The second in a series of three sermons given by Dr. Ralph Blair at the 2010 Preaching Festival held in Ocean Grove, N.J.
“The Good News: It’s a Whole Lot More!”
Luke gives us this report: “Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were approached by a slave girl who had a spirit of fortune telling on which her owners made a great deal of money. She trailed after Paul and the rest of us, shouting, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God. They’re telling you how to be saved.’ She kept on screaming this, day after day. Finally, Paul became so troubled by the screaming that he turned around and said to that spirit, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!’ And at that very moment the spirit left her.” (Acts 16:16-18)
The Greek term that Luke uses for the source of the slave girl’s fortune telling “talent” literally means “a spirit of puthona”, or Python – the ancient mythical sentinel snake at Gaia’s navel, the supposed “center of the earth” at Delphi. Was this girl a pawn of con men? Maybe she did ventriloquism and the peasants took her strange sounds as “secrets from the spirit world”. If so, they weren’t the first to be seduced by a snake and they wouldn’t be the last to swallow snake oil. Could we find a clue in the DSM, the Manual of Mental Disorders? Or, perhaps there was more to it than mythic poetry, pawn, hocus-pocus or psychopathology. Was she demon-possessed? Unlike the early Christians and people in the Third World today, we in contemporary Western culture may be so entangled in Enlightenment that we’re oblivious to the presence of demons, choosing to dismiss the demonic as but a hopelessly primitive level of explanation that we’ve now outgrown and moved on up to the sophistication of psychic mediums, astrologers and tarot card readers.
Well, we really can’t be sure exactly what all may have been involved here. So far as the biblical text is concerned, a University of Aberdeen New Testament scholar says it’s really “hard to draw the lines between demon possession, mental unbalance and charlatanry” in the biblical narratives. (I. Howard Marshall)
As Luke reports, the girl trailed after them for many days, screaming: “These are servants of the most high god! They’re telling you how to be saved! These are servants of the most high god! They’re telling you how to be saved! These are servants of the most high god! They’re telling you how to be saved!”
Paul apparently exercised patience with all this annoying yelling. What she was yelling was literally true. Well, even the Satan, in all his efforts against the Good News, alleges a biblical literalism and a pushing of proof texts. But Bible quotation out of context, in questionable context or not at all contextualized with care for the hearers can be totally at odds with the Good News. And this girl’s loopy loop was lopsided. It left out the love that’s inherent in any true telling of the Good News. And, it goes without saying that it left lots to be desired homiletically. Surely, screaming the Good News isn’t sharing the Good News. So, Paul finally has “had it” with all the screaming. He turns around and, by the authority of Jesus, he commands the “spirit” – whatever it is – to come out of her. And, says Luke, it came out of her at once.
“Whrew!,” thought Paul, “Shoulda’ done that days ago.”
Not surprisingly, the girl’s handlers were furious over that spirit’s having been rendered useless to them. Strange, though, how the fortune telling spirit itself failed to predict it’s own misfortune.
Since the shysters always had to stay at least a step ahead of the game and now that game is over, they shift to Plan B. They accuse Paul and Silas of “disturbing the peace” (translation: disturbing our piece of the action). They stir up a protest rally and riot with racist, xenophobic slurs against these “Jews”.
The apostles are arrested, stripped, beaten and chained up inside the Philippian jail.
Around midnight, Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns in praise to God. I wonder, would we – after being unjustly accused, arrested, stripped, beaten and chained up in jail – be singing hymns in praise to God? Or, would we be feeling very sorry for ourselves and be down in the dumps, pouting at God. Would we be ready to call it quits?
Well, the other prisoners listen intently to the apostles’ odd response.
Suddenly, there’s an earthquake! Walls collapse, chains break loose, doors fall open! Fearing his prisoners had escaped (which would have meant death to him) the jailer rushes in, a suicidal sword in his hand. But Paul shouts out: “Hey, don’t harm yourself! We’re all still here.”
The jailer is so overwhelmed by his own narrow escape, thanks to their not escaping for themselves, that he falls down at their feet, begging them to tell him how to be saved. Clearly, his question isn’t about his already having been saved from the lethal ire of Rome. So, while he tends to their wounds, Paul and Silas share with him the Good News about how he can be deeply saved. And right then and there, he’s brought to trusting in God and he’s baptized into Christ, along with his whole family.
The jailer’s question was the most urgent he’d ever asked. Yet, just moments before, he’d thought the most urgent question of his life was how to save his skin. His skin had been saved. Still, he senses he’s not. He wants to know how he can be saved. He’s told how. And the Lord saves him in the depths of his soul – his true self!
The slave girl had been screaming at the top of her lungs that Paul and Silas were telling people how to be saved. But her handlers couldn’t be bothered asking them about that. All they cared about was making money. And now Paul had ruined that by making useless their moneymaking mistress. They saw the apostles solely in terms of their lost income, not in terms of their lost souls. The jailer, sensing his basic need for salvation, sought pardon. The schemers, obsessing over their base bottom line, sought only to punish.
And just as these guys saw the Good News as their competition – and, it was – folks today can see the Good News as competing with their notions of how to be “saved”, e.g., by their money, their social standing, their celebrity, political power and rights. The Good News is in competition, as well, with so much contemporary preaching by so-called traditionalists, e.g., salvation by heterosexual orientation and heterosexual marriage, by letter-of-the-law morality, by dogmatic details and religious ritual, by assumed or affected applications of Bible verses and by other spin on self-centered self-sufficiency. But, as F. F. Bruce rightly reminds us: “Ultimately, the Christian faith is in a Person: our confession is ‘I know whom I have believed’, not ‘what I have believed’.”
Well, it’s one thing to hear but the hammering hype of what’s assumed to be yet another spiritual shtick. It’s something else to witness the joyful presence of salvation lived out in love in the lives of those who proclaim it. As Alexander Maclaren said over a century ago: “If you would win the world [for Christ], melt it, do not hammer it.”
Proclamation of the Good News is a whole lot more than what so often passes for proclamation of the Good News. Far too much preaching is nothing but the taking of God’s name in vain – abusing God’s holy name to no good purpose and even to evil purposes. Paul warned: There are alleged gospels that aren’t gospels at all. But sadly and so often, preachers, people in the pews and the public at large are clueless about the difference.
So, let’s look at what sometimes merely passes for our take on the Good News, as over against what truly passes the test of what the Good News is. The Good News is a whole lot more than what it’s often taken to be. For example:
The Good News is a whole lot more than good news.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a slogan.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a metaphor.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a hyphen.
The Good News is a whole lot more than me.
The Good News is a whole lot more than being right.
The Good News is a whole lot more than words.
The Good News is a whole lot more than going through the motions.
The Good News is a whole lot more than good news.
The good news is meaningless without bad news. “The chemo worked” is good news. But it’s good news because there’d been bad news: “You’ve got cancer.” You had cancer before the diagnosis, so that “bad” news saved your life. Know what’s wrong, and it might be made right.
It’s true, too, in spiritual matters. Ignorance or denial of our being spiritually dead in sin doesn’t mean we’re not spiritually dead in sin. The bad news that we’re dead in sin is the good news we need before we have any desire to receive the good news that we can be made alive in Christ.
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than good news.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a slogan.
Google displays over 8,000 images of “Jesus bumper stickers”. Besides variations on the fish symbol or a simple “Jesus Saves”, some slogans are meant as jokes: “Jesus loves you. Everyone else things you’re a moron.” Some provoke thought with humor: “Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you’d like to meet him.” Here’s one from the Right: “Jesus Saves. Obama Spends.” And one from the Left: “Jesus Would Heal the Sick. Healthcare Reform Now.” Some are anti-Christian: “Jesus Isn’t Real. Get Over It.” And there’s total nonsense, too: “Jesus was a Buddhist”. But they’re reductions to what’s beside the point, missing the point or contrary to it.
The Good News is no mere slogan, though Paul was succinct: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself”. (II Cor 5:19) And though not a mere slogan, the first Christian creed was quite short. Three words: “Jesus is Lord” – a death-risking counter to “Caesar is Lord”. Yet what can be said succinctly can’t be so easily fathomed. Throughout eternity, all the ever-more meaningful wonder of this mystery of mercy will never be exhausted.
In the meantime, this Good News is the only remedy for all the regrets of unrighteousness past, all the resolutions made but never kept, all the promises of rehab now lying in ruins of remorse and all the efforts at restitution that restored nothing at all that was lost. This Good News is the only assurance against all our anxiety over every future – whether for later today or for all our tomorrows.
And Jesus’ saying, “No one comes to the Father but by me”, is no bad news slogan of intolerance. (John 14:6) It’s good news reassurance that Homecoming to the Father isn’t in the hands of preachers or popes. It’s in no other hands than the nail-pierced hands of the Father’s own Son who died for the sins of the world.
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than a slogan.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a metaphor.
If the term, “father”, always means a male or a man, then the term, God “our Father”, is metaphorical – as is Jesus’ saying he’s a “door” or he’s like a “mama chicken”. But if “our Father” is mere metaphor, if God is not a person but only “as if … a person”, as some liberal religionists say, if God is merely “a force” or a synonym for “the universe”, then, we have no Good News. We have only a marionette, manufactured and manipulated to suit ourselves. C. S. Lewis knew very well that, “The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you”.
Or, what’s the good news if, as some say, Jesus’ resurrection was merely metaphorical and it’s irrelevant whether or not the tomb was empty or whether or not the man the disciples had known as Jesus, really walked and talked and ate with them after his death? Some critics construe that it only seemed to be him, but that the disciples were no doubt hallucinating from stress. But these skeptics contradict the earliest evidence. And, for hallucination theory to work in this case, we must toss out what is known of the psychopathology of hallucination. We must come up with better explanations than metaphor or mass hallucination if we’re going to reject the straightforward biblical accounts of the historically unique and tectonic theological shift to a Jewish report of anyone’s rising from the dead before the end of the world and in the unprecedented form in which the risen Christ is depicted. We must otherwise explain the fact and speed with which this particular messianic movement took off. When other so-called messiahs died, their disciples disbanded. When this messiah was executed by authority of both Roman and Temple establishments, this messiah’s disciples multiplied at an amazing pace, even in the face of family rejection, community expulsion, imprisonment and execution.
If Jesus’ corpse decomposed as any other dead body does, we have no Good News. As Paul – the persecutor turned persecuted – declared after meeting the risen Christ, himself: “If Christ was not raised from the dead, our faith and our preaching is in vain and we’re all still dead in sin.” (I Cor 15)
Thank God the Good News is a whole lot more than a metaphor.
The Good News is a whole lot more than a hyphen.
Evident ethnic, racial, social, cultural, economic, educational and sexual differences exist between groups – even among Christians. Idiosyncratic distinctions are evident between individuals – even among Christians. But, according to Paul’s astonishing argument, there’s absolutely no theological significance to any of these differences. The Gospel declares the complete impartiality of God when it comes to any human difference. A gospel that discriminates in terms of human distinctions is no Gospel, no Good News.
In light of Galatians 3:28, any modifying of the Gospel with any add-on marker mongrelizes the Gospel. Thus, the Good News is in unprecedented opposition to all of the ancient assumptions about signifiers of identity. Paul writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The ancient world’s separation of Jews and Gentiles – dating back to God’s calling Abram out of Ur – ends in Christ. The ages-old separation between slaves and freemen – going back as long as human memory – is obliterated in Christ. Biological and gender differences between men and women – so far as any relevance in Christ is concerned – are all cancelled.
A Bible scholar notes: “The strangest of the three statements [is this one:] ‘there is no male and female’.” (Hans Dieter Betz) He writes: “The claim is made that in the Christian church the sex distinctions between man and woman have lost their significance. … In contrast with the preceding statements, this one names the sexes in the neuter, which indicates that not only the social differences between man and woman (‘roles’) are involved but the biological distinctions. [Betz goes on to explain,] General abolition of sex differences understood in whatever way, is not found in Greco-Roman sources. [Galatians 3:28] is the first occurrence of a doctrine openly propagating the abolition of sex distinction.”
Well whaddaya know! Could Christian couples be the only couples qualified for same-sex marriage? This’ll sure shock the Religious Right! Somebody, please notify Focus on the Family!
As I’ve indicated before, I tend to prefer the term, “Christians who happen to be gay” over the frankly less clumsy, “gay Christians”. A Christian’s identity is and must be in Christ above all – not in gayness or in “ex-gayness” or in any racial, social or class identity or in anything else at all. No marker must modify our identity in Christ. There can be no hyphenated Christians.
And a hyphenated gospel is no Good News. Both heterosexualizing and queering the Gospel distorts it. Hyphens divide our oneness in Christ. To so differentiate is defensive self-centeredness. When irrelevant identity markers are privileged or de-privileged, the comparatively trivial is made to trump the eternal triumph of the crucified and risen Christ. We wind up wallowing in the insecurity of self-seeking pride and self-serving persecution – all at odds with God’s free grace and peace to all.
Thank God the Good News is a whole lot more than a hyphen.
The Good News is a whole lot more than me.
Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University worries “that evangelicals have a kind of privacy about how they understand their relationship with God, [that, our] energy and love of Jesus is understood in a far too individualistic way.” He’s right – but he’s not right enough. Privatization is popular – even politically correct – across the “spirituality” spectrum in the West. It’s also a focus in New Age searches for solace from the East.
In research for his Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah asked a young nurse, Sheila, to describe her spirituality. She replied: “It’s Sheilaism, just my own little voice.” Asked to say more, she said: “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.”
But, when asked about prayer, Jesus gave followers the Our Father prayer. God is our Father. We’re a part of God’s Family. So, how seriously do we take the prayer’s plural personal pronouns? Jesus, our Elder Brother told us to pray to our Father for the needs we all have, for our forgiveness as we forgive whoever sins against us. He said we should pray that we might all withstand our testing times and that we all might be delivered from evil. This prayer is not for or about me, me, me; it’s for and about us all.
Nobody picks his or her parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins or kids. In other cultures, even wives and husbands don’t pick each other. And we don’t get to pick who else is in God’s Family. Yet God’s Family is brought together by choice – God’s choice! We don’t choose God, God chooses us – each of us. It was with exuberant praise that Paul declared that our Father “chose us in Christ before the creation of the world!” (Eph 1:4)
If God so chose us, who are we to neglect or reject one another? We must bear our own as well as each other’s burdens. We need to joy in God together, praising and petitioning our Father. Are we growing in his grace and in the fruit and gifts of his Spirit? His gifts aren’t for stuffing ourselves; they’re for sharing with one another.
Back in 1964, before many of you were born, the big hit on gay bar jukeboxes was a new singer named Barbra Streisand. The song: “People”. In the isolating anonymity of the dark dens of those days, the song clicked.
“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. We’re children needing other children. … Lovers are very special people, they’re the luckiest people in the world. With one person, one very special person, a feeling deep in your soul says, you were half now you’re whole, no more hunger and thirst … ”
But for people in lonely crowds then, as now, that hunger for “one very special person” would not be satisfied nor would the thirst be quenched by the drinks or the drugs or the one-night-stands in store. There’s a need that’s so “deep in the soul” that it’s met only by God in Christ – One Very Special Person, indeed!
Do we, as God’s children who need other children of God, know how very fortunate we are, embraced together, in God’s Family, now and forever? And do we take seriously that this Good News needs to be shared beyond us – for “God so loved the whole world, that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16)
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than me.
The Good News is a whole lot more than being right.
There’s always an offense in the Good News because it’s the Gospel, Godspel, God’s Word over against our words of self-serving excuse. God’s Good News rebukes all our postured good news of petty self-righteousness that’s really very bad news. God’s Good News reveals our rebelliousness, forgives us into repentance and redeems us – reconciled, restored and, one day, resurrected from the dead. We could never do any of this on our own.
We’ve been wrong to claim we’re right. Dead wrong! But God is right to reveal how wrong we’ve been. His Good News is that, in the violent wrong we did to Christ, and in his laying down his life for us, and in God’s vindicating him by raising him from the dead, we have died and we have been raised to life and we have been made right in him.
It’s Good News to learn that we’ve all been wrong in claiming we’re right. We’ve all been wrong in pretending to righteousness. We’ve all wronged God. We’ve all wronged each other. But God’s Good News is that all the wrong has been set right in God’s reconciling the world to himself in Christ, in God’s not counting our sins against us. (II Cor 5:19) The Good News is that we’re made right in Christ and that’s the very righteousness of God that we need.
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than being right.
The Good News is a whole lot more than words.
Words are crucial, yet words can’t always express what cries and groans can express. Christ’s very last word on the cross was a loud cry. (Matt 27:50) And Paul tells us that God’s Spirit groans on our behalf when words just won’t do. (Rom 8:26)
So, the Good News is beyond words. Proclaiming the Good News can’t be in words alone. Our words can be contradicted by our actions. Then, our words are no longer even words – they’re nothing but blah, blah, blah.
You’ve heard that “Actions speak louder than words” and that “Talk is cheap”. These are truisms, for they’re demonstrably true – even painfully so. The Word of God became action to create the cosmos. The Word of God actually came in flesh and actually went to the cross at awful cost, to be the Good News of salvation, himself. The Word of God was actually raised from the dead for our justification. And the Word of God actually will come again in grace and glory. The Word of God is actually alive!
So it must be with our words. It’s irrelevant to say we’re faithful without faithfully doing. Jesus told a parable to religious leaders who challenged his authority. (Matt 21:28-32) His story was about a father who asked his two sons to go to work for him. One said he wouldn’t, but he did. The other said he would, but he didn’t. Jesus asked: So, which son was obedient? The religious leaders answered correctly: The one who said he wouldn’t go to work but, nonetheless, did. Jesus rebuked them, for though they knew very well what the right answer was, they refused to put it to use. They watched in resentment as tax collectors, prostitutes and others whom they piously labeled “sinners” turned in trust to Jesus while they, themselves, dug their heels ever deeper into the squalor of their self-righteousness. Their lifestyle drowned out all their lip service.
Said Paul: “If I preach with eloquence, sounding as stunning as angels, but fail to speak in love, all I’m doing is making a lot of noise.” (I Cor 13:1)
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than words.
The Good News is a whole lot more than going through the motions.
Just as the Good News isn’t a string of words repeated by rote, the Good News isn’t revolving round and round in religiosity, no matter how impressive the moves or how fancy the footwork. The Good News isn’t always on the go but it’s always on point.
Do you remember back in high school, in a class in which you didn’t particularly excel – maybe it was algebra or geometry (uh, you can’t remember which is which), maybe it was Latin or chemistry. And to compensate for your poor performance at what the class was really about, you asked the teacher if you could do some “extra credit” work – as if “extra” meant additional value to credit already earned by your poor performance. Already a bit “artistic”, you drew some pretty little pictures of algebraic equations or Latin conjugations. Well that’s a minor example of trying to make up meaning through meaningless moves.
Will Campbell is an elderly Mississippi Baptist minister and social activist on whom cartoonist Doug Marlette based his Kudzu character, Reverend Will B. Dunn. In a 1970s issue of Klopsch’s Christian Herald magazine, Campbell wrote these wise words to Christians: “If I had to deal with the question, ‘What are we going to do?’, I would have to say, nothing. Rather be – be what you are already by the once-and-for-all-act of God in human history that reconciles us to God and man. You don’t have to reconcile yourself to God or to man. That has already been done for you. So be brothers and sisters. The doing will take care of itself. And I believe you will be surprised at how busy you’ll be.”
Our business as Christians is to be busy being brothers and sisters to our brothers and sisters, being busy being neighborly to all our neighbors, being busy being good to anyone we think is our enemy, as well as to any and all who may indeed be our enemies.
Jesus said that, at the Judgment, people will brag about having driven out demons and boast of their fancy footwork in their footnotes on prophecy. They’ll claim they did many “miracles” in Jesus’ name. But Jesus will say: “I never knew you. … . I was hungry and thirsty and you didn’t to give me anything to eat or drink.” These folks no doubt gave themselves lots of motion sickness while making all those evasive moves to avoid engaging with the needy while keeping busy with all their favorite movements. But their movements meant nothing good for the needy. Their running all about was merely self-serving distraction from love in action.
And there will be others who will have no self-aggrandizing portfolios to pull out and present to the Lord of Judgment. They won’t – as they don’t – try to put him in their debt. And Jesus will say to them, with a big, broad smile on his face: “I know you. You looked after me.” But they won’t recall having done that. And he’ll have to explain to them that it was he, himself, whom they fed and clothed and otherwise cared for when they were doing all these things for others. And he’ll welcome them to the everlasting Home he’s been preparing for them for a very long time. (Matt 7; Matt 25)
Thank God, the Good News is a whole lot more than going through the motions.
Well, there you have it: Something of what the Good News is about and something of what it isn’t about. The Good News is the Evangel – from euongellion, the Greek New Testament word for “good news”. That’s why we’re called “evangelicals”. But the Good News isn’t our news. We didn’t make it up. God authored this Good News. God accomplished this Good News. God applies this Good News to our hearts and our lives.
Having been given this Good News that, indeed, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us (II Cor 5:19), we can receive with joy, all his grace given. And so loved into loving, we can live it and proclaim it in grateful words and in grateful deeds, until he calls us Home.
The Good News of Jesus Christ is a whole lot more than good news. It’s the very best news that ever was and ever could be. It reveals God’s life-giving gift of a whole new life and a whole new lifestyle – by faith in Christ, here and now, and by sight, face to Face with Christ, hereafter and evermore.