It is easy to talk about other people, about what they do or say or believe.
Sometimes it is idle chatter, or gossip, or something more devious like slander.
It is safer to talk about others rather than talking about what is going on in our own lives, our own hearts, it is easier to just rattle on and on than to invite and encourage some one else to share the journey of their own life.
It is hard to even know our own hearts most of the time. We have to help each other with that task. We can’t do it alone.
The Book of Acts chapter 16, something strange and important happens in this chapter. The book of Acts is a story about the journeys and adventures of the Apostles as they carried the Gospel across the Roman Empire.
In chapter 16 the story changes from being about Paul, to being about when “We” were there with Paul. The point of view changes to first person plural. It is no longer what happened to her or him, it is about what we saw. It becomes an eye witness account.
Paul has a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading for Paul to come and help. Then the change in language happens, the change in perspective, “we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.”
We slip through a magic door, and the words about other people become our own journey to a new land, to bring good news. We enter the unknown and faith becomes real.
I’ve always wondered, literally for almost 20 years about that change in chapter 16, perhaps I make too big a deal about it, but it has held my attention.
It is about conversion, faith in Christ becoming something personal, not something involving somebody else, but rather a faith that has consequences for my life, about what I choose to do with my life, not somebody else’s life, and its something done together, we do it, not just me. The adventure of the Gospel is something we do together.
The apostles leave Asia, and enter Europe, and the first convert is a woman, Lydia. A business woman, a person of ability, know how, who heads up a whole house hold. And her whole house hold is baptized and she offers her home and resources as a base of operation for the Apostles.
Lydia’s conversion is interesting, she was a worshipper of God, but she becomes something even more, a follower of Jesus, a person of the Gospel.
The story says that the Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly.
She listened not to a story about Jesus, she listened to the Apostles talk about their own experience of the Risen Lord, she listened to how their lives were changed.
The Apostles were the Good News. It was their experience of faith that set Lydia’s faith on fire.
Lydia’s spiritual disposition connects to her disposition with her possessions. Her generous faith is revealed in her generosity with her possessions. What we do with our possessions says a great deal about how genuine our faith is. It is a common theme in the Acts of the Apostles. To receive grace is to become gracious.
That is the journey of faith, to become so gracious deep down that it spills over into every part of our lives.
Where is that deep place where the good news of the resurrection touches who we are? That place where the story about Jesus’ grace, mercy and peace, becomes our own experience of the vastness of God’s grace?
How do we get there? When does the vision come to us inviting us to cross over to a new land?
The geography of faith is very inefficient and indirect, it wanders.
Like Moses in the wilderness for 40 years.
Like Jesus traveling up and down and across Israel.
Like the Apostles as they zigzagged across the Mediterranean.
The journey is always to that place where God’s grace fills us with a thankful heart, where we become good news to and for the world. Do we ever really get there?
The further we step across into God’s Grace, it seems the further we have to go, until grace is all in all, and thanksgiving is how we greet every episode of our often troubled lives.
Sometimes it seems like such a long way to go.
Ultimately it is the witness of others that sets us on our way, how others have experienced the Divine immensity that is so very close, nudging us into a new way to live, the Way that is gracious.
It is only in setting out that we begin the risk that is faith, the risk that slowly remakes us into those whose experience of Jesus invites others into that journey as well.
We each must make the Gospel real, not just a story, but my story of how God is changing me, becoming part of our story, our experience, as we wander into Grace, as we wander into becoming alive.
Like the Apostles. Like Lyddia.
Like that long chain of hope and love that the witnesses of Grace have passed down to each us touching our hearts and setting them on fire.
Talking about others is an easy way to hide.
When we talk about how God is changing us…that is when we stop hiding and start living.