Faces of Our Faith: Eutychus | Acts 20:1-12 | 8.16.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I'm so glad to be with you all today.

As we uh we're closing in towards the end of our summer series, we've got a couple more weeks.

Uh this series we've been doing called Faces of Our Faith, where we've been looking uh at characters in the Bible who might be misunderstood or overlooked.

Um today we have the story of an early church community in Acts.

And one of the smaller characters, but whose name is remembered in the 20th chapter.

His name is Eudicus.

Let's try it.

Eudychus.

Yeah.

Uh it's a passage that doesn't often make its way into uh the pulpit.

It's not in the common lectionary.

Uh it just doesn't get talked about all that much.

And yet, um, I think this young man's experience in the early church can continue to teach us.

Um, if I can bring us into context just a little bit, you'll hear the first line of the scripture reading today says, after the uproar has ceased.

So it's probably good to know what uproar uh we're talking about.

So in the chapter prior, uh Paul had spent nearly three years in Ephesus, and the gospel had taken such deep root in that city that it started to uh change that city's economy and their religious life, uh, so much so that it sparked uh a riot that nearly got him killed.

Um it's in the immediate aftermath of that riot, with the dust barely settled, that Paul gathers the disciples, embraces them, and then sets out for Macedonia.

So that's that's where we're gonna be starting our reading from after this riot.

Um but before we read our passage for today, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scriptures this morning.

Holy God, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, so that as the scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we might hear with joy what you say to us this day.

Amen.

Now, our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 20.

Um, I'll be reading the first twelve verses, and um, I will be truncating verses four and five.

It's like names and places.

I'll squeeze those together a little bit.

But we'll read from verse one to verse twelve.

Let's listen now for God's word to us today.

After the uproar had ceased, Paul sent for the disciples, and after encouraging them and saying farewell, he left for Macedonia.

When he had gone through those regions and had given them much encouragement, he came to Greece, where he stayed for three months.

And he was about to set sail for Syria, accompanied by a diverse septet of co-workers, including Timothy, and those colleagues went ahead of him and were waiting for us in Troaz.

But as we sailed from Philippi, after the days of unleavened bread, and in five days we joined them in Troaz, where we stayed for seven days.

On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them.

And since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight.

There were many lamps in the room upstairs where we were meeting, and a young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer.

Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below him, and was picked up dead.

But Paul went down and bending over him, took him in his arms and said, Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.

Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn.

Then he left.

Meanwhile, they had taken the boy away alive, and they were not a little comforted.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

I think every preacher faced with this passage is tempted to make the same joke about the dangers of falling asleep during sermons.

But frankly, it just feels a little cheap.

So I won't be doing that.

And for me, perhaps the takeaway is that even if you do fall asleep, don't worry.

We've got you.

You're gonna be okay.

We will pick you up when you fall.

Maybe don't sit in open windows in three-story buildings, though.

So it's the first day of the week, and as is the practice that Paul and his colleagues have been instilling in early churches around the region, they've gathered on the first day of the week to break bread.

The upper room is full of people.

The oil and the lamps keep on burning.

And as Luke established back in chapter two, the early church has commitments and regular practices that shape their life together.

He wrote that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teachings and fellowship, and to the breaking of bread and the prayers, he writes.

And the author of Hebrews elaborates on this as well, reminding the church to provoke one another to love and to good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but to encourage one another.

You see, it's the church doing what the church does.

The only difference being that this time it's getting late, and Paul is getting long-winded.

It's past midnight.

Paul's been talking for a good long while because he's leaving in the morning, and there is a lot left to say.

Maybe you know that feeling.

Somebody you love is heading out, and you keep talking longer than you should, you stay up later than you should, and you just want to keep them with you a little while longer.

My my mom's folks call this the Appalachian goodbye.

Do you know that?

You say bye at the table, and then you say bye at the door, and then you talk with them a little bit in the driveway while they put their bags in the car, and and then and then they're sitting in the driver's seat, and you lean in the open window, and then you finally ask them, Well, how are you really doing?

An Appalachian goodbye isn't finished, by the way, until the car goes over the first hill.

That's that's when it's finally over.

Well, Paul is goodbyeing.

And up in the window sits a young man, Eudychus.

Somebody's child, somebody's best friend.

And his mama named him Lucky, by the way.

That's what Eudychus means.

Fortunate.

Fortunate is what his name means, and he is tired.

Tired like you get after a long day of work, and he's fighting sleep.

Most of us know that fight, and in this case, he loses that fight and he falls.

Three stories down.

And I want us to hang out here for just a second.

Um, because Luke does not hang out here.

Uh, and I think we have gotten very good at not staying here either.

Uh we hear the phrase, and he was picked up dead.

And our ears, because we know that we're reading a Bible story, our ears are already listening for the fix, for the miracle.

But somebody in that room had to run down three flights of stairs not knowing what they would find.

Somebody had to be the one who got there first.

And somebody had to name what they found out loud to a room full of people who 30 seconds earlier were listening to a sermon.

And that's how it happens, isn't it?

It's actually shocking to me if I think, if I read this passage slowly, right?

It's a shock.

But that's how tragedies happen, not with any warning, not on cue.

It's a Tuesday and the phone rings.

It's a regular Sunday, but the doctor calls and says they need to see you tomorrow.

It's the middle of a meeting, an ordinary meeting, a kind with an agenda and a whiteboard.

Someone's phone buzzes, and their face drops.

And nothing about the rest of that day goes like anything anyone had planned.

And Eudicus didn't fall during a crisis, he fell during a sermon.

In the middle of the holiest, most ordinary thing this community knew how to do together.

Gathering, breaking bread, listening for a word from God.

And death climbed in through the window anyway.

It always does.

It never seems to wait for a better time.

And it never has, because there isn't a good time for a tragedy.

And so before we rush to Paul and we get to the miraculous, I want us to sit a moment in that room on the floor in the dark, three stories down from all the lamp light.

And because so many people uh have to sit there.

In our own dark uh version of normalcy interrupted.

Or we have in the past, or we will in the future.

And Eudychus, whoever he was, whatever he wanted, whatever he expected from that evening, uh, he is ours as well.

So let's not move on from what happened to him too quickly.

In the 17th chapter of 1 Kings, Elijah visited a widow and her son during a severe drought in the land.

And she welcomes him and shows him radical hospitality, even though she acknowledges to him we only have water and flour left for maybe a day or two.

She expects they will die, she says, yet she makes a bit of bread and offers some of her water to Elijah.

And miraculously, from that day on, her water and oil and bread sustain them for days and days, and they do not run out.

But a little while later, her son falls ill and dies.

And grief-stricken, the widow lashes out at Elijah, who comes and lays her son on his bed and cries out to God three times to save him, and he is revived.

It's a pattern that Elisha repeats in the next generation.

Paul doesn't perform the miracle with flair or flourish, and he doesn't announce uh that he, through Christ, is echoing the prophetic tasks of Elijah and Elisha.

He just embraces the boy and simply says, his life is in him.

And life returns.

But Luke doesn't linger on the marvel.

We don't get a lot of verbiage here about what that looked like.

And at first I wondered why.

But perhaps it's because so many of us don't get our miracles.

Not the kind where the young man opens his eyes and everyone gasps.

Most of us go home from the hospital, from the graveside, from the empty chair at the table, and nothing gets picked up, revitalized.

So, what do we do with a text like this?

I want to suggest something today.

It might be a theological leap for some of us, but I want you to come with me on a little journey.

I want to suggest that we have been thinking of the idea of miracles incorrectly.

Me too.

Uh, we tend to picture it like it's a magic trick.

Like God is actually like breaking the world to then do a little magic trick and then stepping back out.

Right?

That's what it sounds like when someone walks on water or someone is risen from the dead, but I want to suggest to you that God, that a miracle is not God bending the spoon with God's mind.

Okay?

Because if that's what a miracle has to be, then most of us are right to feel cheated by life.

We didn't get the magic trick.

We got the diagnosis, we got the phone call, we got the fall, and nobody caught us.

But the theologian Paul Tillich spent a good bit of his life arguing that this isn't actually what a miracle means.

Not in Scripture, and not for the deepest and most historical Christian traditions.

He relies heavily on the uh the early fathers and mothers in the desert, the early monks in the Christian church.

For Tillich, God isn't a being alongside other beings.

Tinkering with the machinery from the outside.

God is the very ground of being itself, the very source of our existence, and is closer to us than the causes and effects we can see.

Which means for him, and I think for me, that a miracle isn't God breaking reality.

The miracle is the true thing.

The miracle is the true reality for one unrepeatable moment becoming transparent, the veil being lifted, becoming the sign of the God who holds it up from underneath and within.

I want to push that a half step further than maybe even Tilk does, though, because I think it matters for a room full of tired disciples.

A miracle isn't only the shock of seeing, uh seeing through the veil to God.

Sometimes a miracle is this it's things going the way they were supposed to go.

Sometimes the miracle is that the medicine worked, that the estranged sister calls us back, that there's enough bread when you didn't think there was gonna be.

That someone who fell is picked up and they're alive.

That's not a suspension of how the world works, that's how the world was supposed to work.

And in that one blessed moment, the world is uncorrupted for us.

The veil is lifted and we see through to heaven, to the way things ought to be.

It's the world working the way God meant it to work all along before scarcity got its hands on it, before sin and death moved in and started rearranging the furniture.

And here's the thing about Eudychus' miracle that I almost missed.

Paul doesn't wave his hands.

He doesn't say, hey everyone, you saw this too.

Go tell everybody and convince them to join our team.

Let's make this thing, this event.

Let's now re-center everything we've been doing around this thing, right?

He doesn't call down fire, he just goes downstairs and bends over the body and holds the boy.

And he says the plainest sentence in the whole passage.

His life is in him.

And then he goes back upstairs and he keeps talking until dawn, it says.

And somebody, presumably, puts the tables and chairs back in the morning, and life resumes.

Bread gets broken.

The ordinary practices of that room, gathering and eating, and staying up too late with the people you love.

They just keep going on, except now they're also going on with a boy who's alive instead of a boy who's dead.

And that's what fulfillment looks like for me.

Not a spoon-bending magic trick in front of a crowd, but a room where death climbed in through the window and the community simply said, no, thank you.

They caught what fell.

They came to the aid of their brother when he needed it and got right back to their regularly scheduled programming.

They kept the ordinary things ordinary because the ordinary things done in the name of Christ turn out to be strong enough to hold life and to do miracles.

You will do even greater things than these.

Friends, resurrection in Scripture, and even when it shows up in our own lives, it is often less dramatic than we would expect for it to be.

And it's more embodied.

It's an embrace, it's not a spectacle.

And it's an embrace we are spiritually awake to.

I sometimes wonder how many miracles we walk past every day and don't see.

Because we're not looking for the veil to be lifted.

We're not looking with the lens of the world as it has already been accomplished and just as it isn't quite yet.

Because when we do the ordinary and holy and mundane rhythms of the life of faith, the gathering and sharing meals, the teaching and the prayers, these awaken us to the miraculous, which is to say the true and real and ought to be normal everyday abundance of life.

I think about my own wedding, with all the joy and the we we had a band.

The band played, second-lined us around to the reception, and and and and yet a few weeks later, we had to go back to seminary, back to laundry and dishes.

We had to figure out who was going to cook which nights.

And somehow it was those small, mundane rhythms that sometimes we neglect from time to time.

It's those things that carry us forward and they give us the strength to do life together.

One thing that Luke doesn't tell us ever about this, by the way, is how Eudychus felt about all this.

We get Paul's words, we get the room's relief, that they were not a little comforted, which is a Greek way of saying they were very comforted.

But we don't get Eudychus' own voice.

How would you feel had you personally experienced this miraculous thing?

And everyone smiled for a moment and gave thanks and then went right back upstairs.

I wonder if he expected something different.

I wonder if being raised from the dead and then just going back to a meal felt smaller than what he'd been through.

Have you ever tried to get across to somebody else what God has done for you?

Have you ever expressed how miraculous it felt to find that job, or to reconnect with that long-lost friend, or to discover that there actually was enough in the bank account when that bill came due?

Only to have them say, well, that's pretty neat.

It felt more than pretty neat to you, I guess.

I wonder whose stories in our own community go uh untold or underattended, even after something significant has happened to them.

It can be so hard to describe the indescribable in a world so familiar with lack and loss.

But Luke does tell us how the community felt.

He tells us they were deeply comforted, not amazed, not astounded, not shocked into a frenzy.

These are all Greek words he uses elsewhere.

But here we get deeply comforted, encouraged.

It's something quieter but more sustainable, something that keeps us going bravely in this already but not yet world.

Our salvation has come in Christ Jesus.

Christ has accomplished all that we need to accomplish for the healing of the world, and yet it has not been fully realized.

And so it is the task of the faithful to witness to Christ's victory.

Even in a world and even in bodies that we can't always see it, but because the miraculous hasn't quite yet fully become the ordinary and the expected, it should be ordinary that people have enough to eat.

That widows don't have to worry where their meal is going to come from.

It should be expected that people who are sick are healed.

That work of lifting up those who have fallen and proclaiming God's love for us in Christ is sustaining work.

Miracles are a comfort.

They are not spectacle.

Anyone can waltz into a tragedy or a spectacle and name what it really means.

Anyone can show up to a disaster and they can blame or they can praise or they can grieve or they can celebrate.

And anyone can wait around for the miraculous.

They can wait around for someone who's not them to do something about it.

And they can ignore the regular rhythms of spiritual life because they want God to swoop in and to break things and put them back together without them having to be a part of that transition, that restoration themselves.

Eudychus was fortunate.

But he was not fortunate because God decided there was something unique and special and important about him.

This is my take on Luke, by the way.

Luke doesn't go into who he was related to or what he did for work or anything about this young man, because I bet that if he had told us any more information, we would go, oh, well, God really likes stonemasons, or God really likes people who have mothers that live in this part of town, right?

Like if we if he gives us more information, then we too easily make Eudicus into someone who isn't everyone.

He was fortunate because the community of faith was there for him when he fell, and because of that, the thing that was always supposed to be the case became true in his life.

When we celebrate the miracles that we see in our lives and in the world around us, I pray that the church proclaims not just gratitude for the good fortune of that individual or that situation.

That right, but also the truth.

That God desires healing and wholeness and nourishment and a flourishing life for all of the people, all the time.

So here's the true thing that I want to leave you with this morning.

Not that Eudicus fell, and not even that he was raised, but this.

God does not want one boy picked up alive while the rest stay fallen.

God wants the whole world picked up.

God wants healing for the sister with the diagnosis, and wholeness for the marriage that's struggling, and nourishment for the family two streets over who is having to choose rent or groceries.

Not good fortune for the lucky few whose stories make it into scripture, but flourishing life, Jesus says, and life to the fullest for all people, all the time.

That's the kind of God we have.

Write that down somewhere you see a Tuesday.

And friends, that God doesn't usually show up in the spectacular.

God is in the spectacular, but that's not usually where God shows up.

God shows up in the room, in the lamplight, in the gathering with friends that goes on too long because someone you love is leaving in the morning, and you're not ready to stop talking to them yet.

So here is your charge, church, and it's not a hard one, but it will ask everything of you.

Keep gathering, even when it's late, and even when the sermon runs four and a half minutes too long.

Keep breaking bread, not because bread is magic, but because it is how we practice believing that there will be enough at the table.

Keep opening the word, even when the stories are weird and they don't make sense, especially the ones with names in them that you don't recognize or know how to pronounce, and the ones that don't preach easily, especially those, and keep praying out loud.

With your eyes open sometime for the other people in this room whose falling and rising you may not have heard about yet.

Because someone is always sitting in that window.

Somebody in this room right now is uh closer to that ledge than any of us know.

And the miracle God is asking of us isn't a resurrection with flourish, it's this that we stay in the room long enough to catch each other when we fall.

That when we go downstairs and we bend low, and that we say out loud to somebody who needs to hear it, your life is still in you.

And then, friends, this hard and holy and unglamorous part is that we go back upstairs and we keep the meal going.

And we stay at that table until dawn, if that's what it takes.

And that's not a lesser miracle, that is the miracle.

That's what it looks like when the kingdom of God, which has already come and yet has not fully arrived, when it gets a little more tangible, in one upstairs room in Troaz, and in one sanctuary in South Knoxville.

So go and gather.

Break bread, open the book, and pray.

With your eyes open to catch what falls.

You see, the world was always supposed to work this way.

So let's be the ones who say that and who live it out loud.

May it be so.

Amen.