St. Barnabas the Apostle (Transferred)

Good morning Encouragers,

This morning carries more than its usual weight of things happening at once. After the last hymn, most of you will walk out onto these grounds for the picnic that happens here every year on this feast: the day of the man whose name this parish wears.

Our friends from New Jerusalem Baptist will be at the tables with us, the way they are every summer when our two churches put our hands together for the first graders who will get backpacks from us in August.

And in less than two weeks, Jennifer boards a plane for Bolivia, not for good, just for a fortnight, to spend what God has given her in a place that isn’t Bellville, and then to come home and tell us what she saw.

None of these, on its own, is the subject of a sermon, but taken together, on this feast day, they’re the same thing wearing different clothes: what it looks like when a church starts acting like the man it’s named for.

Because here is what St. Barnabas was, in one plain sentence from the book of Acts: “a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.” And here’s what he did with that fullness: he never once kept it to himself. Every gift the Spirit gave him, he spent looking for somebody else to give it to.

That’s the whole shape of this morning’s Collect, and it’s the whole shape of this sermon: The gifts of the Spirit are meant to be shared, not kept to ourselves. We are to use them for people we haven’t met yet and in places we need to seek out.

A church that truly values these gifts will feel joy when one of its members leaves to use them, as is the case with Jennifer and “One8Go Global”. And she, in turn, will rely not just on herself, but on God, who can multiply what she gives away.

Listen again to what we prayed a few minutes ago: “O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Ghost; Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thine honour and glory.”

Notice the Collect asks for two things, not one. It asks that we not be left without the gifts, and then, in the same breath, that we not be left without the grace to use them.

That second half is easy to skim past, but it’s the harder half to live. Plenty of people have gifts they’ve never spent, and plenty of congregations have resources, talents, hours, and affection sitting in a drawer somewhere, because nobody prayed for the second grace:

The grace to spend what they’d already been given on somebody else, at some cost. That is what we’re asking for today. Not more. Just the nerve to spend what we have.

St. Barnabas is proof that the prayer gets answered. Acts tells us the church in Jerusalem heard that something was happening up in Antioch, Gentiles, of all people, turning to the Lord, and they sent Barnabas to look into it.

“Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad.” Not suspicious. Not territorial. Glad. He saw God doing something in people who weren’t his people, in a city that wasn’t his city, and his first response was joy.

Then, and this is the part I keep returning to, he didn’t stay and run it himself. “Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul.” He went looking for the one man who could do more with it than he could, and brought him back to share the work.

He gave away the very thing that had made him valuable: being the one in charge. And Luke tells us what came of it, plainly, without fanfare: “much people was added unto the Lord.”

Here’s a detail worth sitting with. Barnabas wasn’t born with that name. Acts tells us his given name was Joses, and it was the apostles in Jerusalem who renamed him, and they tell us exactly why:

The name means the son of consolation, or, as some render it, the son of encouragement. They didn’t hand him a title and ask him to grow into it. They watched what he kept giving away, and renamed him for it afterward.

I address you each Sunday as Encouragers, and I do so in hope. This morning, I want you to hear again where that word comes from. It’s St. Barnabas’s other name, the one the church gave him because of what they had watched him spend.

Maybe that’s worth carrying out of here today: that a parish, like a man, can grow into a name by giving enough away that somebody else notices, and says so.

That is exactly the shape of what is happening in this parish right now, and I don’t want us to lose it under the noise of a busy Sunday. As the church at Antioch sent Barnabas out to use the gifts God had given him, so we are sending Jennifer:

Not because Bolivia needs us or her more than Bellville does, and not because we’ve got some surplus lying around that we can spare, but because that is what a church does with what it’s been given, and that is what Jeniffer is doing.

We lend it out. We trust it will come home having grown. And we do it so that, like Barnabas, many would be added unto the Lord, there and here, in ways we may not get to see for years.

This is also, I think, what is happening on these grounds in an hour or so, and at the Methodist church in August.

When New Jerusalem sits down at our tables today to break bread, and when our members work side by side this summer to give backpacks to first graders, we are connecting with each child, including the one who is shy and needs someone to crouch down to their level. This is the joy of St. Barnabas showing itself in our town.

Barnabas didn’t wait to see whether the grace at Antioch looked like the grace at Jerusalem before he would celebrate it; he simply went to work alongside it.

Half a dozen congregations in this town will give up a single August morning to do precisely that, each one carrying the portion that’s theirs. Chrysostom marveled that it was here, at Antioch, in just this kind of mixed and ordinary gathering, that “the disciples were called Christians first.”

The name wasn’t claimed. It was given … given by people watching from outside, who could see something in the way these particular people loved each other, and loved the people around them.

And here is where the Gospel reaches all the way down to the root of it. On the night before He died, Jesus told His friends: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.”

Not servants. Friends. That is not a small change of title. A servant carries out instructions he isn’t required to understand. A friend is let in on the reason why.

Saint Paul will later put the same truth in the language of a household: no longer a servant, but a son, and an heir of God through Christ. That is what lies underneath every good thing this parish does:

Not a list of orders handed down to hired hands, but the confidence of children who have been let in on what the Father is doing, and trusted to go and do some of it themselves.

“Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.” He chose us first. He told us why. And then He sent us out the door.

So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room, onto these grounds, into the next two weeks and the next two months.

If Christ has called you friend rather than servant, then you are not here to take orders you don’t understand; you are here to do something you have been let in on.

If He has placed His own gifts into your hands, and into Jennifer’s, and into the hands of everyone who will set a backpack down in front of a first grader this August, then those gifts were never meant to sit still.

And if the God who sent Barnabas to Tarsus, and sends Jennifer to Bolivia, and has gathered New Jerusalem and St. Barnabas under the same tent this very afternoon, is the same God who has spread this table, then let us come to it now:

As those who have been chosen, fed, and sent, certain that whatever leaves this altar in our hands will be multiplied long after we have stopped keeping track of it.

The fortnight will pass, and Jennifer will be home before we have finished missing her. The backpacks will go out, and most of the children who carry them off will never know our names.

And the Lord who gave Barnabas his singular gifts, and gave him the grace to spend them, gives Himself to us now, in this bread and this cup, so that we might walk out of here and do, in our turn, exactly what he did:

To see the grace of God already at work in somebody else, and simply be glad of it.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.