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February 15, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Acts 19:23-41
‘The Way’
Doug Gwyn
This morning I want to look at one more look snapshot of the earliest
Church, as we find in the Book of Acts. The story Barbara
just read for us is one of my favorites. It’s well
told, with a wonderful undercurrent of irony and humor. These
silversmiths of Ephesus are outraged and frightened that this new
Christian movement will ruin their industry. In their panic,
they are ready to attack both Jews and Christians who claim that gods
made with hands are not gods at all. Demetrius and the
silversmiths throw the entire town of Ephesus into a panic.
There’s a mass demonstration, although a lot of people
aren’t even sure why they’ve assembled.
But they pack the great theater of Ephesus, in what is now
Turkey. That theater is still used today.
I’m told it holds about 30,000 people. Anyway, for
two hours the crowd chants “Great is Artemis of
Ephesus!” It sounds almost like “USA!
USA!” It’s the Super Bowl of
idolatry. I’m sure that, if they had had
‘terrible towels’ they would have been waving them
frantically.
This snapshot from the early Church gives us a glimpse of how the early
Christian movement became the end of the ancient world. Early
Christians preached an ‘end of the world’
message. For Jewish believers, Christ was the end of the
law. For the Greek-speaking world, Christ was the end of
idols. For Jew and Greek alike, Christ was the end of the
world as they knew it. The Roman Empire had set up the
possibility of this happening. The Romans conquered, subdued,
and united a vast array of peoples and nations. It was a
unified, coherent Empire. But it was a great, rambling wreck
of gods and goddesses. All these ancient deities, temples,
and cults jostling together, each with their own claims. It
was a global free market of idolatry. And one of the deities
on offer was fertility goddess Artemis. Her cult was based
there in Ephesus. There are some surviving statues of Artemis
– her whole torso was covered with breasts. So
Artemis had a certain universal appeal. People came to visit
Ephesus, to pray to Artemis, and buy these statues and shrines that the
silversmiths made. So Ephesis enjoyed a thriving Artemis
industry – based on a potent mixture of sex appeal, piety,
and prosperity. And according to local legend. the prototype
of the Artemis statues fell on Ephesus from heaven. That kind
of enfranchised Ephesus as Artemis Central. Or at least
that’s what the local chamber of commerce claimed.
But along comes Paul, preaching this new religion called “the
Way.” That was the earliest name for the Christian
movement. People viewed it as a new religion –
indeed, we still tend to view it as a religion. But it was
really the antithesis of everything called religion in its
day. The Romans later condemned the Christian movement as
atheistic – this Christian god was not a proper god at
all. Christ subverted all religion, everything the Romans
counted on to produce another generation of good, law-abiding,
god-loving pagans. “The Way” is a very
suggestive name. The Way is the opposite of all fixed
images. It began with Jesus preaching the kingdom of heaven
as an unfolding reality among common people. He made it clear
that it wouldn’t fit into the set categories of the
law. For example, when he sensed healing faith in someone, he
helped the healing happen. Even if it was the Sabbath and
would offend the legal experts.
The Kingdom of Heaven was the Way of God spreading among
people. And that Way kept opening in wider and wider
circles. The Way is about tuning to what God is doing here
and now, and acting accordingly. The Way is where God is
going here and now, and going with God. So the Way is not a
set of fixed images. It’s not our mental images,
like our ideas about God. The Way is not fixed forms of
obedience, like immutable laws of behavior or religious
observance. The Way is not fixed images about who we are, or
how life should turn out. The Way is about being present to
God here and now. The Way is waiting and watching to know and
do the will of God in the constantly changing terrain of
life. To live the Way is to live with uncertainty and to
tolerate a certain amount of anxiety. Because the Way unfolds
only one day at a time. It’s like the Israelites
feeding on the manna day by day in the wilderness. We can be
on the Way only one day at a time, one step at a time.
That’s the Way.
The story of Demetrius and the silversmiths of Ephesus offers us a
useful reminder about the Way. We today are threatened by
economic uncertainty. A long period of economic prosperity
has lulled us into a kind of ease and comfort.
We’ve adopted some fixed images of what our lives are about
and what our future holds. It’s very painful to be
shaken out of that. And some among us are feeling that pain
and uncertainty acutely – struggling with debt, losing jobs,
seeing retirement savings evaporate, etc. We’re
heading into new times, unknown territory. It’s a
good time to be on the Way there with God.
My favorite part of this story is the town clerk’s speech at
the end. He was concerned to quiet this riot. And
he succeeded at dispersing the mob by reassuring them of the world
status of Artemis and Ephesus. Luke renders his speech with
wonderful irony. The town clerk tells the crowd, Hey,
everybody knows that our fair city is the home of Artemis.
We’re the keeper of her temple. We’re the
home of that statue that fell from heaven. Nobody can deny
these things. What are you worried about? Now,
these strangers you want to lynch – they’re not
temple robbers, they’re not blaspheming our
goddess. Of course, if they do break any laws, we have courts
to try them. ‘Til then, chill out, my fellow
Ephesians. Go home. The greatest danger in this
moment is that the Roman garrison will think we’re
rioting. And we can’t risk a crack-down by the
Romans. So, the Ephesians calmed down and went home.
Now of course, Luke completed the Book of Acts sometime near the end of
the first century. At that time, the Artemis industry was
still going strong. The Christian community in Ephesus grew,
but not to the peril to the idolatry business. Nevertheless,
even in Luke’s day, early Christians surely read this with a
wry smile. They surely chuckled at the legend of the statue
of Artemis falling from heaven on Ephesus. And certainly, a
couple centuries later, Christians would hear even more irony in the
town clerk’s speech. Demetrius was right.
Faith in Christ was indeed the downfall of the Artemis
industry. It slowly destroyed the whole world of ancient
idolatry. It was the end of the world as Demetrius knew
it.
History is full of ironies like this. And some of those
ironies come back to haunt Christianity itself. Later, the
Roman Empire embraced Christianity, made it official, and made people
conform to it. And Christianity fell into the same
traps. The Way indeed became a religion – a
religion backed by Roman force. Like Artemis, a god you could
bank on. Another irony is that Mary the mother of Jesus
settled in Ephesus – at least according to legend (maybe the
same chamber of commerce). And over the centuries, a Mary
industry eventually replaced the Artemis industry. I suppose
the descendants of Demetrius and the other silversmiths of Ephesus had
a good business of making statues and other Mary
paraphernalia. Three years ago, a Turkish friend of the
Blakes, ________, visited First Friends a two or three times, while she
was teaching for a year at Earlham. She’s Muslim,
but she left us with some souvenirs of Ephesus, little icons of
Mary. But in Lucite instead of silver.
So the story of Ephesus in Luke 19 continues to generate such
ironies. But the real question is, here in Richmond, Indiana,
in the early 21st century, are we on the Way? Are we moving
with God? Or are we in danger of being petrified by the
worship of fixed images? Our fixed images can stunt our
faith. We may have fixed ideas about God, fixed ways of being
a Friends meeting, fixed opinions about who we are as human
beings. In uncertain and changing times, we cannot afford to
be held back by fixed notions of how God is going to take care of
us. If we latch onto what is no longer possible, forms that
no longer serve God, we become petrified, transfixed, terrorized by our
fears and uncertainties. Then we’re history, like
Artemis of Ephesus.
In our Quakerism class the past couple weeks, we’ve been
looking at Quaker faith and practice as a reinvention of early
Christianity. Quakers don’t have a fixed creed or
elaborate liturgies of worship. We are grounded in the simple
conviction that God is present in each person’
heart. Each of us can know God directly and do
God’s will in our own specific circumstances. So
Quakerism is a conscious attempt to worship, make decisions, and live
our lives based on that simple conviction, that essential
experience. It’s not the only way in the world to
be faithful. But it’s a good way.
It’s our way to be on the Way -- to live not by bread alone
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord, day by day,
like the manna in the wilderness. So as we move into open
worship, I’ll read the following Quaker Query (BYM,
QF&P, A/Q #11): “Be honest with yourself.
What unpalatable truths might you be evading? When you
recognize your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you.
In worship together we an find the assurance of God’s love
and the strength to go on with renewed courage.”
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