Join us for our final summer outing in Acts as the “Disorganized Religion” tour makes its final stop in Rome. We begin at 7:30p CDT and meet at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. If you’re unable to join us in person, you can catch the study via FB Live.

Experience as Prime Witness

Shea: This week’s episode in our summer “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts reads like a movie script. Paul keeps getting called on to account for himself—before the Jerusalem church’s leaders, before his adversaries, before the Roman Governor Felix, before the Judean King Herod Agrippa. He keeps telling his story. Sometimes that strategy works in his favor, and sometimes it enflames his enemies even more.

Tim: You’ve just preached a whole sermon about evangelism right there. Our stories are the raw material of our witness. Without them, everything we have to say about our faith is pure conjecture.

Shea: Paul is a brilliant theologian and religious lawyer. He can split the finest doctrinal hairs to make a brilliantly nuanced point. But when the rubber meets the road—even in his letters—Paul skips the doctrine to tell own story. His personal transformation is where the legitimacy of his faith stands tallest.

Tim: That’s where so many of us miss the boat. We believe we don’t know the Bible well enough to discuss our faith. Or we’ve not got our theology sufficiently worked out to explain our belief.

Shea: In this week’s study, we find Paul telling folks, “Something amazing happened to me. I was going down one path and suddenly I got turned in another direction.

Tim: Exactly. Although I can hear folks say, “Well, Paul’s experience is unique. He gets knocked to the ground and blinded. I don’t have that kind of story. I just felt drawn to follow Jesus. Or, I was taught to be a Christian before I even understood what it meant.”

Shea: I get that. You and I were both reared in homes where it was assumed we would follow Jesus. It was all we knew, pretty much all our parents talked about. Yet both of our stories have moments when we realized we weren’t walking in the way God intended, that God’s desire for us exceeded our tradition. These transformative moments happen in big and small ways. We may not get bowled over. But I believe we all have experiences that turn us around.”

Tim: I agree one hundred percent. When I describe my faith journey with people, I consistently see their faces light up when I tell them how I knew God was calling me to minister to the margins, how my own experience of being trapped in a religious ideology that conflicted with my making opened my heart to so many others who suffered similar experiences.

Shea: Paul’s repeated testimony in Acts and throughout his letters reminds us that experience is our prime witness material. Our stories matter because they explain how God works. And that makes them theological, because theology is simply “talking about God.” There’s some powerful stuff in this week’s lesson!

We’re wrapping up our summer tour of Acts, “Disorganized Religion,” with the final chapters in Paul’s ministry. Don’t miss these last two sessions! We meet on Thursday evenings at 7:30p CDT at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can join us online via FB Live.

Who Are You?

Tim: Our “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts goes into high gear for its final episodes.

Shea: It sure does. Paul is traveling all over the Mediterranean and everywhere he goes he meets hard opposition.

Tim: Other than his disciples, no one seems happy with him. Traditional Jews are angry because they believe he’s goading folks into heresy. Gentile power brokers don’t like how he’s disrupting their cities.

Shea: Conspiracies are forming to kill him. The constant pressure would crack a lesser person. But Paul perseveres. And Luke helps out with the occasional dash of humor or entertaining detail.

Tim: An example, please! Most of this final stretch of Acts reads like a broken record: Paul gets into a controversy, he’s brought before the magistrate, the magistrate decides there’s nothing to be done, and they send Paul somewhere else, where another court appearance yields similar results. Humor is a welcome element.

Shea: Here’s a funny moment I always enjoy. In chapter 19, there are some exorcists tramping around—seven sons of a Jewish priest. Now, mind you, they have no connection with Paul but they want to cash in on his notoriety. So they invoke the name of Jesus in their exorcism rites.

Tim: That’s gutsy! What happens?

Shea: Well, they meet up with a violent spirit who barks back at them, saying, “I know Jesus and I’m familiar with Paul, but who are you?” Then the possessed man attacks them!

Tim: Another one of those rather strange serves-‘em-right moments in Acts. And it is funny. But I think there’s also an important lesson there.

Shea: I can guess what you’re going to say, but go right ahead.

Tim: During these trying times, there are plenty of folks running around, doing things in Jesus’s name and they have no business doing so. Just a few days ago, Slate ran an article called “The New Hate Pastors” about self-appointed shepherds who abuse their pulpits to preach extremist hatred. As I read it, shaking my head, I kept hearing echoes from Acts: “Yep, I know Jesus and Paul, but who are you?”

Shea: And that speaks to us: folks will know we’re authentic Christians when our words and actions reflect the One we follow. Jesus has to be recognizable in us as people of love and justice and generosity. The answer to “Who are you?” should be obvious—so obvious the question doesn’t even need to be asked!

Tim: Yes! That’s it. This week as our Acts tour continues, we’ll contemplate the characteristics that Paul portrays as he goes through his trials. I think we can learn a lot from him!

Don’t miss this week’s outing in our “Disorganized Religion” summer tour of Acts. We meet in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park each Thursday evening at 7:30p CDT. If you can’t get out to the OP, you can join us online via FB Live. See you this week!

Using Our Outsider Voices

Nearly every morning begins the same way. I put the kettle on to make coffee (French press here) and open the door to pick up The New York Times. I get it online, but I still like to hold the paper in one hand and cup of coffee in the other. It’s a tactile thing, a ritual jumpstart to the day.

But there are days when I’m reluctant to open my door. There are days when I’m not sure I have the heart for what I’m going to see on the front page and what I’m going to learn when I read what’s inside. Sunday and Monday (when I’m writing this) were two of those days.

When this morning’s headline read, “ONE SHOOTING MASSACRE FOLLOWS ANOTHER, SHAKING A BEWILDERED NATION TO ITS CORE,” a stabbing pain pierced my soul. I flashed back on so many headlines on so many mornings—Columbine, Sandy Hook, the Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas, Parkland, Pittsburg, Poway; we can all recite these lists—and how after each one we tried to comfort ourselves with hope that this would be the one that turns things around… this time the response would be different.

Every time those hopes melted away. After several news cycles, the conversation changed. The stories about lost lives and traumatized victims and haters and heroes slipped “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper biz and eventually slid from sight.

Have we become habituated to mass shootings and gun violence? How close are we to accepting it as the new American way of life? How do we satisfy our longing for a rational response to irrational evil while our spiritual compasses keep whirring and we can’t seem to get our bearings?

In a way that’s not always good, we’ve been conditioned as Christians to default to tolerance and forgiveness as the only right responses to wrongdoing. We’ve been taught to love in spite of rather than because of. When we see something egregiously wrong, our first response is to go into kind, tolerant, and hence quiet mode.

We’ll talk about the evils of the world all day long among ourselves. But confronting sins in society and culture, sins in public offices and legislatures, sins in the mouths and politics of our families, friends, and neighbors? We turn into Auntie Ems from The Wizard of Oz, who told the witchy Almira Gulch, “For 23 years, I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you, and now… well, being a Christian woman, I can’t say it!”

Why couldn’t Auntie Em say it? Why would truth-telling not be the right response for a Christian?

In James 4:17 we read, “It is a sin when someone knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it.” In 2019 America, being Christian—truly Christian, guided by real convictions that reflect the teachings and life of Christ—is a de facto outsider position. Nominal Christians walk the halls of Congress and hold civic power. But their fruits (or lack thereof) expose them as mountebanks and lip-service believers. But they’re not Christians. If they were true Christians, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Those of us outside the circles of power have the responsibility to use our outsider voices to speak truth to this faux Christian power, from the highest levels of government down to the hoodlum preachers and heretical churches that trample the name of Jesus in their quest to propogate ideologies that bear no resemblance to authentic Christian belief and behavior.

What’s happening in America is a sin. And we need to say so. Not only from our pulpits and “intentional” conversations. We need to call sin “sin” in the hearing of those who are committing, supporting, ignoring, and profiting from sin.

We know that guns in the hands of civilians are bad. We know what good looks like. And those who have the power to change things so that lives are saved and peace is restored are doing nothing. This is sinful. They are sinners.

We need to overcome our milquetoast Christian politeness and call sin “sin” in places where we’ll be heard—at family dinner tables, in neighborhood conversations, at our places of work and play. As outsiders, we have nothing to lose, beyond making the sinners around us angry. And they’re angry anyway. They’re angry all the time. They are tools of an oligarchy that makes billions off the anger of insecure, ignorant people.

The oligarchs are sinners; they know whipping up their constituents with fear and fallacy is not right. So are the people who know supporting a gun lobby and an armed civilian class is not right. What’s happening with guns in America is sinful. What’s not happening to end gun violence is sinful. Not saying so out of fear of offending the merchandizers and missionaries of wholesale murder is sinful.

Use your outsider voice to call sin “sin.” Say so.

Don’t miss another fascinating chapter in this summer’s “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts. We meet on Thursdays at 7:30pm CDT, in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can catch us online via FB Live.