April 6, 2008

Can I Get a Witness?

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19
Luke 24:13–35
Acts 2:14a, 36–41

“So those who welcomed his message were baptized,
and that day about three thousand persons were added.”

Acts 2:41 (NRSV)

Like it or not, if you are a Christian, you are called to bear witness,
to testify to the hope that is within you, to tell people about Jesus.
Tomorrow, when you get into the classroom, or the boardroom,
the office, or over the kitchen table, that is what you are called to do.
So we gather on Sunday and we speak to one another about Jesus
so that we might get the courage and conviction to leave here and
to speak to the world about Jesus. You learn, in our Sunday worship,
the joy of hearing the truth, the invigoration that comes from
having things called by their proper names. Then you go forth
into the world to perform that same function for the world.
Would that all of God’s people were prophets.

William H. Willimon
“Prophets All”

As many of you know, I grew up in the Deep South. I inherited my mother’s Presbyterian faith. We were a minority in town. There weren’t great divisions based on faith issues between Protestants and Catholics or Christians and Jews. There weren’t enough of us to divide ourselves that way. The main division was between the majority—the Baptists—and the rest of us—those who weren’t. You were either a Baptist or you weren’t. They were different from the rest of us. They didn’t dance or imbibe, shall we say, but we did. They went to church every Wednesday night, held revivals, and gave testimonies. We only turned up at church on a day other than Sunday if there was food to be had, and we certainly didn’t stand up publicly and witness.

Mark Davis, in his book Holy Conversations, tells of returning home after his first semester of college. He went to see his favorite high school professor and to put into action what he’d learned in his Evangelism 101 class. Davis’s agenda, in his words, was “to seek and to save the lost.” He says that from the theological stance he held at the time, he was genuinely concerned about his teacher, Sam. Sam was patient during Davis’s introduction to Jesus Christ right up to the point Davis asked him to pray “the sinner’s prayer” with him. Sam refused and, not only that, threw Davis out of his office, inviting him to take his prayers and “holier-than-thou attitude” and get out—with a few other choice words added in (Holy Conversations: Talking about Evangelism, p. 20).

This is one of the many ways that witnessing has gotten a bad name—from the coercion and judgment and shaming that often goes along with it. For that and a host of other reasons, we mainliners have often disassociated ourselves from it. So I was taken by surprise when I received information about the most recent Covenant Network conference, promoting the theme “Can I Get a Witness?” The Covenant Network is an organization in our denomination that works for inclusivity in the church—one that our Pastor John Buchanan cofounded and we as Fourth Church support. “Can I Get a Witness?” Surely not, I thought to myself, in that group of progressive Presbyterians. There’s no more chance you’ll get a witness from those Presbyterians than you would have found some of the Baptists I grew up with dancing.

Delightfully the conference proved me wrong. It was testimony done right if ever I’d witnessed it (pun intended). The three days were laced with opportunities for attendees to speak of their experiences in the church. Many of the stories, as one might expect, included expressions of great pain as people told of ways that the church had rejected them or members of their family because of their sexual orientation. And yet these stories had another commonality. The common threads were stories of the great power of the Holy Spirit moving and healing in their lives and the lives of their communities. They were stories of challenge, and they were stories of joy and hope, and they were stories of how lives and communities had been transformed. Testimony done right.

We are prone to imagine that testimony and witness are not part of our tradition, the mainline, Presbyterian tradition. Instead, we think, they belong to the evangelical and Pentecostal traditions. But when we pay attention to those first disciples, we discover it has been part of our tradition from the very beginning.

In Acts there appear some twenty-eight speeches by Peter and Paul. In our text today we read, “Now he”—that being Peter—“testified with many other arguments and exhorted them.” He testified. He told the ways that Christ was alive in the world. It was a new story, and he told it to every ear he could get. In Luke, we discovered the two who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus. What’s their response? They wait not even an hour to get on the road and return to Jerusalem. They have a story to tell. Something personal has happened to them. It’s something for the world to know and by which to be transformed, but first it is their own personal experience of God. They can’t wait to find the other disciples and to tell their story: “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!”

What the community does in response to the resurrection is tangible and visible and audible. They repent. They are baptized. And they tell the story. Peter calls the gathered crowd a crooked generation. And so they are. And so are we. All of us sinners. And yet there is hope. What saves is the story, the story of what has happened, so new and fresh in those days following the resurrection. What Peter says helps define the world in which those new converts will live, and when he is done, there is no doubt that God is busy in the world.

Mark Davis tells about returning to visit his high school teacher Sam some years later. It took him some nerve to return. He had no intention of witnessing again or even bringing up their last conversation or the subject of God. And yet in the course of their conversation, Sam asked him, “What’s the best thing that has happened in your life this year?” Davis reports that despite his intentions not to get into conversations that involved God, he had to answer honestly. He told Sam about the regular morning gatherings he had with others on his dorm hall. A few minutes before they all left for breakfast, they would check in with one another. Sometimes, he reported, there were weighty items on their minds, other times things less trivial—a math test, a confusing relationship, the things of college. After sharing and encouraging, they would have a simple prayer and then be on their way for the day. His teacher’s response: “That was one of the most powerful stories of community that I have ever heard. It tells me a lot more about Christianity than that other stuff you brought with you last time. That story speaks to me” (p. 27).

The story belongs to God. It’s God’s story about God’s people—the history of Israel, the life of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the community of believers, the church. It is not ours alone, and yet we are a part of it. It is our call and our place as we know the story—to tell the story, to preach to the nations, as the Gospel of Luke puts it.

When we gather at this table today, the words of institution will include this: “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the risen Christ until he shall come again.” You see, that is our job. But what must come first is a clear understanding of why Easter does matter to us, our claiming for ourselves the ways that God has been present in our lives and in the activities of this world. As teacher Sam asks, “What good has happened in your life this year?” Where are the places that the spirit of God has been present standing alongside you, sustaining and supporting you? As you come to this table today, recount them and claim them for yourself and proclaim Christ alive in this world so that you might be fueled to go into the world to tell the story and your story however you might choose to do it.

As William Willimon has said,

Like it or not, if you are a Christian, you are called to bear witness, to testify to the hope that is within you, to tell people about Jesus. . . . So we gather on Sunday and we speak to one another about Jesus so that we might get the courage and conviction to leave here and speak to the world about Jesus. You learn, in our Sunday worship, the joy of hearing the truth, the invigoration that comes from having things called by their proper names. Then you go forth into the world to perform that same function for the world. Would that all of God’s people were prophets. (“Prophets All,” Pulpit Resource, 23 May 1999, p. 37)

St Francis of Assisi is known for saying, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” And so it is. And so it is that there are many ways in our life, day in and day out, that we witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ in this world and in our lives

German theologian Dorothee Soelle tells a story of ministry to some of the millions of children who live on the streets of Brazil. There are a host of church mission workers—Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others beyond Christian circles—who serve there. There is a particular spot where many of these Brazilian homeless boys meet each week to chat, to share their fears and angers and their problems. It caused quite a conversation when one of the boys decided he wanted to be baptized. In response to the question “In which church?” he said, “In ours here on the street, of course. I want to be baptized here among us.” Well, among all of the faiths represented, controversy arose: who would issue a certificate and could they actually perform a sacrament jointly? But those were questions that didn’t matter to the boy. He didn’t give in. He would be baptized there on the street. It turns out the Lutheran pastor led the efforts to organize the baptism. An old boot that the children had provided was filled with water and placed on a board over two crates. The Catholic priest brought a candle. And the baptism took place right there on the street in the name of Jesus Christ (from Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America as quoted by Agnes W. Norfleet in “Preaching the Easter Texts,” Journal of Preachers, Easter 2008, p. 24).

And so now it is time to take to the streets. The tomb is empty and Christ the living Lord has returned to the disciples. So now it is time to take to the streets—to tell the power of the empty tomb, to tell the old, old story, and to tell the story of the ways that Christ is alive and at work anew in our lives and in our world that all God’s people might be prophets. Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.

All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.