Call and Response
Acts 9: 1 – 20
HMPC, Christopher H. Edmonston
I.
Back in
There is
one tell-tale sign though that the season has finally arrived: the football jamboree. Now maybe y’all have jamborees down east, but
over in the piedmont of
A football jamboree was always on a Friday or Saturday afternoon. And you would get maybe 4 to 8 teams together, and all have a controlled scrimmage – little practice games. One school’s defense against another’s offense from the 20 yard line in, that sort of thing.
The funny thing about the jamboree game, though, was the coaches always held something back. You wanted to show the other teams your strengths, not your weaknesses. And you certainly wanted to conceal some part of your hand, your strategy, the type of team you were going to be when the games counted. In other words, you wanted to be good, but not too good. Or if you were bad, and you knew it, you wanted to keep it simple so that you would look as good as you possibly could and hide any deficiencies that you might have.
II.
With that in mind, I am calling this my jamboree sermon. The summer for me is over. The new call has begun. The time to ascend this pulpit is at hand, and for good or ill, I am the new minister here. A ministry partner with you as we build on the great foundation of Howard Memorial a future that is worthy of the great membership that is here today, of the great saints that have gone before us, and of the great and gracious God of hope and life and love and truth that we together worship and serve.
My great
friend Jerry Cannon, pastor of C.N. Jenkins Memorial Presbyterian in
He started out his 9 point sermon with lots of Greek and Latin roots, he quoted a bunch of famous people, and noticed that as he preached on, no one was impressed with his learning, that the congregation was detached, and his sermon, he realized was sounding more and more like a lecture and no one was taking notes.
And so he walked out of that pulpit humbled and weakened, his head down, his soul flattened. He walked out questioning his abilities, made humbled by the great task that had before seemed so easy, that God had placed in his way and called him to fulfill.
Ms. Jones, one of the ladies of the church, baptized, confirmed, and ordained there in that same sanctuary, grabbed him after the service, and gave him a supportive hug. “Young man,” she said, “I have no doubt that you are called by God, that you have a deep faith and an unerring intellect, but,” she said, “you need to know one more thing. When you go into that pulpit the way you came down from it, then you will come down from it, the way you went into it.”
III.
Who among us has never been humbled by God? Who among us has never had that experience – gotten into something we seemed so prepared for but when it came time to pay the bills we found out that some of them couldn’t be paid and that we weren’t so big after all?
I guess that is why I have always enjoyed Paul so very much, and why I find him so trustworthy as a writer. Yes, Paul frustrates me – just read Romans and its wordiness, or Galatians and its anger, or Timothy and some of its ill advice and you’ll see what I mean.
But at the same time I find in him someone who is so very much like us. Positive he is right he persecutes the church. Positive that he is just he prosecutes the crimes in his midst. Positive and confident, he has the earliest followers of Jesus stoned and jailed, hunting them down in his zealotry and self-righteousness.
And then he is blinded. Humbled to the point of being led around by the hand. Shocked and stunned, he is called to follow. So shocked is he that he neither eats or drinks for three days. He finds out in a painful and abrupt way that maybe he wasn’t all that right to begin with. Maybe he wasn’t so great after all. That the zealotry he was so confident in was not to be his legacy. He is humbled and sent down a path and along a way that he could not have imagined – yes, that is why I like him.
IV.
But Paul is
not the only character in this tale from Acts 9. No, there is also Ananias, this servant of
God in
Oh, how confident Ananias must have been in himself. A servant of Christ, he knew who he was at least in part, just like we do, by knowing what we are not. By knowing who those are that oppose us and by naming their ills and sins.
Ananias says, just like we would, “Great plan, God, but that guy is going to hurt me – we have all heard about him. He is bad news.”
“Go anyway, for he is my servant now,” God says.
So Ananias goes. Like Abraham, like Moses, like Peter, like so many before him, Ananias goes and follows and does the bidding of God. He is not mentioned biblically again except in one of Paul’s sermons.
This reluctant follower trusts God enough to go to the home of his enemy, his would be prosecutor and persecutor, and baptize him and help him be healed.
V.
Call and reponse. Response and called again. This is how the church works. This is who we are. This is what we must be.
Called to be your new pastor, having responded to the call of God by the hand of this congregation I am here to be in ministry with you.
Today I
stand before you as your pastor, servant, and friend, and I call you to be in
ministry with me. For the
Call and response. Response and called again. This is how the church works. This is who we are. Today we are called by these words in Acts, by this story of two changed disciples, to ask precisely who we are and what it is that God intends for us to become. How is it that God is going to change each of us?
It is clear to me after nearly a decade of theological study and five years of ordained pastoral experience that most people come to church because they have been somehow blinded by Jesus – either blinded by his grace or blinded by his influence. But blinded we are, so much so that most of time we have difficulty seeing Jesus at all.
But don’t miss it – the thrust of this story is that Lord willing, and Paul responding, the blindness, the debilitation is not the final word. Yes, it is the beginning, but it is not the end. God doesn’t let Paul be a second or third class disciple, debilitated and full of pity for his losses. God doesn’t want us blinded – blinded literally or figuratively by our sin, our shortcomings, our need, our want, our anger, our whatever. God wants us to see and see clearly in order that we might be His people, His servants, the sheep of His pasture. God, by calling us to service in the name of Jesus Christ, calls us to see.
And the good and greater news is that minute we achieve and fulfill the callings of God, God is going to call us again for the harvest is great and the workers are few and there is much to be done in the way of feeding the sheep around us who go forgotten, neglected, and ignored.
Call and response. Response and called again. If I may be so bold as to proclaim my agenda as your new pastor it would be simple this: that Howard Memorial be a place of callers and responders, a place where it might be said that over there on St. James Street is a bunch, a whole big bunch, of first-class Presbyterian disciples, that we would we a place where every servant is appreciated and any necessary service is done. A place where every Paul, and every Ananias, every Ruth and every Esther might come and blinded by Jesus, restored to sight in his name, and called forth into the world a disciple tried and true.
Call and response. Response and called again. That is how the church works. It is how we are, and Lord willing, it is how we will be known in our community.
VI.
As Presbyterians, we affirm the priesthood of all believers. We affirm the belief that each of us, young and old, youth and adult, child and octogenarian has a service of God to fulfill. Today we are called as partners in that service, for if God could use Paul surely he can use each of us, those who love his church instead of persecute it.
And when we are serving let us take a page from the jamboree coaches, and from Paul’s first sermon, recorded at Acts 9:20. The church does not have to be complicated. We don’t have to tell all there is the first time we speak, we don’t have to wow others with our knowledge or our learning, we don’t have to call every play in the play book – we only have to follow Paul’s example and tell them the truth about Jesus – “He is the Son of God.” And thanks to God that we such good news to tell.