On dealing with those people we find difficult...

 

Easter 7 - Acts 16:16-34 and John 17:20-26

There are people that we read of in Scripture that I would love to have met.  I wish I’d heard King David sing.  I think I could have sat all day and all night listening to Isaiah preach.  Peter and I could have spent hours together, comparing notes on all the different ways we mess things up.  And I would have loved to have eaten dinner at the home of Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus, and I hope I’d have been thoughtful enough to get up and help with the washing up.

But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I’d have gone out of my way to spend time with the Apostle Paul.

We spend a lot of time with Paul in the season of Easter – during the weeks between Easter Day and Pentecost we don’t read the Old Testament at our services but rather we have a reading from the book of the Acts of the Apostles.  Apparently this is a very old Christian tradition, which can be found as far back as the time of St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century.  The idea was that in the days leading up to Easter, and in particular at the Easter Vigil, we look back and see how God was at work on earth from the very beginning.  Now, in the glory of the resurrection, we are called to look forward.

And so we find ourselves spending time with Paul.  Who, I confess I struggle with.

I struggle with Paul’s theology, but then, in some ways this is a good struggle.  Theology isn’t easy, it’s not meant to be easy.  Theology is, as St Anselm said, faith seeking understanding, it’s working out how we talk about and live out our faith.  And this can be challenging.  In the book of Acts we see the first followers of Jesus setting out on their journeys of faith, trying to make sense of what it meant to live together as the community of God’s people, learning as they went, often through their mistakes.

Paul is a major character in this story, both in the book of Acts and in the letters we have that he wrote to various congregations.  In reading these letters I feel that I am listening in to a set of conversations that I want to join in with – to agree, to argue, to question.  And sometimes I want to just sit in awe at the beauty of his words.  Some of the words in Paul’s letters have become the words that I live by, words that anchor me and lift me.

And then I encounter Paul in the book of Acts, and I find him difficult.  He is difficult obviously because of his history.  This is a man who persecuted the first disciples, this is a man who stood approving at the stoning to death of Stephen.

We talk of the dramatic transformation of Paul, and we rightly celebrate this. The word repentance literally means to turn around, and Paul’s was one of the most dramatic turn arounds in the whole of Scripture.  If there is hope for him there is hope for us all.  God’s forgiveness knows no bounds. 

And yet, though he may have turned away from his former ways, the consequences of these ways could not be so easily left behind.  God was asking Peter and James and the other disciples to take on their enemy as a partner in the Gospel.  How on earth are you meant to find common ground with your enemy, the one who cheered on the murder of your friend?

When I think of this, the people I find myself thinking of are Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, two men who grew up on opposite sides of the religious divide in Northern Ireland.  Paisley was a man who proclaimed from his pulpit an enmity for his fellow country folk who worshipped in a different church.  My mum, who grew up in County Antrim around about the same time as Ian Paisley, said of him that he may not have called people to violence, but he spoke in such a way that his words enabled that violence in others.  Martin McGuinness was on the other side of that divide and he did perpetrate that violence.  And then these two men, McGuinness and Paisley, found themselves sitting together in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.  They had to work together, they had no choice.  Well, in fact they did have a choice.  We’ve seen plenty of examples of people, in Stormont and in other assemblies the world over, who are faced with a choice, to remain stuck in their enmity or to work with their enemy.  In choosing the latter, they managed to build not only a peace for their country folk, but a genuine relationship with one another, so much so that when Ian Paisley died, Martin MMcGuinness was able to say he had lost a friend.

True inclusivity is incredibly hard.  It means including those we oppose, whose views we profoundly disagree with.  It means not waiting for them to change their minds, but working with them anyway, finding tiny patches of common ground where we can, to begin, however tentatively, to work together.

If we are lucky we will find, as Paisley and McGuinness did, friendship across the difference.  And if we are very lucky, we will find reconciliation across divided communities.

Paul is difficult because of his past.  But he also comes across, to me at least, as someone who was quite difficult to get on with, someone who seemed to often find himself disagreeing with people or rubbing them up the wrong way.  It’s not that he didn’t care about other people, and indeed at times he comes across as thoughtful and compassionate.  But he was mission focused in such a way that attending to relationships came second.  That mission focus is admirable, but it’s also difficult to work with.

When I read this passage through the first time when preparing this sermon, there was something that irritated me about the way Paul dealt with the enslaved woman.  His response to her was to be annoyed, to seemingly try to ignore her for a few days, and only eventually to cast out the spirit that held her captive alongside her enslavers.  I found myself wondering why he was annoyed not compassionate, and why it took him so long to respond to her need.  To be fair, Luke does not tell us Paul was annoyed by her, so much as by the distraction she provided, and the response to his actions shows the risk he was taking in intervening.  But still, I found myself irritated by the way he dealt with the situation.

I spoke before about the challenge of working with people who have been our enemies, or those with whom we have profound and deeply held differences of belief.  But often I think we find it difficult working with people we agree with, but where we have different ways of doing things, or even just different personalities. 

Years ago I heard a programme on the radio which was discussing whether we could be friends with people we disagree with.  There was lots of talk about how to get on with people where we disagree on politics, religion, and other values.  Then one of the people on the programme started to talk about becoming friends with people when we didn’t particularly like them but it was convenient.  The others on the panel were a bit bemused at first but she went on to talk about people she’d met at the school gate when their children were friends, or went to some of the same clubs, and their paths crossed so much that even though they didn’t particularly hit it off, it just seemed sensible to become friends. 

In church we find ourselves living and working alongside people we haven’t chosen.  This is the nature of discipleship.  We are together not because we choose one another but because we choose to follow Jesus in this place and this brings us together.  One of Jesus’s last acts on earth was to pray for his disciples – and not just those disciples gathered, but all those who would come to follow him, including us.  That is an awesome thought, that in his last hours before the cross, Jesus was thinking of us, praying for us.  And his prayer was that we would be one.  The call for us to find common ground across with those we disagree with and with those who are different from us or we don’t get on with, this is a call from Jesus – a call to live differently from the divided world around us.  Jesus said that our unity would be a sign to the world that we are his.  And so when we struggle with one another, as we will, let’s lean on the prayer of Jesus and ask him to guide us into that unity.

And so I come to my last point in thinking about Paul.  He is difficult and yet I can still learn from him.  We see him today landing in a prison cell, and we know he ended up in many other tough situations as he followed the Spirit.  And again his response is not what mine would be.  I suspect I would be feeling miserable and feeling sorry for myself, stuck in the weeds of my sorrows.  Maybe Paul felt this way too, but his response was to pray and sing – to lift his head up and look to God. 

On Easter Saturday a few of us gathered in the Synod Hall for a vigil, to sing together songs of lament and hope.  Being good Scots I think our songs tended to lament – but even the songs of lamentation I think were good for our spirits.  In singing together we connected with one another, sometimes listening and sometimes singing together.  We connected with those beyond our group, as we sang their songs and stories.  And we connected with God, as we sang of our faith and our doubts, our sorrows and our joys.  For me, singing does that – lifts my head from my own sorrow.  For you it might be something else, the thing that reaches you when you are stuck in a situation and lifts your head. 

And for all of us, there is prayer.  I don’t mean that to be glib, suggesting that we should pray and everything will just be fine.  Sometimes God will break in to our situation dramatically, like God did here for Paul and Silas, changing their sorrow for joy.  And at other times, we may find the doors of the prison cell remain stubbornly locked. 

Paul wrote to his friends in Phillippi years later from another prison.  As far as we know he did get out of that prison but he landed in another, and ultimately was executed for his faith.  So, when we read him telling his friends that he had learnt to be content in all circumstances, he wasn’t being glib.  And so I can lean on the words of Paul.  I wrestle with them, I am irritated by them at times, but I can lean on them when I am stuck in my own sorrows:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.  Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.