Integrity and unity as evangelism

Last Thursday was Ascension Day Jesus’ apparent departure from his followers. I wonder what must they have thought as the one who came, and died, and then rose again, as they see it, finally departs? Whatever initial sense of sadness or loss they felt was soon to be overcome. As we will see next Sunday, come Pentecost, Jesus’ ascension is no loss to us, but to our benefit.

Ahead of that our gallop through Acts, and the witness of the earliest followers continues. Over the past six weeks we have watched as first they bumped into the risen Jesus. We have been amazed as new life spread out through those who carried the good news far and wide. We have been encouraged that this life changing Gospel is for all people and not just for some. And we have been challenged that it is now our turn, to play our part.

This week we are given two clues as to how to live out this good news. Two ways we can live as followers of Jesus in a world that longs to meet him. Two ways which can surprise others and open their eyes. Two ways that are thankfully not beyond us. Put simply, live with integrity and live in unity.

First, we turn to our passage this week from Acts (Acts 16. 16-34). Paul is in Greece, in the region of Macedonia, in a major Greek city run by the Romans called Philippi. He has been busy as he travelled through the region, and the pace doesn’t slow down for him here. Our reading starts with the evil-spirit inspired slave girl and ends with a Holy Spirit converted jailer.

Rather than being rewarded for releasing the slave girl from the powers of divination that captivated her and from her abusive owners, who saw her value only in her ability to make them money, Paul and his companion Silas find themselves thrown in jail.

But as we see time and again in the whole sweep of the Bible events, people and circumstances that we may consider to be “end of the road” moments, in fact become the occasions where new life begins.

We can probably all relate to a moment in life that stopped us in our tracks. That opened our eyes to see things differently and opened a new way to live. At our outdoor service two weeks ago we thought about how the wonder of creation

can cause us to wonder about the creator.

A new birth can prompt us to wonder in a similar way. Or a severe illness may a person to ask whether there is one who can save them. In today’s reading a jailer from Philippi has his mind opened and his life changed by an earth-shattering moment. And I speak not here of the tremor that he had survived.

Assuming his captives had escaped through the smashed doors he decided that a quick self-imposed suicide seemed preferable to a drawn-out Roman execution. But again it was not this that drew him to faith. That was something much less extreme and yet nonetheless arresting.

It was the integrity of Paul and Silas who, rather than run away, had chosen to wait for justice to be seen to be done. It appears that we do not need miracles or jail sentences. We don't even need to draw attention to ourselves with the singing of hymns at midnight. All we need for our neighbours to notice that people of Christian faith are distinctive, is integrity.

The way we welcome and value outsiders, the way we help in our local community, the way we choose to help others at no profit to ourselves and often at personal cost. People notice these things.

And once living with integrity, walking our talk, has broken down the barriers between us and those who do and those who don’t do church, what follows is a shared experience. In our reading we see how the water provided by the jailer to wash Paul and Silas’ wounds was also used to baptise the jailer and his family.

This is an encouragement. It doesn't require an earthquake to introduce someone to Jesus. It's much simpler than that. To be the light in someone else’s darkness, to be the people who others turn to because they see something in our choices, that is how to open minds to the risen Jesus.

We meet the risen Jesus in our Gospel today (John 17. 20-26). We hear a portion of his prayer offered on the night he was betrayed, the eve of his crucifixion. Jesus is talking to his Father and asking that his disciples “may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me”. And why does it matter “that they may become completely one”?Because that, we are told, is how the world may know that the Father sent Jesus, and loves the world as he loves Jesus.

It can be hard to comprehend the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It would be wrong to understand the divine nature, which we refer to as the Trinity, in a hierarchical way. The Father as the head, with the son doing what he is told, and the Holy Spirit being with them both. I am not sure that is true to today’s Gospel where Jesus describes the Father and Son as one.

Perhaps a better way of viewing the Trinity is a relationship where Father, Son and Holy Spirit breakdown barriers with an intimacy and equality, that is sometimes likened to a dance. There is no one head, no one way of being, as the Persons of the Trinity remain distinctive yet serve one another in love.

How would that be as a model for being church? We would be able to celebrate difference yet be one community. This is a call for unity and not uniformity.

As our Easter season draws to its exciting climax as this week, we pray for the Holy Spirit to fall on us as upon those first followers of Jesus 2,000 years ago. We could do a lot worse than to live as Paul and Silas did, and to pray as Jesus did.

Photo by Mohammad Mardani on Unsplash

Thanks also to Peter Graystone and Paul Kennedy for their reflections on this week’s passages, which are included above.