Sermons
April 14, 2024 (3rd Sunday of Easter)
NOTICE
Acts 3:1-10
When Mike and I lived in Oregon, even though we had a car, we liked to get up sometimes of a Saturday morning and go on a bus adventure. Mike generally rode the bus to work in those days, so he bought a monthly pass that allowed him to ride any bus or train to anywhere in the Portland metro area. At the time it cost him under $50 each month—substantially less than the upkeep of another vehicle. And I would buy a day pass that allowed me to do the same thing, just for the day.
There was a bus that stopped right in front of our house and took us to downtown Portland via the West Hills, a very scenic ride. Sometimes we’d get off partway there in a cute little neighborhood where there were lots of antique stores and other fun shops, as well as a café called Fat City. Or we’d go on into Portland and see what we could find to do there.
Because Portland is a multi-ethnic city, there was almost always some kind of celebration by one ethnic group or another—Festa Italiana, or the Greek Festival, or even a Polish festival where you could go eat sausages and pierogi[1]—or just a street fair in one of the m ore colorful neighborhoods, like Hawthorne. And failing that, there was always Saturday Market, down under the Burnside Bridge and spilling out into the parking lots and public spaces around it, with all kinds of crafty stuff to look at and a food court where you could get whatever you might want, from barbecue to pad Thai to Nepalese dumplings called momos.[2]
Since we got on and off the bus right downtown, there was also a great variety of people to see, some normal-looking, others a bit odd. When we would get on the bus to go home, there was always an elderly Black man standing, always in the same spot, always looking up the side of a building. The other folks on the bus would laugh at him, as he stood there, looking up, with tremors that were probably the result of uncontrolled Parkinson’s disease keeping his hands in constant motion. He was usually there all day, but if we went by in the evening he’d be gone—I don’t know where he would go, but he wasn’t there at night.
Then there came a weekend when I was gone on some kind of trip, probably to Regional Assembly, I’d imagine, although I don’t remember for sure. When I got back Mike told me what he had done while I was gone. He said he had gotten on the bus and gone downtown, and had decided while he was down there that he was going to go talk to the old man at the bus stop, and find out why he was there.
Turns out the gentleman’s name was Isaiah, and he must have had some dementia going on; he couldn’t remember where he lived, and knew he had a son, but didn’t know where he was or how long it’d been since he’d seen him.[3] Mike asked him why he stood and looked up the side of the building, and he said it was because he wondered what was up there.
They had a nice talk, but then it wasn’t too long afterward that we stopped seeing old Isaiah at that bus stop. Don’t know whatever happened to him.
Did you know that, even though Jesus himself and most of his original disciples were from small communities, and most of his ministry took place in rural areas and small towns, when the Christian church got started, it was an urban religion? It began in Jerusalem, in a city, and spread through the cities of the Roman Empire. And so the book of Acts tells us that many of the situations the earliest Christians encountered were situations we might still encounter in a city.
Today’s text describes Peter and John meeting a beggar beside the “Beautiful Gate” to the Temple in Jerusalem. Nowadays we might call the man a panhandler. He could not walk, and evidently had no family who could take care of him, so his only means of support was to beg from those going to the Temple for their regular daily prayers.
When you live in the city, you fairly quickly become sort of hardened, for lack of a better word, to the abundance of homeless, sometimes mentally ill, sometimes addicted people you encounter on the streets. Actually, it doesn’t take long before you figure out that making eye contact increases the likelihood that you’ll be asked for a handout—and you just plain can’t give to all of them.
And of course, there are all the arguments against giving to panhandlers: for instance, they’re not going to use the money you give them for food or shelter, but to buy alcohol or drugs. There was a man somewhere in the metro area back then who would sit beside busy intersections with a cardboard sign that said, “Why lie? I need a beer.” And Mike told me about a time when he encountered a fellow panhandling in front of McDonald’s in downtown Portland, saying, “I’m hungry; give me some money to buy food.” Mike had just come out of McDonald’s with a bag of grub, so he handed the man a hamburger. And the man promptly stuck it in his pocket and resumed his panhandling: “I’m hungry; give me some money to buy food.”
But at that time, you had to pay fifty cents to get a place in a homeless shelter at night, so at least some of the spare change some of the panhandlers in Portland might get did go to providing a roof over their heads for the night.
When you live in the city, it’s almost a matter of survival to allow homeless people and panhandlers to become, in your mind, nothing more than part of the scenery. Eventually you get to where you don’t really even see them anymore.
You only sort of vaguely notice that when you get to the Episcopal cathedral early on a frosty Saturday morning, to set up for a lecture featuring a nationally-known writer, there are people sleeping on the steps in front of the beautiful, red-painted sanctuary doors. You hardly hear them as they begin to apologize for their presence there and pack away their few belongings. It never occurs to you that, like anyone else, they might appreciate a cup of hot coffee—which you had brewing just inside those doors—as they get ready to start their day.
And so it seems remarkable what Peter and John did in this reading today. Not that they encountered a beggar as they went up to the Temple—since devout Jews living in Jerusalem went up to the Temple at that time every day, and since the hope was that such devout Jews might also be inclined to obey the commandment to give alms to the poor, it was a likely place for beggars to gather—that wasn’t all that unusual. It wouldn’t even have been unusual for them to have tossed the man a coin or a crust of bread as they passed by—again, the Jewish Law does require those who have to help care for those who have not.
Here’s what is unusual: When this disabled panhandler, to use today’s terminology, asked Peter and John, “…spare change?” they stopped right there and looked intently at him. Remember how I said that one of the first things city dwellers learn is not to make eye contact with panhandlers?
Have you ever been in a situation where you were interacting with someone else, and there’s never any eye contact between you? It’s a very impersonal, almost dehumanizing experience. And for this beggar at the Beautiful Gate, like many similar people in many times and places—even today—it was a constant reality. People might toss a coin in his general direction, but not look at him, not acknowledge him as a fellow human being, a person created in God’s image, just like anyone else.
But Peter and John stopped and looked at him, and then they asked him to look at them. They truly saw each other. To Peter and John, this man was not just a part of the scenery in the city, a distraction on the way to prayer. He was someone whose life, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who has been raised from the dead, they had the ability to change dramatically and for the better. And so they did.
Acts is clear that it’s the Holy Spirit that makes it possible for Peter and John and the other early Christians to do the wondrous things that they do; but I wonder if we can make a case that it’s because of the Resurrection, because through the lens of the empty tomb everything looks different than it once did, that Peter and John are able truly to see this man and his need—obviously something that had to happen before they could use the gifts they had to help him.
Christianity began as an urban religion, and so the early Christians lived and ministered among the blessings and the problems that have been part of cities as long as there have been cities.
Many Christians today do not live in large cities. Yet no matter where we live, there are people around us who are in need. And just as in Peter’s and John’s case, when they encountered a disabled man at the Beautiful Gate, before we can use the gifts we receive from the Holy Spirit to meet those needs, we must be able, through the risen Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to see them—to notice them, obviously, but also to recognize in them the image of God, no longer to pass by in self-preservation but to stop, knowing that since we no longer have to fear for our self-preservation, we can risk an encounter that could very well change both our lives.
[1] That Polish festival was held at a Catholic church on the north side of town. While we were there I went inside the church to look around, and backing up without looking where I was going, I nearly knocked down the Oregon Secretary of State, Ted Kulongoski!
[2] Nearly every Asian culture has some variation on a steamed, filled dumpling—Chinese pot stickers, central Asian manti, Japanese gyoza, Korean mandu.
[3] Obviously we don’t know for sure, but it’s not unthinkable that his son would find him and bring him home at night; but Isaiah couldn’t remember that.