Faith: Bad for Business, Good for Earthquakes

Sermon, 5/16/10 (Easter 7). So much of our life -- and so often in the church -- we wear the anxious label DBA: Doing Business As. The way of Christ promises us the freedom of BFF: Being Faithful For. Such a faith shakes the foundations of all that seems to be ...

Faith: Bad for Business, Good for Earthquakes

From Worship to Way, 2 of 3

D … B … A.

Raise your hand if you know what that means. And don’t be ashamed to keep your hand down if you don’t know. (Hey, I’m not ashamed to admit that, just two weeks ago at our Rebuilding Together outreach project, I learned for the first time what a vice grip is for!)

D … B … A. Doing Business As.

Perhaps like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s scarlet letter of his novel by that name – the “A” standing for adultery – the slave-girl of today’s scripture had DBA emblazoned on her forehead. A fortune-telling slave can make a lot of money for her handlers, after all.

Perhaps this is why the Apostle Paul became, as we are told, “very much annoyed” when the slave-girl recognized he and Silas as two of her own.

And why not? “These men,” she’s shouting, “are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation!”

“Slaves of the Most High God”: a God-man named Jesus … correct?

Or – more probably – a God-man named Caesar, who was much more popularly known by that same title?

So perhaps – just perhaps – this slave-girl recognizes in Paul and Silas a reflection of herself: oppressed companions, in an empire demanding allegiance to that Most High God? “These men” – like me? – “are slaves of the Most High God!”

Whatever the case: Paul, annoyed, senses the true spiritual source of her owners in her seemingly laudatory words. A nefarious spirit, summarized so profoundly by T. S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason/To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

And so Paul casts out the slave-girl’s spirit in the name of Jesus Christ – not in the name of the Most High God, who the people knew as Caesar. A spirit of possession – of DBA – that would exploit her creation in the image of God for the image of Caesar on her owners’ coins.

And that image on the coins was all that counted for those who owned the slave-girl. For only, as the scriptures put it, “when her owners saw that their hope of making money was (now) gone”, did they see fit to seize, drag, have stripped and flogged these apostles not of Caesar, but of Jesus. “These men”, the owners claimed to the magistrates, who were “disturbing our city … advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”

“Unlawful customs”, of freely proclaiming a liberating gospel, to a people too enslaved to respond to those in need. Those in need – including this slave-girl.

Serving freely in the name of this anti-Caesar named Jesus. The freedom that could only come from a faith unfettered by the claims of “doing business as”.

Faith – not in Caesar, but in Jesus. It was bad for their business. Business as usual. An enslaved person – and it could have been an enslaved institution – whose life and identity is defined by “doing business as.”

Now, I’m going to say a few things that may be painful for some to hear. At a few – not many, but a few – ministry meetings in our congregation, I have heard – at one meeting I counted hearing it five times, from surprising sources – the following declaration: “The church is a business.”

Where in the world – much more so in the gospel – does this idea originate?

All I can think of is that the “church-as-business” notion originates out of fear, and the fear-forgotten-to-breathe known as anxiety. The anxiety that equates the proclaiming of our Christian faith with the material perpetuation of our institution as we know it. An anxiety that does not and cannot believe that faith, and not fear, pays the bills we need to have paid to be vitally Christian – up-front, free of indebtedness to the world. The anxiety borne of doing business as – versus the freedom borne of being faithful for.

For as church consultant Lois Stovall said to me before she led our Session in an amazing retreat in January, “There is no greater wasted energy in the church than the anxiety over money.” Again: the anxiety borne of doing business as – versus the freedom borne of being faithful for.

“But when (the slave-girl’s) owners saw that their hope (through her) of making money was gone …” – God help Paul and Silas from the crowd’s attacks and beatings, for exorcising that spirit from that slave-girl in need! And – need we say it – God help that girl! What happened to her?

Ah, but we are not told. But we do know that God helped Paul and Silas through it all – indeed, through the shaking of the empire’s very foundations. The foundations enslavement that would imprison its resisters but could never imprison their resistance to it. The resistance borne of an earth-shaking faith that we can safely call a complete and overwhelming and awesome faith in a new sort of God.

Or was it something more than faith? If I were to change one word in my sermon title today, it would be changing the word faith to a word some scripture translations use -- and, I believe, with great integrity. A profoundly more relational word, nascent in the text of the Greek original. And that word is trust.

Whatever reflection of our one true and loving God a person may be running from trusting, that person – more often than not – falls back toward that reflection during a cataclysm such as an earthquake. Having lived through two earthquakes – one major in the Bay Area of California in 1989, and one minor in that same area in 1994 – I came to comprehend Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous adage, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

And yet, perhaps we can glean a deeper meaning than a restoration of trust in God with the “violent” earthquake in our scripture today: one where “everyone’s chains were unfastened”. Perhaps an unfastening far more freeing than the stocks around Paul’s and Silas’ feet.

Writing in Sojourners magazine, a man named Don Miller puts it this way:

“Over 200 times in the Bible, God tells us, ‘Do not fear.’ Why? Because God’s pressing us into better stories. Don’t be afraid. Do this thing. It will make you a different person.”¹

Paul and Silas understood this. Enough so that because of their faith – their  trust – in God through Christ, an earth-shattering event such as this one freed and freely created community through them, rather than imprisoned and destroyed those around them. Including those oppressors who have imprisoned them, who are no longer seen as captors to escape from but as neighbors to be present for.

Even if their faith and presence may prove costly, because their captors – unlike the happy ending of this story – may not see them in the same way …

During the course of our adult Christian education series “The Power of Forgiveness” that concluded today, we heard the story of a man named Dirk Willems. Willems was one of countless Christians in the sixteenth century known as Anabaptists – the ancestors of today’s Mennonites and Amish, among others – who were persecuted for their faith.

Imprisoned in 1569 and scheduled to be executed, Willems somehow escaped his captors. While his escape may not have mirrored the actions of Paul and Silas in today’s scripture, what happened afterward did. It was winter, and Willems – light and weakened from his stay in prison – fled across a frozen pond with his well-fed jailor chasing him. He made it across the pond, but the heavier jailor did not, crashing through the ice – about to drown. Seeing this, Willems did not continue fleeing. He ran back to the jailor and pulled him out, saving his life. The jailor then arrested Willems once again, returned him to prison, and shortly thereafter he is executed.²

As one Mennonite historian writes, “What (Willems) did on that icy pond was reflexive – he didn’t have to stop and think whether it was right or wrong or what the consequences would be. He simply did what his faith compelled him to do … Willems’ spontaneous response to someone in need (came) only from a heart undivided.”³

Faith – trust – in God through Christ. Freeing us from our fears – and from doing business as usual – to become free for our neighbors … regardless of our circumstances. Not asking ourselves, “What will happen to us?” but rather asking ourselves, “What will happen to them?” Not falling for the captivity of “doing business as”, but freely responding to Jesus by saying, “We are present for.”

Friends in Christ: Let not our hearts be divided by treating church as a business when our business lies beyond the threshold of this church.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

Benediction …

The eminent conservationist John Muir once declared that he was better off than Union Pacific railroad magnate E. H. Harriman. “I have all the money I want,” Muir explained, “and he hasn’t.”⁴

And when all our hope of making money is gone … where do we place our trust? Whom do we serve?

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.

¹Sojourners (www.sojo.net), January 2010.

²As the story is told in Martin Doblmeier’s film The Power of Forgiveness (Journey Films, 2007).

³ Paul Toews, Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission’s “Profiles of Mennonite Faith” – “Dirk Willems: A Heart Undivided”, found at http://www.mbhistory.org/profiles/dirk.en.html.

⁴Quoted in Martin E. Marty’s “Context”, 42:3, March 2010.