Friends,

This coming Sunday has some of my favorite and least favorite passages from scripture.

I almost always just use the Gospel lesson as my source scripture when I preach. The reason I give most people is that the Gospels are specifically about Jesus, so it makes sense to start there. Probably a more honest reason is that I preach right after I get done reading the Gospel in front of Church, so it’s what I have on my mind when I start talking. Don’t get me wrong, I think about my sermon way before I preach, but it feels weird to read the Gospel like I mean it and then go preach about the psalm or whatever. All of this is to say, I am getting nothing about this week’s Gospel.

John 17:20-26 is so incredibly typical of John’s style, and I can’t stand it. It’s set in the context of the narrative of the Gospel, but it doesn’t really advance the plot at all, and John has Jesus talk in this incredibly dense and unnatural manner, that drives me to my commentary rather than a place of inspiration. I can’t help but think that John’s assignment was to write a story, but he really wanted to write systematic theology, so he sneaks it in whenever he can.

Did you know that we have lectionary that decides the lesson for every Sunday? It is in a three-year cycle with year A focusing on Matthew’s Gospel, year B on Mark’s and year C on Luke. We are in year C and most Sundays this year you’ll hear Luke’s Gospel. John gets fit in by getting sprinkled through all three years, most often in the Easter Season. This is generally paired with lessons from the Acts of the Apostles replacing either slot where the Old Testament or the Epistle would typically go. The Acts of the Apostles is unique, because does not fit the genres we clump the rest of scripture into. It is essentially a sequel to Luke’s Gospel and describes the lives of the Apostles in the first years of the Church. It reads much like Luke’s Gospel and contains stories found nowhere else. All of this is to say, I love this book. It is entertaining, usually profound, still relevant to Church dynamics, and often just plain ol’ weird.

This Sunday we have Acts 16:16-34 as our first lesson, and it is rapid fire, chaotic, interesting, a bit mysterious, and is full of narrative loose ends that can lead to worthwhile conversations. We see a slave girl possessed with a spirit that gives her the gift of fortune telling. She harasses Paul and his buddy Silas by loudly and correctly identifying them as “slaves of the most high God”. They respond by casting out the spirit, but not because they wanted to help her, but because they were annoyed. Everyone is in awe and rejoices, right? Nope. Her owners are furious, because they used the slave’s ability to make money, and they just lost their source of income. They do some rabble rousing and get Paul and co. beaten and arrested. While they are shackled, they sing hymns, and an earthquake hits (I’m assuming this of divine origin, but the text does not specify). Assuming all the prisoners escape, the jailer gets ready to kill himself, but is stopped by Paul and Silas. The jailer is overjoyed, frees them anyways, and has them baptize his whole household.

What the hell just happened??

As Luke’s pretend editor of this sequel to his hit book, “The Gospel According to Luke”, I would fill the margins with comments like, “You’ll get back to the whole slave girl thing, right?” or “Can you tell me how this relates back to the narrative?” and of course, “The overall narrative would benefit if you stuck with the main characters.”

The great thing about the Gospels are they are written. Through translation we can bend meaning to fit our notions of what it should say, but even when people do so boldly and with intention, you can only bend the words so much. I love passages like this, because it reminds me of the world around us. When we look at physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy it is pretty clear that we live in a chaotic world that is void of the meaning that we cannot help but create. The miraculous thing is that we are part of that universe, and God made us to find meaning. People find seemingly divine images on burnt toast conspiracy theories everywhere, and great self-revelations in the positions of the stars. We are great at finding meaning, even when there is none to be found. We are also good and pondering at things of profound importance, discovering mysteries of the universe, making really good food, and striving to make the world better. We do these things imperfectly, but in a universe that is seemingly chaotic and without purpose, we are an impossibly rare thing.

Luke is tapping into the innate human drive to find meaning, and he is giving us heaps of space to fill in the gaps. Maybe he had a specific interpretation of the side narrative of the slave girl and the jailer, but he does not offer one, which in my opinion is the power of the story. These narratives of divine events have traveled across millennia forcing us to ask to pass judgement on the actions of the Apostles, slavers, and jailers. For me, I am desperate to ask for more story. What happened to all of them? Did word of the events go around, and people repent and have their hearts softened? Did the miraculous healing of the enslaved child ultimately improve her lot in life, or did it remove what little advantage she had? There are so many unresolved stories within these eighteen verses, but in the glimpses of greater stories we see the incredible truth, that in the midst of chaos is something else that connects the world with God. Like the world we live in, we are not entitled to everyone’s complete story, nor are we entitled to happy endings or author’s notes. Instead, we are daily thrust into a world that is so full of meaning, that we confuse it for chaos, and in this way, I find our passage from the Acts of the Apostles to be so very honest.

The greater lesson in this is that I am wrong about John’s Gospel… or maybe my perspective is limited. I find John’s fixation on explaining everything to be slog, and I am comfortable with the loose ends we find in so many of the other books of the Bible. I know that there is something I am missing, which makes it so wonderful that the Church has such a variety of people. John undoubtedly has something to say to our community here in Fort Hunt and I suspect I do not have the right ears to hear it. Not if, but when I find someone who passionately disagrees with my feelings on John arrives, I cannot wait to hear what they have to say.

Blessings,

Nick

POSTSCRIPT:

It is at this point that I change my efforts to reviewing the bulletin for Sunday. I am surprised to find that the lessons do not match, and I am so relieved that I caught this error! Then the terror began to set in. We are observing Ascension Day this Sunday, which changes the lessons. I hope you enjoyed my reflections on what almost was our lessons for this coming Sunday. I will get a chance to preach on this in three more years, so consider this a preview of something yet to come. -NAH