St. Mary's Episcopal Church

The Reverend Beth Fain
May 21, 2006
Easter 6b: Being Jesus’ extraordinary friends (Acts 11. 19—30)

I’m loving our Easter lessons in Acts.

Because Acts was written to encourage ordinary people to be extraordinary Christians.
Isn’t that what we ordinary people want to be?
Extraordinary Christians.
We read our lesson from Acts today through the lens of our gospel from John. Where Jesus says these extraordinary words: “I have called you friends . . . You did not choose me but I chose you.” (John 15. 15, 16)
Listen: Jesus calls you, yes you, friend.
Not because of anything that we do, but because Jesus chose, yes chose, you to be his friend.
Our passage from Acts goes on to show us what it looks like when we are friends of Jesus.
We read about a community of people figuring out what it means to be friends with Jesus and to be friends with Jesus’ friends.
Those who follow Christ have been scattered except for the 12 apostles who have remained in Jerusalem.
275 miles north of Jerusalem, a community of friends of Jesus is being formed in Antioch.
We are told this occurs because the hand of the Lord is with them.
Choosing them. A great number grabbing hold of that hand.
Barnabas is sent by the 12 apostles in Jerusalem to check on the community of people calling themselves friends of Jesus.
We are told that Barnabas is delighted to see this new community of friends of Jesus full of the grace of God, and he encourages them.
Even more people become friends of Jesus.
Antioch was a community of Jesus’ friends who were making sure that other people knew that Jesus wanted to be friends with them, too.
What did Barnabas do after he saw that the community in Antioch was Jesus’ friends?
He went and secured a master teacher to come and nurture their friendship with Jesus.
Saul, who will become known as Paul, came from Tarsus and alongside Barnabas taught Jesus’ friends in Antioch.
In fact, Paul and Barnabas did such an effective job of teaching these friends of Jesus that the people of Antioch, those that were not yet friends of Jesus, looked at these friends of Jesus and called them Christians. For the very first time.
A new name for friends of Jesus.
Christians. Meaning disciples of the Christ.
Then almost like an afterthought, after describing the mission and the nurture of this early group of Jesus’ friends, the story wraps up by describing the Lord’s hand through the outreach of the Antioch friends.
It’s not about outreach by time or talent.
Jesus’ friends give their money.
Jesus’ friends in Antioch help their sister church in Jerusalem.
Sharing material goods is always present in authentic Christian community.
Jesus’ friends do not live isolated from each other but are yoked to one another.
Jesus’ friends in Antioch were so full of Jesus’ friendship that they couldn’t do anything but reach out to Jesus’ friends in Jerusalem.
It’s the kind of reaching out that happened at St. Mary’s last fall when you so generously reached out to the victims of Katrina.
Then we paired that ministry with that of Jesus’ friends in a church in New York City.
Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of friendship.
Because a sign of being Jesus’ friends is the desire to share our material goods especially when it doesn’t seem practical or possible.
A sign of being Jesus’ friends is that Jesus’ hand is with us making the impossible and impractical extravagantly, extraordinarily possible.
Some of you have stopped listening because I am talking about how we use our money as part of being Jesus’ friends.
But don’t.
Because part of being Jesus’ friends always comes down to what we do with our money.
Because we do love our money!
Jesus knows that. So Jesus loves to mess with our love of money.
Because our love of our money and our material possessions gets in the way of our friendship with Jesus.
The battle between our friendship with Jesus and our friendship, if we can call it that, with our money is unrelenting.
I believe that it’s not Islam or Buddhism or secular humanism or the religious right or the religious left that is the enemy of friendship with Jesus.
I believe that it is our personal friendship with our money that is the enemy of our friendship with Jesus.
It was the struggle with the earliest groups of Jesus’ friends It continues today.
It may seem scary to be better friends with Jesus than it is with our money and our time.
I know that some of you may be afraid to be better friends with Jesus than with your money or your time.
Some of you don’t feel like you don’t have much money left to share with Jesus’ friends.
That may be. It’s always been that way.
I believe that when one friend of Jesus has less money to give that another will have more.
Like the friends of Jesus in Antioch. For the friends of Jesus in Jerusalem. Because it says there in Acts that each friend of Jesus in Antioch one gave according to his or her ability.
One gave more. Another less. It was extravagantly enough.

These friends of Jesus who are the first to be called Christians.
Why did strangers look at these ordinary people in Antioch and call these friends of Jesus Christians?
These friends of Jesus were doing three things: Mission. Nurture. Outreach.
Friends of Jesus can’t help but invite, inspire other people to be friends of Jesus, too. That’s mission. That’s what it means when we hear that a great number of people in Antioch were believing and becoming friends of Jesus.
Friends of Jesus can’t help but want to learn more about what being a friend of Jesus means. That’s nurture. That’s what Paul and Barnabas did with the friends of Jesus when they taught them.
Friends of Jesus can’t help but want to give to others in need: Those who are friends of Jesus. Those who aren’t friends of Jesus. That’s outreach. That’s what the friends of Jesus in Antioch did when they gave to the people in Judea.
Friends of Jesus, when we are really friends, will be engaged in mission, outreach, and nurture.
All of this after Jesus first chooses us to be friends. That’s the grace.
Then we grow in that friendship through mission, nurture, and outreach.
There’s always that other part: we grow in that friendship because God’s hand is upon us.
The mission, the nurture, the outreach is always a little beyond what we can do on our own.
So that we can know that it is the helping hand of our friend, Jesus, that makes it all possible.
Friendship with Jesus. Mission. Nurture. Outreach. The Lord’s hand on us. Then we ordinary people are called extraordinary Christians.
AMEN