Adventures in Missing the Point
Text: Acts 4:1-11
Rev. Dr. John E. Manzo
May 7, 2006

Recently Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren, two of my favorite authors, co-wrote a book entitled, Adventures in Missing the Point. The book is about Christianity and cultural Christianity and how much of what we do, as Christians, often for good reasons, missing the point.

I liked the title of the book and I thought it fit well with the Scripture passage for this morning.

Peter and John were preaching about the resurrection. Luke tells us that their message was potent and convincing. There were 5000 people who listened and believed.

But, the leadership of the Jewish community was upset. “By what power, or by hat name did you do this?” What, praytell, are you credentials which leads you to teach the resurrection to the masses?

It was a serious question. Peter and John had, from their vantage point, no authority, no training, no education to give them the right to preach.

Furthermore, from the perspective of the Jewish leadership, Peter and John were teaching misleading nonsense. They were teaching contrary to Jewish beliefs, and, frankly, giving people false hope.

The thing is those who were questioning Peter and John were not ignorant of Jesus or everything that had been said about Jesus. They knew the answer, by whose authority are you teaching? They knew Peter and John’s answer and they knew the stories of the resurrection and the message of hope that the early Christian church was bringing.

In many ways, Caiaphas and Annas, and the other leaders were engaging in an adventure in missing the point. Peter and John were preaching a profound message of hope, a great story about God, and Caiaphas and Annas, and the other leaders were more interested in seeing Peter and John’s credentials. They had missed the point of the entire event.

We, in our day and age, from our vantage point like to boast that we, as Christians, ‘get it’ and we tend to look down at the leadership of the Jews at that point in history and think that this would never happen to us.

But when we do so, we live our own adventure in missing the point.

Caiaphas and Annas, and the other leaders of the Jewish community were not necessarily bad people trying to do bad things. They had come to a perspective that people needed to live out their faith in God on a day to day basis. Every aspect of people’s lives should be, they believed, a reflection of their commitment to God.

Good stuff!

Their belief was that the best way to do this was to live out the rituals and the laws of Judaism in a rather meticulous fashion. If people were devout, they thought, they would happily live out their lives of faith each moment of each day. Again, good stuff.

The problem with ancient Judaism isn’t that it was a bad thing, it had become too institutionalized, too built upon its practices and not enough on it’s reason for existing in the first place.

Christianity often falls into that trap as well.

Sometimes we see and believe things that we want to see and believe as opposed to what is actually there.


Ever hear of Paul Revere?

Ever hear of Israel Bissel?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made Paul Revere famous in his poem, The Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere.

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Paul Revere did make a midnight ride, pretty much from Boston to Lexington to Concord. He did his part, and it was risky, and it was a part. But, comparatively speaking, a small part.

However, Israel Bissel. Israel Bissell, was the 23-year old, little known, post rider who carried the "call to arms" alerting the colonists of the British attack on April 19, 1775. He rode day and night for four days, six hours and some minutes covering 345 miles from Watertown to the City Hall in Philadelphia.

Along the way he roused citizens in tiny hamlets, towns and cities shouting of the impending danger that started with the "shot heard round the world" for American independence.

LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Israel Bissell,
Dreary and cold and starting to drizzle,
I’m writing this poem but it’s starting to fizzle.
Sorry it’s just not going to happen, Mr. Bissell.

History books do not speak of Israel Bissell, or if they do, they do so only in passing. Paul Revere gets the credit. And it doesn’t matter if it makes sense historically or not, it’s what we want to believe as opposed to what is actually there.

The leaders of Judaism, of that era, were not ignorant or unaware of Jesus. They had not missed the huge earthquake had come upon them with Jesus. The God they worshiped had answered their prayers. The Messiah they had prayed for had come. The prophesies of their Bible had been fulfilled.

And they missed it. They were not open to the fact that God moves among us, speaks among us, and forces us to think and rethink. It was easier to continue to believe in what they wanted to believe as opposed to what was actually there, right here and right now.

It was an adventure in missing the point.

They remind us, in so many ways, that we have comparable challenges. God moves in our midst as well, comforts us and confronts us and challenges us to see what is there.

The choice is up to us. We can have an adventure in missing the point. We can live believing what we want to believe and not be much different from the leaders of the Jewish community at Jesus’ time.

We can live the adventure in getting the point. It’s a lot scarier and a lot more unpredictable.

We advocate, God is Still Speaking, and when we believe it and live it we never know what God is going to say, or where God is going to lead us. But we have faith that as long as we are with God, we are faithful and, ultimately getting and not missing the point.