Can I Get a Witness?
1 Peter 3:15
I once heard about a church board meeting where things got very heated. People were arguing, tempers were flaring, blood pressure levels were shooting through the roof, voices were rising, it was not pretty.
Finally, one gentle old saint, who almost never spoke up in those kinds of meetings rose to his feet and said, “Please, please, can we just stop and pray?” One of the board members turned to another and said, “O my gosh, has it come to this?”
To stop and pray at a church board meeting? Revolutionary.
In his letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul tells us to pray always, to pray without ceasing. Yes, pray in church board meetings. Pray when you’re driving down the road. Pray when you first wake up, just before you go to sleep. Paul says, “Pray always.”
In our text today, the Apostle Peter tells us about something else we should do every day. We are told to always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is within us.
Always pray, and always be ready to give an account for the hope within you.
Of course, in the church we have a formal name for giving an account for the hope that is within us. It’s one of our membership vows….it is called witnessing.
However, I would venture to say it is not one of the most popular of the membership vows.
A lot of Methodists I know, including other pastors, don’t find the idea of witnessing very appealing.
First image that often pops into their mind is some wild-eyed person standing downtown on the street corner wearing a sandwich board sign that says something about the end of the world and the Book of Revelation.
And if the idea of witnessing doesn’t conjure up anything that scary, when a lot of people think about witnessing they picture very obnoxious people who have not learned the importance of personal space. (Or the value of a good breath mint.)
But witnessing is one of our membership vows and there are ways to give an account for the hope that is within us that aren’t quite so extreme.
Now, if you are called to do something extreme don’t let me discourage you, but there are ways to share our faith that fit in more naturally to everyday life and conversation.
You can even see examples of that kind of witnessing in the Bible.
In the Book of Acts, chapter 17, the Apostle Paul is in the city of Athens in Greece waiting to meet up with Timothy and Silas. They had gotten split up in Beroea and while Paul was waiting for them he got into some discussions with some Epicureans and Stoic philosophers. They found him interesting and some of his ideas novel, so he was invited to speak at the Areopagus, to a group of philosophers and politicians, located there just below the Parthenon.
There were lots of images of Roman and Greek gods everywhere. But, rather than attack the Greeks for their pagan gods, Paul looked around and found an inscription that said, “To an Unknown god” and he told them about Jesus and the God that has created everything that is.
Rather than put them down for what they believed, he connected with what they believed, with their hunger for the divine.
We can do that too.
Maybe you have a friend who is an artist…you can talk about how God is an artist
Maybe you have a friend who is a musician, you can talk about how God gave us sound and harmony
Maybe you have a friend who is an accountant, point out how God is orderly.
We can do what Paul did in our witness. We can connect what people are already doing with who God is and what God is doing.
Another way, we can witness that is not obnoxious is to let people know how crazy God is about them.
I think I’ve told the story before about Tony Campolo’s trip over to Hawaii. Campolo is a sociologist, Christian author and speaker and was over in Hawaii for a conference.
The first night he was there he woke up about 2:30 in the morning because his body was telling him it was day time. He was hungry. His stomach started growling, so he went out looking for something to eat. The only restaurant t he found open was a little diner down a dark, scary alley, sort of a greasy spoon. He was hoping to order some bacon and eggs with biscuits and gravy, but after he walked inside and saw the man behind the counter he had second thoughts. Big guy, greasy apron, sink full of dirty dishes, stove that didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a while.
So when the man asked him what you want? He spotted some donuts under a plastic cover and said, “I’ll take a donut and a cup of coffee.” The guy gave him his donut. As he sat there munching it at 3:00 in the morning. A group of loud, boisterous women came in and sat down at the counter around him. After overhearing some of their conversations, Tony realized they were what was once called “ladies of the night,” and they had just finished “working.”
He heard the one sitting right next to him say to her friend, “tomorrow is my birthday, I’m gonna be……….39. “Her friend said, “So tomorrow is your birthday, what do you want from me, a cake? Do you want me to throw you a party?”
She said, “No I don’t want anything. Why do you have to be so mean? I just said it’s my birthday tomorrow. I’ve never had a birthday party in my life and I am not expecting one now.” After a few minutes they left.
Tony stayed behind and he asked the man behind the counter, whose name was Harry, “Do those women come in here every night?” He said, “They sure do, every night, just like clockwork.” He said what about the one who was sitting right next to me. Does she come in here every night?” He said, “O yea, that is Agnes. She has been coming in here for years.”
Campolo said, “I have an idea. I heard her say tomorrow is her birthday. I want to throw a party for her. Do you think we could do that right here in the diner?”
He said, “I think that is a great idea.” Campolo said, I’ll bring some balloons, a banner and a cake. “Harry said, “No, no the cake’s my thing.” Then he called out to the kitchen to his wife, “Honey, there is guy here who wants to throw a party for Agnes tomorrow, says it’s her birthday.” His wife said, “That’s terrific. She is always trying to help other people and no one ever does anything nice for her.”
Next night, at 2:30 Campolo was back with balloons and banners. Harry had the cake and had gotten the word out on the street about the party and when Agnes walked in, every sex worker in Honolulu along with Tony Campolo shouted, “Happy Birthday, Agnes!” Her knees buckled up under her. She could barely stand up. They lit the candles (all 39 of them) and sang happy birthday to her. Harry told her to blow out the candles, handed her a knife and said, “Cut the cake, Agnes.”
She said, “I don’t want to cut the cake. Is it okay if I don’t cut the cake? I would like to show it to my mom first, she just lives around the corner.” They said, “It’s your cake. You can do whatever you want to with it.” She said, “I’ll be right back. I just want to show it to my mom.”
She walked out of the restaurant, everything got quiet, very quiet. Nobody knew what to do. So Tony said, “Let’s pray.” He thanked God for Agnes’ life, he prayed for her health and for her salvation. He said, “I prayed that her life would be changed and that God would be good to her.”
When he finished, Harry came over and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you didn’t tell me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to anyway?”
Campolo said, “I belong to a church that throws parties for prostitutes at 3:00 in the morning.”
He said, “No you don’t. I would join a church like that.”
One way we can all witness is to let everybody know that God is crazy about them, even those who have never had anyone ever throw them a birthday party – maybe even especially them.
We can witness by helping people see the hunger they have for beauty, the hunger they have for creativity comes from a pretty good source.
Our membership vows are means of grace and not just for us but for those we might serve. And yea, they might involve moving out of our comfort zone a little bit, but isn’t it great that there were those willing to move out of their comfort zones so that we might be here today?