What I Have I Give You

7

WHAT I HAVE I GIVE YOU

Acts 3:1-19; Luke 24:36-48

A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on

April 22, 2012

As many of you know, my parents live in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the figures who played a prominent role in Atlanta during the civil rights era was the rabbi at the oldest synagogue in Atlanta, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild. In 1958, his synagogue, called “The Temple” was dynamited by white supremacists. It is the bombing described in the movie, “Driving Miss Daisy.” When the people came for Sabbath services on the next Friday after the bombing, they found the windows shattered and boarded up and some of the doors hanging off their hinges. At the service, the Temple was overflowing with people – there were far more than would have been there for a regular Friday evening service. When Rabbi Rothschild got up to speak during the service, he looked out and after standing silently for a moment surveying the crowd with a penetrating gaze, he quipped, “So this is what it takes to get you to temple!”[1]

A somewhat similar scene takes place here in Acts 3. In this case, the event, the “explosion,” that draws a crowd to Solomon’s Portico at the Temple in Jerusalem is the healing by Peter and John of a well-known beggar who had been lame by birth. Friends of the lame man always brought the man to one of the gates of the Temple so he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he asks Peter and John for money, the two apostles look intently at the man before Peter says, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have, I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” Then, with Peter holding his right hand, the man stands up and walks. When “all the people [see] him walking and praising God,” Luke, the author of Acts, tells us, they go running after Peter and John.

What happens at Solomon’s Portico is similar to what happened at the Temple in Atlanta in 1958, or what happened to congregations across the country at the end of World War II or after the events of 9-11. After momentous events, both good and bad, people are drawn to gather with others in sacred places out of a combination of fear, gratitude, and awe. In the same way, after the healing in front of the Temple in Acts 3, a large crowd gathers around Peter and John.

What do you think they are looking for? A spectacle? Healing for themselves or someone they love? What draws them to Peter and John - more miracles? Simple curiosity? “Perhaps they did not even know themselves. All they knew was that something startling and unexpected disrupted their normal world, and they gathered at the holy place. ‘So this is what it takes to get you to temple!’”[2]

We may not know for sure what they are looking for, but we do know for sure what they get when they get to Solomon’s Portico – not more miracles but a sermon. Peter delivers the second major sermon in Acts here in chapter 3, and believe it or not, it, and not the healing, is the climax of chapter 3.

Why is that? Why would a sermon be more important than a miraculous healing in the eyes of the author, Luke?

Because Luke knows, what Peter and John know, that the healing, as amazing and awesome as it is, is susceptible to being misunderstood. In the same way, Jesus knows in Luke 24, the other passage read today, that it is not enough for his disciples to simply see and touch his risen body, any more than it was enough for them to witness his crucifixion. After he eats with them, he takes time and “opens their mind to understand the scriptures.” He shows them how his suffering, death, and resurrection are all described and predicted in the scriptures.

Whether startling and joyful like the healing of the lame man, or tragic, joyful, and awesome like Jesus’ death and resurrection, we need more than the events themselves to understand what God is up to. It is not enough to see. We also need to understand. As John Calvin once wrote, the scriptures are the spectacles through which we look at the events of the world so that we can see things more clearly, understand them more completely. The scriptures act as a kind of narrative thread tying together what might otherwise look random so that we can better comprehend the ongoing story that God is writing in our lives and the life of the world.

Notice what goes wrong in the people’s minds and hearts here before they hear Peter’s sermon. First, they misunderstand the source of the healing. They think that this man is healed because of some power or knowledge on the part of Peter and John.

They are not alone. We too have a seemingly bottomless hunger for people who might have some extra power or extra knowledge that will heal us or make life easier for us. It used to be faith healers in tents and traveling salesmen, now it is slick presentations on television infomercials and in best-selling self-help books. If only you tap into the power they have tapped into, if only you have the secret knowledge that they have, if only you follow the formula that they have worked out, then you will be healthier, smarter, and wealthier.

What Peter says to the people then, he says to us now: “Do you really think it was our power, our faith, or our wisdom that healed this man? No, this was God’s doing, and God’s doing alone.”

To be sure, we can learn from the wisdom, insights, and experiences, of others. But God alone has the power to give us what we need. There is no bestseller, no matter how many copies it sells, that can take the place of the Bible for helping us to understand what we are seeing. There is nothing offered on the Food Network that will satisfy our deepest hungers. And there is no exercise program or doctor’s prescription that has the power to truly and fully heal us. Only God can do that. Indeed, what happens, according to Peter, when we place our ultimate trust in human power and human wisdom? The cross, where God’s Son was crucified by the political and religious leaders, with the people’s support.

Peter preaches so that the people will not misunderstand who did the healing here. It was God and God alone. The second misunderstanding that Peter preaches to correct is what is required of those listening to him. They think it is enough to be astonished. He wants them to repent.

After the people witness the lame man leaping around and praising God, there is understandably a whole swirl of emotions: “wonder,” “amazement,” “astonishment,” according to Luke. There is nothing wrong with those emotions. Indeed, they are appropriate. But Peter wants them to do more than stand around and appreciate what they have just seen. He wants also to see them enlisted in a cause, God’s cause.

Enlisting in that cause begins with repentance, he tells them. What the word, “repentance,” literally means is “to turn.” What Peter is telling his listeners to do, then and now, is to confess our sins and receive God’s grace through Jesus Christ; to turn from our way of doing things to God’s way; to turn away from trusting in ourselves and to turn to trusting in God.

As Tom Long points out in his commentary on this passage, whenever we witness a miracle or wonder, we may be filled with wonder and joy. “But Peter’s sermon lets us know that such events call for an ever-deeper response of self-reflection. God’s healing and restoring work discloses another world, another reality, another sovereignty shimmering amid the wreckage of a decaying culture. In the face of God’s deeds of mercy all around us, we are summoned not merely to say, ‘How wonderful!’ but to turn around, to repent, to change our citizenship [from this world to the Kingdom of God], and to become a faithful part of God’s work in [this] world.”[3]

Which brings us to the third misunderstanding that Peter’s sermon helps to correct. Looking at the healing of the lame man in Peter and John’s presence, the people are likely to think that such healings can happen only with other people – not with themselves, in other words, not with us.

There is a two-step wonder when we look at these two passages together. First, in Luke 24, Jesus tells the disciples, the very ones who have betrayed, denied, and run away from him, that they are to be his witnesses – and they are to be given his power. Then, in Acts 3, Peter tells the crowds gathered around him that John and he and the other disciples have no monopoly on the power to be Jesus’ witnesses. It is passed on to all who have faith, even those who rejected Jesus and failed him. The only necessary ingredients for miracles to be done, such the healing of the lame man, is faith. The power of Jesus Christ takes care of the rest.

Astonishment and wonder are not enough when it comes to witnessing what God has done and what God is doing. Repentance and faith, enlistment and action, on our part is also required. But when we do that, we will witness even more wonders and have even more occasion for astonishment. We may even redefine what we mean by a miracle.

As some of you know, Bruce Main, is the leader of Urban Promise, a ministry to youth in inner city Camden that our church has supported for a number of years. In his book, Holy Hunches, he talks about miracles and discipleship.

“Miracles are overrated. Now, don’t be offended,” he writes. “Let me explain. When most of us think of miracles, we envision people dramatically cured from a fatal disease, or …being resuscitated from a near-death experience. If you’re anything like me, you probably never imagine yourself performing [such a] wonder…But, thinking of miracles only in terms of the supernatural is a problem for many of us, and when we think that we immediately disqualify ourselves from participating with God in something rather…well…miraculous.”

Main then writes about a Dr. Cox, who after hearing Bruce speak at the Midwestern university where he teaches, recruited a colleague, packed up a trailer of lab equipment, and drove out to Camden to teach for a week in the small inner city high school Urban Promise runs for troubled and disadvantaged youths. Main writes: “He and his friend spent a week in what has been deemed America’s most dangerous city – at their own expense, and on their own vacation time – to open the minds of young people to the wonders of chemistry and the possibility of a university education. That may not be considered a miracle in your book, but it is certainly close in mine. After all, how many college professors have spent time teaching impoverished, inner-city kids in a dilapidated three-bedroom row home? Very few. That probability likely ranks with winning a lottery or being struck by lighting twice.”

But it doesn’t’ stop there. “Consider Dante, who attended Dr. Cox’s weeklong chemistry classes, [and] goes to a university because of the inspiration of Dr. Cox. The patience of the doctor, coupled with his passion for chemistry, infected Dante with a kind of self-confidence that he never experienced before. Instead of taking the minimum-wage job at the local nursing home, which his mother wanted him to take, Dante filled out his college application form and got accepted.”

Of course, Dr. Cox does not think of what he did as miraculous. “Rather he saw his visit simply as an expression of his Christian commitment.” But what happened was miraculous. Lives were changed. Bruce concludes: “The ordinariness of our daily lives too often blinds us from seeing the bigger picture – the miraculous presence of God working through our ordinariness.”[4]

Friends, we too are ordinary. I cannot promise that you will see someone throw away his crutches here and go bounding down the aisle. But I can promise this, if we not only marvel at the love and grace of Jesus Christ, but also turn to follow him and enlist in his cause, if we do what Peter did when he responded to the lame man, “what I have I give you,” then there is no telling what the power of Jesus Christ can do through our ordinariness.

And there will be no limits to the joy and wonder we will experience. Who does not want to be a part of that? Thanks be to God.

[1] Thomas G. Long, “Acts 3:12-19:Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol 2, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylors, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 406. I am indebted to Dr. Long’s exegetical analysis for the structure of this sermon.

[2] Long, 408.

[3] Long, 410.

[4] Bruce Main, Holy Hunches: Responding to the Promptings of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 27-29.