Speaking at St Polycarp’s, February 23 2025.
Acts 14:1-20 – Paul and Barnabas in Iconium and Lystra
It’s great to be here with you this morning.
Together since the start of the year we’ve been going through a series of talks called ‘Supernaturally Evangelisitc’ – considering how the encounters that people have with signs and wonders tell of who God is, and how they can lead people to faith.
We’re going to spend a bit of time this morning looking at the passage, and then thinking about what the supernatural actually is and what it means. And, to give you some spoilers really early doors, we’re going to conclude that living a life of faith means ‘being in over our heads, trusting God’s message of grace’.
Let’s start with the passage
In the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at Acts. In the passage last week, the church in Antioch are gathered, worshiping the Lord and fasting. While they are there, the Holy Spirit said – “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.” Jamys spoke with us about the preparations of this church – in their fasting and worship and obedience – and we see the power of God at work in the way that Paul identifies and confronts Elymas the sorcerer. But at the end of this chapter, the Jewish leaders turn agains Paul and Barnabas and expel them from the region.
We pick up in Acts 14 with Paul and Barnabas going to Iconium. Things start well. They speak so effectively, we’re told, that a “great number of Jews and Greeks” believed. But then things get stirred up, and while they stay, and while the Lord “confirms the message of his grace by enabling them to perform signs and wonders”, the city is divided, then there’s talk of a “plot” (which is how you know things are about to go seriously wrong) and then they have to flee.
Now in Lystra, Paul heals a man. The people start worshipping them. This isn’t what Paul and Barnabas have in mind at all, and they try to settle things down and explain that it’s by the power of the living God that they themselves have power. This doesn’t seem to work, and then the people who were stirring up trouble from before come here, continue with the previous plot, and Paul is stoned.
Now, I don’t know about you, but this passage seems like a bit of a surprise ending to a series about the ‘supernaturally evangelistic’, and I was a bit puzzled when Jamys sent it to me. It’s puzzling because I was expecting a passage with some sort of clear cause and effect between ‘things happen that are supernatural’, and, ‘people responding faith’. But this cause and effect is entirely absent from the passage.
So what are we actually meant to take from that??
It’s time to think about what the supernatural actually is
I don’t know what you first think about when you hear the word ‘supernatural’, but if we were playing the word association game, ‘ghosts’ and ‘American televangelist’ wouldn’t be far from my tongue. And I’m not convinced that some of those associations are particularly helpful for us.
The supernatural can feel a bit like ‘the exception to the rule’, and so we can think of miracles, or even Jesus’ resurrection as an inexplicable one-off.
This makes the supernatural, by definition, rare and not to be expected. They’re an ‘interruption’ or almost a bit of a ‘malfunction’.
But that’s not the picture we should have.
And so, I want instead, for us to situate this passage, and the others we’ve been looking at in previous weeks, within the wider context of Scripture that tells us two things.
- In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1)
- For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus] and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)
Let’s take the first verse of the Bible in Genesis. We need to know that when we talk about creation, we are talking about heaven and earth. Which I think is important, because sometimes we give heaven an uncreated status, which it doesn’t actually have. Heaven and earth are created together and they are intended to have integrity together as a whole.
And that makes the verses in Colossians make more sense. Jesus comes to reconcile both heaven and earth because they are both part of creation. These verses in Bibles have a subheading above them called ‘The Supremacy of Christ’. That passage also says ‘He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.’ Christ is the integrity of Creation, it is in Jesus that we have the promise of the New Creation in which heaven and earth are renewed and restored as a whole.
The theologian Francis Schaeffer says that when he talks about the good news of the gospel, he always starts by talking about angels, because then there can be no confusion that the Christian life is claiming anything other than the extraordinary. The faith we profess is one that makes extraordinary claims that implicate the very nature of the world.
When we talk about angels, or consider passages like the one we read today, it’s a clue to us that we’re immediately stepping into a world that’s bigger than our day-to-day reality. It’s like opening a door and realising there’s so much more to the house than just the room you’ve been sitting in.
The supernatural is not an interruption, it’s a continuation
If you look at the back of a tapestry, you see a mess of tangled threads, knots, and seemingly random colours. And that’s sort of our view of supernatural events – seeing snatches of brightness in amongst the chaos.
But the supernatural better understood by turning over that tapestry. The supernatural is’nt a random collection of miraculous events stitched onto our “normal” world – it’s the revelation of the full picture of creation that exists on the other side. In Jesus everything of God is united with everything that is created, whether things on heaven or earth. In becoming human, Jesus weaves himself into the very fabric of our world. Jesus is the fabric on which all reality is stitched and held together. Jesus overcomes the separation; of invisible and visible, of infinite and finite, of creator and created.
All this is to say that the claim of the gospels is not a claim about a miraculous ‘blip’ – one person being raised to life – but about the existence of the supernatural in its fullest sense: a God who has consecrated the entirety of creation and makes it holy. The supernatural is not the departure from the norm, but the opening out of a deeper reality. In this way, it’s a realer-real than the real.
We’re in over our heads
I don’t know if you’ve ever been swimming in the sea and had a sudden realisation that you’re further out from the shore than really you feel comfortable with. The water that seemed so manageable from the beach suddenly stretching endlessly in every direction. As you turn back, you are flooded with the feeling of both exhilaration and terror as you hit the limits of what you feel in control of. That feeling is the one I hit when trying to comprehend God…! It’s the feeling of being in over your head.
To live a life of faith means to be in over our heads. We’ve had two thousand years of trying to comprehend and understand the significance and reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection – and we could have another twenty-thousand – but we’re not going to get on top of it.
And that leads us back to what happens in this passage, because the people in Lystra seem to make a very fair assumption. They recognise the power of Paul and Barnabas, and so they jump to a conclusion with makes sense to them, which is to worship them as Gods.
The people in Lystra have had the words of Paul and Barnabas, the healing of a man they know, and are told by Paul that “[God] has not left you without testimony”. And yet, God remains hidden from them.
This a tension in this passage because you know what, Paul and Barnabas’ message isn’t self-evident! And that’s a pattern we are familiar with, because if we think of other passages like the disciples on the road to Emmaus trying to figure out the meaning of Jesus’ death – that wasn’t self-evident either. Those disciples had their understanding of scripture, had their experiences as contemporaries of Jesus, and yet it tool the direct revelation of Jesus for them to understand with faith.
And this is a tension many of us will recognise in our own journeys of faith. We may know something of God’s message of grace and presence, and yet feeling how incredibly small that grasp is and struggle with God’s simultaneous absence and hiddenness.
We are in over our heads!
The writer Annie Dillard says on this: “On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible [aware] of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? It is madness to wear straw hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets”
Getting our crash helmets on
Back in September, I went on a walking tour of Sheffield which takes you through the waterways and Victorian underground tunnels through to the Megatron, which is Europe’s largest underwater drainage system. Or something, there were rats and spiders and so my concentration on everything wasn’t brilliant. Anyway, to get there, you’re in wellies, in hard hats, you’ve crawled through small gaps, and you spend quite a lot of time underneath Sheffield train station, and occasionally you hear a train whoosh overhead. As someone who has lived here 5 years and spends a lot of time going to the train station I found it mind boggling and I still find it really weird now being on platforms – I sort of want to jiggle up and down and to nudge a fellow train passenger and whisper furtively “I know what’s underneath here!!”
But you know what’s equally amazing? Being at the station on a clear night and looking up. Above those same platforms stretch the infinite expanse of stars – countless points of light reaching farther than we can imagine. We’re standing in this incredible space, sandwiched between vast underground channels and the endless cosmos above. This is our reality – so much bigger and more expansive than just containing the train station to being the train station!
I say this to make a slightly ropey analogy between Sheffield train station being our ordinary everyday, and the expanse of the Megatron below and the expanse of the stars above being part of the true largeness of Sheffield train station. Trying to talk to people about the river underneath the train station isn’t an easy task. And neither is trying to communicate our faith. But our faith is an orientation towards who God is that pervades and transforms our understanding of our everyday.
In this passage, we’re told that the Lord enables signs and wonders to “confirm the message of his grace”. They aren’t ‘blips’ or ‘exceptions’ – they are snapshots of this wider picture of the absolutely wonderful but crazy message of grace that says that the love of Christ holds together the whole world. That same expansiveness is orientation of faith.
The invitation – in over our heads
It wouldn’t feel right I don’t think, to not address the fact that in this passage, Paul is stoned and left for dead at the end. What God promises isn’t ‘easy fixes’. And people can end up drawn to the supernatural because they are looking for a power that will be an easy fix. The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama says “Jesus Christ is not a quick answer. If Jesus Christ is the answer he is the answer in the way portrayed in crucifixion”.
Faith comes with a warning label. It’s paradoxical and topsy-turvy. It’s an invitation to a new understanding of reality in which love is more powerful than death, in which you find your life when you lose it, are strong when you are weak, and in which many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. It’s worth sharing, it’s a joy to be part of. It’s also not self-evident, and does not promise safety from pain or from danger.
So this is our invitation, to embrace a topsy-turvy life faith that means we will be in over our heads, trusting God’s message of grace.
thejoyofrachel 