Good News                                                                            5/3/42

 

Scripture: Acts 1: 1-8

 

Text: Acts 1: 8a;  -- “Ye shall receive power.”

 

One of the Negro spirituals begins, in a sudden, exultant mood, with the words, “Good news, chariot’s a’comin!  Good news, chariot’s a’comin’!”  The gospel is good news of the coming of something more important than chariots!  It is the news of the coming of Jesus Christ, of his accomplishments when he came, and of the coming, with transforming power, of God’s Holy Spirit.

 

The church remembers, with appropriate observance and celebration, the birth of Jesus at Christmastide.  Then attention is focused, later in the season, on his works, his passion, and death, and resurrection.  This observance is emphasized during Lent and at Easter.  An observance even more important, perhaps, is one which has not been given the attention in recent Protestant generations that it deserves.  I refer to the coming of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ disciples, which experience we call by the not-too-familiar word, Pentecost.  Because I believe the experience of Pentecost to be fully as important to the experience of Christian mankind as Christmas or Easter, I have suggested that we study it during these four weeks to May 24th.  I have suggested that we read, (each one of us who will do so) a chapter a day from the Book of Acts, beginning last Monday with Chapter one.  Those who are doing so will be reading chapter seven today.  During these four Sundays, I propose to preach from the book of Acts.

 

Halford Luccock, son of a Methodist bishop and a professor at Yale University, whose comments on the Acts of the Apostles are extraordinarily stimulating, calls attention to the very first words of the first chapter of the book - “the former treatise have I made, O Theophilus” --- the former treatise!  There had, then, been a former treatise.  And even before it cooled, here came another.  It is as though this writer of gospel had more good news to relate before the former had really gotten into circulation.  “Extra! New developments in the case of Jesus!”

 

All through history there has been a conflict between the “files” and “today’s edition.”  I understand that newspapermen sometimes refer to the newspaper files as “the morgue.”  Luccock suggests that two kinds of folk have been in conflict throughout Christendom; the “embalmers” who are interested primarily in the past, and the “creators” who are interested chiefly in the present and in anticipation of the future.  The embalmers are those who feel that all the history worth noting is to be found in the “files” of yesterday.  The creators are those who think of religion as a living, present-day, many-sided experience.  The “former treatise” is always fulfilled in a new “extra.”  So the Christian gospel must be cried out today in the streets of our town, of Washington and Berlin and Rome and London and Stockholm and Tokyo and Buenos Aires!  The gospel of Jesus it still news!  Our Bible is as basic to Christian faith as history is to contemporary intelligence.  But God’s truth is still being revealed!  Strickland Gilliland expresses this in a line of verse in which he declares that “God kept on talking when his book had gone to press.”

 

It is a mistake to conceive our religion as a closed book.  That attitude was unintentionally pictured in a religious newspaper’s report of an Easter sunrise service: “Easter dawn service began at five-thirty and was over just after dawn.”  Well, it is tragedy, when Easter is over just after dawn!  Easter ought to mean more than just an anniversary.  Easter is a story in which we ourselves, here in this day, should be the latest chapters; a story in serial, if you please, beneath which we discern the Great Publisher’s note: “To be continued.”

 

There is further food for reflection in the last words of that same verse (the first in the Book of Acts) - these words: “All that Jesus began to do.”  Weymouth translates it, “All that Jesus did, as a beginning.”  Christianity is a point of departure, as well as a point of arrival.  The Acts, and the words, of Jesus are a beginning from which to continue our journey.

 

Of course our Christian faith has a destination, a point of arrival -- out of fear to assurance, out of being lost to very salvation.  Yet a harbor is not only a port of safe arrival.  And it is wrong to make it a place of permanent anchorage!

 

A little boy puts the truth in a memorable picture.  From his home in Brooklyn Heights, where he watched the ships, he went one Sunday to hear the great Henry Ward Beecher preach.  On that day, Beecher spoke of a harbor as a place of refuge “into which storm-tossed ships put for safety.”  And silently, to himself, the disrespectful little boy said, “You big chump” and settled back in his pew in disgust.  He though, “To hear him talk about ‘safe in the harbor’ and “Home to the harbor to rest,’ you would think a harbor was place to snuggle down in, a nice little place to come home and go to bed at night!  I guess he has never seen it much,” snorted the lad.  The boy didn’t think of a harbor as a place to dock, but always as a place from which to start out into the storms and fog and danger and adventure of the sea.

 

Having lived on the shore of a harbor in Kahului on the Hawaiian island of Maui, I think I sympathize with the boy’s point of view.  I have seen many ships in all sorts of weather, fair or foul, put out to sea with passengers, crew and cargo for Honolulu or for the ports of a wide, wide world.  Those ships were made for the sea.  For them, an anchorage is just a temporary thing, a pause for refueling or repair, for new cargo, new passengers, refreshed or augmented crew.

 

1900 years ago, Jesus began to teach and act.  He is still at it!  If his disciples can’t find a passage through the troubled seas of our day from Wall Street or from Moscow, let them try another starting point.  How about Jerusalem?

 

Luccock again points to the suggestive quality of words in the third verse of our Scripture lesson; the words: “to whom he showed himself.”  To whom?  To his friends, of course.  Great revelations come to the attentive.  Great insights have followed periods of costly attention and mental wrestling.  This is certainly true in the field of scientific discovery.  In this field there are four great stages which may be outlined in this way: (1) study of the problem; (2) unconscious incubation; (3) the emergence of the solution; and (4) verification by experiment.  In this intellectual world it is profoundly true that it is the “rolling stone which gathers no moss.”  It is just as true in fields other than that of natural science.  There are numerous ways of perceiving truth other than by scientific research.  But the seeker after truth must give some attention to them.

 

When the President of the United States visited Hawaii several years ago, there was staged, for the entertainment of the presidential party, a gigantic lantern parade.  Only those who were present got the full benefit of it.  Radio commentators, attempting to describe it to the rest of us failed to get very far beyond the word “colorful” where they stuck like the revolving wheels of a motor car stalled in sand.  You can’t get the fragrance of flower leis or the beauty of lanterns over the radio.  You have to be present to realize them.  Jesus shows himself only to those who are attentive to him.  We have all heard the well-worn assertion that one can be as good a Christian away from the church as in it; that one can commune with God in the country as well as in the church on a summer Sunday morning.  There is potential truth in these assertions (if they can be sufficiently divorced from easy-going self interest!)  But it is not true unless one definitely gives his positive attention to God where he is!  For the perception of God’s truth doesn’t “just happen.”  It comes to those who give their attention to it.  For most of us it is more likely to come in church, than on the road, the links, or the lawn.

 

The disciples of Jesus have always been busy people in the highways and byways and the market places.  They have learned much and taught much on the hillside and by the lake.  But their great spiritual experiences have come where they were gathered together - in an upper room where they communed in fortification against tragedy; in their assembling together at Pentecost; in their countless assemblies for worship and mutual encouragement.  It is there that Jesus “comes alive” out of the remoteness of shadow or pedestal, just as he “showed himself alive” to the apostles.  The fellowship of Christian people is the holiest communion of purpose, of sympathy, of sacrificial spending of life.  When we give definite, careful attention to him, when we respond to his invitation, “Follow me,” when we partake of his love and his struggle, Jesus comes out of the shadow, alive.

 

Until his disciples had received the spiritual courage to do their individual jobs alone, Jesus charged them to stick to their base - “not to depart from Jerusalem.”  There is no triumphant climax for the Christian except in the concrete.  “God so loved the world” is an expression from an actual cross on a particular day.

 

The eighth verse, and the last of this morning’s Scripture lesson, begins with the words, “But ye shall receive power.”  They did receive power, those apostles.  They went out sometime later with a missionary zeal that spread Christ’s truth all over the world, in spite of the fiercest persecution, in the face of flame, torture, wild beasts, and the craftiness and cunning of strong men.  That “power” makes the Christian church a missionary fellowship, concerned with using its power for the evangelizing of others.  The apostles found that they had something explosive that would not be held down by the conservative provincialism of the early Judaizers who thought:

 

            The rustic cackle of their burg

            The murmur of the world.

 

A certain minister sent a number of books, among them a copy of the New Testament, to be rebound.  When the job was finished and the books were returned, he was surprised to see on the shelfback of one the label in gilt letters, “T.N.T.”  On opening it he found that it was his Testament.  There wasn’t room on the back to spell out the words “The New Testament” so the bookbinders had merely printed the first letters of those words, TNT.  Not a bad name for the New Testament!  It is TNT.  Luccock says “It explodes and comes down in unexpected places.”  It is true, as some cautious souls have pointed out, that there is no Bible text reading, “Go ye into all the CIO strikes and preach the gospel,” or “Go ye into all the diplomatic conferences and preach the gospel,” or “Go ye among war’s generals and soldiers and preach the gospel.”  Nevertheless, when the power of Jesus’ gospel explodes, it comes right down where men live, including their disputes!  A true Christian is by his words and his deeds a witness to the power of the gospel!  The power of our witness goes out, whether we know it or not, from the high and from the lowly.

 

Consider briefly a striking contrast.  A few years ago, one of the “social arbiters” of New York and Newport died.  The Associated Press dispatches said of Mrs. Sara King Iselin that “she was known as the most exclusive of ‘the great ladies of the city.’  No new names had been added to her invitation list in 25 years.”  No new names in 25 years!  Well, God save our church from any such Mount Everest of exclusiveness!  The church and Christian people had better be like the humble pebble.  The pebble may lie quite unnoticed on a path.  And yet, when given even the power of a small boy’s arm as he tosses it into the lake, it starts ripples, which wave their way in ever-widening circles reaching out in every direction to everywhere!  If we take the good news of the gospel of the New Testament seriously, we shall yet release enough of its power to give this wicked old world the shaking that shall save it for God’s good purposes.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 3, 1942.