Today’s post is written by Revd. Sarah Moore. Sarah is a United Reformed minister serving in Darwen, Lancashire. This post was supposed to have appeared yesterday, but I was travelling to Harrogate and didn’t get her post up yesterday. My apologies to all the readers and to Sarah!
Today’s Reading for the post: Acts 20.7-12
You can feel your eyelids getting heavy and you slump down in your chair. If only the meeting would end and everyone could get home. An experience that many of us can identify with, whether at a church meeting or a committee meeting for the bowling green, amateur dramatics, choir or many other voluntary groups.
Meetings going on too long when everyone is beyond their best is an occupational hazard of life in the modern church. Acts 20 shows us that this experience is not limited to 2007 but was also an issue in the mid 1st century, within 30 years of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul, apostle, missionary and travel writer extraordinaire was in town. Paul was the ‘must see’ Christian celebrity of his time and the community flocked to listen to what he had to say.
So, the good people of Troas gathered in an upstairs room. It was the first day of the week; in our parlance this was an evening service. The body of Christ in that place had met to break bread, as was their custom and ours. Paul was speaking. As the light faded, the lamps were lit. These would have been oil lamps so the light produced would have been dim. We are in a Mediterranean setting so the weather would have been warm. A young man, probably a boy in his teens named Eutychus was sitting in the window. As the evening drew on, Eutychus became more and more sleepy. Like many young men, he was of few words so no one took much notice of him. Paul’s sermon had a sophorific effect on Eutychus as he fell asleep and fell out of the window. This might be the last thing Eutychus would do as he fell to the ground from the third floor and was picked up for dead.
Paul breaks off from his sermon, goes downstairs to check on the young man. Paul declares that he is still alive, takes him in his arms and carries Eutychus back upstairs. How embarrassing for Eutychus! To fall out of a window and be carried back into the house by a visiting preacher is definitely not cool and would do nothing for Eutychus’s street cred.
The community return to their third floor room, have something to eat and Paul resumes his sermon. Undeterred Paul preaches on until dawn. We hear nothing more about Eutychus.
This passage that does not appear in our Sunday lectionaries (sadly since it has much to teach us) invites us to consider how we do meetings and more importantly the affect that our church life has on our young people. Note that I am not referring to children and young teenagers here but rather to older teenagers and twentysomething adults. Do our meetings go on and are sufficiently uninspiring as to send folk to sleep? Church is supposed to nourish us for our walk with Christ and to equip us to speak of and live of Christ in our everyday lives. If it is a drag, then we must take responsibility for the state that we’re in and work together to sort it out. If we want to attract younger people into our fellowships, then we must be attractive to them. We must order our church life so to show that faith is an attractive and vibrant way of living. Being a follower of Christ is about being wide awake people of the day. It should not be sending us off to sleep.
Thanks for your post, Sarah. I wish we would take these words more seriously. I always laugh at initiatives in the church to get young people to come to Church Council, etc. meetings because I always think, ‘Why would they want to come?’ Even our chair of district insinuated this when at Fall Synod, he announced that two young people would be invited to serve on the District Policy and then noted, ‘Whether or not they want to come is up to them.’ I touched on this in an earlier post, not necessarily with young people and 20-somethings, but on the whole: we need to look at how we do our meetings.
By: blackburnpresbyter on 28 December 07
at 9:36 am