Thanks, Irma. And thanks to everyone who participates in our services. It’s very much appreciated. And this morning, as we turn to the word, uh we’re coming to the very end of the book of Acts. And last week we dealt with that highly detailed adventure story that Luke, the author of the book of Acts, told concerning their uh their shipwrecked trip from uh from Cesaria where Paul had been held captive to the little island of Malta. And I was thinking how much fun it must have been for Luke to write scripture and to narrate that for us. I suspect that for a lot of the authors of scripture, it’s just great fun for them to be inspired by God and to be carried along by the Holy Spirit, but they’re writing in their own styles and their own vocabularies and uh and uh just their own personalities. Yet, the Holy Spirit is using that to just spin these living active words of God that affect all generations, including us. And by volume, Luke actually wrote more of the New Testament than any other author. This morning, we come to the end of his two volume work. He wrote the Gospel of Luke, obviously, and the book of Acts. Each of his books covers a little over 30 years of first century history. Begin with the birth of Jesus being foretold to an aged old priest named Zechariah. ends with the great name of the resurrected Jesus rapidly gaining renown all over the known world right to the capital city of the empire and to Rome and the events of those 66 years or so covered by Luke have created more ripples in human history than any other set of events human politics and philosophies and literary works and scientific discoveries and music and art magnificent achievements in their own right but they none of them have attained the same level of influence as what happened during those 66 years. And certainly people interpret those years very differently. Some like us perhaps see those events as having changed everything in the in the universe, everything in the cosmos, everything in terms of uh the way we view our lives. And others fail to see much relevance to those years at all. And Jesus himself as he talked about the kingdom of God always provoked that that mixed response. And it’s a mixed response that carries on right throughout the book of Acts. And actually, the book of Acts concludes with a mixed response this morning. So, right now, it’s a little it’s it’s it’s a little odd that there are probably hundreds of churches across our city where people are occupied doing what we’re doing now. Uh feeling that what we see and hear and perceive and the truth about Jesus, his life, and his resurrection, it makes perfect sense to us. It makes sense of our lives. uh and we look forward to being with him at the conclusion of this current age. And uh and others, great many people in our city don’t subscribe to that kind of enchanted story at all concerning why we’re here and what we’re here to do and uh and where we hope to be at the end of all things. We’re all exposed to much the same information, but that information is just deciphered differently. And we see that in our key section in the concluding passage in Acts this morning where Paul quotes from the ancient prophet Isaiah speaking of those who hear but never understand and who see yet never perceive. I had a fellow in my church. He’s passed away since but he was a great enjoyer of classical music and along with his wife he’d frequently attend the symphonies at the Windspear or at Horlock Park the uh the symphony under the stars. He thoroughly enjoyed music that a philistine like myself just has no ear for. In fact, when when Charlie and I if we’re given tickets to the symphony, don’t ever give us tickets because we we tend to we tend to fall asleep and uh and we usually slip out at halftime at intermission. So, we uh we don’t have to put up with those tranquilizing effects. But my friend who deeply enjoyed classical music told me that very descriptively that jazz to him uh was like tinfoil in a microwave. And in both cases, whether listening to classical or jazz, we’re hearing the same musical information, but we’re just deciphering it all together differently. Someone’s hearing it as attractive. The other person’s hearing it is repulsive. The other uh it’s just the opposite. There are those who hear but never understand, who see yet never perceive. And we’ll reflect on that this morning as it concerns our Christian faith and our ability to communicate our faith uh to people in our city. But but first, Luke, the consumate travel writer who I suspect I think greatly enjoyed sea travel, has to get us to Rome. So again, he takes a bit of time to give us the itinerary. Last uh week uh last Sunday, we left Paul the prisoner, Luke himself, some Roman guards, over 250 soldiers shipwrecked on the little island of Malta that they just happened to come across as they were being blown all across the ocean by a storm that threatened to sink the ship. And the ship it itself had been caught on an offshore reef, then smashed apart by the waves. And the crew miraculously had to leap into the ocean. And each one of them, each soul was saved and consigned to spending the winter on the island. I don’t imagine that uh being on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean is the worst place to spend a winter. And so for 3 months, November through January, Paul and all his companions hung out just a little south of their original Italian destination. And they were waiting for the traditional westerly winds to begin to blow, which normally happens about the first week of February, somewhere around February 8th. And at that time another ship is found that’s been wintering at Malta. They get on to resume their journey and Luke again provides the detailed itinerary. They go from Malta to Syracuse on the island of Sicily. 3 days later they go up to Regime on the toe of the Italian mainland. And from there there’s a favorable south wind that pushes them another 300 kilometers up the coast to a place called Pioli. That’s where they would disembark and then carry on by foot to Rome. They stayed there a week. Paul and Luke, it says, met some fellow Christians that never met before. And once again, the kindly Roman centurion who was looking after all the prisoners allowed Paul and Luke to stay with those new Christian friends for that week. Now, Paul had never been to Rome. Uh three years earlier, he had sent them the letter that we know as the book of Romans. In that letter, he mentioned that he’d like to visit them, stay for a while, and then uh springboard from there on to Spain so he could take the gospel to the western regions of the empire. Instead, following his arrest in Jerusalem, his appeal uh as a Roman citizen to have his case tried in the court of the emperor, Paul’s being brought to Rome as a prisoner, not as an itinerant missionary. And being the booming capital that it was, Rome attracted all kinds of people from all over the empire, many of whom had converted to Christianity. Throughout his travels, uh Paul actually mentions some of them in the end of his letter of the Romans. He had some fleeting contact with a number of these people. And as his letter had successfully circulated among all the little house churches and all the little Christian gatherings in Rome, people anticipated his arrival with great eagerness. where Luke writes that news reaches the church that Paul’s on his way and some show great support by traveling south to intercept him and welcome him. Some walked about 70 kilometers to meet him at a place called Aius and others and these are the ones that I imagine were a little less fundamentalist. They decided that they’d wait for Paul at a place called the Three Taverns. Perhaps figuring out that getting out of the sun and grabbing a table by the patio, he’s going to walk by them anyway. they could meet him there and take him the rest of the way into Rome. Any event says when Paul met the welcoming committee, he thanked God and he took courage. There’s a pastor named Sam Albury put out a book last year entitled what God has to say about our bodies subtitled how the gospel is good news for our physical selves. And it’s just a summation of many of the things that scripture tells us about our magnificent bodies. In the first chapter, he makes mention of this brief reference in the book of Acts where people go out to meet Paul on the last leg of his journey. And as Alberry reflects on that, uh, these folks didn’t have any urgent business with Paul. They weren’t completing any tasks. They just wanted to show physical presence and support for him. And it made a difference. It caused Paul to be thankful. He drew courage just from the fact that the there’s solidarity with him. And Albury goes on to specifi specify how physical presence with one another, it just honors our common humanity in a way that online relationships never can touch. I mean, social media allows us to communicate with people great geographical distances, but it doesn’t help cultivate close personal relationships and friendships. He mentions that a friend of his was pastoring a church that was going through a really difficult time. and his friend pointed out one church member sitting quietly in the front pew and he says that guy has the spiritual gift of turning up. He was constantly being encouraged just by that fella’s physical presence as he was going through a difficult time. And we’ve all endured the better part of two years where we’ve had far less contact with people, physical one-to-one face-to-face contact with people than we’re accustomed to. We don’t have to be told that there’s no substitute really for physical presence, for singing together, for worshiping together, and praying together. More than one occasion in his letters to his churches, Paul encourages appropriate godly touch on the part of Christians with his encouragement to greet one another with a holy kiss. And in our culture that’s been described as sex obsessed but touchdeprived, a handshake or a hug or a little warmth of presence I think can mean a great deal. Albury speaks of how little a widow might experience touch as it’s meant to be. Her family might only might live a long ways away and visit only sporadically. But beyond the pokes of medical people, the elderly often enter a famine of touch as if dwelling in the desert years of their lives. And certainly this physical presence that people bring him seems to significantly recharge Paul. They’ve come from a distance to welcome him as a spiritual leader, as a new friend, as a companion into their city. And so Paul goes with his heart lightened into Rome. Doesn’t go to trial immediately. And the concluding verses of Acts 28 mentions that Paul lived in Rome for two years under a loose kind of house arrest with only one Roman soldier looking after him. He could receive people. he could have visitors. After 3 days of settling in, Paul calls together uh the local leaders of the Jewish populace. And remember in the preceding chapters, it was the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem who were completely done with Paul. They were out for his blood. Their verdict was that he was operating outside the Jewish faith with what he believed by by by elevating Jesus Christ and by subverting their laws and traditions. So their aggression toward Paul had led to his arrest. the two years that he had just spent in Cesaria as a prisoner of the government. But when the Jewish leaders in in Rome, Paul’s starting fresh with them and no emails or social media posts, not even any snail mail letters have made it their way. If one had come, Paul probably would have been pre-cancled before he even arrived. But but uh he’s starting fresh. They assure him, “We haven’t received any news or any letters from you.” And Paul explains his chains by saying,”Well, I don’t have any aggression against my fellow Jewish people or their customs or traditions. Lets them know that the governor in Judea would have already released him if he hadn’t appealed to have his case transferred to Rome.” And Paul explains that the reason he’s invited them now into his house for a chat is just to converse about their great shared religious cultural hope in the Messiah, the hope of Israel. response of the Jewish leaders is quite amiable. They say, “We’ve received no letters from Judea about you. Uh, none of the brothers coming here has reported or spoken any evil about you, but we desire to hear from you what your views are. For with regard to this sect, meaning Christianity, we know that everywhere it’s spoken against.” So they’re saying they have no real personal bones to pick with Paul, but they are suspicious of this Jesus sect that he represents. So they get out their calendars and they set a day. They come together in large numbers to hear what Paul has to say. And we read that from morning to evening on that day, Paul expounded to them, testifying to the kingdom of God, trying to convince them about Jesus, both from the law of Moses and from the prophets. So he’s appealing to their shared base of information, the scriptures that they all respect and adhere to. He just wants them to decipher the information differently to hear the voice and music and calling of Jesus, not like tinfoil in a microwave, but as something beautiful, as beautiful music uh so that they could share the scriptures together and honor and anticipate the one that’s spoken of in those scriptures. There’s a lot of evidence Paul would have drawn from probably on that long day morning till evening. But even if he’d addressed just one 700year-old prophecy in the writings of Isaiah, it would have clarified and highlighted the ministry of Jesus in beautiful high definition. That’s Isaiah 53. You read Isaiah 53. It’s an amazing 700year-old prophecy that details the sad plight of all humanity. All we like sheep gone astray. We’ve turned everyone to his own way. And it speaks of a punishment for our sin that has to land somewhere because a holy God can’t just ignore and shrug his shoulders at all the terrible harm and injustice that we do to ourselves and to others. Isaiah 53 speaks of the ordinariness of the one who was to come. He didn’t have any form or majesty that we’d look at him twice. No beauty that we’d desire him. He might be just a simple bluecollar carpenter son from Nazareth with no status or no ministry training. The simple servant would be despised and rejected by men and smitten by God. He would take it from all sides. But in doing that, he was taking up our infirmities, carrying our sorrows, being pierced for our transgressions, and crushed for our iniquities. And then when his sufferings on our behalf were finished, by his wounds, we would be healed. His chastisement would bring us peace and we would be re-evaluated by the holy God in heaven in light of the servant suffering on our behalf and we would be newly declared to be righteous. All of that is in Isaiah 53. It was a case that Paul had made in front of Jewish people many many times before and it always provoked a mixed response among the Jewish leaders in in Rome. Some found what Paul was saying to be revoly to be believable. Others found it to be f fanciful, pretty implausible. Stirred up all kinds of debate. Paul watched this happen again for the eenth time. And then he dropped these words from Isaiah chapter 6. And these are the key words for us to pay attention to this morning. This is a quotation that all four gospel writers uh record Jesus saying on occasion as well. Paul says this, “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet, “Go to this people and say, you will indeed hear, but never understand. You will indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull with their ears they can barely hear. and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them. Just with deep sadness in his heart that Paul concluded that long day, a day in which he probably would have hoped and prayed for uh for more gospel fruit, for more people to respond. And he closes then by saying,”Therefore, let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles. They’ll listen.” And they have been listening as the church has grown increasingly gentile in focus. As eager as we might be to share the good news we believe about Jesus, the sad fact acknowledged by Isaiah, acknowledged by Jesus, acknowledged by Paul, is that some will have ears to hear and others will hear without understanding and see without perceiving. That’s not news. That’s not a new concept to any of us. We see it every day. We’re always rubbing shoulders with people who hear without understanding, see without perceiving. And to them, Jesus and the Christians who follow him, we sound boring. We sound like irrelevant background music that they have no grocery store music, the stuff we have to say about Jesus and and Christianity. Or perhaps maybe a little more aggressively, we’re viewed as dangerous or oppressive or repulsive. What we have to say is more like tin foil in a microwave. Jesus, Paul, and Isaiah would say, “At least for the time being, many will hear without understanding and see without perceiving.” And to illustrate that, we’re all susceptible to hearing without understanding, seeing without perceiving, taking for granted things in our world, missing the beauty and the relevance and uh the implications of various things for our lives. been reading a book called Why God Makes Sense in a world that doesn’t by Gavin Ortland and he describes an academic discipline that most of us take for granted and don’t really think of as anything particularly special. However, others people who’ve invested a lot of time and thought into this academic discipline, they perceive and understand it as as transcendent. He’s talking about the nerdy old discipline of mathematics and talks about how people who get into it approach it in a kind almost like it’s kind of a holy subject with holy wonder. Portland quotes a fellow named Philip Davis and Ruben Hir hirs from their book the mathematical experience where they write if you do mathematics every day it seems the most natural thing in the world if you stop to think about what you’re doing and what it means seems one of the most mysterious. And what they’re digging down to is the idea that if nature was all there was, if everything we know, everything uh was randomly generated, then our universe as we experience it should feel like rumaging through a bit of a junk drawer. Inside there might be a few things that have evolved into usefulness. Elastic bands and paper clips and bobby pins and unsharpened pencils. But then we dig into that drawer a little further and we suddenly come across this perfect set of numbers that it’s so pristine and so consistent and so otherworldly and it’s just lying there in its perfect state waiting for us to unwrap it. Nothing in a universe that’s random ought to work the way numbers do. But they worked every time with elegance and consistency and extreme usefulness for us to build and create with. So mathematicians who may have no particular interest in any belief or any specific religion, they still speak of mathematics in a hushed, reverential, really transcendent tone. Give you a few examples. Sacell spoke of doing math as kind of a transit from one realm to another. British physicist Roger Penrose speaks of uh the um not the invention but the discovery of something that’s called the Mendel brought set. Anyone know what the mendel brought set is? No, I see no hands. Saying that it’s just it’s just discovered. It’s like Mount Everest. It’s just standing there. He says that doing math is like being guided to eternal self-existing truths of which we only have partial knowledge. Discovering a mathematical truth is a kind of breaking into another world. Paul Erdos from Hungary. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century. highly eccentric guy, no believer. His nickname for God was the supreme fascist. Nonetheless, he said that when you discover a new mathematical proof, God is showing you a page from his book. He and many others saw doing math, it’s not like an architect who builds from scratch, but it’s like an archaeologist who is digging under the surface, finding out what’s already there. So, Erdos said this. He said, “Why are numbers beautiful?” Well, it’s like asking why is Beethoven’s ninth symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. He says, I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is. Al Durac said that if your equation has beauty to it, it’s a sure sign that you’re progressing mathematically. Eugene Wner argued that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences, there’s no rational explanation for that. He said, “It’s like a man with a bunch of keys and and you’re tasked with opening several doors in succession and somehow you always hit on the right key, the first or second attempt. Eventually, you get suspicious of this unique unexplainable relationship between keys and doors. Scientists may speak of this mystery of mathematics in very religious terms. Paul Durk says, “God must have used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” More directly, Edward Everett said, “In the pure mathematics, we contemplate absolute truths which existed in divine mind before the morning stars sang together and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.” What he’s really saying there is that if the buttons got pressed tomorrow and our world blew apart and all of humanity and everything on earth was wiped out, still the Pythagorean theorem a^2 plus b 2 + c^2 would still exist outside of our world as an eternal truth as in indestructible as ever. A random universe shouldn’t ought to be able to produce a system like that that spans all worlds. the renowned uh mathematical mathematician theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. He ought to have a word as well because he could be very critical of organized religion. He didn’t profess any belief in a personal god. Little girl asked him once, “Do scientists pray?” And he answered her by saying, “Everyone who’s seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe. spirit that’s vastly superior to man, one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel very humble. On the eve of his 50th birthday, he was asked whether he believed in God. And Einstein said, “Well, I’m not an atheist.” The problem involved, it’s too vast for our limited minds. We’re in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. Doesn’t know how. doesn’t understand the languages in which they’re written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but we only dimly understand those laws. And that was reading that was somewhat revelational for me because most of us take something like numbers and mathematics and the way they work just for granted. We’ve never really thought much about it. Math to us might seem just uh very uh utilitarian, quite boring. We hear but we don’t understand. We see but we don’t perceive. But in the minds of those who have plumbed some of the mathematical depths, they know it’s too rich and too organized and too otherworldly not to be a genuine point of contact with something beyond nature. So our encouragement this morning is uh if we can be as obtuse and lack understanding in an area like mathematics not to give up on those who were praying for who are hearing but not understanding who are seeing without perceiving. And we see Jesus and he seems so obvious to us as the most important person who has ever lived. But we also fail to see the beauty and the depth of something like mathematics. So we can empathize with those who really don’t yet see any beauty in Jesus. And the information is all there for them, just as the mathematics information is all there for us. It just hasn’t been successfully deciphered yet. And despite many fruitless efforts at sharing the gospel with his fellow Jews, Paul never gave up on his own people. Gentiles might be responding more rapidly in greater numbers for the moment, but Paul never ceased wanting to help decipher the Old Testament scriptures correctly for his fellow Jews. And that eagerness to help others, it just continues with us. Really, if you look at the book of Acts, it uh it ends exactly the same way it begins. Chapter 1 and verse three, it began with the resurrected Jesus speaking to his followers about the kingdom of God. In the last verse of the last chapter, we have Paul in Rome pro proclaiming the kingdom of God, teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, without hindrance. And with that closing verse, Acts doesn’t really seem to give us the most satisfactory ending. We’re left hanging. We don’t know how things ended up for Paul or the apostles. We don’t know what became of Paul’s trial, what the eventual verdict was that was given. Luke doesn’t tell us anything about that crushing of rebellion in Jerusalem. This only happened 10 years after the conclusion of the book of Acts. The Jews rebelled in Jerusalem and the Romans marched in and tore the city apart and tore the temple apart, never to have been rebuilt since. Luke doesn’t deal with any of that. Instead, the book begins and ends with the kingdom of God being taught and proclaimed, and then it’s like it’s passing the torch on to us. You folks, just keep doing that. keep trying to help people decipher the beautiful gospel music so that they can both see and hear the things that we can see and hear this morning as we come to worship Jesus. So, Acts isn’t a it’s not a dead book as we conclude it this morning. It’s living. It’s active. It’s a springboard for us to uh to go out and not be discouraged by those we’re praying for who haven’t yet responded. God has ways of leveraging uh ears open and leveraging eyes so they can see. He’s done it with us. And we’re not the clever ones. Look at us. We’re not the clever ones in the world. But if he can do it for us, he can do it for those we pray for as well. That’s his bow and prayer.