Sermons for the Month
Rifters
DATE: May 27, 2001
SERVICE: Easter VII
TEXT: Acts 16:16-34“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
Many people are gifted. But only a few are rift-gifted. Walt Disney was one of them. In fact, Walt was a three-time rifter, one of the few people who have successfully managed to find a rift in the continuum of life, to bet everything on it, and become successful by doing so. So just what is a rift? A rift is a big tear in the fabric of the rules that we live by. It's a fundamental change in the game, one that creates a bunch of new losers - and a handful of new winners. Walt Disney saw three major rifts, dove into them and changed our culture forever. First, he noticed early on that movies would transform the world of entertainment. Realizing that there would soon be a huge demand for family entertainment, he pioneered the development of the animated movie, perfecting the form in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At the same time, he grasped that a cartoon could work as a feature-length film - rather than merely a "short" that you saw in the theater before the feature. The second rift came in the form of the automobile. Disney realized that the car was going to change the way that the American family got its entertainment, and sensed that a strategically located, extravagantly designed theme park could reinvent family travel. So, beginning with California's Disneyland in 1955, he built another huge organization around this rift - and it has dominated the theme-park industry ever since. Even Ohio's Cedar Point owes its success to a design by one of Walt Disney's planners. Once Disney was into this rift thing, he saw a third opportunity: television. Although many people regarded television simply as in-home movies, or as radio with a screen, Disney saw in it an entirely different medium. So, with properties like the Mickey Mouse Club, he set out to build a third organization, one that would produce a never-ending stream of content for this market. So Walt was a three-time rifter: Someone who saw rifts in the continuum of life, and who mobilized an entire organization to take advantage of them. As a result, the motto of most rifters ought to be WWWD: What Would Walt Do? You've got to wonder what Walt would have done with the Internet. Or with cable TV. Or with home shopping, home video and DVD? WWWD? But Walt Disney was not the world's original rifter. He wasn't the first post-conventional thinker to see a rip in the rules and then grab it and exploit it. Today's text from Acts introduces us to two rifters of the Early Church: Paul and Silas. After driving a spirit from a slave girl in Philippi, they are attacked, stripped, flogged, thrown in jail, and locked in stocks. Bummer But Paul and Silas see rifts, not roadblocks. Breaks, not barriers. That's why we see them exploiting their first rift: Adversity is an opportunity for praise. Trapped in the belly of the Philippians Big House, most people would have cried, cursed, whined and despaired. But not these two. About midnight, they are praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners are listening to them. They spot and exploit a praise rift in their imprisonment. Then an earthquake hits - one so violent that the foundations of the prison are shaken. Immediately all the doors are opened, and everyone's chains are unfastened. Is this a divinely orchestrated contraction of the earth's crust? A completely gracious and God-given chance for a great escape? Only to a non-rifter. Paul and Silas see a second rift: Opportunity can lead to evangelistic creativity. The jailer wakes up and spots the prison doors wide open, and fearing that the convicts have escaped, he does the only thing that an honorable Roman jailer can do: draws his sword to kill himself. But Paul and Silas, rather than taking off, have stayed put, and they tell the jailer, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here" (Acts 16:28). Their unconventional reaction saves a life. Many in their position would've sprung out of their bonds and raced into the night shouting, "Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!" Paul and Silas had extra-spiritual perception. They saw that their opportunity to do the expected was actually an invitation to rift the unexpected. This choice leads to the salvation and baptism of the jailer and his household, as well as to the articulation of one of the greatest verses in Scripture: "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (16:31). Their experience should cause us to consider two issues: One, who are the rifters among us? Two, what rifts in our congregation and community should we be taking advantage of? Take the Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City for example. It is doing some pretty daring rift-diving as it takes off as the fastest-growing United Methodist congregation in the country. It started in an unlikely place back in 1990 - in the chapel of a local funeral home. "We called ourselves Church of the Resurrection, really tongue-in-cheek," recalls pastor Adam Hamilton. "We wanted to say, 'We're not afraid to worship in a funeral home because Jesus rose from the dead and we're not afraid of death.'" But this group of Christians is equally committed to evangelism, working hard from the beginning to reach nonreligious and nominally religious people for Jesus Christ. The rift they identified was "thinking people" - thinking people who had felt like they believed in God at one point, but then found church to be irrelevant. "We wanted to reach them through their heads first," says the pastor, "and then through their hearts." This rift-jump seems to be working. Church of the Resurrection can hardly keep pace with its own growth, despite the offering of six services each weekend. The current sanctuary, built two years ago, seats 1,600 people, not nearly enough space for a projected attendance that could reach 20,000 in the next 10 years. In order to handle this growth, church leaders are diving into yet another rift - they are forming a separate commercial company to purchase and develop real estate around the church, a company in which church members serve as the primary investors. Instead of passing the plate and asking for donations, this company is inviting church members to invest in 47 acres of undeveloped land. Some acres will be used by the church, some by rent-paying businesses, and it's hoped that all investors will receive a return on their investment. Out in Montana, a Lutheran Church started a second campus designed to reach the young. They knew they weren't coming to their conventional church so they rented a garage and began worshipping there. The Garage attracts hundreds of young people every Sunday evening. Philippians prisons. Kansas City funeral homes. Garages in Montana. Praise rifts can be exploited in some unlikely places. The good news is that the Holy Spirit is the key to creative thinking and empowered living. Before the Holy Spirit, both Paul and Silas were drifters, not rifters. We have rifters in our churches. Ed Rich is a rifter. He is our webmaster. Through his work, I reach more people online each week than I do on Sunday morning. Our Website attracts approximately 500 hits per DAY, most of those are going to my sermons. I have received emails from people in Germany, Britain and even students at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus. Let me give you just one example. Daniel is a professional shepherd living on the British Columbia side of the Alaska panhandle. He calls himself an atheist but I am not sure I believe him. He emailed me concerning a sermon that I preached in April, 1998 about Thomas. He writes: "I happened across your Thomas sermon a moment ago while browsing the skeptics literature, a movement I am active within, and thought I might take a moment to congratulate you on having conducted such a warm and honest service. I enjoyed the transcript a great deal, and I feel compelled to offer a few words of response.In my readings of the New Testament, Thomas and Jesus emerge forcefully as heroes, and I have often wondered why Christians seem so rarely to think so. After all, Jesus seems to value Thomas, a handpicked member of his ministry and to consider his doubt reasonable. I was thrilled to see his reputation upheld in your sermon. The reclamation of Thomas seems to me to hold within it the promise of greater understanding between our communities and worldviews, something we obviously need when there is so much saving the world for us to be getting on with..It may be that I am completely wrong about (my purely rational scientific view) of how the universe works, and that God has limited patience for my scotch verdict ('not proven'), and so on. It could be the case that Christians are right, and that God is a bit fed up with me. However, if so, then his words about loving neighbors, removing beams, and getting on with the kindness and charity have the force of natural law. Either way, those ideas have the force of moral law for humanists and Christians alike, and I have hope that your work might help make that clear for some." The Church needs rifters. We need to find them. We have potential rifters in our congregations; we need to empower them - spring them lose. We need to abandon the notion that the pastor is the only one with ideas, that spirit-directed ministry flows only through the paid staff. The worst thing you can do is to shift into neutral while searching for a new pastor after I'm gone. In an era of unparalleled technological diversions, a church with a few rifters is the church that will reach its community with the good news of Jesus Christ. The Pentecost church is a rift-gifted church. AMEN