Acts 14:8-18

Psalm 67

Revelation 21:22-22:5

JOHN 14:23-29

“WHAT IS ‘SUCCESS’?”

What is ‘SUCCESS’? Is it to do something well that’s worthwhile, that brings out the best in you and gives you a decent income? Or is it only to be rich, famous and powerful – perhaps regardless of the cost in relationships or in the truth? Or is ‘success’ something that keeps getting redefined by somebody else so that it is always just beyond one’s grasp, as though the words and phrases “enough” and “peace of mind” no longer exist?

Contrary to the “gospel” some clergy preach, the Bible does not focus much on “success” as it’s sometimes understood, and when it does it’s often with ambivalence, or with reservations. King David was eminently successful in worldly terms – but at the high tide of his success, he wanted even more – namely Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah – with disastrous results. For Abraham, success was defined simply as being faithful and willing to wait years to experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to him of a son and a home. Abraham was already prosperous when he entered the biblical story, and the Bible is almost uninterested in his growth in prosperity. The patriarch Joseph, a spectacularly successful man – he rose from being a foreigner, a slave and a prisoner to become Prime Minister of Egypt, the only superpower in the world in his time – believed that his success was ordained not for its own sake or for himself, but was to save the lives of his extended family members – even those who had sold him into slavery! And Jesus died penniless on a cross – how “successful” in worldly terms was that?

Nevertheless, “success” of the wrong sort is present in the Bible as a temptation – notably in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that book of the Bible which tells the story of “the Jesus movement” for the first thirty years after Jesus’ resurrection and then ascension into heaven.

Barnabas and his then-assistant, Paul, are in the midst of the first missionary journey ever taken by Christian evangelists into territory in which no one worships God as God is revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Before this, they had been in towns with synagogues and/or people with some understanding of the one true God. But when they come to Lystra in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), they are for the first time in a totally pagan town, where people worship many gods in the Greek pantheon, including Zeus (the King of the gods, renamed Jupiter by the Romans) and Hermes (Mercury to the Romans).

While in Lystra Paul (by the power of Christ) heals a cripple who has never walked. Instead of people praising God and saying “a great prophet has risen among us” as Jews might have done, the people shouted in the Lycaonian language, “’The gods have come down to us in human form!’ Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker.”

Perhaps Barnabas and Paul were a little slow accessing their Lycaonian phrase book and didn’t understand the peoples’ words – but they understood clearly enough when the pagan priests came out and started worshiping them.

Talk about “success”! Ever wanted to get treated like a rock star? Or like a big-time movie star, or the way a super-star athlete gets treated? Imagine getting literally “idolized” by people – being their idol, their focus of worship. Would there be anything those devout pagans wouldn’t do for you if they thought you really were Zeus or Hermes?

There’s a story Rudyard Kipling wrote about such a scenario, set in an imaginary isolated valley in the Himalayas, later turned into a movie starring Michael Caine, I believe, called “The Man Who Would Be King.” In the story, two British soldiers decide to accept the worship offered to them and they are treated divinely – until the people discover that they aren’t divine. Their end is rather bloody.

But Barnabas and Paul were working just a bit before Kipling or any movies, so they wouldn’t have known how that story ended. Wouldn’t leading a preaching tour and getting treated like gods constitute “success” – success, indeed, beyond one’s wildest dreams?

No. In fact, Barnabas and Paul saw this for what it was – a disaster. They were so appalled that they tore their robes – a sign among ancient Jews like them of “distress and violent protest” which was probably lost on the locals but rang true to them. It was (and is) the most profound form of blasphemy to worship a mere mortal as though he were divine. (Jesus, remember, was fully human and fully divine while he was on earth.) And it was (and is) the most appalling thing to allow oneself to be worshiped even for a moment.

Paul, in his usual diplomatic way (not), explained to the locals that not only were they not Zeus and Hermes, but that Zeus and Hermes were totally bogus and that they, Barnabas and Paul, actually had come to town to tell the people about the real one-and-only God, Creator of Heaven and earth.

What happens when people are, literally, dis-illusioned? Well, they get angry. The part of the story you just heard read aloud is actually the sanitized version. In the verses from “Acts” immediately following these, a mob attacks Paul and drags him outside the city – and leaves him for dead.

“But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city.” Wow. This Bible story packs more of a punch than the Mayweather/De la Hoya fight, and you didn’t even have to pop for Pay Per View.

Success for Barnabas and Paul meant leading people to faith in the one true God and deepening peoples’ relationships with God and with each other through Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. That was how they defined success: not personal adulation, ticker tape parades, successful book tours, being on “Oprah,” multi-million dollar contracts to write their memoirs – or getting treated like divinities.

It’s interesting that it is in this chapter of “Acts” that Luke for the first time refers to “the apostles” Barnabas and Paul. That awesome rank in the Church was indeed hard-won – like a battlefield promotion. And let’s remember, too, that neither of these guys died of old age: both were martyred, giving their lives so that others might come to know Jesus Christ. Others, like us.

Let’s notice the brief sermon Paul gives to the people of this pagan town once he realizes that he needs to start from Square One in teaching them about God. He starts by telling them there is one God, “who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them,” and that the beauty and abundance of God’s creation is a witness to God and to God’s generosity towards all people.

God as the Creator of Heaven and Earth – sounds familiar from the Creeds, right? -- and as the owner of the Creation, is a fundamental tenet of Christianity. God is the generous one who is the source of all abundance. Not us.

Anybody here think this sermon needs to be given in 21^st Century America, too?

Maybe there aren’t too many people in our neighborhoods who worship Zeus and Hermes, but there are, alas, a good number of people who worship “success.” And I don’t mean the people who view success as doing something well which is worthwhile, that brings out the best in you and gives you a decent income. I mean the people who only want to be rich and famous – sometimes at all costs. As Jesus said, “What does it profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul?”

I would like to propose that we take a page from Paul’s script and, in a world in which too many people worship something other that the true God – including a perverted notion of “success” – that we proclaim the true God who is the source of abundance and whose recognition of us is the only recognition that ultimately matters. Fame is fleeting, we can’t take bank accounts with us when we die, but heaven is all-expenses-paid and admission is only by the grace of God.

How can all of us “proclaim” our faith in God the Creator and owner of the universe? After all, most of us don’t get to preach the way I’m doing now. But for all of us, the most important “sermons” we “preach” are how we live our lives. And there are people who notice how we live our lives who have never – yet – set foot in a church.

So let me offer this thought. Imagine if all anyone who saw you all week long knew about your faith was based on how you, personally, treated the environment?

Does the way you treat the environment – the Creation – bear witness to your belief that God made it, entrusted it to the care of our species and will give us a grade for our stewardship of the environment?

The environment includes our fellow human beings near and far, other species of animals – and plants, the air, earth and water – anything tangible. Can anyone else tell that we are Christians by the way we treat the environment?

And if we think we homo sapiens are currently “successful” as a species – well, let’s hear from Jane Goodall, the world’s greatest expert on chimpanzees. In a recent issue of Discover magazine, she was asked, “If chimps are so much like us, why are they endangered while human beings dominate the globe? She responded:

“Well, in some ways we’re not successful at all. We’re destroying our home. That’s not a bit successful. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forests, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.”

[Emphasis added.]

Today is Rogation Sunday, the Episcopal Church’s version of “Earth Day “ which goes back a long time before Earth Day started in 1970. On the Sixth Sunday of Easter Season each year we focus on God the Creator of Heaven and Earth. Let’s do that not just by the scripture we listen to, the prayers we say and (most obviously today) the hymns we sing, but by the lives we lead.

So, I leave us with two questions, for you and for me: what does “success” mean to each of us? And, what can anyone watching how each of us treats the environment tell about what we believe about God?

Let us pray.

“O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.” Amen.

(The Collect for the Stewardship of Creation, page 259 in The Book of Common Prayer.)

The Rev. Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, New Jersey

May 13, 2007