sixth Sunday After Trinity

I’d like to invite you to come with me to Antioch. Antioch was the third largest city in the Roman Empire, next to Rome and Alexandria. Modern historians suggest that the population when Saul and Barnabus visited would have been about 100, 000. Today it is the city of Antakya in Syria. In the first century was the new centre of the church and it’s from here that the churches mission now radiates. The sending out of Saul and Barnabus is one of those defining moments for the young church. Note that this defining moment arose out of prayer and fasting, that it was the Holy Spirit’s initiative to send Saul and Barnabus out from this growing centre of Jewish Christianity. (v2)

Their first destination is Cyprus and Luke shows us immediately that the mission imperative will always be opposed. In this case, it’s by a Jewish magician, a false prophet called Elymas. (The same word is used for the wise men in Luke 2.1)

Saul, later known as Paul, denounces Elymas fiercely with vehemence that might surprise the first time reader. “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the paths of the Lord?” (v10) he says. He condemns Elymas to temporary blindness, knowing full well himself how disabling that can be. For it wasn’t long before that Saul was blind.

What we begin to see here in this story, is the mounting conflict between Judaism and the church. It’s a conflict that will run throughout Luke-Acts, as the first Christians begin to establish their belief and faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

The lasting issue for us as contemporary Christians to ponder tonight is how we deal with opposition when we face it.

Generally we assume that we need to employ the grace, love and patience that we see in Jesus; and that’s absolutely right. However, there are times when evil requires nothing less than uncompromising rejection.

On the whole in this century, Christians in other cultures have experienced more opposition than we have in the West. We see on our TV scenes and read in our papers stories of regimens in other parts of the world, where dictators rule unjustly, where famine is exacerbated by fighting within, where power is abused and terrorism appears to prevail. Where people are intimidated and much worse murdered for their faith.

Though even in the West recently: we have experienced evil. In the massacre in Norway, in the man convicted of raping a two year old child and reading reports that there is a significant increase in the number of young people being brought illegally into this country to work in the sex trade – the slave trade has by no means gone here in the twenty first century. Just three examples of evil taken from the news this week.

Perhaps we might ponder too, our tendency to compromise and to fudge issues in the interest of good manners. When people who are the poorest in our country are penalised and we say and do nothing:  Just this Friday a neighbour of mine came to tell me she has been made redundant from the council. Her job was to run a scheme to help the elderly and housebound at home. Some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our community here. Or maybe, when we continue to use resources without thinking of the effect it might have on our environment; yet we complain about the bins being collected less frequently and struggle to recycle or create less rubbish for landfill. Or maybe when we buy cheap fruit in our supermarkets at the expense of those who are paid beneath the minimum wage to bring the fruit to our table; the migrant workers picking fruit less then three miles from us here in the town centre.

Do we, like the psalmist who wrote the psalm 80 we sang tonight, need to ask God to” turn us again O Lord God of hosts” to turn us away from evil, the glaringly obvious and the more subtle. To turn us away from evil to walk more closely with Jesus.

How might we do this? Well, Paul and Barnabus give us an example to ponder tonight: they prayed, they fasted and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. 

Paul is often criticised for being over-robust at times and his words can make us feel uneasy.  But I wonder if you and I might be challenged for not being robust enough in confronting the evil amongst us.

Amen.