All Saints’, Dorval
April 14, 2024
Approximately one-tenth of the Messy Church crowd from Friday.
Today’s reading from Acts is really just the second part of the story. It’s the apostle Peter’s sermon to the crowds that gather at the entrance of the Jerusalem Temple, in the aftermath of Peter’s healing of a man who had been disabled from birth (the first healing miracle by a disciple of Jesus after the Resurrection).
And to be honest, I’m less interested today in most of what Peter had to say than I am in the man himself. When he was unable to walk, he had made his living by begging; the text tells us that every day people would lay him down at a gate called the Beautiful Gate, in order that he could ask for alms from the people coming into the Temple for worship, which is what Peter and John had been doing when they met him.
Peter doesn’t ask the man – as Jesus frequently did when he healed people – whether he wanted to be healed. He just tells him to stand up and walk. And then the man goes into the Temple with Peter and John, “walking and leaping and praising God.” But he is also described as clinging to Peter and John – perhaps not entirely accustomed to having functional legs yet, and still needing help to stay upright.
And I find myself wondering: after those first few delirious minutes – when the focus of the text in Acts shifts to the crowd and their amazement, and Peter and his sermon, and we never catch another glimpse of the person to whom the miracle actually happened – what did this guy think of his new, post-healing life? Was he ready for it? Did he miss his old routine? How did he find work and make a living, now that he was no longer “qualified” to be a beggar? Who were those people who had brought him to the Temple every morning, and were they any use in helping him get situated in this new phase of his existence? Were there other beggars who had become his friends, who were now jealous that he was no longer one of them? Did he become a follower of Jesus? Or did he decide he wanted nothing more to do with this prophet who had upended his life?
Change is scary, even when the change is wonderful. I’m sure we all have stories, from loved ones if not from our own experience, of people who got married and then spent the honeymoon period fighting like cats, or people who had babies and then barely survived the newborn period, or people who got their dream house or job and it threw their whole life into unexpected turmoil. And those are planned, anticipated changes, unlike the situation of a man who woke up with feet that didn’t work and ended the day in “perfect health” – a change in a characteristic than had been fundamental to his identity since he was born.
Here at All Saints’, something has been happening recently that most churches dream of. A lot of new folks have been showing up, and in particular, our last two Messy Church sessions have been literally double the size of our largest previous one. (The month I came back from sabbatical – last October – we had five kids at Messy Church. The day before yesterday, we had thirty-five.) We had six baptisms on Easter Sunday and anticipate four more on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is very clearly up to something here.
And yet, the growing pains are real. Those huge Messy Church gatherings have come with a copious helping of noise and chaos. (Yes, part of that was my fault for planning an activity that involved party horns. Live and learn.) It’s no longer possible for me to kick back and chat with people during the event; I’m too busy managing everything – and so I have to work harder to make sure that I build relationships with the new families in other ways. We’re already having a conversation among the parents and volunteers about ways to create structures and procedures to ensure that everyone is safe, the kids are learning, and the adults aren’t driven up the wall by sensory overload. It’s hard do all those things my mother so wisely said last week about forming the faith of children, when you can’t hear yourself think.
Change can be both wonderful and daunting. New life – the life that Jesus claimed when he rose from the dead, and that he then shared with his disciples, who passed it on to the people they met and healed and preached to, until it was finally passed on even to us, two thousand years later – new life is both wonderful and daunting. Sometimes we feel like it would be easier for us to stay stuck in the old patterns: sitting and begging at the gate of the Temple, hiding in an upper room mourning for our dead teacher, doing the same things with the same handful of people who’ve always done them.
But God doesn’t leave us where we are. Easter follows Lent, inevitably, even when we’re not ready for it. We are not the ones in charge here; we can only respond, as faithfully as possible, to the movement of God in our lives.
After healing the beggar in the Temple, Peter rebukes the crowd for thinking that he had anything to do with it: “Why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made this man walk?”
In the last few decades of decline, the church has tried desperately to figure out what we were doing wrong and how we could do things differently in order to set them right again. But – although obviously there are better and worse approaches when faced with such a crisis – in the grand scheme of things, it was never up to us. And God is not making things to be just the way they used to be. God never makes things the way they used to be; God makes things new. The risen Jesus is not the same as the pre-crucifixion Jesus, and the fact that he can apparently walk through walls is only the beginning.
Our job is not to be God, but to love God, to worship God, and to do our best to follow God. That is true when the challenge we face is “our beloved parish is struggling to stay afloat,” and equally true when the challenge is “our beloved parish is deluged with people curious about what life in God is like”, and especially true when both of those things are the case.
And of course, that’s true for all of us when it comes to the whole of our lives, not just the time we spend in this building and actively engaged in prayer and other churchy activities. When things change – and they will – even if the change is good, it’s only human to have a little bit of a crisis while we navigate the new reality. But the Spirit is moving, and God gives us what we need to respond to the change faithfully.
And here, now, at All Saints’: If you’ve been a church person for decades, how can you get to know some of the new faces, how can you help them, and what might they teach you about what following Jesus means? (I know a lot of you are already doing this, because you’re awesome.)
And if you’re here because you’ve had to move halfway across the world, or because you woke up one day at a small voice in your heart was telling you to go to church even though you hadn’t been for years, how can you get to know some of the saints whom you’ve met here, how can you help them, and what might they teach you about what following Jesus means? (I know a lot of you are already doing this, because you’re awesome.)
God doesn’t give us a choice about whether things change. God does give us new life, life beyond and out of death, abundant life for all; and God will sustain us as we go forward into that new life, with all its challenges and its joys.
Amen.
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