Let us pray. The grass withers and the flower
fades, O God, but Your Word will stand forever.
So as we hear Your Word, we pray that by the
power of Your Spirit we might hear Your voice.
Speak to us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Our
second reading is from Acts chapter 20, starting
with verse 17. Let us listen together now for
God's Word to us. From Miletus, Paul sent a message
to Ephesus asking the elders of the church to
meet him. When they came to him, he said to them,
you yourselves know how I lived among you. The
entire time from the first day that I set foot
in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and
with tears, enduring the trials that came to
me through the plots of the Jews, I did not shrink
from doing anything helpful, proclaiming the
message to you and teaching you publicly and
from house to house. as I testified to both Jews
and Greeks about repentance toward God and faith
toward our Lord Jesus. And now, as a captive
to the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not
knowing what will happen to me there. Keep watch
over yourselves and over all the flock of which
the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd
the church of God that He obtained with the blood
of His own Son. I know that after I have gone,
savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing
the flock. Some even from your own group will
come, distorting the truth in order to entice
the disciples to follow them. Therefore, be alert,
remembering that for three years I did not cease
night or day to warn everyone with tears. And
now I commend you to God and to the message of
His grace, a message that is able to build you
up and to give you the inheritance among all
who are sanctified. I coveted no one's silver
or gold or clothing. You know yourselves that
I worked with my own hands to support myself
and my companions. In all this, I have given
you an example that by such work we must support
the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus,
for He Himself said, It is more blessed to give
than to receive. The Word of the Lord. Thanks
be to God. So today's the last of our series,
summer road trip, where we have been following
the travels of Paul in the book of Acts, starting
with Acts chapter 13 and now through Acts chapter
20. He's been to Cyprus and Antioch, Iconium,
Lystra, Derbe, Jerusalem for a council of the
church, and then Macedonia, Thessalonica, Athens,
Corinth, Ephesus, Troas, Miletus, and then he
will go again to Jerusalem. And on these journeys,
he has confronted a number of challenges. He
had a confrontation with a magician, a fortune
teller. He had to deal with the intramural dispute
over circumcision with other leaders of the Christian
church. He's had to contend with pagan deities
and the devotion and practices that surround
those other deities. He's had conflicts with
Jews. There have been mobs and riots. He's been
to prison. He has suffered beatings. There have
been assassination plots. And he has lived and
traveled and worked under the constant threat
of death. After this point in the story, Acts
goes on for several chapters following him as
he goes to Jerusalem. But there, there's another
mob. He gets arrested. He stands trial. Even
standing trial, he proclaims the good news of
the gospel. He appeals to the Roman emperor and
so then has to travel to Rome. will be wrecked,
and they almost all perish, but he will eventually
make it to Rome. In all these places, and through
all of these challenges, to many different people,
and in response to a variety of different kinds
of situations and demands, Paul steadfastly proclaimed
the gospel. I think we should just pause and
consider how remarkable a thing it is that Paul
did this, that the gospel that Paul preached
remained the same through all of these things.
There's a song lyric I heard a while back that
I love, and it's this, have you ever seen an
idealist with gray hairs on his head? Time and
experience, especially experiences that are difficult
and challenging, they have a tendency to grind
away at our ideals and even sometimes our principles.
When I finished seminary, now almost 20 years
ago, I had all kinds of big ideas about the church.
What the church was, what the church should be.
I was so full of ideas. In fact, I was full of
only ideas. Ideas that needed testing. They needed
proving. I'm going to need to do this a lot this
morning, sorry. Ideas that needed recalibrating.
Ideas that needed contact with reality. Just
in time for that one. Some ideas even that needed,
perhaps, My sense of the church over the course
of my time in ministry has changed. It has changed
in ways that it probably needed to. It has probably
also changed in ways that maybe it shouldn't
have. That maybe I have let go of some of those
ideals, those big ideas that I should have held
on to. This process of change isn't necessarily
a corruption of ideals. It's a negotiation. It's
a constant, ongoing negotiation as our ideals
and reality come together between the world as
we imagine it and the world as it really is.
But in this kind of negotiation, in this kind
of process, there is always a danger that our
ideals, our principles, will give way to reality.
To the possible. And that those things that we
should hold on to, the things that keep us anchored,
the things that keep us centered, they are gradually
given up or ignored. And we drift. At so many
junctures in Paul's ministry, it is easy to imagine
Paul choosing to just slightly adjust. his outlook,
to just slightly recalibrate his principles,
compromise just a little his ideals. He gets
embroiled in conflict with his fellow Christian
leaders over Gentiles and the question of circumcision.
I can imagine him just softening his position
a little bit to keep the peace of the church.
These fledgling Christian communities try to
make their way when no one has done this before.
He tries to help them get out of their own way
and all of the problems that they bring. The
Corinthians. The Galatians. I can imagine Paul
being tempted to soften his position a little
bit. To ease up on the whole notion of divisions
within the church, that maybe divisions are okay.
Maybe there are different classes of Christians,
just like there are different classes of people
in society. Paul works throughout his ministry
to earn his own keep. He's a tent maker. It's
not because the church doesn't offer to support
him. It's because he refuses the offer of support.
And I can imagine Paul along the way thinking,
you know, my back is tired. and I want to preach
the gospel, but he doesn't. He endures mobs and
riots and the constant threat of death, and I
can imagine Paul saying to himself, maybe I should
present the gospel in a more affable way, in
a way that doesn't cause people to get angry
and all exercised and want to come out to the
streets and throw stones. Any one of these challenges
would be enough all by itself. Maybe just to
nudge Paul a little bit. Just nudge him slightly
off course. But you put them all together and
it amounts to a kind of irresistible pressure
to change, to accommodate all these different
challenges, to compromise, to lose his center.
But he doesn't. And the reason that Paul doesn't
bend or break as he proclaims the gospel is that
the gospel that Paul preaches has a rock -solid
core. The gospel he preaches is built around
an unchanging, immovable idea. And here in Acts
20, which is more or less the end of his missionary
journeys, though as I said, you can't stop him
from proclaiming the gospel no matter where he
goes. Here at the end of his ministry, his journeys,
Paul says farewell to some of the leaders of
the church for two reasons. He gives them rather,
he reminds them, he uses this opportunity to
remind them. what the core of the gospel is,
so that they can continue to preach it faithfully,
but also so that they can recognize those who
don't. Now, this is a question that has confronted
the church throughout the ages, from its very
beginning. Maybe it was less of a problem when
the church was truly Catholic, meaning universal.
This idea that there are true and false Gospels.
But even when the church was more or less Catholic
in that universal sense, there were different
ideas about Jesus and the work of salvation that
He brought about. There were heresies. There
was orthodoxy. But since the Protestant Reformation
500 years ago, there have been a wide variety
of expressions of the Christian faith. A wide
variety of ways of articulating the truth of
the gospel. And these different expressions of
the church are not just competing for adherence
so that they can grow and endure, but also they
are presenting competing views of the gospel.
Leading the church throughout the ages to ask,
what is the true gospel? And what is the false
gospel? So this question is as important today
as it has ever been. How do we know what the
true gospel is? And how can we recognize a false
gospel? How can we spot what Paul calls the savage
wolves who distort the truth in order to entice
us to follow? And Paul's answer to this question
begins with a few reminders for his leaders about
how he carried out his own ministry. He says
that he lived among the people, serving the Lord
with all humility and with tears and enduring
trials. He says he did not shrink from doing
anything helpful. He did not count his life of
any value to himself. He says he coveted no one's
silver or gold. or clothing. He worked with his
own hands to support himself and his companions.
He offered an example so that those who emulate
him would live in such a way that they support
the weak. And then, when he boils it all down,
and he quotes the words of Jesus, it is more
blessed to give than to receive. Now, this is
a familiar phrase, such a familiar phrase that
it is, a little bit trite, but if we reflect
on it for a moment, we realize how profound it
is, how revolutionary it is. For one thing, it
runs completely counter to our basic human inclinations.
We would rather receive than give. I think we
can all admit, but it's much deeper than that.
It's deeper even than the shape of Paul's own
selfless ministry, of God's many actions in the
world. Of all the things that Scripture tells
us that God has done, the one that is most self
-revelatory, the one that tells us the most about
God's nature, the one that shows us God's character
most clearly is the incarnation, Jesus taking
on flesh, God coming to be among us. It is an
act of sacrificial self -giving. When Jesus describes
His own ministry to others, When he tells them
what he is up to, he says, the Son of Man came
not to be served, but to serve and to give. His
life is a ransom for many. When Jesus invites
people to follow him, he says, whoever wants
to save their life will lose it. But whoever
loses their life, whoever gives their life for
my sake, will find it. And when His ministry
comes to an end, when Jesus is staring death
in the face, if there was ever for a time, if
there was ever a time for Him to choose to receive
rather than give, to receive, help, protection,
rescue, power from on high, if there was ever
a time for Him to receive rather than give, this
was it. But He gave fully all the way to the
end. He gave all that he had to give because
giving is the heart of the gospel. And if at
the last he decided that there was a limit, yes,
it's extreme, but here there is a limit to what
he was willing to give, then he would have undermined,
he would have undone, he would have erased his
ministry and his purpose. He would have hollowed
out the call that he issued to his disciples
and to us. And he would have contradicted the
very heart of God. You see, it is more blessed
to give than to receive is not a cute message
for a Hallmark card. And it is certainly not
a fundraising slogan. It is the key that unlocks
the gospel. It is the acid test that helps us
to know the real thing when we see it. And helps
us to see the cheap imitators. for what they
are. It's the true north in our journey toward
truth and goodness and beauty and faithfulness.
It is who God is, and it is how God is, and it
is how Jesus has called us to live. There's a
story told of a rabbi in a little Russian village.
There were fantastic rumors told about this rabbi.
During each morning of the high holidays, was
nowhere to be found, and his followers took to
claiming that he was, every morning, ascending
to heaven to be with God. But there was a skeptic
in this town who didn't believe the hype, and
he decided to put an end to this silly story
about a rabbi ascending into heaven, so he took
it upon himself to investigate. The skeptic sneaked
into the rabbi's home. and hid under his bed
one evening. And by morning, when the rabbi woke,
this was the time that he was supposedly supposed
to ascend to heaven, the rabbi gets up, recites
his morning prayers, and then he goes to his
closet. He takes out an old jacket, worn trousers
and boots, and puts them on. Then he took an
axe and an old sack from the closet. He looked
like a woodcutter. about to set out for the forest.
The rabbi left the house, and the skeptic followed
him at a safe distance. Eventually, they came
to the forest at the edge of town, where the
rabbi gathered some wood, chopped it, filled
his sack, and then he walked deeper into the
forest. And the skeptic followed. The rabbi came
to a small house. He knocked, and the weak voice
of an old woman could be heard behind the door
saying, Who is it? It's the woodcutter, answered
the rabbi. Oh yes, said the voice, but I can't
get out of bed. Never mind, said the rabbi, I'll
bring the wood in. Could you light the fire too,
the voice asked. I suppose, answered the rabbi.
And the skeptic saw him light a fire and heard
him recite the morning prayers. The rabbi left
the forest, left his woodcutter's clothes at
home, and went about the normal activities of
the day. Then an amazing thing happened. The
skeptic showed up at the synagogue for worship.
He joined the congregation. Whenever anyone would
tell the story of the rabbi ascending to heaven,
the skeptic no longer laughed. He would add quietly,
yes, if not, even higher. As complicated As religion
gets, and it gets complicated, it tends to remain
very simple at its core. This is the reason for
the enduring beauty of the words from the prophet
Micah that we heard before. What does God want?
What sort of religion is pleasing to God? What
sacrifice, or if you like, what doctrine, what
denomination, what gospel? God has told you what
is good, and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your God? This is, in fact, the heart
of the gospel, self -giving love, love of God,
love of neighbor, expressed through a humble
willingness to give of ourselves. And this gospel
can be found in many forms, in many places, many
expressions, Christian or otherwise. And anyone
who claims otherwise, anyone who claims to be
in sole possession of the true gospel is, as
Paul says, distorting the truth. So which is
the true gospel today? Is it the gospel of the
American church or is it the gospel of the church
in the parts of the world that are growing the
fastest? Which one's the true gospel? Is it the
gospel of the evangelical church or is it the
gospel of the mainline church? Which one is the
true gospel? Is it the gospel of the conservative
church or is it the gospel of the progressive
church? Is it the gospel of the mega church or
the gospel of the small church? None of the above.
And all of the above. And more. Because at the
end of the day, the gospel is not the possession
of any one tradition, any one theology, even
any one religion. The gospel is found wherever
people live lives of self -giving love, wherever
people embody The truth that it is more blessed
to give than to receive. So may the gospel be
found here. May the gospel be found in us. May
it work through us. Let us pray. God, remind
us that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
Remind us of that again and again because we
want to receive. We're not so interested all
the time in giving. But remind us that in giving
of ourselves, we give expression to something
much greater than ourselves, you and your love
that has been poured out on this world, the very
good news of your gospel. May we bear living
witness. to that gospel. In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.