Listen to Rhoda or Strange People: Portals to Eternity
Acts 12
Pastor Peter Hiett
July 25, 1999
. . . irony here about what Herod’s doing; this is Herod Agrippa. He is a lot like his grandfather, Herod, the Great, who, you remember, tried to kill the infant Jesus. He’s also like his uncle, Herod Antipas, who conspired with Rome and tried to kill, or killed Jesus, King of the Jews, at Passover. And now he, Herod Agrippa, throws Peter in prison, at Passover, on Easter. And he does it for the same reason that his uncle, Herod Antipas, conspired with Rome; that is, the public opinion polls said this would be in his favor. He saw that the Jews were pleased by that, like his uncle who conspired with Pilate. In fact, Pilate even yelled to the crowd, “What would you have me do with your King?” And they screamed, “Crucify!” Justice, truth, by opinion poll! What an idea!
Yet, you know, privately, it was Pilate who then asked Jesus, “What is truth?”
I feel sorry for these kings and governors in the New Testament, because they come across as kind of insane. And yet these guys are charged with dispensing and judging sanity. How do we determine what’s sane, what’s true? Public opinion, what powerful people say, the government, the media, the educational establishment, science? Bill Nye, the Science Guy, says, "It's science!”
The empirical method, that everything that’s true is what can be empirically proven? That statement cannot be empirically proven; your thoughts cannot be empirically proven; that statement, in itself, is absurd, a bit insane. It’s just that powerful people have been saying it for quite some time. So, it’s the post-modern world, like Aram talked about, so maybe there’s no truth; maybe there is no truth. But then, if there’s no truth, there’s no truth to that statement that there’s no truth, which would mean that there is at least some truth. How do you know what’s true? How do you know who’s sane? How do you know what madness is? What is madness?
The definition of madness changes from society to society. What if all the people giving the psych tests are themselves a bit unbalanced? What do we do then? In parts of the world, you’d be judged insane right now. What is it? It’s hardly ever defined as the mental state of those in power, like the dean of the psych school, the Soviet premier, the king. You just don’t go around telling jokes about the king. The king cannot be a fool. The king can’t be a fool. Perhaps insanity, then, is politically defined by those who happen in to be in power, like survival of the fittest. The sane are those in power. Is that what sanity is?
I’ll tell you this – I’m sane! Why are you laughing? I’m wise; I know the truth. Why are you sitting here looking at me, listening to me? Well, because I know the truth; and how do you know that I know the truth? I got a piece of paper from Fuller Seminary; it says Master of Divinity. I got a plaque on the wall from college, Phi Beta Kappa. I looked that up, what that stands for – philosopho philafia, byu, something else. I looked it up in the Greek dictionary. Basically, it means “king of worldly wisdom, of this life.” So you see, I know; I’m sane. It’s in Science! So, I know the truth. My Christian faith rises out of years of grueling study; I’m sane.
You know, ever since I was a young child, I’ve known a person who really struggled with sanity. He doesn’t have a degree like me; he doesn’t have as much schooling as me; he lived on he streets, the streets of Denver, unlike me, spent quite a bit of time at the Fort Logan Mental Health Facility. There may be some chemical imbalances – physiological imbalances, psychological issues. He did drugs when he was younger; he’s my cousin. Kind of the bottom line with my cousin—why it ended up that way, is that he kept saying he heard voices. He heard voices, he said. Everybody said, “No, you don’t; you don’t hear any voices, not really; that’s madness, madness!” He’s better now. He has changed. He’s older, better adjusted, more stable. Yet, I always had this nagging question growing up – how did they know that he didn’t hear voices? How’d they know?
How do we know truth? Well, if truth is a thing, it would make sense that we’d hunt it down and conquer it at some school somewhere. Guys hunt and conquer and master things – guys do! So it only stands to reason that truth is something that can be hunted down and mastered by kings and masters – that’s guy logic!
What about a renowned master mathematician named Lagme, who laid on his deathbed for something like 38 hours in silence. Then his beloved came in and she spoke to him, but he would not even respond to her voice. Then an acquaintance said, “Do you remember what 67 to the 2nd power is?” He got a smile on his face, and he said, “4,489.” And then he died.
Did he know the truth? Did the truth set him free? Maybe you just can’t hunt down and acquire the truth like that; maybe the truth is something that hunts you down. Maybe Jesus really is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If that is, in fact, true then truth isn’t a thing that you can go bag somewhere in school; truth is more like a person to be met.
If truth is a thing, that would mean prayer, at its best, is some kind of psychological mental exercise that we go through. At its worst, it’s insanity. However, if truth is a person, then prayer would be more like hanging out by a door, waiting for a knock, listening for a voice.
Chapter 12, verse 4
So Herod (King Herod) seized Peter, put him in prison and delivered him to four squads (that’s 16 soldiers) to guard him, intending to hold him in prison over Easter, intending to then bring him out to the people. But earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. The very night when Herod was about to bring him out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison. (He’s really in prison!) And behold, an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell, and he smacked Peter on the side and woke him and said, ‘Get up, quickly!’ And the chains fell off his hands, and the angel said to him, ‘Get dressed and put on your sandals,’ and he did so. And he said to him, ‘Get your coat and wrap it around you and follow me.’ And he went out and followed him. He did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision, hearing voices.
When they had passed the first and the second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city. It opened to them of its own accord, and they went out and passed on through one street, and immediately, the angel left him. And Peter came to himself and said, ‘Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting. And when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying.
And remember, this is earnest prayer; the leaders of the church, I would imagine, the big dogs of the church, in earnest, faithful prayer. A lot of sermons have been preached about their earnest, faithful prayer. There’s a knock,
Verse 13
And when Peter knocked at the door of the gateway, a maid named Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter’s voice, in her joy, she did not open the gate, but ran in and told that Peter was standing at the gate, and they said to her, ‘You’re mad!’
The earnest pray-ers said to her,
“You’re nuts!
You’re out of touch with reality there, Rhoda!”
After all, what does Rhoda know?
She’s the maid; that means the servant girl, possibly, slave girl.
“Rhoda, you don’t have a degree;
you haven’t been to school;
you’re not an apostle;
you don’t know this stuff!
Rhoda, what do you think?
Do you think that God would hide this stuff from us wise guys and reveal it to a maid?
Rhoda, this is an idle tale!”
The story sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, it was in Luke’s first volume, the first book he wrote, that he talked about Easter morning and how Jesus was imprisoned and entombed. And on Easter morning, it was the women who went to the tomb first and found that it was open. They spoke with an angel, and they ran back in their joy to tell Peter and the apostles, and all the others. And these men listened to the women, and they said, "That's a silly story; that’s an idle tale.” And they did not believe it, Luke chapter 24 says. An idle tale, an old wives’ tale – did you ever wonder about that expression – old wives’ tale? An idle tale!
I heard a preacher raise the question, these doubts of the apostles and church leaders, are they intellectual doubts or are they more like socio-political doubts? And I was thinking, maybe so many of our statements, our intellectual statements, are really socio-politcal statements. If this would have been an apostle, or a theologian, or a seminary professor, or a philosopher who had gone to the door, maybe they would have believed him. But it was Rhoda, a maid. “You’re nuts, Rhoda; you’re hearing things!”
Verse 15
But she insisted that it was so. They said, “It’s his angel.”
Isn’t that amazing? They were ready to believe it was Peter’s guardian angel more than that Peter got sprung from jail somehow. Why? I think it’s because they came up with the angel thing – it was their idea.
But Peter (while all this was going on) kept knocking on the door. So when they finally opened it, they saw him, and they were amazed.
They were shocked, these earnest pray-ers.
But Peter motioned to them with his hand to be silent,and he described to them how the Lord had brought him out of prison. And he said, ‘Now tell this to James and to the brethren. And he departed and went to another place.
You know, Peter’s saying, “I’m out of here; but now, you guys, you go and tell all the others so that they could believe, just like Rhoda told you and you believed.”
You see, this story is a joke. By that I don’t mean that it’s not true; it’s extremely true. But not only is it a joke on Herod; it’s a joke on those church leaders, like Easter was a joke on the apostles, told by those crazy women, just like Easter now is a joke on this entire self-righteous, pompous world.
A joke – and who gets the joke? Who is it that laughs at a joke?
Maids,
the poor,
the weak,
the disenfranchised,
the powerless --
Some of the women must have laughed—those who don’t put a whole lot of faith in this world, because this world hasn’t worked out all that well for them. I would imagine they laughed. Those people get the joke; they know the truth; they inherit the world—the earth.
And, by the way, this is important to think about; this is some pretty good evidence that Scripture is authentic. If it was just a bunch of religious, pompous guys sitting around making up stories, they wouldn’t make up this one. Being authentic, it tells us that they were pretty committed to the truth. And not only that, they were able to take a joke. And even more than that, that they seemed to even delight in a joke upon themselves. And to delight in a joke on yourself, you can’t take yourself all that seriously. The only real way that you can not take yourself seriously is if you take God very seriously.
Do you take God seriously?
Do you take Easter seriously?
Do you take his grace seriously?
As in the words of Saint Simeon of Salas, a 6th century monk who was kicked out of church repeatedly – Will Willomen tells about him – for throwing nuts at the altar candles. As he was being dragged out of church for the last time, on Good Friday because, during the mass, as the priest asked the faithful to mortify the flesh, he pulled out this large sausage and started chewing on it during mass. As he was being dragged out of the sanctuary, he said, “The essence of human sinfulness is taking ourselves and our rituals too seriously.” I think he’s saying, you know, a king, a Christian king, a Christian person, ought to be able to take a joke on themselves.
A couple months ago, we were in London with the Motts, where Aram was just this last week. While we were there, Susan and I went on a tour of Hampton Court, which was where King Henry VIII lived for awhile. I’m telling you – those kings were scary guys; they had so much power, it was absolutely frightening. Just a nod of the head and a thousand people would die, people would be tortured; people would be murdered – absolutely frightening!
We found out that every one of those kings had a joker, a court jester. One of the Beefeater guards tried to explain it to us. He said that the court fool, as they were called, really had no status; they lived off the scraps from the king’s table. However, the court jester could say whatever he wanted and the king could not lift a finger against him. The idea was that a Christian king ought to be able to take a joke – a jester, a fool.
A Christian king needs humility, and that comes from humiliations. He needs his suppositions questioned by somebody – truth – from the joker, the jester, the court fool.
If you were at the church retreat three years ago, you remember Dan Allender shared with us how in medieval times, they had this thing called the Ship of Fools. That’s where that expression Ship of Fools comes from; they’d take people who were mad, who were looked at as insane and different, and they’d load them on this ship and they’d travel out on the sea, the realm of mystery and chaos. They’d put into one port after another. And when they’d put into a port, the people in the town didn’t look down upon the “fools;” in fact, they lined up to board their ship. Because they believed that these people had insights into mysteries unknown to them; that they would challenge their suppositions and disrupt their ways of thinking and lead them into new realms of truth. Kind of like the king’s court fool.