ISAIAH
42:5-12
PSALM
112
ACTS 11:19-30; 13:1-3
MATTHEW 10:7-16
Sermon
6/9/02
The
Son of Encouragement
O.K., so who was
this Barnabas, this saint for whom this church is named; and what can we learn
from his example to inspire and guide us as a Christian community in the 21st
century?
Barnabas was the
first prominent leader of the Christian Church to have become a believer in
Jesus after the first Pentecost, i.e., without ever knowing Jesus during
his earthly ministry or seeing him resurrectedor even hearing him, as did Paul
later on. As such, he is more like us
than any of the others who were given the rank of apostle in the New Testament (literally, an emissary, a delegated
official entrusted with a mission) in that his faith rested on the teaching of
those who knew Jesus and of his own experience of the Holy Spirit,
not on a sensory experience of Jesus.
We in fact know more
about Barnabas than about most of the original twelve
apostles. He is a major figure in The
Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament book which is St. Lukes account of
what happened in the twenty or so years immediately after Jesus ascension into
heaven; and St. Barnabas also is mentioned in St. Pauls First Letter to the Corinthians,
the Letter to the Galatians and Letter to the Colossians.
Barnabas was
actually a nickname given to one
Joseph, a Levite (a Jew who was descended from the original priestly tribe)
from Cyprus, the large island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea south of
modern-day Turkey and north-west of the Holy Land. The name Barnabas means son of encouragement. As a nickname, son of means one adopted by
or reflective of the qualities of someone.
To call someone son of encouragement meant that he was extraordinarily
good at encouraging othersa great coach and a great team-mate, the kind of
person who would put the team first and not himself.
And so it is that
the very first time we meet him in the Bible, in Acts 4:36, we hear that he
sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the
apostles feet. This is reported
immediately after a description of the generosity of early Christians and the
commitment of the early Church to make sure no church member ever went hungry. This impressed Barnabas, and he started
walking the walk of faith immediately by practicing exemplary stewardship while still a relative
newcomer.
Barnabas must have
been a rising star in the Church, because the second mention of him in
the Bible (Acts 9:27) describes how he convinced the apostles that Paul
(previously a determined and dangerous persecutor of believers in Jesus) really
and truly was now a believer himself.
Barnabas took Paul, brought him to the apostles, and described for them
how on the road he had seen the Lord, who had spoken to him, and how in
Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus.
Barnabas would have
had an honored place in Christian history for this act alone: to use a sports analogy, you could say he
scouted and signed the number one draft pick of all time, St. Paul. This incident also showcases something else
significant. Christians who have had
dramatic, personal conversion experiences sometimes have not always appreciated
Christians with faith equally deep who have not had born again
experiencesand vice versa. Here
we can see the quiet God-given gift of spiritual discernment and persuasion at work in Barnabas vouching
for the genuineness of Pauls born again experience. Those who have had dramatic experiences of
Christ and those who have not but believe deeply are both on the same
teamas Barnabas and Paul were.
Chapters 11-15 of
Acts, from which we just heard an excerpt, are dominated by the adventures of
Barnabas, who was designated by the leaders of the Jerusalem Church to be, so
to speak, the first missionary bishop in Christian history, the first
officially designated leader of a church outside of the Holy Land.
We in this
congregation, who come from all over the world, should especially appreciate
the significance of this. At this very
early stage, the Christian Church had to make a crucial decision: to be a first-tier leader, did
a person have to be related to the original twelve apostles, or from the
same province as theyor even from the same country? Noif leaders discerned that the Holy
Spirit had raised up another leader, that person could be from somewhere
else. Barnabas was from out-of-town,
Cyprus, and was commissioned to lead the first major church outside the Holy
Land instead of one of the original apostles.
And what an
interesting church it was. Antioch in
the first century was a major city, located in what today is the southern-most
part of Turkey, near Syria. Acts 13:1-3
lists the leaders of the church as Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger
[meaning he was a black man], Lucius of Cyrene [a part of Libya in North
Africa), Manaen, a member of the court of Herod the ruler [a new convert who
worked for the same Herod who had executed John the Baptist!] and Saul, who
(Acts 8) had been a notorious persecutor of Christians. This was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural
congregation with the most remarkable political diversity sincethe original
twelve apostles themselves. And Barnabas
apparently flourished as a leader in
dynamic, multi-cultural contexts.
Hmm.
Barnabas was also secure enough in himself to hire Saul,
now becoming Paul, as his assistant.
Some leaders get assistants who make them look smart or flashy by
comparison. Not Barnabas. He just got the best. He wasnt worried about how he would look
next to the eloquent, brilliant, spectacular Paul. My sense is that if Barnabas and Paul had gone to a modern high
school together, Paul would have been Valedictorian and Captain of the Debating
Team, while Barnabas would have been President of the Class.
It was in Antioch
that the disciples were first called Christians, Luke tells us. The foundation laid during Barnabas
leadership took. Three hundred years
later, there were five patriarchates in the Christian Church (a patriarch is
higher than an archbishop), one of which was Antiochputting it on the same
level as Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Rome.
Unlike some people
who are characterized as solid, dependable, self-effacing leaders, Barnabas was
also adventurous enough to do
something no one had ever done before:
lead the first official missionary trip for Christianity deep into pagan
territory, in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).
There, in the town of Lystra, Barnabas and Paul were taken initially as
incarnations of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermesand then they were brutally
driven out of town when they told the people instead about the real
God. Some people would have been
seduced by the adulation or discouraged by the persecution; Barnabas was both grounded and determined to persevere, and not vulnerable either to false
adulation or to persecution. It was at
this point in his narrative that Luke refers to Barnabas and Paul as apostles: they had earned their commissions.
So here are the
qualities of our patron saint:
generous, gifted with spiritual discernment and the ability to persuade,
able to appreciate someone whose spiritual experience was very different from
his own, an enthusiastic leader comfortable in a multi-cultural environment,
strong and secure without egotism, willing to train and team up with a rising
star, adventurous, well-grounded, determinedand a great encourager of others.
Sounds like
qualities Christians need in the 21st century just as much as we did
in the 1st century.
So while we have no
authentic writings of Barnabas, not even a speech of his recorded in the Bible
nor a single miracle (in the usual sense) done by him, we do have the fruits
of his labors. By the end of Barnabas
life, Christianity was solidly committed to evangelism without boundaries, to
recruiting future leaders without preconceptions, to building faith communities
without segregation. At some times and
some places, Christians have reneged on one or more of these commitments, but
whenever we go back to our roots for guidance and inspiration, we find these
principles right in plain sight.
How did Barnabas do
what he did? It says simply in Acts
11:24, He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.
Let us go and be
likewise.
(The
Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard
St.
Barnabas Episcopal Church