The Last Word--November 13, 2023

The Last Word--November 13, 2023

"[Paul] lived there [in Rome] two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance." [Acts 28:30-31]

We say it at funerals a lot, but it is certainly true here, too--God gets the last word in our story. And literally here, the last word is of great importance. 

Today's verse is actually the final sentence in the book of Acts, that sweeping story of the early church's witness from the time of Jesus' ascension into the first years of the gospel's spread to the wider world. And it ends with a sort of non-ending, actually.  The book of Acts ends, basically, with a declaration that the story isn't over, but rather will keep on going as God keeps moving through the community of Jesus to reach the whole world.  It's an ending that says, "But this isn't really the end."

In the Greek that our narrator Luke uses, it's just one word that says, "without hindrance," rather like our word "unencumbered," or to put it a little bit more colloquially, "with nothing in the way that could ultimately stop him." The last word is that the news of Jesus is free, uninhibited, unleashed. The last word is that the movement of Jesus' followers, opened up to the in-breaking Reign of God, keeps on rippling out from that first pouring out of the Spirit on Pentecost--and the world could not stop it. The last word is that the risen Christ and the living Spirit remain loose in the world.

In some ways, that is an entirely unsatisfactory way to end a story. A good literary critic would point out how many loose ends are left unresolved and how much is left up in the air for anybody who has waded through all 28 chapters of the story for so long. We never get to see Paul's day in court. We never learn what the emperor's verdict was at Paul's presumptive trial. We never know what became of the Christian community....

Except that we do--we are living proof that the story is still going on. Luke has written this story knowing that the Christian community continues and live and thrives, still "unencumbered" and "without hindrance" itself, long after the events of Paul's life that are written down here. We are the continuation of the story. Luke doesn't give a nice and tidy ending to his story, no "And they all lived happily every after..." because the story didn't end with Paul. It keeps going. The same Spirit is loose and alive and working among us and in us (and even, if we can bear to admit it, in spite of us sometimes). Saying anything more than what Luke says, which is essentially, "And the story kept going on..." would suggest that the "real" mission of God was over, and that we Christians are left just to tell the stories of what God did. But that misses the point--this book was never just a record of what God did; it was always a reminder that the Spirit of God is leading us to live as Jesus' people still, even now, even thousands of years after Jesus' death and resurrection. There's no punctuation in the original Greek of Luke's book, but I suspect that if there would have been, he would have even ended the last sentence with a good old ellipsis (...) to say that there is more to come and the story of Jesus' people continued in hope and confidence, even after Luke stopped writing about it, and even after the empire put Paul to death.

There is that old cliché that we should not put periods where God puts commas, and as tired as that might sound, there is real truth to it. The empire thought it could put a period on the life and ministry of Paul by executing him (eventually--we don't get the story here). And before Paul, the angry mobs (of which Paul was a part, if you remember, when he was going by Saul) thought they could put a period on the life and ministry of Stephen by stoning him. And of course, before that, the empire and the religious leaders and the angry mobs (and even Satan, we could say) thought they could put a period on the troublemaking of Jesus by putting him to an ugly death, too. But, as the saying goes, God had it in mind to put commas at each of those points--or better yet, to put an ellipsis after the cross, and after the stoning of Stephen, and even after the end of Paul's earthly life.

Keep that in mind in these days, too. Many in our country like to talk about the decline of the church--some who wistfully remember days gone by when Christianity had a place of public prestige about it, others who are eager to see the dethronement of any faith of any kind, and others who are not quite sure what to make of the signs and symptoms they see. And it may well be that church as we have known it in our lifetimes is indeed dying--that Sunday-morning faith which never is lived out through the week will in fact fold up. In may well be that the church as the comfortable hideout of people who want to appear respectably religious will need to make room for a deeper, riskier, more passionate and on-the-fringe community of disciples. But let's not put any periods where an ellipsis should really be.... The community of Jesus has lived through death and resurrection before--in fact, it has staked its life on it. The community of Jesus, though not ever hemmed in to one set of liturgies or church-talk or style, has continued on "without hindrance." And even that is not our own accomplishment--it is the power of the same Spirit who works in us and who has upheld us all along. For whatever else is out there for us--for you and for me as individuals, and for us as gathered communities of Jesus' followers--Luke wants us to hear his last word, "without hindrance," not as an end, but as a signpost along the way to remind us whose we are, whose hands we are in, and whose work we get to be a part of. What else can we say to that but "Amen and Amen"? Out we go today, confident that for whatever else it looks like to the period-pushers of the world, the Reign of God keeps rippling out among us and in us and through us--even, as Jesus says, to the ends of the earth....

Lord Jesus, in some ways, all of our prayers begin with an unspoken, "Into your hands, we commend our spirits." So, too, today, on the verge of ending one part of our journey with the completion of Acts, we place ourselves intentionally where you have already put us yourself--into your hands. From that place of confidence, go along with us, out into your world, spurred on by your Spirit, upheld by the gracious presence of Jesus, to embody the blessed life of your Kingdom for all. We ask it in the name of Jesus, the great Amen himself, as the Scriptures say, and offering our lives as a living Amen to your promise....