Title: A Safe Place (with cues for power point slides)

Text: Acts 17: 22-31

Date: April 27, 2008

(a map) In Sunday School years ago, I was always fascinated by the Apostle Paul – and most especially by his missionary journeys. I have always been fascinated by maps. In fact right over there on the front pew is a black box being used as a prop for the laptop. It has been there a couple years now because it is just the right size for the job. Inside of that box is my collection of National Geographic maps. I threw away the magazines – which everyone knows is a capital offense – no one throws away National Geographic. But I kept the maps. Anyhow, even as a boy I was fascinated by Paul’s journeys and by tracing them on the maps provided in Sunday School.

(Billy Graham Crusade) As I read the book of Acts, however, I envisioned and pictured what I was reading through my own 20^th century experiences. I put my 20^th century lens on and saw things happening 2000 years as if they were happening today. Not just children in Sunday School do this. We all do this. When I read about Paul the first and great evangelist I could not imagine what Paul - at work as an evangelist - looked like without thinking about Billy Graham. Maybe some of you have had this experience, too. I would imagine Paul preaching in a huge Roman coliseum before thousands of people just like Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden. I would imagine hundreds of people being converted or “saved” at those first revival meetings. I figured they all came forward, swinging their arms in the air to be blessed by Paul before going home. Afterward, I imagined they built a church as Acts indicates happened. Of course the church (New England Church) was a simple white clapboard building with four pillars on the front supporting a soaring steeple with an open housing for one of Paul Revere’s bells!

That is not quite the way it happened. We ought to know it but we frequently forget our lens that cloud the image when we read Scriptures. In today’s lesson, Paul did not preach before thousands in some ancient Madison Square Garden. (Areopagus) Athens in his day was like Berkeley, CA or Cambridge, MA, or Oxford, England – a place internationally acknowledged for scholarship and learning. Rich and high placed Romans around the world sent their sons to Athens for their education. Paul didn’t preach there in a large Roberts Stadium. In fact, what we are reading is a record of a court appearance not a revival meeting. The Areopagus was the supreme court of Athens - a place of where both justice and truth was sought. To the Areopagus, some curious Epicurean and Stoic philosophers had brought Paul and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is which you present?” (v19). “The Athenians spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (v. 21)

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Paul did not convert hundreds. The church he built was not a building at all. It was a new small group of believers who met in a someone’s home. Acts tells us more about that first church in Athens. It was comprised of a congregation of two. After all the work Paul did in , the Billy Graham crusade would have probably considered that way short of the pre-crusade target if not a huge failure. (Dionysius and Damaris) One of those new member was Dionysius who was a judge at the Areopagus. Tradition has it that he later became the Bishop of Athens. The other new convert was Damaris. Damaris was quite likely a wealthy and influential woman in Athens. If that were not so, she would not have been at the Areopagus in the first place. She would have been on her knees washing clothes on stones down by the brook or engaged in some other equally menial task which occupied most women’s time. Her home was Christ Church’s Ross Theatre, the church’s first home. Damaris is one of those first century women without whom we might not know about Paul at all. She and other women like her in other cities made up the first class of local pastors in the cities to which Paul traveled. They provided a place and leadership to the fledgling congregations that Paul left behind.

When Damaris heard Paul talking about carrying a cross, (a cross) she heard and knew something different from what we hear today. By providing a home for that early congregation, she risked losing her home and even her life. When I hear Christians today talk about carrying a cross, I hear stories about things as trivial as suffering with a hangnail on the right foot’s third toe. I had a professor in Seminary who knew something about risk-taking for his faith. He came to America after escaping from the Communist under the iron curtain in Hungary. On the backs of his hands he carried for the rest of his life the scars from cigarette burns he had received while being interrogated and tortured before escaping. That is carrying a cross.

(women in Paul’s life) Damaris in Athens provided something very important for the church. It was so important that it has become itself a part of the church’s identity and mission over the centuries. She provided a safe place in her home for the vulnerable and fledgling group of Followers of the Way, as they knew themselves at that time. A safe-place has been an underlining theme in this year’s pre-Pentecost readings. We read about the disciples on the road to Emmaus looking for a safe place after Jesus’ crucifixion. While on their life’s road that day, they found that the only real safe place was with the Risen Lord himself. We have read about how the disciples holed up in boarded and locked rooms hoping to be safe. They had a tendency to stay there until the spirit finally drove them out into the world again. We have remembered the last supper recently. Finding a safe place to be with his disciples on that last night was important to Jesus. John tells us that Jesus talked to his disciples about the ultimate safe place as he promised, “I go and I prepare a place for you.”

(vision statement)Being a safe place has also emerged as an important aspect of our identity here at Christ Church. The second sentence of our vision statement is, “We are here to provide a safe place, a sanctuary, for each to grow in his or her relationship with God and each other.” Vision statements have two dimensions. First, they speak to how we see ourselves in the present and how we have seen ourselves in the past. Second, they speak to how we see ourselves in the future.

God’s calling is in both dimensions: How we have responded and are responding to God’s call, and most importantly, how we are to respond to God’s call into the future.

How do you hear God calling you as a congregation to be a safe place in the future? Another important question is: by what criteria do we discern that call in the first place? For us, just as it was for Damaris in Athens and every other early Christian whose story is mentioned in the New Testament, God’s call beckons us to pick up a cross and follow Jesus. (cross carrying) Damaris picked up the cross in the risks she took to assist Paul by providing a safe place for Followers of the Way in her home. Like Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross, she too picked up someone else’s cross by offering her home as a safe place.

Our Outreach Board and our Consistory for several months have been carrying on a conversation that is basically about how can our church expand it’s ministry as a safe place. In particular, we have been hashing over the question of being a safe place for holding a conversation with each other about sensitive even controversial topics.

Have you ever reflected on how much we don’t talk about in church, about how much we keep under the carpet or in the closet because of the discomfort of the conversation. Have you ever been challenged by how much more we could really be church to and for each other, and for others beyond, if we could be a place where we talk to each other about so much that most of the time we by pass or we make jokes about or just plain ignore or deny.

Alcoholism is a good example here. (AA sign)About the only time I hear this topic being mentioned is when someone cracks some smart Alec remark or joke, usually very inappropriate and most of the time very immature. Evansville is known as the place that has the greatest concentration per capita of UCC congregations in the whole world. No other place has so many UCC churches per capita as right here. I believe we have another record. Evansville has more UCC churches per capita than any other place that totally disregard the need for a ministry to alcoholism and its victims. I have visited every UCC church in the area. In those visits I have also looked for something that is present in UCC churches and many, many other churches everywhere around the world and which I have seen everywhere I have ever been except here. I cannot find in our church and our sister UCC churches the familiar signs by the entry ways giving the schedules for AA, Alanon, and Alateen meetings that take place in the building. Alcohol treatment and ministry to the alcoholic and its victims is invisible in Evansville and, most especially, in our UCC churches here. You really have to go out and look for that ministry which in so many other places you trip over as soon as you get near a church.

Alcoholism has many victims. (alcoholism) Many persons dealing with that and other addictive disorders be it their own illness or someone close to them is carrying a cross. When Jesus said, “Pick up your cross,” the cross he meant is someone else’s cross for you to carry for them if you are their brother or sister. There are many carrying huge crosses because of the afflictions of alcoholism to families, individuals and society itself. One of the ways churches provide a ministry of safe place, - one of the ways churches pick up crosses as Jesus commanded, - is by providing room for AA, Alateen and Alanon to meet in their buildings. Where are the signs here at Christ Church and why aren’t there any here or in any UCC and at most churches in general in Evansville?

I have never thought(people in church) that being either gay or straight is a cross to carry for anyone. But gay people and their families have crosses to carry in the animosity, the prejudice, hatred and even threat to life that they receive in our culture. Like alcoholism, politics, and even religion quite often, sexuality is one of those subjects we don’t even talk about in the church. Yes, I included religion in that list because there are some aspects of our faith that we can’t even talk about in church. We don’t talk about those issues because we don’t feel safe for any number of reasons doing so. What we have been discussing at Outreach and Consistory meetings is taking some steps to intentionally make our church a safe place, as our vision statement calls us, for discussing difficult subjects. Specifically, we have been discussing showing a film for any in the congregation to come and view. The film is entitled, “For the Bible Tells Me So.” (film clip) It is the story of four sets of parents who share the singular experience of having a child come out to them as a gay person. All are Americans, all are very active church goers, and all share the struggle this experience brings to people who have been brought up in the strong Biblical tradition of their faith. The film tells their stories and offers a tremendous kick-off for discussion and study and ministry itself. By showing the film we would be offering a safe place to engage in conversation about a difficult subject. By showing the film we might even be lightening the load for some who carry this cross by being present for them as a church in a way that churches are seldom there for people who carry the crosses represented by difficult subjects – about which we won’t even speak not to mention, reaching out to the people invovlved.

We began this morning in Athens (Areopagus) with Paul revealing an unknown God in his arguments before the judges of truth. God is still unknown to many people. We are called to make visible this invisible God. And God still can become known to others. God becomes known through our picking up the crosses that others carry. Sometimes that is doing nothing more than providing a safe place for honest conversation and loving listening.

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