Three Truths of a Christian Witness
Pastor Mathew Magera – 5/8/16 – Sermon 164
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Acts 1:8 is probably in my
top ten list of favorite quotes made by Jesus because it actually gives his
followers instructions using plain normal language and doesn't twist it around
into some parable. Plus the fact that these are the last words of Jesus that
were recorded before he ascended into heaven, so if we put any value on
peoples' last words, I would place a bet that these instructions are pretty
important to us. We spent most of our bread crumbs study last Sunday talking
about this very verse, how it applies to us today and how we can understand the
locations to which Jesus wants us to be witnesses. I still want to use this
verse as the foundation for my message this morning but I'm going to forego
talking about the locations in order to open up our minds to the concept of a
witness. Jesus says, "you will be my witnesses." That's all I'm going
to use because it might raise up at least two questions in our mind, including:
what exactly does it mean to be a witness? and what exactly are we witnesses
to?
If you’ve ever heard of
someone going witnessing before, you might think of someone who is going door
to door or is trying to convert someone into being Christian. That, of course,
can be one interpretation of what it means to be a witness but in its simplest
form, being a witness means to share the hope of the resurrected Christ. This
can and is done in more ways than by going door to door or by standing on a
crowded street corner with a sign and a megaphone. In fact, if we use the term
“witnessing”, the best place do such thing is through ordinary conversation.
Nothing can be more socially awkward than going up to a random persons house
and asking them if they believe in Jesus. Perhaps that’s one reason why
Lutherans are not known to do that. On the other hand, Lutherans get criticized
for having nothing good to say about our faith in any situation. Still, Jesus
calls us to be witnesses and we can do this, we can. Wherever we can sow seeds
of hope and pointing that hope to Jesus, we are being a witness.
So, then when it comes to
the question of what exactly are we witnesses to, the answer is that we are
witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and everything this resurrection
means as a result of it. To say it in
another way, we are witnesses to life after death or hope after hopeless. Now,
this presents us with a problem. How can we be witnesses of the resurrection of
Jesus, how can we be witnesses to life after death if we, ourselves, have not
experienced it? Did you see Christ rise from the dead? Did he get into your car
and talk to you on your way to Grand Rapids one day? Have you died and been
risen by God into eternal life? We probably can’t say yes to these questions,
but the question we can answer yes to is the one that says, “do you live your life
any differently on account of Jesus rising from the dead?” And what can we say,
hopefully? Absolutely I do!
In fact, we are the best
possible choices as Christian witnesses not because we’re witnessing the
resurrection, we’re witnessing life after death right now. The truth of the
resurrection is all around us. We are here because there is a part of us that
is experiencing that hope and that wants to experience it more. The promise of
life after death fully surrounds us and is already a part of us, that grace,
that forgiveness. Our witness therefore is our life in Christ. We are his
witnesses. As a witness, too, we are given many different words of
encouragement in our task and those encouraging words are also used in such a
way that when we fail they are able to lift us up again, true statements that
reflect our mission as witnesses in the world.
Truth #1: A
Christian witness does not depend on logic
The resurrection defies our
logical minds. There is no question about it. Life just does not restart itself
three days after it was gone. The body cannot repair itself to that extent. So,
as a Christian witness, we are proclaiming something that takes our thinking to
a new level.
For instance, we know that
two plus two is four but we don't say that someone is a witness to the fact
that two plus two is four. This logical truth is normally communicated by
teachers not by witnesses. So, when someone needs to communicate facts to a
court, it is not a teacher they call but a witness. A teacher would say that when
you add two apples to two apples there is no way you would have five apples
because that's impossible. A witness, however, would say that when you add two
apples to two apples it makes five apples because they saw it happen that way.
The teacher and the witness have different stories, one using logic and one removed
from it.
This very truth of being a
witness to life after death makes it oh so difficult for people to grasp in our
world because we are bound by the limitations of logic. There is no logical explanation
for Jesus coming back from death but thankfully, as witnesses, we are not bound
by such a limitation because faith allows us to break out of it. We don't
witness to doctrines or books, we witness to an event that happened. We witness
to an act of God.
Truth #2: A
Christian witness is aware of the context
Earlier I said that one of
the reasons we make good witnesses is because we are actively experiencing and
witnessing the resurrection here and now. When we say we are witnesses to life
after death, we are saying that Jesus' resurrection from the dead changed the
entire world and that after that event, everything that happens happens as a
result of that change. Everything about our life today is founded on Easter
Sunday. However, it is so important for witnesses not to stuck in the past in
our communication of that witness. This is why it is important for us to learn
and utilize methods of communicating our witness in the modern world. A
Christian witness is aware of the context. There is a certain way I preach each
Sunday that takes into account the context. Sometimes I have a particular group
of people in mind when I preach. If I'm preaching on Christmas or Easter to a
crowd that includes some who I know have never been to church before, I craft
the message differently than I would other days. If it’s a special day, like
Mother’s Day, I try to bring in illustrations that might include a reference to
such things, as I will be doing in just a few minutes. I try to use modern
examples to show how the resurrection event impacts us today.
A Christian witness is aware
of the context because it is when Christ can enter our hearts in our world that
we are most likely to receive him. If you are out fishing with someone and try
to start up a conversation on the Diet of Worms and the impact it had on the
reformation, you might not be well received. However, if you talk about how God
shaped the world around us and and what love it took to do that, you might get
somewhere. And, if you didn't know the Diet of Worms was an event in history,
not a health kick someone tried in the 1500s. Always be aware of the context.
Truth #3: Christian
witness is the call of the church
We can't escape the fact
that Jesus issues us these last words as a command. "You will be my
witnesses." Being witnesses to life after death is more than optional.
It's not something we choose to do, but rather something absolutely necessary
for the growing of God's kingdom. But, to be honest, after hearing that as a
witness we are not bound by logic and that we should be aware of our context,
something deep inside of us bothers us when we hear that being a witness is the
call of the church. It bothers us because we often wonder why we might not be so
good at it. Perhaps we are bothered because it appears that we aren't making
progress.
Here is our encouragement,
right when we need it. Jesus says we will be his witnesses. We will be his
witnesses. He didn't say, "you will try to be my witnesses but fall on
your butts in the process." He didn't say, "You will make a terrible
effort at being my witnesses, so good luck, bye." He said, "You will
be my witnesses" As Christians, as followers of Christ, no matter our
doubts, questions, lack of knowledge, whatever it may be that holds us back,
don't let it. We are his witnesses. He tells us so. We are his church. We tell
of the good news, the event that Jesus was raised from the dead and ascended
into heaven. This means that because of what Jesus has done for us, as his
followers, as his witnesses, we cannot fail. We trust in his words and promises
that because of his death and resurrection that there is a life beyond this
one, that we are surrounded by it, that we are a part of it already and that
makes us not only qualified to be witnesses, but darn good ones too.
* * *
The bottom line is that we
are his witnesses. It's a daunting task to proclaim the illogical to a logical
world. It's not always easy to speak a historical event in a present context,
but the promise is that we are his witnesses and that through Christ we cannot
fail. Even as we might fear that his promises could potentially be false, I
want to offer you one last piece of hope that might keep you encouraged as we
go on our way this week. With it being Mother's Day today, I thought it would
be appropriate to share this perspective as each of us have been in this very
situation. If my readers would come forward and take their places, I would like
to offer this as a new way of understanding the promise of life after death along
with our call to be witnesses to that
promise in a story taken from the book, Your Sacred Self by Dr. Wayne Dyer. The
story is called "Conversation in the Womb: A Parable of Life after
Delivery."
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you
believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has
to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what
we will be later.”
“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind
of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here.
Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have
other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating
with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and
everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is
to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s
different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why
has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in
the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It
takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet
Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s
laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We
are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and
could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She
doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you
focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear
Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
While I can't say we would
have had minds like that while in the womb, this story affirms our questions of
being a witness in this world while also providing hope that if there is life
after delivery when it seems impossible, there is a hope of life after death.
In a way, we've experienced that transition. So, go out and live by this hope.
Go and be his witnesses in the world in response to his command and his call.
Live your life as if you were already there because you are. We still might be
fearful for ourselves, for others, but we also have each other to be witnesses
for us just as we are witnesses for others in their doubt or fear. So, I leave
you with this question that doubles as a word of hope for you to carry with you
this week: If God can bring forth life from the womb, who are we to say that
God can't bring forth life from the grave? To God be the glory, now and always.
Amen.