Faithful Presence

Scripture Text: Acts 28:1-10

Andrew Peterson, The God of the Garden
To my right, on the little wooden table beside my chair, sits a black, leather-bound Bible with my name embossed on the lower right of the cover. The many pages within carry a translation of the Word of God, the Word that told trees to exist in the first place, and those words are made alive by a holy wind blowing through the book's leaves. That living Word planted a seed in my parents, a seed that fell on good soil, and they in turn planted in me and my siblings an imagination-grounding story about a tree in a garden, a tree on a hill of death, and a tree in a heavenly city. Those trees fill my heart and my head, and they keep my compass trained on the Kingdom…I am kept by trees.

Wendell Berry, “Economy and Pleasure”, What Are People For?
Ultimately, in the argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one's pleasure to offer. It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one's place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is enough. Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one's work.

Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary
The gospel did not arrive in power but in weakness and humility. Paul experiences the hospitality of the Maltese precisely at the point of his urgent need. A template is forming here not simply for missions but for the living of the life of faith, where we recognize our vulnerability and our shared need for one another as the beginning point of sharing the gospel. The Maltese’s action toward the shipwrecked was a surprise of grace and kindness that would be repeated in so many other contexts and with so many other peoples in the centuries that followed, and the church has never learned to see such kindnesses as what they actually are—signs of the Spirit’s presence with peoples as precursor to a holy joining being orchestrated by God.

Application Questions

1. What is your next step with discipleship in Jesus?

2. To what community has God called you to be on mission?

3. How will you prioritize “life together” here at Oaks Parish?