Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, April 21, 2024
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Rejection does not have to alter the strength, the consistency, or the nature of God’s love that we strive to bring into the world every day.
This passage from Acts is a bit bizarre, not just because it touches on some explicit conflict, but also because feeds into a kind of bigger-picture mismatch in they way that many of us understand Paul’s early ministry. We have context clues in our 1 Thessalonians text and in some other portions of the New Testament that suggest that Paul’s involvement in Thessalonica was quite significant—that he spent a good amount of time establishing the church there. But this story is the only one we have, the only one we hear. And it’s a far cry from a success story as we tend to think of evangelism.
What’s most important for us to remember here is that Luke’s target audience in the Book of Acts is people who are already following Christ—not people he thinks need to be convinced to follow Christ. That means we should think of his purpose as witness instead of apology; his voice as matter-of-fact instead of forming an agenda. Luke isn’t actually making any one, central theological claim in this text. He is simply relaying the fact that, in a life of faith, you might encounter disagreement. Discomfort. Rejection. People might not like you because they associate you with something they cannot possibly get behind. And realistically, some of this friction might be high stakes enough that it is scary. That’s because faith is such a foundational and visceral piece of our identities—the most baseline determiner in our day to day lives.
Implicit in this observation is a call to resiliency. A charge to keep going. Especially when we read this portion of Acts alongside Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, we understand that persecution is nothing to revel in. It’s nothing we should feed or give energy to. It’s simply something we can anticipate. And because we can anticipate it, we can easily sidestep it to keep our focus on what is most important: proclaiming God’s love and making room for the Holy Spirit to do her work and to call us into it alongside her.
Our main learning today is that we need not be distracted or discouraged by howothers might perceive us. We already know that we’re facing a mixed bag of reaction. In Christ, we are liberated to focus, instead, on how others might be loved by us, might be served by us. In Christ, we are liberated to focus, instead, on what is truly important. And that is kingdom-building work.
