Business as Usual: Acts 20:7-12
Third Sunday of Ordinary Time
On the first day of the week, when we were gathered
together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the
next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight. 8 There
were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered. 9 And
a young man named Eutychus, sitting at the window, sank into a deep sleep as
Paul talked still longer. And being overcome by sleep, he fell
down from the third story and was taken up dead. 10 But
Paul went down and bent over him, and taking him in his arms,
said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” 11 And
when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with
them a long while, until daybreak, and so departed. 12 And
they took the youth away alive, and were not a little comforted. (ESV)
In 1970, a pair of behavioral
scientists wanted to study how much internal moral compasses and ideologies
really affected people’s external actions.
They went to Princeton University to its seminary, figuring that people
training to be priests would be as good a needle for morality as any. Gathering a group of young men[1] and not telling them that
they were about to be tested, the researchers gave the class a series of surveys
over several days to gather information about their religious beliefs and
self-images. They then asked the students
to prepare a sermon—on the Good Samaritan, of all things—and, in a meeting,
told the students to go to a building across campus to work with another
professor on that sermon.
The crux of the
new meeting instruction was that the researchers told some students they had
plenty of time to get to the building across campus; they told some that they needed
to be quick because the meeting was soon; and they told some that they were already
late.
Along the path
between the two buildings, the scientists placed a man dressed as a
beggar. He was to ask every would-be
priest who came by for help—and, as it turned out, the surveys about what the
seminary students believed didn’t really matter in dictating their
response. The ones who had time before
their next meeting stopped to talk to the man six times as much as the
ones who were already late.
Of the already
late, only 10% paused to help.[2]
It’s a
sobering thing, that recognition that our schedules play so much havoc with our
hopes and dreams and visions of the world.
I’m not wildly fond of the fact that this used priests as a benchmark
because I promise you, we are not any more holy or generous than anyone else
simply because we talk about holiness and generosity more often. Clergy are people in ministry, same as anyone
else.
But I am
struck by the way in which this highlights that we can know with every fiber
of our being, can learn over and over what a certain situation requires of us,
and then we will walk right past the extraordinary if we have somewhere else we
need to be. I am unsurprised that only
10% of the late students stopped; I know myself well enough to know that I
probably wouldn’t be in that ten percent because I do not like being late to
things and making someone else wait for me. I also know that we of the church—not just we
pastors but we Christians—have a pretty terrible habit of not only getting lost
in our schedules, humans that we are, but of getting lost in our habits. The beggar would understand, we might think,
if he knew that we were going to church, or if he knew we were late for a council
meeting, or if he knew that today was Communion Sunday and I have a special seat
in the third pew on the left that I need to make sure I get.
This bizarre
little interlude about sleep and death and very long preaching in today’s six
verses of Acts begins, “On the first day of the week.” Luke is setting the scene for us to say this
is a routine, this is an established expectation, this is a reason to make sure
you aren’t late to the service. In New
Testament-speak, the first day of the week means the time when believers in the
new offshoot of Judaism, the Way, would gather together. It was the predecessor to our making Sunday
sacred as the Christian version of the Sabbath, a feat we Christians pulled off
so well that there were (and still are) laws encoding what you could and
couldn’t do on a Sunday because Jesus was apparently paying more attention than
on Thursday. We have a letter from Pliny
the Younger to the Emperor Trajan in 112 A.D. talking about how Christians had
the habit to meet “on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to
Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to do some crime, but
not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse
to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their
custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but ordinary and
innocent food.”[3]
On the first
day of the week this group who knew the rules gathered together and ate because
the Church grounds itself in its sacraments, another ritual that is beautiful
and comforting and repetitive. We who
have done this a hundred times before know the expectations, what intinction is
with communion, how to be orderly in our lines up to where the pastor stands, how
not to be late after the stewards have started wrapping things up, and that by
gum we really should be able to take communion even in a pandemic because
that’s what Jesus told us to do even if it’s a bit dangerous, right?
Enter
Eutychus, who may well have known what to do, but…didn’t do that.
Eutychus is a
very strange figure who is never mentioned again in Luke’s sweeping tale of
Paul’s mission journeys. This story of
his nap, death, and seeming resurrection has a long history of being treated
with no small amount of humor among commentors and preachers; the translator
Nichols King heads this section of Acts with “the dangers of long sermons” in
his New Testament translation. Others
have commented on the idea that it is no wonder a poor youth at the end of the
day would nod off in a dimly-lit room while Paul droned on; the miracle is that
it didn’t happen more often, really.
Still others
have taken a different turn with this, noting that Eutychus is the only young
person mentioned and is on the literal margins of this scene; he’s sitting in
the open window while the older folk press up close to this traveling
preacher. It’s a parable for the current
state of our church, some say, about how we ignore the young people who
literally fall away from what the long-time members deem important.
And some, like
Professor Andrew Arterbury, say that this is an indictment against Eutychus’
faith amidst the fervency of that early community of believers. “Characterized by the marks of faithful
Christian worship,” Arterbury writes, “we see both Paul and the Christians in
Troas wide-awake, worshipping God, and breaking bread at midnight. They are in
an upper room that is illuminated by lamps while darkness surrounds them on the
outside. Eutychus is the only Christian who behaves otherwise. He falls asleep,
which prevents his participation in the acts of worship. Moreover, his slumber
has tragic consequences. Unlike Peter, Paul, Silas, and the church in
Jerusalem, Eutychus is not alert to the work of God. Instead, when he falls
asleep, he also falls away from the worshipping community, into the darkness,
and down three flights to the ground resulting in death.”[4]
Perhaps. But I’m far less interested, at this time in
our history, in what Eutychus could represent than in how Paul dealt with him.
Eutychus “fell
down from the third story and was taken up dead. But Paul went down and bent
over him, and taking him in his arms, said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is
in him.’ And when Paul had gone up and
had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while, until
daybreak, and so departed.”
For all the
fact that Luke’s recounting of the Acts of the Apostles focuses so heavily on
Paul, this is a remarkably short shrift of Paul’s interaction with the young
man whose name, incidentally, means “lucky.”
“He’s fine,” says Paul, and then goes back to the business of preaching,
business as usual, nothing to see here.
Perhaps he is late to the meeting in the building across campus; after
all, as Luke tells us, he’s leaving in the morning and he has things to say
before he heads out on his continued travels.
This past week
was the inauguration of the new president and vice president of the United
States and some remarked on how good it was not to have anything calamitous
occur at the ceremony. Yes, true; I’m
always happy when the promise of a peaceful transition of power in this
representative democracy is fulfilled.
I’m not, as you may have gathered, much a fan of armed insurrection.
But I worry as
an American and a Christian about how easily we allow ourselves to embrace the
rhythms of business as usual such that even a young man falling out of a window
doesn’t stop our council meetings and paperwork deadlines. This is not to say that such meetings or
paperwork are completely unimportant, but it is to note that if Eutychus was
well and truly dead, then Paul performed a miracle of resurrection and went
back to grab a bite before talking some more.
Perhaps I have
my own priorities disordered, but it would seem to me that preaching the good
news is well-served by acknowledging the literal resurrection that just
happened in the street.
But maybe he
wasn’t really dead; after all, Paul said “his life is in him.” Cue the visions of the man in Monty Python’s
“Holy Grail” film where the old man protests he’s not dead, he’s getting
better, he feels happy. A tumble from a
third story window is nothing to be brushed off, but maybe it’s just a broken
arm and a bonk on the noggin?
Except Luke’s
account has some pretty important Scriptural parallels on the being-dead aspect. In Luke 8, Jesus is called to the house of
Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, whose teenaged daughter is dying. As the group arrives, the household says it
is too late, she has died, and Jesus replies, “She is not dead but sleeping.”[5] In 1 Kings, the prophet Elijah covers a dead
young boy similar to Paul here in order to bring him back to life.[6] By Scriptural precedent, the man was really
most sincerely dead.
“Do not be
alarmed,” Paul says, reviving Eutychus and continuing on his routine. This may be in the category of the many times
Scriptural people are told “do not fear” at the very moment when being afraid
seems the most natural response—of course this community who knew Eutychus
would be alarmed at his death, seeming or real.
But Paul has an agenda to which he needs to return and widespread
grieving gets in its way.
How often,
Church, do we miss the miraculous because we are focused on the agenda? How often do we pass right by the work of the
Spirit because we are doing the work of ourselves, of our own rhythms and
desires, of ensuring that things happen the way we expected them to happen, the
way they have always happened? How often
do we forget to look around us at our fellow humans while we are running to
catch up to our own schedules; to allow for the fact that some people spend
their Sundays differently; to slow ourselves down enough to remember that we
are in a pandemic where all of the rules we built do not apply, that a new
presidential administration is a time of celebration and of recommitment to the
work of justice and mercy and accountability at all levels, that there is no
such thing as business as usual these days if there ever was in the first
place?
One of the
highlights of the inauguration this week was a recitation by the poet Amanda
Gorman with her work, “The Hill We Climb.”
It’s a lovely call to visioning for the nation, but the lines that
caught my ear were this: “We’ve learned
that quiet isn’t always peace. / And the norms and notions of what just is /
isn’t always just-ice.”[7]
“What just is”
can be our backdoor out of so much; “don’t be alarmed, his life is in him,” we
have other things to do, I have more to say, I promised I would be at this
meeting across campus. And perhaps Paul’s
discussion was riveting and groundbreaking and set the churches of Troas aflame
with the power and direction of the Spirit.
I don’t know, because Luke does not give us the speech—Luke gives us a
young man falling out of a window and a religious man deciding to preference
his work of conversation over caring for the newly-resurrected. Luke does not say whether it was the right or
wrong choice and so neither can we, but it is important that we step into this
week and our continued lives of faith remembering that miracles do not work on
timetables and the Spirit refuses to be confined to our business.
May we have
the grace to reexamine ourselves and our habits to see where we may be
sidestepping the wondrous, the discernment to see what we need to keep and what
we can let go in our patterns and priorities, and the joy to invite others into
this journey without expecting that they will conform to our usual business in
this unusual faith. Amen.
[1]
Princeton had only begun allowing women into the seminary the year before, so
the study did not encompass them.
[4]
239228.pdf
(baylor.edu), “Warning to the Wise:
Learning from Eutychus’s Mistake”
[5]
Luke 8:52, NRSV.
[6]
1 Kings 17:21.
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