the reason why the church is suffering in America is because the church has failed to be the church:  a place where all are welcome, a place where people are focused on responding to the needs of others rather than having our own needs met, a place that is about love and compassion, not judgment and condemnation, a place where every person is my neighbor and every person is a child of God.  When we fail to live up to that calling, the people who are responsible in the end are us.

I ran into the consequences of this in another moment on my vacation.  For Father’s Day, I was given a half day of fishing with a guide.  A few minutes into our time together, Steve, the guide, asked the dreaded question, “So…what do you do?”  Uh oh…here come the assumptions.  “Well…I’m a pastor, but…I’m not the holier than thou, evangelical, save your soul guy.  I’m still stuck back on  the notion of feeding the hungry and caring for the sick…that stuff.”  He chuckled and totally understood.  It turned out that he had a bit of that “old school” take on the faith himself.

Here’s the other point I can make from that moment, though.  What if I was a rabbi?  What if I was an imam?  He might have been just as open to having the kind of discussion that we had, finding the common ground between us, regardless of our particular faith, in caring for those in need and in making the world a more compassionate, loving place.  Having fished with Steve, I trust that would have been the case with him.

That’s the thing, though.  For the person who feels that Christianity is being attacked, the mere existence of other faiths is a threat.  For them, America was founded as a “Christian nation.”  It was a “Christian nation” for a long time.  Then, the sixties happened and the nation became less Christian (in their eyes) each time the rights of minorities were recognized, each time religious pluralism was acknowledged, each time what seemed to them to be core, traditional values changed.  Things happened that made people feel uncomfortable—seeing an interracial couple, or seeing two people of the same gender who loved each other, or seeing someone who simply dressed differently as an expression of their faith.  People saw the requirement for a business to not discriminate against someone because of their skin color or because of who they loved as an erosion of values, as an attack on Christian faith.

Every time the “church” opposed such changes—the “church” that was the loudest and most visible on television—people who were spending less and less time in an actual church believed that all church people must be opposed to gay rights or to other religions or to women’s rights.  What people have seen in the public arena for decades now is, in my opinion, the least Christian actions of the church.  Christ taught us to love.  Here is a church that is judgmental.  Christ taught us to care.  Here is a church that seeks political power to enforce its views.  Of course, a whole lot of churches and pastors and priests and nuns and lay leaders were quietly going about the business of caring for people that whole time.  However, those are not the folks who were seen or heard.

So, the folks who believe the church is under attack believe that the thing that needs to happen is that America needs to become a “Christian nation” again.  As Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, a conservative social network says, ”We don't want people who are atheists. We don't want people who are Jewish. We don't want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country. We're not saying we're going to deport all these people or whatever. You're free to stay here. You're not going to be forced to convert or anything like this because that's not biblical whatsoever. But you're going to enjoy the fruits of living in a Christian society under Christian laws and under a Christian culture and you can thank us later.”

The problem, of course, is two fold.  First, the people who founded this nation intended for this to be a place where all faiths could be practiced, where no faith would be the “established” faith, and where, if people chose, they could practice no faith at all.  Why did this matter to them?  Because, they were coming from countries where people were arrested and persecuted and even executed for practicing the “wrong” faith in the “wrong” country.  They realized what a toxic thing it is to mix religion and nationalism.

Second, if being Christian is at least as much about what you do as it is about what you say, our ancestors cooked up some terribly un-Christian practices and institutionalized them from the start.  We stole the land and abused the native people.  We shipped in people to be our slaves to build our nation for us.  It took us over a century to realize that maybe women should vote.  And, of course, deep down, many people still struggle with the notion of folks who look different than us or think different than us or who pray differently than we pray really having any right to vote at all.

 How am I responsible for such things?  To a certain degree, I’ve enjoyed all the benefits that come from being white and male and straight and Christian.  No one in power has ever felt uncomfortable when they saw me coming.   And still,  I can feel like I never did any of those bad things myself!  Even more personally, though, my “sins” are probably more acts of omission than commission.  I don’t like conflict.  I want to get along.  As a result, I have chosen too often to say nothing when I should have spoken up.  I care about people with whom I know that I disagree.  I don’t want to dismiss or cancel anyone.  Still, though, shouldn’t I be willing to speak up and find out if maybe, just maybe, we can disagree and still get along?

This is where we arrive at our text this morning.  Saul, who still isn’t officially going by Paul, has taken the full life tour.  He stood by and said nothing when Stephen, a really wonderful young man, was convicted by those in power and put to death—simply for what he believed.  Saul has had an illustrious career hunting down Christians, arresting them, making sure that their lives were a living hell, and terrorizing everyone who knew his name.  While on the road to a whole new roundup of these believers in Damascus, he gets knocked down and blinded and challenged by God.  Then, he’s cared for and healed by one of the people he came to arrest.  Suddenly, he sees everything in a whole new way.

What does Saul do?  He doesn’t go on a personal retreat and take time for reflection.  He doesn’t give things time to settle, at all.  No, Saul, who, “five minutes or so before” hated and hunted Christians, becomes one.  Unlike me, the man speaks up!  Unlike me, he’s never really cared about hurting anyone else’s feelings or offending anyone.  Now, though, the truth that he’s set to speak is his newfound truth as a follower of Christ.

And then, everything is perfect, right?  Nope!  The believers whom he preaches to in Damascus don’t trust him:  “Isn’t this the guy who tore Jerusalem apart, who came here to arrest us?” While in Damascus, he visits the Jewish leaders there, the one’s who adored him before, and offends them to pieces by preaching his newfound faith.  He barely escaped Damascus alive.  When he got back to Jerusalem, he tried preaching there to the disciples but no-one trusted him, not a bit.  

That’s when it happened, though.  That’s when someone stood up.  This person’s name was Barnabas.  It’s likely that he had been a Pharisee before he, himself, became a follower of “The Way.”  As such, like Saul, he would have been steeped in the law.  He would have been used to rising in a moment to speak on behalf of someone else.  He would have been a “kindred spirit,” not only in his religious roots but in the experience of changing and having others doubt that such a change was possible. 

 Barnabas stands up and defends Saul.  In the words of our translation, Barnabas “takes Saul under his wing.”  He tells the disciples all about Saul’s conversion and his bold preaching ever since.  Then, the most miraculous thing happens, the disciples forgive Saul and trust him and treat him as one of their own.  Saul is not condemned.  Rather, he is redeemed.  All of which happens just in time for Saul to offend another group of people.  Again, he barely makes it out alive with the help of his newfound friends.  And we’re told that the church is peaceful and thrives after these days.

For the first three hundred years after Jesus died, his followers were under attack, largely by folks who were mixing political power and faith and who felt threatened by this upstart group.  If you really study that time carefully, though, you will find that while those believers were trying so hard to survive, their communities were actually remarkably open and accepting.  There were men and women in leadership. There were Jews and Greeks living together, finding ways to navigate their differences, from what they would eat to how they would practice their faith.  It seems that questions of who was in and who was out, who would have power and who wouldn’t have power, were questions that no one really had time to worry about when they were worrying about staying alive.  

I’ll never be Saul, just blindly “telling it like it is.”  Maybe though, I can occasionally choose to be Barnabas, challenging people to rethink a few things.  Maybe that’s what we are all being called to do…