Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2025

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Senior Associate Pastor

Psalm 67
Acts 16:9–15

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May 1 was decision day, specifically college decision day: the day when most colleges in the U.S. require a decision about the admission they have offered you.

Just out of curiosity, raise your hand if you or someone you know had a decision to make about college this spring.

College is an incredibly consequential decision. Not everyone needs to go to college, of course. We also make consequential decisions about jobs to apply for or take. We decide about places to live. We make decisions about romantic relationships, as our full calendar of weddings this summer attests.

Life is full of decisions.

In the life of faith, we often talk about decision-making using the term discernment. Discernment is decision-making that seeks God’s will in a particular situation. We practice discernment both individually and collectively, in prayer, deliberation, silence, and by what the Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner called “listening to our life.”

Discernment is listening. Discernment is talking. Discernment is paying attention to developments you didn’t see coming and asking “What’s going on here?”

Everyone has their own story about this. Here is part of mine.

I discerned that I was called to pastoral ministry as I said the words of the assurance of pardon in a Sunday morning worship service in June 2002 to a congregation in Parkville, Missouri.

I had enrolled in seminary a year earlier saying very clearly that I was not going to become a pastor. Rather, I was just really interested in theology and the Bible and the church, and I wanted to experience a full course of study of those things.

Yet in its wisdom my seminary required all students to serve internships in congregations in order to graduate.

It might have been the first Sunday of my internship when I was tasked by the pastor to lead the prayer of confession and assurance of pardon. I’d never done it before, so I had the words all typed out in front of me.

The prayer of confession was simple enough: everybody prays that together, in unison.

But after the “Amen” I looked up, and there was this congregation looking at me, waiting to hear words they knew well, words that anchored their faith in something good and reliable and true, and I was truly surprised to experience those words coming out of my mouth as naturally as if they were my own name.

I almost didn’t even need the paper: “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. Look, the old life has gone and a new life is already begun. Friends, believe the good news: in Jesus Christ we are forgiven.”

As I said those words to that congregation, something clicked. Questions I’d been grappling with about purpose and calling and vocation all felt answered in a moment that I absolutely did not see coming.

What else could I do after that? Pastor suddenly felt like the only thing that made sense, the thing that had made sense all along, though I hadn’t known it until right then.

You have a discernment story too, I’m sure.

Discernment is faith’s way of making decisions, even if sometimes it feels like the decision is made for us.

And it is rarely only about us, is it?

In our scripture story today, not only Paul but also his friend Silas and his new recruit Timothy discern that God has called them to proclaim the good news to the Macedonians. a people they know nothing about and have never thought to evangelize.

A little context: the part of the story leading up to the vision is about how this merry little band of evangelists were trying to go somewhere else entirely. It’s complicated and involves names of places that have long since changed, but the long and short of it is that they couldn’t get to where they wanted to go because God, the story says, prevented them.

They’re kind of stuck, and they have to decide what to do, where to go. As often happens in the Bible (it happens especially often in Acts), somebody sees a vision that makes the way clear.

Only it’s not as simple as one inspired person’s vision, I don’t think, because there’s a lot of real estate between Paul’s midnight dream of a Man of Macedonia and everyone else in that group becoming convinced that what they should do is sail to what is today northern Greece, a place none of them are from or have ever been.

“He” saw a vision, but “we” were convinced by it.

Discernment involves an “us” as much as it does a “you” or a “me” or a “him” or a “her” or a “them.”

In worship this morning we are ordaining and installing Deacons and Elders and commissioning Trustees. These women and men have discerned that God is calling them to lead in our church at this particular time.

I’m sure the idea of leadership occurred to some of these folks when they read in the worship bulletin or heard an announcement inviting nominations for church officers. But I also know that it would not have occurred to others of them if it had not been discerned by someone else in the church first.

However it occurred, though, there is much more to discernment.

There’s a lot of real estate between the moment you first suspect that God might be calling you or someone else to leadership and that Sunday morning when you or they stand before the congregation to answer ordination questions.

What lies in that real estate in between is the discernment of a community. It is one of the greatest gifts and challenges of life as a community.

And I want to say that it’s not just called “discernment” when it gets to yes. Some people were approached about the possibility and were not convinced; for whatever reason, it didn’t feel like the right time or the right invitation.

The community, too, might not discern a calling where an individual does. That’s hard. Discernment usually is.

Being the church involves us in discerning what God is up to and what that requires of us in this moment. We’re all involved in that, yet it is bigger than any one of us.

And what God is so often up to is crossing frontiers that we would not be inclined to cross.

Macedonia was not on the itinerary. It wasn’t in anybody’s long-range plan. Macedonia is in Greece. It’s Europe. It’s not on the same side of the sea as all the other places “we” have been and have thought we should go.

Our story started in Jerusalem; Macedonia is a world away from Jerusalem, and that distance is measured in far more than miles, if you know what I mean.

In fact, when it comes to following where God is leading, the geographic frontiers may turn out to be the easy ones to cross. God also calls us across frontiers of language and ethnicity and culture and so much else.

This is our story, and it is the story of how “we” keep expanding, the story of one frontier after another crossed for the sake of sharing the good news of God’s inclusive love in Jesus Christ with all people.

People like Lydia.

Lydia is a “Worshiper of God,” which is the New Testament’s way of describing a Gentile who has not converted to Judaism but who worships in a synagogue and follows some Jewish customs.

That’s not all that unusual at this point. I mean, one of our group is a new guy named Timothy, whose father is Greek.

But Lydia isn’t Timothy. Lydia isn’t like anyone we’ve encountered before (she’s also, in case you didn’t notice, any kind of “Man of Macedonia”).

Lydia is an independent businesswoman, and she seems to be the head of her own household, and we certainly have not seen that before in this story. The typical Jewish family structure at the time is patrilineal and patriarchal. Women are daughters or wives or widows, not heads of households.

And yet did you notice that Lydia — and Lydia alone — is the object of God’s activity in this story? Opening Lydia’s heart is the only thing that God expressly does in the story; we were convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to the Macedonians, but that says something about us, about our discernment.

But God did this. God moved in Lydia in a unique way. In fact, nowhere else in the New Testament but here is it said that God opens someone’s heart. Only Lydia.

And it happens so easily. We go from Lydia listening eagerly to what Paul is saying there down by the river to Lydia and her household being baptized — becoming fully part of the church! — without another word.

Other baptism stories involve some dialogue at least (“What is to prevent me from being baptized?” “Oh, hey, look, there’s some water”). Not here. It’s like it had already happened before it happened, like God was already on the other side of that frontier waiting for us.

But just because “we” have expanded to include Lydia and her household, that doesn’t mean that all the frontiers that separated us have been crossed. Divisions remain, then and now.

And it doesn’t take Lydia long to lead the church to cross another one of those frontiers.

When Lydia invites Paul and Silas and Timothy and Luke to stay at her home, she is challenging them to follow the claims of the gospel — that, in Christ, dividing walls of hostility separating peoples are torn down — to their next conclusion: her living room.

To accept her invitation would scandalize all of their relatives — that they would stay as guests in the home of an unmarried Gentile woman. You can imagine the four of them huddling off to the side to talk about it in hushed tones, like “This is a bridge too far. We are not comfortable with this.”

Then how did it come to be that Lydia’s house is ground zero for the church in Europe? Well, she prevailed upon them.

Another translation says she “persuaded us.” Still another says she was “insistent toward us.” Nevertheless, she persisted.

Thank God for Lydia’s persuading and insisting and persisting and prevailing.

The church needs to be pushed sometimes to follow the claims of the gospel to their conclusions, because it is one thing to say “All are one in Christ,” but it is another thing entirely to live it in our relationships and our habits.

So the session formed a task force in March to help us more fully welcome and include transgender and gender nonbinary people into our worship, ministry, and community. We’re convinced that our fidelity to the gospel requires that we do more than say “all are welcome.” It requires that we push to make God’s welcome for all people explicit and intentional in our life together.

This is just the next step in our journey of following God across frontiers of relationships and identities, our journey of discernment.

The hymn we will be singing next, “Lord Jesus, You Shall Be My Song,” was composed by some women who pushed the church to follow the claims of the gospel to their conclusion, an order of nuns in French Algeria called The Little Sisters of Jesus. I have a companion to our hymnal that explains,

“The emphasis on ‘journey’ throughout the text reflects the highly transient life of this contemplative Roman Catholic order in general and of its founder, Magdeleine Hutin in particular [she founded the order in 1939]. Beginning with a ministry among the nomads of Algeria, she was constantly finding new places and new people on the margins of society for whom her community could be a sign of love.

It also explains that “Lord Jesus, You Shall Be My Song” has been adopted by L’Arche communities around the world. L’Arche (French for “the Ark”) is a network of family-style households for adults with disabilities and their caregivers.

It’s one of my favorite hymns.

May it be our song as we discern together for what new places and new people our community can be a sign of love.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church