Acts 1:15-17, 21-26, Psalm 1, 1 John 5:9-13, John 17:6-19
Do you speak up? When you see something do you say something? Or do you mind your own business, do you keep your mouth shut—if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all? Or, well, have you ever had to say, “Me too?” When do Christians speak up? And for what? What truth are we supposed to tell? What truth are we supposed to know? Can we even know the truth? What is required of us, when the Bible speaks of us being witnesses who testify?
We want to tell the truth. But we also want to offer a space of unconditional welcome. What if we say, “Jesus is Lord,” and someone comes into our space and then feels judged by our truth—is our welcome conditional? We live in this post-modern context of everybody having the right to their own truth, at least in public space. No one’s truth has privilege—your truth is for you and my truth is for me, and if our truths differ you may not say that mine is false. All the cultural problems here I’m not going into, but this is the context in which we find our conversation. The Christian faith has lost its cultural dominance, which is probably a good thing, and it has never hurt the gospel to have no power of privilege.
We are called to be witnesses. We are not called to be the judges or the jury. We are not judges to condemn those who disagree with us. We are not the jury who get to make the verdict. The verdict is not up to us. Nor are we called to be prosecutors of those who disagree with us. Our job is not to prove why any one else is wrong. Our job as witnesses is to offer our testimony for others to judge, and if we are challenged with tough questions about what we have testified, we do not get defensive but we count it our privilege to clarify what we have said and to back it up with our lives.
These last few weeks in the Easter Season we have been talking about the power of God. First the power to heal, then the power to invest your life, then the power to love, and then the power to choose. The power to choose your words is what we consider today, the power to testify, the power to speak what is true from what you know to be true. The Holy Spirit gives you power to know the truth, even if that truth is also a mystery beyond your full understanding. It’s the kind of truth that children love to know. When I teach Sunday School the children remind me of the joy of knowing God and knowing the things of God.
God wants to be known by you because God wants to be loved by you. This kind of knowing has some objective knowledge in it, but most deeply it’s what philosophers call personal knowledge, like a baby knowing her mother and my granddaughter knowing the way to school. It’s the knowledge of familiarity and intimacy and abiding, as a child abides in her mother’s arms. This kind of knowledge is what goes with love. Its purpose and its goal is love.
Your knowledge of God is for love. If what you think you know of God is not for love’s sake, then your knowledge is carnal and its power is worldly—“of the world,” as Jesus says—and not from God. If your testimony is not for love, then all your words, no matter how convincing to yourself, are noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.
You have the power to know God and the power to tell what you know, to testify to what you know. You are called to be a witness, that’s your contribution to God’s long-term redemption of the world. But what form should your witness take? Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Like the fundamentalists? Most of us are shy to think of ourselves as witnesses. “Come on. This is Park Slope. Half of my friends are Jewish. Do you expect me to witness to them?”
Well, actually, yes! If your witnessing is sharing instead of winning. And if it’s appropriate to you relationships. You know that my best friend among the clergy in Brooklyn is Rabbi Bachman, and he and I witness to each other all the time. We’re not interested in convincing each other, but we offer ourselves to each other, and we trust each other with what we believe.
Just this past Holy Week we were having a beer and he asked me about Good Friday and what it meant for my soul. What I told him really surprised him. (You’ll have to ask him yourself!) More than once I’ve told him what the Lord Jesus means to me, which he doesn’t share, and I don’t expect him to, and I listen to what’s in his heart too. We don’t judge each other. We leave it to God to be the judge and jury, we offer each other hospitality, I give him a place within my space. He does the same for me.
Fifteen years ago I went to a Bengladeshi coffee shop in the Kensington neighborhood to speak to some leaders from their mosque. We were talking about a joint prayer service. They were all about it, coming to pray with us at Old First. I remember that even though I was inviting them I was feeling doubts. I said, “You know, we’re going to pray in the name of Jesus.” “O we love Jesus!” Then I said, “But we will say that we believe in his resurrection from the dead.” “Oh, we know that! Come on!”
Why didn’t I just trust that my Christian testimony was a bridge and not a wall? Now of course it’s different in other parts of the world, but for you it is true that as long as you respectfully report what you believe without judging others, you can make place for others within your space.
Thirty-seven years ago I was the pastor of a small Hungarian Reformed church in Jersey–my first charge. Our son Nicholas was a year old, and I would hoist his carrier on my back and walk to visit my people, who all lived in that same north-end neighborhood. Out the back gate the first house I always passed was the house of Mrs. Elsie Pituk, one of our oldest members.
She’d be sitting outside, under this huge oak tree with a tall trunk. She was ancient, and tiny, and she didn’t speak much English, but she was gracious to me and she loved to see Nick—she’d give him a cookies, and one of his first words was “Pituk.” On the table next to her was always her Énekeskönyv, her hymnbook, with the psalms and all the prayers. I learned to read those prayers and sing the Psalms with her, including Psalm 1. I already knew the tune from singing it in Dutch. Aki nem jár hitlenek tanácsán, És meg nem áll a bűnösök útján. Like that.
Mrs. Pituk had a blood disease. Every couple months I would find her in the hospital. Never in her bed. She’d have gotten up early before the staff came in and made her bed and swept her room and sat in the chair. I liked to visit her and I’d bring my Énekeskönyv along to sing and pray from. I think she was my first funeral. I preached on Psalm 1, because as tiny as she was she seemed to me to be a tree, planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in season, with leaves that do not wither.
Being Hungarian, after the funeral we all went to the Elks Club for the party. Her son and her daughter and the grandchildren told me that yes, they knew how she sat there under that tree, and how she had been a great sheltering shade for all of them over the years, with her great love. Pituk. They knew what she believed. She knew what she knew, and her quiet witness was strong and her testimony true.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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