Like many people, I’m glad to live in a temperate zone.  I love the slow turn of the wheel of the year.  I love a slow spring like this one.  Ancient authors thought of history itself as a cycle, just on a bigger scale, taking fifteen thousand years to repeat itself.  Jesus changed all that, however, with one dramatic gesture.  Not long before his death, he was returning to Jerusalem from a village called Bethany, and “he was hungry.  And seeing a fig tree by the wayside he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only.  And he said to it, ‘May no fruit ever come from you again!’  And the fig tree withered at once.” (Matt. 21: 18-19).  What was that all about?  Well, the fig tree was following its cycle as it had to.  No fruit this year, perhaps the next.  But it wasn’t given the chance.  Jesus wasn’t going to pass that way again.  Ready or not.  And Christian historians went on to turn all of history from a cycle into a line, steps that were never to be repeated, from the Creation to the Last Judgment.  Every individual life is just as linear, of course.  I love the turning wheel of the vegetative year; but it is a Ferris wheel.  The bridegroom comes in the night.  Someone eventually stops the wheel for you and opens a little gate and lets you off.

            Christians have their own version of the vegetative year. It goes from Advent to Christmas and Epiphany to Easter and the Ascension of Jesus to Pentecost and Trinity Sunday and then a long string of summer Sundays as they are called, as long as a summer’s day itself, it starts to seem, until “[t]he leaves lance from the linden tree and light on the ground,” as one poet put it, and everything is still in the tree for a little while, and then and we begin again.  For every Sunday, tradition sets a particular reading, depending on where we are on the cycle.   Today it’s our Second Reading of Scripture, an account of the conversion of Saul, a Greek-speaking Jew come to Jerusalem from the southern coast of what is modern Turkey and a fierce enemy of Christianity in its first year or two.  “. . . Still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [Saul] went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.  Now as [Saul] journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him, And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’  And [Saul] said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’  And [the Lord said], ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’  The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one” (Acts 9: 1-7).

            What I want to focus on this morning is something that happens a little earlier than this most famous of all conversions.  And I want to set the scene.

             The number of Jesus’s disciples ― those people who learned from him ― that number waxes and wanes.  As Jesus is led to his death he is followed by “a great multitude” (Luke 23: 27), but his death will evidently defeat and demoralize most of them, because in a few weeks they are down to about a hundred and twenty (Acts 1: 15).  The apostles were different.  From the time Jesus picked twelve in Galilee, calling them apostles because he was sending them out, they were constant in number, and ― except for Judas of course ― they were there in the house in Jerusalem when a mighty wind filled the house and inspired them.  Once Peter and John were preaching in the very courtyard of the temple, believers multiplied again.  These believers came to own “everything in common.”  No one had anything in his own right any longer.   “There was not a needy person among them,” and “distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4: 35).  Because the twelve thought they had their hands full with preaching, they asked the rest of the disciples to pick seven who would handle this distributing; and so the multitude chose people named Stephen and Philip and then five others and “prayed and laid their hands upon them.”  Thus began the office of the diakonoi, the servants, the deacons.  Stephen also preached, however, and it was this, not his stewardship in the kitchen, that brought about his death.  For when he was hauled before the temple council, he denounced them as “stiff-necked people” who had persecuted the prophets and had now killed Jesus.  When the council was confronted like that, it threw Stephen out of the city, and the followers of the council stoned him to death, with Saul consenting to that.  When our Nominating Committee was calling around this last month, they probably didn’t tell Joy, Luise, Josh and our other new deacons that the first deacon was also the first martyr.

            It’s the second deacon, however, it’s Philip, I want to follow for a bit this morning.  The persecution that began with the death of Stephen scattered the believers like seed.  It scatters Philip up north into Samaria, where he proclaims Christ to multitudes, being the first apostle to do that outside Jerusalem.  But then an angel sends him south to Gaza, that city of misery in our own time, on which the world has turned its back.  It’s well south of Jerusalem, where Philip had started.  And while he is on a desert road headed there, a chariot passes him carrying a Jew who had gone to worship in Jerusalem and is now headed home all the way to Ethiopia, where he, a eunuch, is in charge of all the treasure of the queen.  As the eunuch in his chariot passes Philip, the eunuch is reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah ― actually, the passage that Lynn read to us this morning.  Philip runs up and asks him if he understands what he is reading.  And the eunuch says, “’How can I [understand], unless some one guides me?’  And he invite[s] Philip to come up and sit with him.  Now the passage . . . which he [is] reading was this:  ‘As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth.  In his humiliation justice was denied him.  Who can describe his generation?  For his life is taken up from the earth.’  And the eunuch [says] to Philip, ‘About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’  Then Philip open[s] his mouth, and . . . [tells] him the good news of Jesus.” (Acts 8: 31-35). We find this story in the Acts of the Apostles, which was written by Luke.  In Luke’s gospel, when Herod questioned Jesus at length, Jesus “made no answer” (23: 9).  That is, “he opens not his mouth.”  In other words, Luke in this story in Acts about Philip has Philip teaching the eunuch that the verse that Luke wrote in his gospel is the missing context for the passage in Isaiah.  The suffering servant of God in Isaiah is unidentified until you realize that Jesus before Herod also kept his mouth shut.

            The eunuch asks to be baptized, Philip obliges, and then Philip is swept up again by the Spirit, turned again in the opposite direction, deposited to preach along the coast to the north, and is last mentioned in retirement further north in his home town, the port city of Caesarea.  I want to say three things about this story.  Philip, a character in scripture himself, nevertheless sets us the example of putting two verses in scripture together.  When we do that, we typically attach more weight to one than to the other, and we have our reasons for it.  For Christians, the verse in Luke explains the one in Isaiah, not the other way around.  This is not to deny that such verses as the one in Luke were written to echo Hebrew prophecy.  Of course they were.  It is to say that for Christians it is more important that Luke’s verse names the event itself, the Passion of the Christ, than whether or not another verse actually prophesied the Passion.  To take a recent example, some seven verses scattered through scripture can be seized upon to argue that God prohibits homosexual practice in and of itself.   Yet the Christian attaches always the greatest weight to the Great Commandment, “You shall  love . . . your neighbor as yourself.”  The Great Commandment is always the missing part of the context for everything else.  And thus it should set the seven scattered verses to rights, line them up, as a magnet lines up iron filings.  Philip teaches us how to read.

            Philip in Luke’s story becomes the first person to construe Jesus as the suffering servant prophesied in Isaiah.  But it is left to us to construe Jesus as not the last.  This coming summer is the fortieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, the summer of 1964.  When that summer began, fewer than seven per cent of African Americans in Mississippi who were of voting age were actually registered to vote.  An NAACP leader in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, had been shot and killed the previous summer.  My sainted college mate, Robert Parris Moses, organized an effort by the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and the NAACP.  Forty years ago this June, eight hundred students gathered for orientation up the road in Oxford at Western College for Women, a campus now part of Miami.  Two hundred of them were no sooner in Mississippi than three workers turned up missing.   Their bodies would be found that August, buried in an earthen dam.  In writing back home in those days, one student gave an idea of what Mississippi life was like:  “We got 14 Negroes to go to the court house with the intention of registering to vote.  Sheriff Smith greeted the party with a six shooter drawn from his pocket, and said ‘Okay, who’s first?’  Most of the Negroes remained cautiously quiet.  After several seconds a man who had never before been a leader stepped up to the Sheriff, smiled and said, ‘I’m first, Hartman Turbow.’  All registration applications were permitted to be filled out and all were judged illiterate.  The next week, Turnbow’s house was bombed with Molotov cocktails.  When the Turnbows left the burning house, they were shot at.  A couple of days later, Turnbow was accused of having bombed his own house, which wasn’t insured.  Sheriff Smith was the one witness against them.  Mr. Turnbow was convicted.”  Four lambs:  Medgar  Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, two blacks, two whites, two Christians, two Jews, three of them led to the slaughter by a sheriff who turned them over to the Ku Klux Klan.  By 1969, 67% of voting-age blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote, six per cent above the national average.

            John Lennon would have turned 65 next year.  The working-class people from Galilee who learned from Jesus probably would not have understood or approved very much in John Lennon’s life.  Still, these disciples, who came to own “everything in common,” would have approved of his vision:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world . . . .

At the height of the Viet Nam war, Lennon held, not a sit-in, but a bed-in with Yoko Ono in Toronto.  This all in itself no doubt would have astonished if not scandalized the apostles.  While in bed, Lennon dashed off and recorded Give Peace a Chance.  Right now, the world needs many people, not just our indefatigable Don Rucknagel, to sing it again.  While all its stanzas are forgettable, the refrain is not:  “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”  Retaliation for violence is the path of tragedy.  We should resist the arrogant, even insane idea that dialogue and negotiation make a weak response to aggression.  If Osama bin Laden can send a tape to the West, surely the West can send a tape to the Middle East ― better still, to everywhere in the world, if that’s where Al Qaeda is scattered.  The first two words on the tape should be, “Let’s talk.”   In December 1980, of course, John Lennon was shot down by someone who was thinking, no doubt, this man has a daily beauty that makes me ugly.  “By oppression . . . he was taken away,” this lamb who had opened his mouth.

            We later apostles have the task of not only reading the Bible as Philip did and the task of pointing out what Philip could not ― that the suffering of the servants of God did not end in “the place which is called The Skull” (Luke 23: 33).  We have the responsibility of facing up to what Christian historians have not always faced up to.  There is no later age than the age of the Apostles.  This is the last age.  The judges, the prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus himself are all gone.  Stop waiting for Jesus to return, I think Hal Porter once said.  He’s not coming.  And so I say to you, with every respect to the Reverend Ed Dykstra, whom the Session has appointed as our interim pastor; and with every respect also to the Pastor Nominating Committee we elected last week to search for a pastor who will be installed:  I say to you, Stop waiting for the great pastor who will lift up this congregation.  He isn’t coming.  Neither is she.  The Good Pastor, the Good Shepherd, is always already behind us.  Even the best pastor I have ever known, the Reverend Harold Gordon Porter, was and is only an apostle.  The Good Shepherd was already behind him.

            Don’t wait for the great pastor.  You are an apostle, God has sent you out, whether or not hands have yet been laid on you.  Apply for our vacant position of Education Coordinator, ably filled in the past by a long line that ended with our remarkable and dedicated friend, Carl Ward.  If you don’t want to do all that, teach a Sunday School class.  If you don’t want to do it for a whole year, do it for half a year.  Offer ideas for an Adult Forum.  Suggest someone who can lead it that day.  Offer to lead it yourself.  When it comes to money, I think there are few people under this roof who do not have enough.  If you have not made a pledge, make one.  If you have made a pledge, think about increasing it.  Think over your friends.  Is there one who may be searching for a church?  Say to this person, you haven’t seen a loving community until you’ve seen Mount Auburn.  As Kathy Westmoreland pointed out last week, we do welcomes right.  Go in with someone to sponsor a coffee hour, picking up in your own way the caring service distinguished in recent years by the Montgomeries, among others, and of course by our loyal Phyllis Hoyer.  Serve a meal or play a game with a child when Mount Auburn takes its turn giving shelter to the homeless, as part of the Interfaith Hospitality Network.  Tie a string around your finger to bring canned goods on the first Sunday of the month.  Put a couple of dollars under your envelop when the collection plate is passed this morning.  Augment that loose offering a bit, which goes to train good shepherds in Brazil.  Spring Workday is scheduled for three weeks from yesterday.  Come in for a few hours to paint a wall or plant some flowers.  Join the dedicated likes of Tom Hefley, Eric Burgmann, and Guy Humphrey, whose talents have reached from conceiving the beautiful chancel in which I’m standing to all the details of keeping this vast fabric in one piece ― not just this beautiful sanctuary, not just all that lies under it, but all that rambles behind it.  They work, believe me, with precious little money to spend.

            God sends you out beyond Mount Auburn.  See Dr. Rucknagel about how to get to Washington to march.  Find out who’s registering people to vote and help out there.  Drive voters to the polls on Election Day.  When you drive a voter in from Price Hill, you won’t be facing a six-shooter at the polling place.  Campaign door to door next Saturday for the repeal of Article XII.  Headquarters for the repeal is 4001 Hamilton Avenue.  Tutor a child.  Children not far from here, as Kathy also pointed out, need help learning to read.  The eunuch who went by in the chariot was already reading.  The last Weekday has a remembrance of Charlotte Staab, who had the nerve to leave us before she was even 103.  Charlotte, we read, “taught Sunday School for many years.  A church member, the mother of a handicapped daughter, told us that the little bit of reading her girl could manage was due to Charlotte’s efforts.”  There isn’t any second coming of Jesus.  Rather, he is always coming, saying, as we can rightly imagine, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matt. 25: 35-36) ― like the Kairos Prison Ministry, now established in our church.

            These are good things, you will say, but then, you will say with a rueful smile, they aren’t the one thing needful, are they?  And you’ll have in mind Luke’s little story of the two sisters of Lazarus, who are entertaining Jesus.  Martha is working hard and complains that Mary isn’t lifting a hand.  All Mary is doing is sitting at Jesus’s feet, looking at him and listening to him.  But Jesus doesn’t oblige Martha by criticizing Mary.  Indeed, he says Mary “has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (10: 42).  Where is the good portion we can choose?  For us, in this late age, Jesus is not really here for us to see and listen to.  Mary, after all, in some sense wasn’t imagining the Son of man.    

            I say to you that the kingdom of God is like a party, given by an elderly and wealthy widow.  For two weeks before, the woman ― whose name was Agnes ― saw to every detail, instructing the caterers, seeing that the silver was polished and the crystal was washed, thinking that she would go on the morning of the party to choose the flowers.  The party was simply drinks and buffet, and so many guests decided against bringing wine and would arrive at the party with no gift other than a special inclination to be open and attentive to Agnes herself.   Over many years, you see, Agnes had mostly conquered her self-consciousness, even though she had never been pretty and was embarrassed that her father had made a fortune from ushering people into tax shelters.  With her self consciousness mostly defeated, nonetheless, she had had the particular gift of being attentive to people, remembering their birthdays, listening to them kindly and closely.  And so it was, when, in their very best clothes, the guests had arrived and been admitted by one of the servers and taken drinks and canapés from the trays being passed, that many of them found themselves being alert to each other.  They had arrived gratefully disposed towards Agnes, but she was not yet in evidence.  Among the guests was a woman now in her fifties who had never married and who defended the perfect privacy of her feelings by bright, straightforward conversation.  She had spent her entire adult life in service to an increasingly needy mother.  In the life of everyone else, she was entirely peripheral.  For a moment, nonetheless, someone gazing at this plain, old-fashioned woman saw in her a commitment as tenacious and unshakable as any that drew Abraham up Mount Moriah.   Not far away stood a former athlete, now in late middle age, who had come from the country and lived through his football days to become, somehow, the very model of deference, pleasantly ironic always, unflappable and urbane.  For a moment, nonetheless, from over by the French doors that led to the terrace, another guest remembered that twenty-odd years ago, in a certain matter, this man had declared, without a trace of irony, that something was low and wrong; and through all his  mellowness, justice for a moment had gleamed like a knife.   And then there was the guest who, in a certain respect, had been terribly handicapped from childhood and had compensated with an incessant and self-assertive public activity that his friends politely acknowledged but otherwise ignored.  This was one reason why all the activity usually came to very little.  For a little while, nonetheless, another guest, assisted no doubt by the very good champagne, saw at the core of this lonely human being a purity of good nature that no amount of neglect had soured in the least.  This observer, having arrived well disposed towards Agnes but somehow not yet found her, saw as if for the first time a sweetness in his fellow that tasted like milk kept cold at the bottom of a well.  And so all around the room, kingfishers caught fire and dragonflies flamed.  Each person for a moment was present to the others as a value that was infinite exactly because it was a value.  And then they had petits fours and coffee, looked to thank their hostess but couldn’t find her, and went off into the April evening.  The caterers, who had been there more than once, knew how to tidy up, left, and would send their bill.

            Riding home together, two couples had different views on why no one had seen Agnes.  One of the men in the back seat, gloomy by nature, was certain that something terrible had happened to her in the night, that she had checked herself in to a hospital that morning, and was already gone.  One of the women in the front seat, who was humorous and literary, suggested that Agnes had been reading The Great Gatsby, who hardly attended any of his own parties.

            Ladies and gentlemen, the church year turns with a comfortable certainty:  Easter two weeks ago, Pentecost five weeks ahead.  But ironically, Jesus of Nazareth changed all that for us, not least when he blasted the unready fig tree. We are left to build the kingdom, with nothing reoccurring in quite the same way.  We don’t quite know what is going to happen.  The wind of the Spirit brought Philip to Caesarea and retirement.  That same hot wind, having burned away the flaws of Peter, blew him to Rome to be crucified upside down.  The devil in dying is not knowing how things are going to turn out.  But what are men and women that they should see into the mind of their God?  We have been sent, not knowing into what, believing nonetheless that in life and in death the God who is love is with us.

            Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters with Yeshua of Nazareth:  I am the last of the pulpit supply, and here is my last word:  greet the unknown with a cheer.

Dr. Britton Harwood, Elder

Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church
April 25, 2004