With the final chapters of Acts, Luke hits the fast forward button. Having spent the first 15 chapters focusing on specific episodes covering just a few years, Luke now takes us on a whirlwind tour around Asia Minor following Paul. Snapshots and summaries are the order of the day – Paul spends six months here, a year there, plants a church, moves on, preaches the gospel, starts a riot.. There is a huge sense of energy and excitement. We get earthquakes, torture, riots, quarrels, courtroom drama. Great miracles happen, people are healed by shadows and handkerchiefs. All great stuff.

So why then am I left slightly weary? I think it is because there is an elephant running round the room which I am trying hard not to get trampled by. The elephant is not Paul himself but how we have used Paul as the exemplary Christian missionary, and in some senses the paradigmatic Christian.

It would be so easy from these chapters to glory in Paul’s example. His all out commitment despite numerous beatings, imprisonment, even shipwreck is certainly impressive. His willingness to leave his own town, his family, his former life and the certainties and status it conferred is admirable. But for me at least this is all a little divorced from my situation. I guess like most of us, life is a balancing act between various commitments. Work, family, friends, recreation, sport, community involvement, commuting, all jostle for time and energy. The reality is that I simply don’t have time to dash off round Asia for a couple of years.

And yet…I still feel somewhat inadequate and deep down guilty in reading these chapters. I can’t measure up to Paul’s example which consciously or otherwise, is so often held up as the paradigm for mission. Church culture still tends to honour the professional Christian – the minister, the missionary, the theologian, the church administrator. We seem seduced by a cult of Christian celebrity, which in turn shapes how we view our own commitment. Do we give the same dignity to a database supervisor as we would a church leader? I wonder if I asked you who were the most influential Christians in the past say 50 years? I would bet that instinctively we would all name the ‘professionals’ - maybe Mother Theresa, perhaps Billy Graham, Karl Barth, Steve Chalke, Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This is in no way to cast aspersions on the integrity or ministries of Paul or modern day Christian professionals. But such a narrow view of what Christian mission looks like inevitably sets up hierarchies and unleashes the professional Christian elephant which, we can either try and pacify by volunteering for a load of programmes or ignore and feel guilty.

I sometimes wish that Luke had left Paul to do his thing for a couple of years and spent some time with the church in Ephesus and seen how the gospel shaped their lives and community, in the midst of working the fields, of having children, dealing with illness, celebrating birthdays. Sadly he did not.

Should we then just leave these chapters to those single male missionary types who are able to respond to Paul’s example? I think that despite the distance between Paul’s life stage and ours, these chapters do offer us some resources which can help us shape our own mission, even if this mission looks very different to Paul’s. I want to return to two themes which run throughout Luke-Acts – witness and power.

A striking feature of these last chapters is the number of times Paul returns to his Damascus Road experience. Throughout Acts, Luke frames what the disciples are doing in ‘witness’ terms. You shall be my witness in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth. Paul witnesses to his conversion experience, the foundational event in his life and ministry. This is an extremely helpful concept for mission today. A witness is someone whose whole personality is involved – from experience, to intellect to emotions. It speaks of an authentic experience, a position of powerlessness. In the multicultural Graeco-Roman empire, witness was a key strategy. Paul has nothing except his own experiences and understanding to fall back on in his preaching. In much the same way, we in the secular post-Christendom west, are no longer in a position of privilege (Anglican readers excepted….). We witness to the reality of the resurrected Christ from our own experience, not from any agreed set of universal propositions. Witness also expands the scope of what mission might look like. Being a witness affects and draws on every area of life, and as such, might be a helpful way of moving away from idolising the professional Christian and giving equal dignity and importance to the work of everyone.

The second theme is power. As we have seen before, Luke’s fundamental plot line is from Jerusalem to Rome, always provoking the question who is in control, Caesar or Christ. Paul constantly is rubbing up against the powers that be – be they Jewish or Roman. Being a witness to Jesus always involves a confrontation with the powers that be. In today’s culture, there are hugely influential powers vying for our allegiance which we have to be aware of and in some cases confront. The journey from Jerusalem to Rome is a journey which we all must undertake. For instance, do our allegiances lie with an individualistic consumerism or with the Christ who calls us to take up our cross and live for others?

So while Luke uses the second part of Acts to focus almost exclusively on Paul, he does give us some clues which can help us in our own context. And we have a great opportunity today to live out – with our whole lives – the gospel. In the midst of the pain of a deep recession, we have the chance to bear witness to a different way of life, centered on the life of the resurrected Messiah who Luke first introduced us to so many chapters ago. As confidence has been shattered in the ability of capitalism to provide and deliver the good life, perhaps the Spirit might direct us not to Macedonia but to the public spaces of our society and anoint us with tongues of fire to speak a new language…

Reflection:

Acts finishes but Luke chooses to not tie up the loose ends. We know from church history that Paul dies, probably in Rome, but for some reason Luke chooses not to give us the full story. Instead he leaves Paul alive and still preaching. There is a sense that the story is just getting started and perhaps an invitation for us become characters and create our own plot lines. I like that sense of possibility and open-endedness.

From the strange birth, ministry and life of Jesus and the miraculous resurrection and Pentecost experiences, the open road was before the early church. And so it is with us. I pray that we might learn to witness to this resurrected Christ, confronting the powers of this dark age, singing God’s songs. I love this poem from Walt Whitman which captures brilliantly that sense of possibility.

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the
geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.