“If We Build It…”

- Acts 16:6-15 -

Matthew 28:19a: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…

Acts 1:8b: … and you will be my witnesses…

Acts 16:9: During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

[prayer]

Once again I have discovered that providence happens. Once again I started doing something practical and mundane that turned out to be something else altogether.

Not only have I departed from the lectionary this morning, I have also pulled an old sermon out of the barrel and updated it. My original reason for doing so was a time crunch, but as I worked on the sermon I remembered something. Tonight the Session, Deacons, and Trustees will meet to discuss our present financial realities, take a hard look at various building needs that must be addressed, and hopefully look at some mission and ministry priorities for 2007 and beyond. In the midst of all the pragmatic, hard-nosed, bottom line discussions about money and facilities, it is my hope that we will begin looking beyond ourselves. Hopefully we will all remember that the budget and building aren’t supposed to drive mission; mission is to be the driving force behind the budget and the use of the building.

The sermon title is borrowed from a familiar line in the movie Field of Dreams, the one where Kevin Costner hears and obeys a mystical voice telling him to build a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield. In his case he had to go against not only conventional wisdom but also cultural definitions of sanity and rationality. He built the field. The players, long-dead baseball legends, came, and then came the fans. Obeying a voice heard only in his heart, the hero built it and the people came.

To repeat a more modern version an old adage: Humanity proposes, and God disposes. We all have our hopes, dreams, plans, and ambitions, things we propose to do or accomplish. But sometimes God, in a multitude of ways, reminds us that our proposals - even those that we consider to clearly be of God - aren’t always synonymous with his will. We want this. We feel led to that. But God wants something else.

So it was with the Apostle Paul in today’s text. Paul felt led to do ministry in Asia Minor, the region of Ephesus, Laodicia, and other communities to which he would later be sent by God. But each time he headed there, he was somehow constrained by the Spirit of God. In ways not made clear by the text, God let Paul know that this wasn’t the time to turn east. Maybe it was Paul’s health. Maybe it was the fierce opposition of the region’s Jewish population to the spread of the Gospel. Maybe it was simply a holy hunch on Paul’s part. Deep within himself Paul intuitively knew that now wasn’t the time to carry the Gospel east.

Probably uncertain and possibly frustrated by God’s resistance to his plans, Paul ended up in Troas, and there he had a dream. In the dream a man from Macedonia - from Greece - pleaded for him to travel west. And so he and his small band of missionaries did just that. They headed west until they arrived in the Roman colony of Philippi, a major center of commercial and political power and influence.

What happened in Philippi? Did Paul, Luke, and the others rent a space, put up a sign declaring it to be the site of the First Philippian Church, put an ad in the local paper, and wait for the crowds to pour in? With a reverse twist on the premise of the earlier mentioned movie, Paul didn’t build it and wait for people to come. No. Paul and the others sought out a Jewish synagogue in which to worship. In some commonly used modern terminology, they didn’t wait for the seekers to come seeking; they went out and sought those who might be seeking.

Finding no Synagogue, they headed to the river, where devout Jews, lacking a quorum for a synagogue, would gather to worship and pray. There they found a group of devout women led by Lydia, a wealthy merchant woman. They weren’t Jews. They were, however, believers in God and seekers after God’s truth. Paul had found the seekers he had sought.

Paul and the others witnessed to them. One-on-one they shared the Good News of Jesus. No sermons. No formal services. No heavy pressure. No gimmicks. Simply an intimate sharing of the Gospel. Lydia heard and believed the Good News. She accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior. She shared this news with her household. They accepted it. All were baptized. Christianity had its first European converts. A strong foundation was laid for the Philippian Church. A strong foothold for Christ was established in Macedonia. The Gospel spread further west into Europe from there.

This is good history, stuff we need to know about Paul’s missionary activities. More than that, it’s a good lesson to modern American Christians and modern American churches. It reminds us that our priorities are not always God’s priorities. Our plans for our lives and the life of the church, even our most prayerful and seemingly faithful plans, are not always what God wants us to be doing. Sometimes when we think it’s time to zig, God lets us know that it’s time to zag.

And he doesn’t always let us know through the expected channels. Sometimes we’re called to respond to an unexpected dream. Sometimes we need to be open enough to God’s Spirit to realize that we’ve been dealt a holy hunch, a hunch that might just fly in the face of long-held assumptions or conventional wisdom. Maybe it’s simply a matter of finally realizing that we’ve been beating our heads against the wrong wall or knocking on the wrong door. Like Paul, we may be headed in the opposite direction from where God wants us to go.

Following Jesus is not an exact science. It requires a spiritual sensitivity that many of us lack. Being sons and daughters of the enlightenment, with its emphasis on all things rational, we sometimes cut ourselves off from the intuitive, imaginative parts of who we are. We depend too heavily on our intellectual abilities, ignoring the other channels through which God speaks.

This is not to discount the intellect. One of the historic strengths of the Presbyterian tradition has been our emphasis on education. A mind really is a terrible thing to waste. But then, so is a heart. Jesus leads us by way of both.

Another way in which this text speaks to us is through the example of Paul’s ministry in Philippi. He didn’t wait for folks to come to him. He went to where the seekers were. He initiated spiritual dialogue. Lydia was seeking God’s truth. Paul, by the power of the Spirit, had that truth to share. He went to the place a seeker was most likely to be, and there he shared the Gospel message. He didn’t schedule a service for Sunday morning and wait for folks to attend it. He took the Good News about Jesus out into the community in which he ministered. He met folks on their turf. Never, ever did he buy into the mid-20^th Century American Protestant mindset that “if we build it they will come.”

In today’s cultural climate, we’re called to do what Paul did: meet people where they are instead of expecting them to come to us; shape our ministries to our community’s expressed spiritual, emotional, and physical needs instead of expecting the people around us to conform to what we’ve always done; establish warm, welcoming relationships with people in which we earn the privilege of sharing the Gospel instead of expecting the modern seekers after God to adapt themselves to our comfort zone. We’ve got to become a missionary church. And the mission field is our very own community.

This is tough. It requires flexibility. It requires a willingness to change things. Mission-minded Christians and missionary churches have to be intuitively open to God’s call to zig when we’d rather zag, or in some cases, to zig when the conventional ecclesiastical wisdom of the day says zag. Mission-minded Christians and missionary churches of today can’t be locked into yesterday’s assumptions about how to do ministry or be church. The days of us building and them coming are long gone.

We have to be ready to go where God calls us, ready to answer the pleas for help sent to us by the Macedonians of our time. When we have received the vision, however it comes, and are convinced that this is what God is calling us to do, we must be ready and willing to take the Gospel message to where it needs to be: around the world or simply around the block.

There are seekers all around us, maybe even seekers among us. We are called by Jesus to make disciples of them, to be his witnesses in the world. It is our holy task to discover how God wants us to do it, to figure out where God’s call to zig might not match our desire to zag. And when it’s clear that God wants us to zig, then do so: faithfully, humbly, and prayerfully. Amen.