Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
Acts 16:16-34
May 16, 2010

Friends for Good

A month or so ago, late on a Friday afternoon, I left the church and headed home down Warwick Avenue toward Oakland Beach. When I got to Dockside Sea Food, I saw a car trying to exit the parking lot onto Warwick Avenue to head north. Since there was a long line of cars behind me, I stopped to let the car out. On Sunday, Don Fowler thanked me for making it possible for him to cross the line of traffic. I hadn’t known whom I was helping. We laughed; another Rhode Island moment! ...until I looked this week to see what Homiletics magazine had to say about today’s text.

They quoted a study conducted by Harvard professor Robert Putnam and Notre Dame scholar David Campbell, that showed that religious people are three to four times more likely to be involved in their community than non-religious people. Soon to be published as a book, Amazing Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives, they write:

[Religious people] are more apt to work on community projects, belong to voluntary organizations, vote in local elections, attend public meetings and donate both time and money to public causes, including secular ones.

The studies also show that religious people are, in general, just “nicer.” They do good deeds, help both neighbors and strangers, give money to panhandlers and let others cut in front of them in line.1

What is particularly interesting in the study, however, is why this is so – and it’s not because of the sermons they hear, or the Sunday School lessons, or out of fear of divine judgment. So what is it that makes the difference? Relationships! Because of the relationships they have in their places of worship.

And it’s not just any relationships: In other words, relationships in one’s “moral community” carry more weight than relationships in say, our bowling leagues or garden clubs. And, further, “the effect of these relationships is so strong ... that people who attend religious services regularly but don’t have any friends there behave more like nonreligious people than fellow believers when it comes to civic involvement. ‘It’s not faith that accounts for this,’ says Putnam. ‘It’s faith communities.’” “Faith community relationships are so powerful that the authors have dubbed them ‘supercharged friends.’”2 I like to think of them as “friends for good” because they make good things happen, here in this church and in the wider community.

In our text from the Book of Acts this morning, Paul and Silas are friends for good. They are in Philippi, on their missionary trip, staying at Lydia’s “bed and breakfast.” Remember last week’s sermon – how Lydia is walking by the river and overhears Paul talking about the Messiah Jesus and asks to be baptized, then invites Paul and his friends to stay at her home, making it their missionary base of operations.

Paul and Silas have been preaching in the street, and every day they have to listen to a slave-girl, who had “a spirit of divination” and was a fortune-telling “cash cow” for her owners, cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” After many days, Paul gets sick of listening to her and turns and says to the spirit, “’I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And it came out that very hour” (Acts 16:18).

We might wonder why Paul didn’t heal her right away, seeing that she was possessed. Why wait until he was annoyed and wanting to get her off his back? Seems rather self-serving, doesn’t it, not to mention doing good for the wrong reasons? And why he healed her, eventually, of her possession and not of being a possession, a slave. But these questions are probably topics for another sermon....

Nevertheless, the slave girl is healed and loses her financial usefulness for her owners. They are enraged and have Paul and Silas, these “super-charged” friends for good, dragged into the marketplace where they are accused of disturbing the peace, arrested, beaten, and thrown into prison. But even bloodied, chained, cold and hungry, Paul and Silas pray and sing hymns to God while other prisoners listen in. Even in the darkest night, we can still preach about the love of God!

And then a miracle happens. A high-magnitude earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison and the doors fly open and the chains are unfastened. Everyone is free – but they don’t flee, perhaps out of respect for the jailer who will lose his job, if not his life. By their faithfulness, the jailer, too, is converted and his family believes and is baptized. Amazing grace!

In their book, Amazing Grace, the professors talk about the church as a moral community with the benefit to be derived from going to church, rather than just watching a church service and listening to a sermon on television. (Remember, it’s not the theology that matters but the relationships! And you can’t have a relationship with your TV, even though some people try.) They note that, “A congregation as a whole is a super-charged friendship where we draw forth good things from one another for the benefit of others.”3
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On Wednesday, I saw the super-charged friends at Edgewood Church in high gear for Wayne’s funeral: directing parking, handing out bulletins, showing the way, setting up chairs, comforting the family, taking part in the service. There must have been 25 or more of you here. Not only did you provide a beautiful and safe setting for family and friends to grieve and say goodbye to one who is much loved, but you also created a place where 300 people could pay their respects to a friend and colleague. As we say in the UCC, “No matter who you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” All of you, “super-charged friends for good,” were missionaries and evangelists for the good news gospel of Jesus Christ, whether you were aware of it – or not.

And there are many other examples: When we are creating a Peace Garden, a place for meditation and reflection around our peace pole, we are friends for good. When we are making Hygiene Kits and raising One Great Hour of Sharing funds for Haiti, we are friends for good. When we are hosting a May Breakfast for the community – which also builds community among us – we are friends for good.

This week, Interim Rector at Church of the Transfiguration, Rev. Mary Korte, brought eight members of her church to the conference on childhood poverty in Rhode Island. She is providing them an opportunity to look beyond the food pantry and thrift shop to understand the root causes of poverty – why we need a food pantry and a thrift shop to begin with, why children go to bed hungry, and fail to thrive, and drop out of school. (Thirty-six thousand children in Rhode Island live below the federal poverty line of $17,000 for a family of three.) Rev. Korte is turning her congregation into super-charged friends for good, who will not only continue providing a helping hand to those in need, but also will think about turning the unjust economic power structures-that-be into good news for the poor.

I was so impressed that I pointed out Transfiguration to the rest of the conference as an example of what religious leaders need to do in their congregations. Clergy can get too far ahead; we need to bring all of you along with us, to understand for yourselves where the gospel meets the road and how to change government to be government for all, not just the well-connected and wealthy. That’s why I was so gratified when Merry and Megan came to the Interfaith Vigil, and Dave to the press conference, at the State House last year, and Jametta to the Poverty Conference on Tuesday.

Here at Edgewood Church, when we are working on the education building to turn it into a Community Center, and a place for After School with the Arts, we are friends for good. And now that we have received a grant from New Roots to help us take the next step to develop the Center, we will need even more of you “friends for good” to step forward.

There’s no knowing where all of this will end, where the gospel will lead us, as we move into the future. To be sure, there are many problems to be solved in this world in which each of us is broken in one way or another, and in many ways through the death of a loved one, this week for Laura and Grace and their extended families.

Yet, the church came into being through the movement of the Spirit in the lives and sacrifices of just-plain-folks like us who took the gospel into remote places like Lydia’s city of Philippi, and into close, confining places like prison cells and living rooms, that the world might be saved.

May it be so, for us here at Edgewood Church, where “super-charged friends for good” turn the world upside down and make all things new.

Amen.

1. Homiletics, May 16, 2010, pp. 30-32.
2. ibid.
3. op. cit.