Acts 16:9-15
9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.
11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. 12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.
13 On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.
This world is not as God would have it to be. As long as there is killing in our streets, hunger in our cities, and hatred in our hearts, we’ve not yet arrived. And I firmly believe that as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to make this world more like the one Jesus proclaimed, the Kingdom of God. But how do we help make this world as God wants it to be? How do we join together to make God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven? I think the answer is kind of counter intuitive.
We are so used to be do-ers, being busy. Many pastors, myself included, like to encourage their congregations to do more for Christ. Today I hope to show you how to stop, listen, ask questions, and pause. I’m going to call this the “slap method.” We are going to learn to slap one another, in Jesus’s name. And of course, as good followers of Jesus, you will turn the other cheek. 🙂
The text immediately before our scripture for this morning is the story of the Jerusalem Council. This council convened around the question of how Jewish a person needed to be to become a Christian. I know, that was a strange way to say it, but the question boiled down to how much of the Torah a person had to keep in order to be a part of the church. Remember that Christianity started as a sect of Judaism, and likely didn’t completely separate from one another for a generation or two after Jesus’s death. And the main concern seemed to be circumcision. Did a man need to be circumcised to be a Christian? We find the result of their council in Acts 15:28-29, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.”
Circumcision is no longer required to be a part of the church. The door has been flung wide open for Gentiles to enter the church and to enter the kingdom.
At the end of chapter 15, we find Paul setting out for another missionary journey. Paul and Barnabas had gone on a mission trip earlier, where they would frequently go to synagogues and teach the Jews about Jesus. Many were convinced, and they believed that Jesus was their long-expected Messiah. This approach was working for Paul! Now, fresh off the Jerusalem Council, Paul wants to return to the churches that he previously helped establish. We are told that he wants to share with them the findings of the Jerusalem Council. For this mission trip, Paul takes Silas and a young man named Timothy.
The text tells us that Timothy’s mother was a Jew who believed in Jesus, and his father was Greek. So what does Paul do before they head out to tell the churches that circumcision was no longer a requirement to be a part of the church? Paul has Timothy circumcised. But Luke, the author of Acts, explains to us that Timothy’s circumcision is done so that he can enter the synagogues, preach to the Jews, and be accepted by their communities. I guess that makes sense.
However, the plans change for Paul, Silas, and Timothy. They never make it to those churches that Paul helped establish. In verse 6 we read that Paul and his companions were “kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.” They try a different location in verse 7, “When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.”
I’m not sure how to interpret this. I don’t know how the Holy Spirit kept them from preaching in the province of Asia, and I’m not sure how the spirit of Jesus kept them out of these cities, whose names I don’t know how to pronounce. Did people just not listen in Asia? Were they physically kept out of these other cities because they were outsiders? I don’t know, but Luke attributed these failures to the triune God. Somehow, God kept them from ministering to the people they wanted to visit on this missionary journey. Paul wants to do something, to keep doing what he has been doing, but God straight-up stops him.
Here’s what I think is going on. Paul’s ministry has been to the Jews, and though I can’t say for sure who he was planning to visit in Asia, Mysia, or Bithynia, I assume he was going to continue to visit with Jews in established synagogues. But God says no. No, we aren’t going to keep doing this as we have always done it. Sure, you will keep preaching the love, grace, and mercy of Jesus to the Jews, but that’s no longer our main focus. That whole Jerusalem Council thing we just did was about bringing outsiders in.
God is saying, “Paul, I’ve got other plans for you.”
This is where the “stop” part of the slap method comes in. Paul was doing good work, preaching to the Jews and establishing Christian churches. There was a time and a place for this ministry, and Paul did it well. God ending that ministry was not meant to be a critique of what Paul has previously done, but that role had run its course. Now Paul is being told to stop. He isn’t told to stop and do nothing, but stop and do something different. There was a time and a place for Paul to minister to the Jews. Now it is time for a new mission field.
I think that this is a good reminder for many churches who find their numbers decreasing. There are so many churches that look back on the 80’s and 90’s as their glory days. They had Sunday evening church, Wednesday activities, and summer Bible Schools. Maybe they went door-to-door inviting people to special events at the church. But over the years the level of interest has dropped and today people’s time is already stretched thin. It is okay to stop, in fact, in Paul’s case, God demanded he stop. Stop and do something else, something new.
God has a new mission field in mind: the Gentiles. Up until now, the main missionary work of Paul has taken place among the Jews, often meeting in the local synagogues. But now, Paul and his companions will be reaching out to a new ethnic and religious group. Let’s look at verses 9-10, “During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”
Notice that the pronoun used to describe this group changes from “they” to “we” in verse 10. Many scholars believe that Paul, Silas, and Timothy picked up another companion before they went to Macedonia. And with “we” being the 1st person singular, we can assume that the additional missionary was the author of Acts, Luke.
Here’s the thing about Macedonia, it is a long way from Jerusalem, and it is a very Greek part of the world. In fact, to get to Macedonia, you need to cross the Aegean Sea into modern-day Greece. If Paul’s target audience is the Jews, this doesn’t look like a great option. But remember, Paul and his friends were blocked when they tried to go north, south, and east. And Paul has a vision of a man inviting them to cross the sea into the very Gentile, very Greek region of Macedonia.
So what do you do? You get in a boat and you cross the sea.
The “l” from the slap method is for listen. I wish I could tell you that it was as easy to hear and discern God’s calling as it was for Paul. We don’t all have dreams as clear as Paul’s, but I also don’t want us to simply dismiss this experience as something that was meant for Paul and not for average people like us. I like the word listen because it means a few things. When we listen we slow down or stop altogether and intentionally pay extra attention to something or someone. This isn’t just background music, but something that we are actually paying attention to.
But to listen means more than just to hear something. It also requires action. Paul heard God calling him, but he didn’t stop there. He got in a boat and crossed the sea. Paul listened.
My wife can tell me a million times to wash my whiskers down the drain, and I can hear her, but not actually do it. If I’m really listening to her, I will act appropriately.
We know what happens in our text. Paul goes to Macedonia, and we find this in verse 13, “On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there.”
Paul and his companions don’t go to the synagogue, like they normally would have done on the Sabbath. They can’t go to the synagogue, because there wasn’t one in Macedonia. In order to have a synagogue in a city, you must have ten Jews. There wasn’t even that many, which is just another reminder that Paul is ministering to a different group than he was used to. So they went down to the river to pray. They met some women, and struck up a conversation with them. Notice, it doesn’t simply say that Paul taught them or preached (kerusso) to them, but they struck up a conversation, leleo in the Greek. I’m sure Paul asked questions of the women, and they asked questions right back.
One of those women was Lydia, a dealer of purple cloth. She was wealthy, the head of her own household. Lydia was convinced by her conversation with Paul, and she and her household were baptized. And an interesting side note, there is reason to believe that this wealthy woman helped finance Paul’s later missionary journey.
We Christians tend to think we need to do all of the talking, telling people what they need. At its best, that sounds like being bossy. At its worst, it looks like colonialism. Often, it is somewhere in the middle.
I heard a pastor share this week about her first year in her first pastorate. This woman had a passion to serve the people of her community and she envisioned her church being a blessing to the people around them. I think that is a beautiful vision, one that every church should have. We are blessed to be a blessing to others. This pastor met with her church council, they shared some ideas within the council, and ultimately voted to help a local school. Their church was positioned adjacent to a school, and they started to think of ways that they could be a blessing to that congregation. They prepared a list, and the pastor arranged a time to meet with the principal. They sat down together and the pastor shared, excitedly, that they were going to have a coat drive for the kids. And they were going to have tutors come in a read with the children, helping the children who were not keeping up with the rest of the class. The pastor shared her entire list with the principal and walked out the door and back to her office.
It wasn’t until much later that something struck her. She never thought to ask the principal what they were already doing and how they might be able to help. She never asked, “What can we do for you?” Instead, she told the principal what they were going to do.
We need to be careful when we go into a situation that we are unfamiliar with. We can’t assume that we know what someone else needs. We need to ask questions, we need to make observations, and we need to be aware that God is already active there among them.
Let’s jump ahead to Acts 18 to fill in the “p” of the slap method. Acts 18:5-6 says, “When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. But when they opposed Paul and became abusive, he shook out his clothes in protest and said to them, ‘Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent of it. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.’”
Paul’s time seems to be split between ministering to the Jewish and Gentile populations. And what was effective earlier in his ministry just wasn’t getting it done now. Paul had to pause again, to reassess just what his calling was.
We are just finishing our first ever diaper drive from the Valley Mission. If you have been around for a while, you may know that we have traditionally, for the last 4 years or so, held a toilet paper drive for the Mission each year in the spring. We’ve even had some fun names for this drive, like “wipe out poverty.” This all started years ago when we spoke with some people at the mission and asked what we could provide. Toilet paper is seems like a silly thing to collect, perhaps because no matter how old you are, potty humor is still funny. This was an easy thing to bring in. I encouraged people to pick up an extra pack of toilet paper when they went to the grocery store.
This year, as spring was coming around, we probably would have had another toilet paper drive, if another church hadn’t received some press for making a major toilet paper donation to the Mission. So we did something we hadn’t done in a few years: we asked what they needed. Their needs had changed, and if we had just done what we always had done, that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. But that wouldn’t have been what they needed the most.
The “s” in the slap method was a complete stop. That ministry had run it’s course and God was calling us to something new. The “p” is simply a pause to assess.
Paul, who was perhaps the greatest missionary of all time, used the slap method. He was open to God’s leading, and when a ministry had run its course, he stopped it. When God was calling him to something new, he listened. When confronted with a new situation, Paul asked questions. And after a period of time, Paul paused to reassess.
It is my hope that we can be the kind of Christians who slap one another. We are a bunch of do-ers, but sometimes, to be the most effective for the Kingdom of God, we need to stop.
Staunton Mennonite Weblog 