April 30, 2006: In WHOSE Name?
Acts 3:12-19, 1 John 3:1-2, Psalm 4

Eileen Parfrey - Springwater Presbyterian Church

It turns out that the apostle Peter must have had the same preaching professor as my mentor. My mentor had learned, grab your listeners' attention in the first 30 seconds and make them wonder what you're saying has to do with them. Peter grabs his listeners' attention through their curiosity about the healing, but keeps their interest by not talking about what he's talking about. Everybody wants to know about the lame man, but Peter riffs on God and their ancestors. I can just hear people asking, "What does this miracle have to do with that guy who died?" until Peter implicates them all in Jesus' death, using that old Presbyterian cliché, "pre-ordained before the beginning of time." Because it's about "how to be the church."

And this story is supposed to help us unpack the implications of the resurrection. As if the lectionary committee thinks the motley crew we've called "church" for the last 2,000 years is the logical consequence of God's universe-shifting miracle of resurrection. It's the perfect lectionary excuse for unpacking Springwater's new mission statement.

Right now, Peter's got a mob waiting for answers. He addresses his listeners as "brothers"-and doesn't every family have one? The know-it-all sibling who makes everything perfectly clear. The heart of Peter's explanation is verse 16, where he says that an abstraction-faith-is what made this man well. Oh, like that clears everything up! Whose faith, and in what? Peter says it's faith in Jesus' name, but how can trusting someone's name make another person well?

One of the faith-in-a-name miracles I know about concerns a rural church of barely 70 people, which annually contributes 4 tons of food to the local food bank. Now, the news department of a local TV station collects more than that amount of food for the Oregon Food Bank around Christmas each year. If it's effectiveness you want, that kind of publicity is more effective than 4 tons over the span of a year, one soup can at a time. But the food drive of that church isn't about efficiency, just as Peter and John healing the lame man wasn't out of human decency or medical proficiency. Neither of those needs an explanation. Peter says the lame man's healing is because of the power of God which resurrected Jesus from the dead. This is not "how" the man is healed, Peter is talking about why the man was healed. And that "why" is more important than either "how" or "what."

Springwater doesn't feed hungry people because "we've got so much and they've got so little." We do it because the power that resurrected Jesus-the power that makes a dead man live again-this power gives us the power to defy "natural" laws. Because, according to the writer of 1 John, we will be like Jesus, that notorious law-breaker. You know those laws. Look out for yourself, otherwise no one else will. Get yours while the getting's good. Winning is everything. It's all about success. You are what you do. Or what you can buy. Or how busy you are. Keep all these laws and your life will be about abundance (or at least about more and more and more and more).

Springwater's new mission statement (which we will be dedicating later during this worship service) says we are a fellowship of believers in the Triune God. "Believe" means "by life," so when we say we are "believers," we mean more than thinking or feeling good about God. We affirm God by how we live, and the Mission Statement gives us some concrete ways to do that. One of the ways we affirm God by life is by serving others through hunger ministries. Not to eliminate world or even local hunger. We do this to live as if God's generosity makes a requirement for generosity of us. We do this to live as if the One Who Creates is both body and spirit, and this has implications for our bodies and spirits. Because we believe the power of God made alive someone who was dead, we share that power by life-by how we believe. This is truly to be like Jesus.

I started reading a response to the denomination's report from the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force. Whenever an elder or pastor is ordained or installed, we take a promise to uphold the peace, unity, and purity of the church, so this has a great deal to do with us. The response blew me away by stating that asking questions to find "right answers" is not the point of faith. Peter got into trouble with the religious authorities because he wasn't helping their pursuit of "right" answers.

As Springwater lives into the implications of our new Mission Statement and the reorganization of session, we can benefit from the recommendations of this response. Rather than praying, "Help us get it right" or clinging to "the way we've always done it" or even asking whether the Mission Study Committee heard the congregation correctly, maybe we could ask some different questions. Maybe we could ask, "What can we learn from the process we used? Where are answers consistent with or different from what we thought we already knew? How is our tradition challenged or used in new ways? Where are we departing from scripture or tradition or policy?"

The document I was reading says these questions result in practical wisdom. Practical wisdom being, "what is required for unity while important differences remain." I'm not sure if this means "don't sweat the small stuff" or if it's more theological than that. Maybe you think we need weekly potlucks or more direct, hands-on mission work. Maybe you think we ought to go back to nine session committees with nine elders. Maybe you think we ought to be a "green church" and only drink fair trade coffee out of washable cups. And where is the basketball court in our new driveway and the pre-school and shouldn't we be going door to door to get more kids here?

The practical wisdom of our new Mission Statement is spelled out in six points that follow the statement that "who we are" is a fellowship of people who follow a Triune God. Learning to live and work together as community means learning ways to navigate change and compromise, to be more committed to the good of the whole than individual rightness or wrongness. Not sweating any detail that falls short of an acknowledgement that the head of the church is Jesus Christ. It's a practical wisdom expressing love.

Love in the New Testament sense is not an emotion or a warm fuzzy. Love is a deed, an action, a commitment-to each other, to cooperation, to working together, to change, to widening our boundaries so that the kingdom of God means salvation of the world. Jesus says the first commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, strength. The traditional Jewish commentary on scripture, the Talmud, adds to that commandment, to love God with your resources. When Constantine's soldiers were baptized in the 4th century, they held their swords above the water to preserve them for fighting and killing. We don't have swords, but American Christians have been known to keep their wallets and pocket calendars from the wetness of baptismal waters.

What if we didn't do that? Our mission statement makes the preposterous claim that we're willing to live differently, that we're willing to do this together. The "natural" law is to approach church as "what's in it for me" or "does it meet my needs." What if we were to approach church as a place to grow in faith and thereby use the power of the God who made the dead guy live? Would you live differently? Our new Mission Statement says we believe-by life-we believe , because we act like it, even when we're not sure, even when we're scared. We believe this is possible-to have access to that power. What would it be like if we lived like that?