Sunday, April 26, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Let It Be Known

Matt Helms
Minister for Children and Families, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
1 John 3:16–24
Acts 3:1–10, 4:5–12

O Christ of the poor and the yearning,
kindle in my heart within
a flame of love for my neighbor,
for my foe, for my friend,
for my kindred all.
From the humblest thing that lives
to the name that is highest of all,
kindle in my heart within
a flame of love.

J. Philip Newell
Celtic Prayers from Iona

As we begin this morning, I’m curious to see your response to a question—we’ll do a show of hands because it’s good to stretch this early in the morning. Raise your hand if within the last year you’ve started a new hobby or volunteered to do something you knew absolutely nothing about. How about the last three years.

You’ll notice that I did not raise my hand. I, like most adults, take great pains to avoid things in which I do not feel proficient. I can only think of a handful of experiences in my adult life where I truly tried my hand at a skill completely outside my comfort zone—the most glaring of which was in college. During my junior year, after living with housemates who were excellent guitar players, I decided that I was going to learn how to play the bass. The story I told myself is that it was going to be easy to learn, that I’d discover some previously unknown talent, and that by the summer my friends and I would be playing at outdoor festivals in Madison and Chicago. The only problem, of course, is that I didn’t have some previously unknown musical talent—or really any musical talent to speak of. All I had were delusions of grandeur and unrealistic expectations about how things would go. Rather than learning the basics of rhythm and guitar chords, I instead dove into trying to emulate my favorite bassists—listening to songs over and over and trying to pluck out the right notes. Shockingly, this process did not work. After several days of calloused fingers and little, to no, progress, my bass guitar ended up sitting in the corner of the room for months at a time—only being picked up on occasion to check if I had somehow learned how to play through osmosis. I had not. It was a humbling and frustrating experience, and I soon found myself gravitating towards things that I knew I could do well, trying to avoid looking and feeling foolish. It’s a feeling that many adults share. We hate to look like we don’t know what we’re doing, and even worse, we hate feeling as though were inadequate for the task at hand.

In this season of Eastertide, I’ve found myself wondering if that’s exactly how the disciples felt in those first few weeks after Jesus left them. Even though they had been following him for quite some time, they were more spectators than participants while Jesus was around. The Gospels frequently record the disciples misunderstanding Jesus or being surprised by the things that he was able to do. Now that they have been given the Great Commission and are tasked with spreading the good news to the ends of the earth, it’s not hard to imagine they felt inadequate for the task. But given how fast the book of Acts moves, though, it’s easy to miss that there was a great deal of time that had passed between Jesus leaving the disciples and our lesson from Acts today.

The disciples spend some of that time outside of Jerusalem, but for the most part we don’t learn much other than a general overview of their time together: it’s said that they spent time at the temple, breaking bread with one another, and presumably teaching and talking to one another. We don’t know what was going through their minds, but I like to think that some of them were like me with that bass guitar—hoping to do things just as Jesus did, occasionally suffering from delusions of grandeur, needing to learn the basics before moving on to something greater—and all the while, in the back of their heads, was this nagging sense of doubt that perhaps they weren’t up to the task, that they didn’t know what they were doing and would be exposed as frauds.

Feelings of doubt and inadequacy can be crippling to us as adults, particularly whenever we endeavor to learn something new. We apply the classic adage—you can’t teach an old dog new tricks—to ourselves, and we create a self-fulfilling prophecy where we believe we are unable to be successful, and it comes true. But according to current research, our age actually has little to do with our ability to learn. The main things that prevent adults from succeeding in something new are perfectionism and a fear of failure. Most children are not afraid to make mistakes or to not do well at something the first time; most adults, however, are.

This idea of perfectionism and wanting to be successful has been exacerbated by the recent 10,000-hour theory that rose to prominence in the book Outliers, written in 2008 by author Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell makes the case that achieving mastery and achievement in a given area comes from 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, whether it be in fields of music or sports or computer coding. This 10,000-hour number is intimidating—it equates to approximately fifteen months of practice without sleep—and it may only serve to heighten our anxieties about sticking to the things that we know. If we cannot devote a great deal of time to something, we might as well not try at all—or, at least, that may be the excuse that we tell ourselves.

But recently, and perhaps in response to this theory, there has been another school of thought arising. While mastering a skill may take thousands of hours of practice, merely being proficient at something takes around twenty hours. Another best-selling author, Josh Kaufman, writes about his experiences learning new languages, taking up hobbies, and other activities, reaching a passable level in only twenty focused hours. One of the key pieces, he writes, is letting go of the perfectionist part of our brains that says we’re not doing something well and we should abandon it. We need to experience productive failures, to learn from our mistakes, and to trust that we will indeed improve over time.

In thinking about our scripture passage from Acts today, both Peter and John make the healing and preaching seem so natural. Peter’s teaching is well thought through and reasoned. Their healing done in the name of Jesus is successful. But we know that these earliest disciples weren’t professional speakers or teachers. They were fishermen. Tax collectors. Tentmakers. Their areas of experience and mastery were in other skills, and yet after a few months had elapsed and with the help of the Holy Spirit, these disciples were ready to respond to the Great Commission that Jesus had given them.

I’m sure they would have loved a three-year seminary training program to learn preaching and pastoral care, but instead they got their training through hands-on experience. The Bible doesn’t frequently record failures, but I have to imagine they had sermons fall on deaf ears or teachings that didn’t land. But it’s amazing that through the dedication of those earliest followers of Jesus, the early Christian community grew exponentially beyond the movement that Jesus had started. They may not have mastered their preaching and teaching like Jesus had, but through their willingness to learn from failure and step outside what they knew, they found that they were more than up to the task.

In the letter of 1 John that we read, a letter that circulated amongst an early Christian community in the first century, the author demands of the community that they love not in word and speech, but in truth and action. God’s Spirit abides in us, the author says, and so we love one another and obey God’s commandments. In this time of year when we are learning about the early church, we are reminded how often these earliest followers of Christ were asked to pick up something new for the sake of the community. They traveled to unfamiliar lands, changed dietary patterns, taught with no public speaking experience, and some learned how to read and write. Christ’s love was made known through their actions, even if their attempts were poor or unsuccessful at times.

So often we look at the work of the disciples and the early church and think that it goes beyond anything that we’d ever be able to do at church. “I could never teach Sunday School: I don’t know enough about the Bible”. “I could never serve on a Care Team: I’m not very good in hospitals.” “I wouldn’t be a good tutor. I don’t know how to interact with kids.” And maybe all of that is true at the moment, but those earliest disciples didn’t know much about teaching other than what they had seen, yet through their belief and a desire to let their love be known, they learned and eventually they thrived. We should never let the love that we have be pigeon-holed. Instead, we should let it be known.

That’s the challenge of our texts today. How are we each being called to serve in God’s kingdom and to let Christ’s love be made known? It may involve something that goes well outside of what we normally would expect of ourselves—and we as the church are all too guilty of typecasting people into roles. But if we’re willing to take that leap into something new—if we’re willing to let ourselves fail and experiment and improve—we may discover new capacities for heart and mind within ourselves that we never knew existed, and we may—just like the disciples—have a sense of God’s Spirit with us through it all.

So, friends, where are you feeling called to let your love be known in your life? Where might you, like the disciples, need to take a leap of faith into something unfamiliar? It may not end up working out in the ways that we envision, but if we are willing to let our love and care shine through whatever we do, then that will never be a failure. So thanks be to God for the gift of new opportunities and for the gift of the Spirit to be with us through every step of the way. Amen.