Audacious

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
May 1, 2022

3 Easter C 

          On Sunday, April 10 of this year, our Outreach Ministry Team launched the Christ Church Easter Chromebook Challenge, with a goal of raising $5000 in two weeks to purchase 25 Chromebooks for the International Institute of Akron and their work to resettle refugees in Summit County.  I said at the time that this was an audacious goal.  However, audacious is what we do at Christ Church.  Less than 10 years after a major disruption in the life of this church, we took on a significant building project, completely renovating our parish hall and creating new restrooms.  The construction itself was begun and completed during a global pandemic.  And these are just a couple of examples. Big challenges require big responses and as a church, we generally rise to those challenges. So, with a goal of raising $5000 in two weeks, by working together with gifts of all sizes, we raised $5470.  Audacious goal, check!

          This morning’s Scripture readings are all about God doing big, audacious things.  First, there is Saul’s dramatic experience of the Risen Christ while traveling on the road to Damascus.  One moment, Saul is storming into the city to arrest the followers of Jesus.  The next moment he is blind and has to be led by the hand into Damascus.  After three days, Saul is healed and converted through the ministry of Ananias.  Through out the rest of the book of Acts, the man now called Paul takes the gospel to all of the known world. 

          In the reading from Revelation, God gives the writer a tremendous vision in which the elders sing a new song, and they sing together with all the angels in a choir thousands of voices strong “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”  At the end, the elders are so moved, so transformed, having experienced something so utterly beyond themselves, that they fall on their faces and worship. 

And in the gospel reading, after Jesus has been crucified and has risen, the disciples figure they had best get on with their lives, so they go back to fishing.   However, the disciples do not seem to be very good at fishing, since they worked all night and caught nothing.  When an apparent stranger suggests in the morning that they cast their nets to the right side of the boat, low and behold they catch 153 fish and recognize the risen Lord in their midst.  Jesus cooks them breakfast on the grill at the beach and there is no doubt in their minds that they are with the risen Lord.

In each story, the main character is God.  The stories are about God’s work in the lives of Saul, the writer of Revelation, and Peter and the disciples.  In each case, God does something big and audacious, and while these are incredible stories, they can leave us feeling a bit unsettled if God has never acted in our lives in quite such a dramatic way. 

There is another human character, however, in the story from Acts who deserves our attention.  That character is Ananias.  Ananias, we are told, was a disciple who lived in Damascus.  Ananias was just a regular guy, minding his own business when the Lord calls his name in a vision: “Ananias!” 

God tells Ananias to go and lay hands on Saul of Tarsus so that he might regain his sight.  Ananias knew all about Saul, and from Ananias’ perspective, a Saul without sight who was neither eating nor drinking was to be preferred.  But God is insistent.  So, through the quiet ministry of Ananias, Saul’s sight is restored, and much to Ananias’ great surprise, Saul is baptized, and he begins to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues saying “This is the Son of God.”

Ananias was a regular guy but through the simple act of a single person who was open to God, something big happened.  Saul was converted to Christianity.  Saul needed someone, some person, to be the hands and voice that made the experience of risen Christ life changing and real.  God chose to work through the prayers and action of a single ordinary individual to make the word of God known to a broken world.

As a church, when God asks us to do something hard, something clearly audacious, we rise to the challenge.  But sometimes God choses to work through us in less dramatic but equally important ways to make the presence of the risen Christ known in the world.  We are called to be the ones who notice the light, who see the stranger feeding the hungry, who recognize the longing and the experience of something beyond ourselves, and name the Risen Christ in our midst for those around us. We are called to simply show up, for God and for each other, week in and week out, never knowing when our presence and a kind word or thoughtful gesture will make a life changing difference for someone.  We are called to form ourselves and our children as people of faith so that we are open to God’s call on our lives as Ananias was open.  What God will choose to do when we offer ourselves is beyond our wildest imagination. 

If we believe that the only time God is at work when we take on some crazy, audacious goal, and that our simple presence day in and day out, the love of God spoken through our sole voice, and the everyday gifts and dreams that we each have do not matter, we are fooling ourselves and hindering God’s work in the world.  Ananias reminds us that God will use each of us and all of us, as God has used people throughout history, in ways large AND small, for the audacious work of making the good news known in the world.                                  

 Amen.