Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

May 17, 2009

Scripture:         Acts 10:44-48

Sermon:           “Out of Order”

            There was once a great movement that swept like wildfire in the dry brush across the midsection of a new nation called the United States of America.  Some of you are here in this place, New Albany, Indiana, because your ancestors settled this land as pioneers expanded the borders westward.  And this great movement followed on the heels of these pioneers with a great fervor to bring folks to faith in God through Jesus Christ.

            They grew out of these great tent revivals in the hill country of Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.  And they sought to make the Christian faith simple again, as they imagined it once was in the very beginning.  They said things like, “we are not the only Christians, but we are Christians only,” because they were tired of the divisions in the church.  They said things like, “no creed but Christ,” and, “no book but the Bible,” because they had been alienated by the confusing doctrines created over the years by the church.

            Does any of this sound familiar to you?  You who call yourselves Disciples of Christ, does it sound familiar?  These are the roots of your family tree, you know.  Barton Stone.  Alexander Campbell.  Great thinkers and great motivators of people in faith.  The churches they established appealed to the pioneering spirit of the American frontier.

            One of the churches established in this great movement was in a new town along the banks of the Ohio River.  From what I’ve read, this church was actually a group of Baptists who found the message of the Disciples appealing.  That town was New Albany, Indiana.  And that church was Park Christian Church, so named for its proximity to a park that no longer exists.  The year was 1835.  We’ll be celebrating our 175^th anniversary next year, by the way.  Stay tuned as preparations are made for a big event!

            I’ve heard rumors that Alexander Campbell himself preached from the pulpit of this church.  And that’s quite a claim to fame among our ilk.

            But, there was another name that took simplifying the Christian faith to a whole new level.  He was Walter Scott.  His message was the “five-finger exercise.”  If you really want to know what the gospel is all about, he instructed to remember one simple step for each finger of your hand—assuming you have five, that is.

            Want to learn it?

#1        You come to have faith by believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

#2        You repent of your sins by confessing them openly and vowing to change your ways.

#3        You get baptized by being immersed in the water

#4        You accept God’s forgiveness

#5        You receive the Holy Spirit

            Folks liked to have an easy, systematic way of boiling things down.  And Walter Scott’s five-finger exercise did just that.  Want to be a Christian?  Want to be saved?  Here are the five easy steps.

            And that probably reflects the way the first disciples went about things.  They were no longer disciples after Jesus had died and was resurrected.  Disciples are followers, students, learners like the word “discipline” suggests.  They became apostles.  So they understood themselves as no longer students, but “messengers” or “ambassadors”.

            Now, the apostles, who were mostly former disciples except for a couple of notable converts like Paul, were trying their level best to understand exactly how it was that folks were receiving salvation in Jesus Christ.  And they had experienced it themselves in a very certain way.  They were Jews, of course.  And they’d all been baptized at one time or another.  And then the Holy Spirit came upon them.  And that all seemed to be a pattern they could teach to others.

            Be a Jew that believes in Jesus as the Messiah, get baptized, receive the Holy Spirit.  That’s how it works.

            But, then it happened that things didn’t always work out according to that plan.  And that’s what today’s scripture is all about.  The folks who came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah were not Jews.  So, what could it mean that they believe in a Messiah?  On top of that, they Holy Spirit went on ahead and filled them just like had happened to the other believers.  They received the Holy Spirit without even being baptized yet.  And that’s just out of order.  Entirely.

            Here is how the story goes in Acts 10, verses 44 through 48.  You can read it along with in the pew bible on page   of the New Testament.

            While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.  The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.  Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”  So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.  Then they invited him to stay for several days.

            That’s how it is.  People are forever trying to define just exactly what God is and what God is up to.  And they’ll tell you how much they know, write a few books, and suddenly God is completely understandable.

            But, then the Holy Spirit goes and throws a wrench into the whole plan by doing things that don’t quite fit.  And that’s what Jesus warned us would happen.  We haven’t listened all that well.  But, that’s what he said.  He said to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

            Most folks remember better what he said next to Nicodemus.  It’s there in John 3:16.  He said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

            The Spirit of God blowing around however it sees fit?  We haven’t remembered that as well.  But, that’s what Jesus said would happen.  Got a mind of its own.

            So, when that unpredictable Holy Spirit gets poured out on some Gentiles, folks who hadn’t bothered to be circumcised and all that, and they hadn’t even been baptized yet, these apostles weren’t quite ready for it.  Peter said, “Well, y’all, I think we should probably go ahead and baptize them anyway.  Looks like God’s already gone and claimed them.”

            There’s a man traveling out to Los Angeles for an important business meeting a few years ago.  Took three flights to get there in something like 12 hours.  Layovers in Cincinnati and then Salt Lake City.  Typical of these ordeals, his bags end up somewhere else entirely.  Lost.  Who knows when they’ll turn up?  He’s got a meeting in four hours after landing, so the one suit that he had packed in those bags in order to impress his clients is hopelessly lost.

            Well, he’s a resourceful guy.  Four hours?  No problem.  Plenty of time to buy a new suit and have it ready to go.  So, he walks to a fine men’s clothing store near his upscale hotel.  It is on a street called Rodeo Drive.  Fancy.  And he’s wearing sandals, some cargo shorts, and a tee-shirt from a bar down in Florida.  It’s all he’s got now.  Looks, quite frankly, like he’s way out of place.  But, that’s all about to change when he buys a new suit.  Temporary problem.

            He starts to open the door of the men’s store and sees a sign that says, “Proper Attire Required.”  To be honest, that sounds like a bit of a joke.  That’s what they’re selling in that store, proper attire.  Of course he’ll have proper attire once he gives him a credit card.  So, he walks on in looking the way he does and starts to look at the very fine suits hanging on racks.

            “No, no, no, no, sir.  You have to be wearing a jacket and tie.”  That’s what came booming out from behind the cash register from a little man with a measuring tape around his neck.  “You can’t come in here wearing that.  You have to have a jacket and tie.”

            Do you see the irony here?

            “That’s what I’m buying, a jacket and a tie.  Actually, I’m thinking about one of these suits here.”

            “You have to wear a jacket and tie in this store, sir.”

            “I don’t have a jacket and tie, yet.  I’ll have them as soon as you sell them to me.”

            He left.  You can get a suit and tie at plenty of other places if you’ve got four hours.  And that’s what he did.

            But, it’s something like the church every now and then.  Folks have a set of expectations for how you ought to be when you get here.  You want to come to church, get your act together and come on in.  Turn your life around and you’ll fit in just fine.  That’s the order of things.  You come to church when you’ve got all your stuff cleaned up, or at least put on a good show of it.

            It happens.  They turn around and see somebody out of order and whisper to their neighbor, “You’ll never believe who just walked in here.”

            They forget that the Holy Spirit may be trying to make something happen.  And it isn’t going to work with this one like it worked with a lot of others.  Just like Jesus warned, you know, “The wind blows where it chooses.”

            Peter?  He seemed to think this was a great thing.  “They don’t quite fit our expectations?  Well, God’s doing something here we ought to pay attention to.  Baptize them, for crying out loud.”

            You know, I’d say the Holy Spirit is probably blowing around every single time a person starts to seek out what may be happening in a church.  They’re looking for a new life.  A new life is what we’ve got to offer.  But, sometimes we expect them to already be wearing it when they get here.  Out of order.

            I connected to an old friend from high school on Facebook a few months ago.  I say “Facebook” and some of you scratch your heads.  But, then there are others here that are my Facebook friends.  Young folks.  Older folks.  You’d be amazed.  You can find people from across the world that you’ve known at different points in your life.  And you can begin to reconnect and keep in touch so much more readily.  And I think it makes all of our relationships just a little less disposable than before.  That’s a good thing.

            This woman is now living in Texas, and I saw in the pictures she’d shared on her page that she had married the guy she was dating when we were all seniors together.  Her high school sweetheart.  And I thought that was really romantic to fall in love with someone at such a young age and make it work all these years.  They had a family with three children in Fort Worth.

            I saw the pictures of her children, too.  Beautiful.  A couple of sandy-blonde headed boys.  And then there was this girl who had really, really dark skin.  And I assumed that they had adopted her at some time.  So, I stepped out on a limb and stuck my foot in my mouth and just asked her about it.

            “Well,” she wrote me, “the boys are mine from my first marriage.  And that didn’t work out at all.  I don’t even know where their father is anymore.  And the three of us struggled along for a couple of years until I ran into Keith again at a class reunion.  Where were you, by the way?  Anyhow, Keith has this little girl and they’ve been struggling along, too, since his first wife died.  And we fell in love again.  Now, we’re a family.  Happiest, healthiest family I’ve ever been a part of.  We know that we need each other so much.  We’re not what you call 2.5 kids with a dog and a picket fence in the suburbs, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever known.  We’re just sort of cobbled together.  And it works.”

            Now, that strikes me as a better image for the church.  You?  Do you think the Holy Spirit blows around as it wills and just sort of cobbles together a new family in Christ and that it’s the best thing we could ever know?  It may not look like what anybody expected at times.  But, it is not out of order.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)