Richard Davenport

May 11, 2025 – Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 20:17-35

            St. Paul’s life would have been a difficult one for a lot of people to handle.  Prior to being called by God to be a missionary, he probably had a pretty normal home life.  He obviously travelled some, but we have no reason to think he went all that far.  He probably had to leave a lot of his friends behind after his conversion. 

            Following his conversion, Paul was on the road a lot. Even there, people in our day may have jobs that take them travelling constantly, international sales, truck driving, the military, but when the job is done there’s still a home to come back to. It sounds as though Paul lived in Jerusalem, since that’s where we first hear about him, but he doesn’t end up back there very often.  In fact, he sets off for Jerusalem at the beginning of the next chapter.  But, this isn’t going to be a relaxing time to share with family and friends.  It won’t be a time to reflect and study at the temple.  Paul goes to Jerusalem knowing he needs to proclaim the Gospel there and that this will get him arrested and kick off the whole series of events that finally sends him to Rome.

            That’s already pretty rough living.  Modern missionaries don’t even work like that. Most of the time they go off to some remote country and live there for years.  They build up a community of believers.  They build a church.  They live and work and grow with the people there.  They get to know the people there and become a part of their lives. Eventually many missionaries do return to their home country, but usually that doesn’t happen until they have established a solid foundation for a church to grow, or for others to come in and continue the work.

            St. Paul doesn’t stay anywhere for very long, a couple of years at most.  He’s constantly on the move.  New places, new faces, new challenges to deal with.  He’s constantly making friends and constantly having to leave them again. Sure, he sometimes gets to reconnect with them, but those meetings are few and far between.  He usually has a companion or two on his journey, so it’s not as if he’s doing this entirely by himself, but still, there’s a certain amount of loneliness that’s built into what he’s doing.  It’s not like he has a phone or the internet so that he can at least keep in touch on a regular basis.  Anything he does long distance is by letter.  The Romans aren’t terrible with that sort of thing, but it isn’t as though they have an organized mail system like we do here.  Any letter you send is going to take time to get there, perhaps months or more, depending on where you send it and how it has to get there.

            What’s still more is that he knows that when he leaves, the church is going to have troubles.  It’s not that he necessarily could prevent the troubles, but he’d be there with them.  He’d be there to guide them, encourage them, and strengthen them as they faced the difficulties.  His absence will be what opens the door to a lot of these problems.  These will be people within the church who will start spouting false teachings, accusing others of being faithless, of being idolators. These will be people who will proclaim a new teaching that they say will save, and many will be lured by them to their own destruction. 

Paul knows better.  As an apostle called by Christ directly, Paul is quite capable of driving out these false teachers and helping the church to stay on the proper course.  But he won’t be there to help them.  They will have to face this challenge alone and they’ll lose people in the process.  Pain and torment wait ahead of him and heartbreak and anger will arise behind him.

Were this any other situation, any normal person would be asking why he even goes through with it.  If your boss, your supervisor, your commanding officer, offers to transfer you to another location and then tells you you’ll be miserable if you go and that everything you left behind will be worse off, well, that sounds like a pretty easy decision.  Just don’t do it.  Why put yourself through that?  Why put the people you’re leaving behind through that?  Stay put, and everything will be better.

But Paul isn’t a normal office worker, factory man, or soldier.  He knows all of this is going to happen, but he’s going to follow through with anyway, because God tells him to.  That’s terrible!  Doesn’t God care about Paul?  Doesn’t God care about the church Paul will be leaving behind?  Why would Paul go along with this?  There doesn’t seem to be any upside to any of it.

The four Gospels are the story of Jesus.  That’s their entire purpose.  There are lots of other stories, even stories that claim to be gospels, but they’re not. The Gospels, the “good news” is the story of God coming to earth, of him living a life among his people, of him carrying out his ministry, of him dying, of him rising again, of him ascending into heaven to await the last day.  If you don’t have the story of Jesus dying and rising again to save his people from their sins, you don’t have a gospel.  The story of Jesus is the most important thing we have.

But, the gospels are also the story of the disciples.  They aren’t the main characters.  They don’t die and rise again.  They don’t save anyone from their sins, but they are still important supporting cast members.  In reading the gospels, we see Jesus, but we also see them.  We see them as they go from following to being sent.  We see them going from students to leaders.  We see them grow as they learn what God is really doing in the world and what Jesus means for both the present and future of the whole world. 

Even St. Paul shows this.  Granted, his transformation is much less gradual, but he still goes from a newly faithful Christian into a powerful force for the kingdom of God.  Yet, right at the outset, as St. Paul is taking his first few steps into his newly given faith, God declares that Paul will suffer much for the sake of his name.  The rest of the apostles don’t have it much better.  The book of Acts details over and over again how different apostles are rounded up, beaten, imprisoned, and how the faithful are already being murdered simply because they are Christian.

You might ask the same questions of all of them.  Why do it?  Why go through with it?  Why not just stay right where you are and not have to face all of that?  The physical pain, imprisonment, abandonment, the hatred, the horrific executions, you don’t have to do any of it, so why would you? Just stay right where you are and all of that passes right on by.

Those are tough questions, but the answer is one you’ve hopefully already arrived at.  If not, those questions will face you at some point in your life and you’ll have to sort out whether being a part of the church is worth it.  Many in the last few decades have been confronted with these questions and determined it isn’t worth it after all and they’ve left. 

The apostles did not.  They understood what was at stake.  The forgiveness, life, and salvation Christ died to give were more important than anything else in this world.  No amount of pain, hatred, abuse, or loneliness would change that.  They were the most important gift anyone could receive. Without Christ’s forgiveness, all of the pain and torment of this life won’t even be comparable to an eternity of condemnation.  So yes, the pain and misery of this life aren’t anything anyone looks forward to, but they are still worth enduring in order to hold on to the gift Christ gives. 

That brings us back to St. Paul today.  His situation isn’t about deciding whether to stay Christian or not. It’s whether to leave this particular place, leaving it vulnerable to false prophets, and go to another place where life will be quite a bit more painful.  They sound like different scenarios, different situations, different problems to be faced, but they are not.  The motivation is the same and the goal is the same.  God comes to save his people.  Jesus didn’t die for just one, but for all.  God desires all to be saved.  God sends Paul to go out and preach the Gospel, not because Paul needs to hear it, but because others do.  Just as Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, he sends his apostles out to continue that mission.  Others need forgiveness, life, and salvation too, and God sends Paul to bring it to them.

We consider the cost for ourselves and realize it’s worth it to suffer a little grief if it means living forever, but the life of God’s chosen goes beyond the self.  Christ came into the world, suffered and died, not to save himself, but to save you. We look to the cross and see what love really means.  It is a love that considers suffering and even death to be of little consequence if it means bring eternal life to others.  We look to the cross and see how far short we fall from Christ’s love, but we also see that this is why he came.  We look to the cross and see that, despite how he was and continues to be treated, he still died for you, for me, and for everyone else in the world.  We look to the cross and see that, even though it meant his death, he still forgives us.  He still gives us life.

When St. Paul is sent out to new people, he is sad because of the trials that will come upon the people he is leaving, but he still goes in confidence. He knows Christ has already triumphed and that proclaiming the Gospel to new people will mean more will hear and see the love of Christ.  His sufferings can’t compare with that.  Whatever he suffers is worth it if it means more hear about God’s love for them.

God asks the same from us.  It isn’t any more than he himself was willing to give.  To be willing to take on the grief, the pain, the frustration, even sometimes the heartbreak, if it means others hear and see the love of God is the mission God has given the church.  He calls us not to shrink from it or to hide in the hopes it will pass us by, but to stride forth confidently, knowing that it can do little to hurt us and that every new person who sees God’s love and trust him is one less that death has a hold on. 

We see the difficult decisions that we are confronted with from time to time, whether to share God’s love and risk bringing all of this anger and pain down you, or whether to sit and quietly let it pass you by.  Sometimes the temptation gets the better of us.  God’s love doesn’t change.  Where we fail, Christ does not.  His love remains constant and is forgiveness is limitless for those who repent. We come to him and see again what he has done for us and what he had to do to bring that salvation to us.  We are strengthened and encouraged by him to once again go into the world and share it with others, so that they may receive what our savior died to give.