After Paul’s conversion, he spent three years in Arabia, Damascus and Tarsus until Barnabas went to look for him and brought him to Antioch where together they taught great numbers of people for a whole year. Afterwards, they were set apart and sent off on their first journey. The audiences were mixed, Jewish and Gentile, until we come to the passage this morning where Paul speaks to his first completely Gentile audience. They are not sophisticated like the Athenians but no doubt Paul begins as he usually does. He begins with where they are and their frame of reference. But this time he is totally surprised by the results.

Acts 14:8-20:

In Lystra there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and had never walked. 9 He listened to Paul as he was speaking. Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed 10 and called out, “Stand up on your feet!” At that, the man jumped up and began to walk. 11 When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” 12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them. 14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting: 15 “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. 16 In the past, he let all nations go their own way. 17 Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” 18 Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them. 19 Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. 20 But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.

1.  We all see the world through a window, a filter, a set of categories by which we make sense out of the life. We see and hear what we are prepared and predisposed to hear and see. All sorts of tests have confirmed this. Once we see a pattern it is hard to unsee it. When we get new information we sort through it and fit it into categories that already exist. That is why our minds sometimes autocorrect words that are misplaced or missing in a sentence. We have formulas that help us like, “I before E except after C” but then there are the words science, neighbor, conscience and society.

We do the same with Truth for which we have no existing categories. We squeeze it into an existing one. Sometimes we simply baptize old customs and adopt them as ways to keep them. For instance, the roots of how we celebrate Christmas are in German and Nordic celebrations but newly converted Christians wanted to carry those with them. The same is true for many of the Catholic saints. Pre-existing customs and traditions were adopted because it was too hard to leave them completely. We need old things for the new things to make sense. We need new ideas to be consistent with old ideas.

We have to make them familiar and consistent so we reshape them to fit our worldview – our paradigm.

You probably know the story of Captain James Cook.

Cook’s arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the Polynesian god Lono. Coincidentally the form of Cook’s ship, HMS Resolution, or more particularly the mast formation, sails and rigging, resembled certain significant artefacts that formed part of the season of worship. Similarly, Cook’s clockwise route around the island of Hawaii before making landfall resembled the processions that took place in a clockwise direction around the island during the Lono festivals. The natives believed Cook and his crew were deities because everything they did fit the story they had been telling for years.

That is exactly what the people did here. The people were easily able to accept an extraordinary and supernatural Truth (God has become man) but they had to fit it into their existing categories. They experienced something that, unknown to Paul and Barnabas, was not only familiar but was the core story of their whole community. Many years ago they had experienced a similar visit from two men.

Jupiter/Zeus had decided to destroy the human race but was willing to give it one more chance if he was able to find one virtuous couple. He and Hermes/Mercury came disguised as ordinary peasants, and began asking the people of the town for a place to sleep that night. They were rejected by all before they came to Baucis and Philemon’s simple rustic cottage. Though the couple were poor, their generosity far surpassed that of their rich neighbours, at whose homes the gods found “all the doors bolted and no word of kindness given, so wicked were the people of that land.”

After serving the two guests food and wine, Baucis noticed that, although she had refilled her guest’s beechwood cups many times, the pitcher was still full. Realising that her guests were gods, she and her husband “raised their hands in supplication and implored indulgence for their simple home and fare.” Philemon thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it into a meal, but when he went to do so, it ran to safety in Zeus’s lap. Zeus said they need not slay the goose and that they should leave the town. This was because he was going to destroy the town and all those who had turned them away and not provided due hospitality. He told Baucis and Philemon to climb the mountain with him and Hermes, not to turn back until they reached the top.

After climbing to the summit Baucis and Philemon looked back on their town and saw that it had been destroyed by a flood and that Zeus had turned their cottage into an ornate temple. The couple’s wish to be guardians of the temple was granted.

Does that story sound familiar? Of course, it does. It is so similar to the story of Abraham and the angels who destroy Sodom and Gomorrah but save Lot and his family. It sounds like Hebrews 13:2 that says, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” The theme of gods in disguise is everywhere we look.

It is not always our blindness that limits us but our inability to go outside what we find familiar. It was not a refusal to believe but an inability to believe outside their categories that created the problem later.

2.  We need to be prepared for the next revelation. We are never unprepared – only rightly or wrongly prepared. The lame man, in spite of a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, was prepared for Paul.

The crowd was not unprepared to hear about gods becoming men. They were completely open to that – but in the wrong way. In the same way, the Jews had been prepared for the coming of the Messiah for centuries but when he came they could not fit him into their categories.

I read this week about the battle of Gettysburg. General Robert E. Lee was not unprepared for that battle. He was prepared for the wrong battle. While he believed the Northern army was small, it was actually larger than his. While he imagined they were demoralized they were actually far more ready to fight than he thought. His intelligence from the scouts was wrong and his style of delegating to the commanders was not a fit for the situation. He was totally prepared for another battle but not for this one.

The Greeks were prepared for wisdom but it came in a way they could not recognize. It came as weakness and, as Paul says, foolishness. All of us are prepared for religion that gives us some sort of advantage but we are not prepared for suffering, are we? We are prepared for something that makes life easier – not harder. Something that explains everything and makes it simple but not making questions even more puzzling.

3.  We are not to spend our lives living off the last revelation of God and waiting for Him to repeat it over and over again. Instead, we should be preparing for the next stage of growth. Many of us want what we call revival – to recapture the old feelings and experiences. To somehow generate and renew what happened years ago or as a friend put it, “Let’s do yesterday, only better.” I was watching some of the South Carolina Freedom Summit yesterday and one of the consistent themes for some of the speakers was almost exactly that. Let’s recapture the time when we were the majority. Let’s fit what is new into the old categories. Let’s make what is unfamiliar into something we recognize. Let’s carry our old gods with us.

The crowd at Lystra was so prepared not to repeat their last mistake with Jupiter and Mercury that they missed the good news entirely. What was familiar caused them to miss what was extraordinary.

Living off the residue of the last revelation may make us incapable of seeing the next. Oswald Chambers says, “Beware of making a fetish of consistency to your convictions instead of being devoted to God. It is easier to be a fanatic than a faithful soul.”

Jacques Ellul put it this way, “We must be convinced that there are no such things as ‘Christian principles.’ There is the Person of Christ, who is the principle of everything. But if we wish to be faithful to Him, we cannot dream of reducing Christianity to a certain number of principles, the consequences of which can be logically deduced. This tendency to transform the work of the Living God into a philosophical doctrine is the constant temptation of theologians, and also of the faithful, and their greatest disloyalty when they transform the action of the Spirit which brings forth fruit in themselves into an ethic, a new law, into ‘principles’ which only have to be ‘applied.”

Growing up with all the millennial charts that interpreted every current event as a sure sign of the end, I can appreciate the desire to make everything consistent and systematic. There is a pattern and everything had to fit the pattern. Every new twist and turn was fit into the grand scheme we had been taught. We knew the mind of God and the course of history. I saw a funny cartoon the other day. You’ve all seen the Civil War re-enactments that can be pretty elaborate and realistic? The cartoon had a whole classroom of older adults underneath school desks with their heads covered. The caption read, “Cold War Re-enactment.” That’s how we thought. Everything was a sign of the end and the future was short.

4.  But then the story turns. Paul and Barnabas are horrified that the people have taken Truth and twisted it into their own pagan ways. But even in those circumstances he still has the presence of mind to start with where they are and the courage to disappoint them. He and Barnabas are not gods disguised as men but men like them. He doesn’t even take this as an opportunity to tell them about the god who did become man and dwell among us. He starts at the most basic point with them – there is a God who is kind and who has written a message about Himself in His creation. That message is all around them. Everything else is worthless and empty but there are things that are full of God and point us to Him if we will but pay attention. What are those few things that point us toward the true God? They are so simple. Anyone can see them.

Our work.
Our food.
Our joy.

All of these good things are full of worth and when we see them correctly they are sign posts pointing toward God. These few things constantly remind us of God and keep us from becoming worthless. We work and remember God. We break bread and remember God. We have joy and remember God. God is to be found in the most ordinary things of our lives – not in the ornate and sophisticated. Seeing God does not require special language or education or places. The ordinary is full of God. The poet Mary Oliver said it this way, “It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

5.  The greatest peril in Christian service is not persecution but praise. G. Campbell Morgan wrote, “The gravest peril threatening these men was that which came to them in the hour when men suggested that they should worship them. That is the supreme peril of the Christian worker. It would have been so easy to gain power and notoriety; to take this worship, and abandon the pathway of persecution and of that stones. That is the peril of the prophets. When men bring garlands to worship, when men suggest deification, he is in extreme danger. If men would help the prophet, they should pray that he may never accept the garland, or the worship of men. This was the most insidious hour.”

But, like those at Lystra, the world is full of people looking for gods in disguise and men are still seduced by those looking for them. To be an idol for anyone is to become worthless yourself and lead them to the same. This is a good story for any of us who desire the attention of crowds. Not only because of the temptation to become little gods but a warning about the nature of crowds. They can turn on you suddenly. Crowds cannot love. They can only adore or abhor. They are fickle and turn on a dime. Just read “Julius Caesar”. Brutus turns the mob against Caesar and then Mark Antony skillfully reverses them with sarcasm, irony and a little greed.

In the same way, the Jews who follow Paul around want him dead. They are not interested in winning arguments. Like Mark Antony, they skillfully turn the crowd to their advantage. Those who moments before wanted to worship them now are wanting Paul dead. It reminds us of the scene with Jesus before Pilate. There is no reasoning with the crowd in spite of his innocence. “With one voice they cried out, crucify him.” That is the nature of crowds, isn’t it?

I mentioned Captain Cook but you know how he died, don’t you? He was killed by those who thought him once to be a god.

6.  The power of the Gospel has always been and always will be the beginning and the end of this passage. First, the life of a single individual has been forever changed. Second, a small group of believers gathered around someone willing to die…who gets up and goes on and says later, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” The Gospel is free but it is hard. It is a gift but is not cheap. It is something that comes to us and is completely outside our categories of earning our way – it is grace.