f I come toward you with an open hand, what does that mean? If I approach you from across the room with either one hand or both hands open, how would you interpret that?
Well, of course, it would mean different things for different kinds of open hands. There is more than one way to be openhanded. If I come with my open hand palm up, it suggests I want something from you; put something in my open hand. It used to be a dime for a cup of coffee; now it is four dollars for a Starbucks latte. But if you see my hand open, palm up, you think I want something.
Or if my hand is open and is raised above my shoulder, that means I want your attention. I am trying to get you to notice me, because I have something to say that you need to hear. Maybe we should instruct all those who read the Bible in worship to put one hand up when they start, because we really must pay better attention to the reading of Scripture!
Or, again, your interpretation would be quite different if my hand, still open, was stretched out at arm’s length in front of me. If my open hand is in your face, you know it means “Stop”. Stop right where you are, stop what you are doing, you are on the wrong track, stop!
All of these things are suggested by open hands. But there are at least two more options, two more ways my open hand could be read. I might open my hand, turn it sideways, and aim toward your hand. That would be a sign that I want to shake hands with you; I want my open hand to meet your open hand and link with me. It would be a gesture of greeting. Did you know that the custom of shaking hands goes back hundreds of years, and that it may have originated as a way for two people to demonstrate that their hands contained no weapons? An open hand, extended for a handshake, is a sign that as we greet, there is no hostility and there are no weapons that might inflict injury.
That’s one option. And the other option is the salute. I could raise my open hand to my eyebrow and hold it there for a few seconds. How would you read that? I am not a member of the armed forces, but that’s where the salute comes from; the salute is a gesture of respect. If I salute you, I acknowledge that I respect you, you are a person of integrity, you are somebody. An open hand as a salute means, “I trust you and what you stand for.”
Open hands, the handshake and the salute, are metaphors for the way you and I need to encounter the world around us. We need to approach this world with open hands – not to beg, not to demand attention, not even to stop them from doing something wrong. All those things are important; but our best approaches to the world are the handshake and the salute.
What I mean is pictured for us in the story of the man once called Saul; open hands played a large role in his story.
I
Saul first appears in the New Testament as an enemy of the Gospel. He shows up at the stoning of Stephen and cheers the crowd on. He gets warrants from the Temple authorities to go down to Damascus and root out this pestilence of believers in Jesus. He is the epitome of enmity.
And yet Jesus encounters Saul, Jesus challenges him, and almost instantly, Saul the enemy becomes Saul the disabled, Saul the confused, Saul in crisis. He is blinded, he is weak, he is unable to do much of anything. Saul needs help. So what happened next?
“So [those who were traveling with him] led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus.” They led him by the hand. Open hands took the hand of this dazzled, disoriented rabbi, and led him to safe haven in Damascus.
Friends, all around us there are confused and lonely and unhappy people. They may not look that way. They may look perfectly normal. They may have jobs and families and likes and dislikes just as all of us do. But outside of fellowship with God, they are not going to find genuine happiness. Outside of faith in Christ, they are not going to discover authentic fulfillment. They need somebody to lead them by the hand and take them to a safe haven. They need our open hands, extended in friendship, to link with their hands and lead them to safety.
Now here’s the problem. Here’s the issue. Many of us have defined anybody who is not like us as “The Enemy”. Just as Saul saw Christians as his enemy, and guess what, they saw him as their enemy too, a whole lot of modern Christians have enemies. There are folks who make us uncomfortable, there are people whose lifestyles are repugnant, there are groups that we think are out to undermine us, and what do we want to do? Either we want to stay away and have nothing to do with them; or we want to construct elaborate arguments to prove them wrong and beat them down. Flight or fight, those seem to be our choices. But that’s not what the world needs. The world does not need for Christians either to avoid or to do battle. The world needs Christians with open hands, followers of Jesus who will extend their hands in friendship, hand to hand and heart to heart, to lead others to a place of peace and safety.
Who is on your enemies list? Who do you love to hate? Atheists, maybe, who are in your face to say there is no God? Or secularists, who are quite happy, thank you very much, without any apparent need of a relationship with God? Or maybe you flee from or fight with people of other religions; Muslims in the era of 9/11, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban are favorite targets. Do you consider them enemies?
Or how about other Christian groups? That may be the most painful enmity of all. The history of American Christianity records that we have spent enormous amounts of energy constructing arguments to prove that the Catholics are idolatrous, the Methodists are sloppy, and the Presbyterians were predestined to get it wrong! Enemies! We have come to look for enemies everywhere and then, instead of opening our hands to them to invite them to come to a place of safety and peace, we demonize them and waste our energies correcting them. But, brothers and sisters, what the world needs, what difficult people want, is not to be labeled as an enemy but to be led by friendly hands to a place of peace and safety.
Sosena was a young woman from Ethiopia who started coming to my church. I tried talking with her each Sunday, but she would wave me off with vague comments about not being ready right now. It was clear that this was a troubled young woman. And so I was disturbed one Sunday when I noticed her cornered by one of our men who always made it his business to find every visitor and to interrogate them. Sometimes that was all right, but every now and then we would get someone like Sosena, who wanted to be left alone. This brother did not leave anybody alone; he talked, he pushed, he followed visitors out on to the sidewalk, pressing his questions, all in the interest of what he called witnessing.
Well, I knew enough to know that Sosena was not going to do well with that, and so I joined the discussion, or rather, the monologue, to rescue her. With a kind of panicky look in her eyes, she said, “Pastor, could we go to your office? I want to talk.” Well, I used one of those open hand gestures – STOP – on the chatty church member, and away we went. In a few moments Sosena told me her story – estrangement from her parents, a background in the Ethiopian Coptic Church, she hated her job, and most of all, she could not identify any purpose in her life. She was at sea, confused, blinded. But – how the Lord’s Spirit does work – she had to drive past our church every morning on her way to work and every evening on her way home, and, as she would pass, she would look at our building and our grounds and would say to herself, “That looks like a place of peace. I think I’ll go there and see if it is.” Just imagine! The very building and its surroundings communicated peace to a confused young woman. And so she came, she came again, she came several times – and finally was ready to share her story. She was ready for an open hand, offered in friendship. Not ready for the fellow who wanted to argue her into the Kingdom, not ready to listen to propositions and ideas; but ready for a place of safety.
Much of our discussion had focused on her lack of purpose, so I gave her a copy of the book, The Purpose-Driven Life, and suggested we get together again to discuss it. She said she was going back to Africa for the Christmas holiday, hoping to mend fences with her family, and that she would read it on the plane. Read it she did. She used its insights to heal the breach in her family; and, to cut a long story short, that Easter I baptized her as a new believer.
Men and women, what the world needs now is not combat soldiers, fighting off every enemy, real or imagined. What the world needs now is not argumentative spirits who want to beat down every opponent. What the world needs is followers of Christ, secure in their relationship with the Savior, who will see that in every human mind there is a hunger for truth and who will know that in every human heart there is a thirst for love. Do not see this world as full of enemies; see instead children of God who have not yet realized that that is who they are. Do not see your neighbors as battles to be won; see souls in need of care and of love. Hands open, in friendship, to lead them.
And just as Saul’s traveling companions, seeing his blindness and noticing his confusion, led him by the hand and took him to the city, extend your open hand to that young man next door who is experimenting with drugs. To that desperate woman down the street who is coping with an abusive relationship. Grasp the shaking hand of that lonely senior who has always seemed so grouchy. See not enemies, but children of God who do not yet know that God loves them, and hold out hope. Lead them by the hand to a place of peace.
II
But now in your mind’s eye go with me to the home of one Ananias, a Christian in Damascus. The Lord said to Ananias, “There is a man named Saul living in the street called Straight; I want you to go to him. I want you to take care of him. Ananias, go to Saul’s place and lay hands on him so that he can be healed.”
Now you are part of the little Christian community in Damascus, and you have heard about this Saul. It is not good stuff. You have heard that this guy is coming down from Jerusalem and is gunning for you and the other believers. And the Lord wants you to do what? Meet Saul? Embrace Saul? Lay hands on Saul? As you would a brother in Christ?
Yes. Yes. That is exactly what Ananias was called to do. Lay hands on Saul. Salute Saul – for a salute, remember, is an open-handed gesture that signals respect. Salute Saul, for, says the Lord, “Saul is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before nations and kings and peoples.” I have big plans for Saul, Ananias, and your job is to bless him, to offer him your hand of respect, your salute. Go lay hands on Saul, and do it now.
Lord, this man is dangerous! Ananias, just lay on hands, respect him. He is mine. But Lord, will Saul build our church here in, will he help us succeed? Ananias, go lay on hands, salute, respect, and that is all you need to do. It’s not about you, Ananias; it’s not about your church being successful. It is about your being faithful so that Saul will be empowered.
The call of God to each of us is to bless others. The call of God to each of us is to bless others, to love them, to open hands of respect to the gifts that have been placed in their lives. And this has to be done one-on-one, in very personal ways. The call of God is for personal witness, intimate caring. One-on-one, hands on. Ananias, go lay on hands. Christian, go find somebody to encourage. One on one.
Let me be clear about your church and its style of outreach. Billy Graham and the mass evangelists touch thousands, and that’s fine; the megachurches engage hundreds, and if that is authentic, that’s fine too. But that is not, as I perceive it, God’s call to First Baptist Church of Gaithersburg. You are not called to be massive, you are not born to be mega, you are gifted to be personal. Each person in this congregation can find at least one fellow struggler, and you can bless his or her potential. You can be an encourager, a mentor, an accountability partner; but it must be open-handed and personal and respectful.
Well, can I just pray for someone and not get too close? I have heard that he can be very hostile. No, Ananias, go lay on hands! How about if I send a card with a nice note in it? She might hurt me with her bad attitude! Or an email! I could send an email from Dayspring Greetings. That’s good, but not good enough. Ananias, she is my instrument, and you must show her your open hands. When you see someone who is struggling, and you offer open hands of salute and respect, you will affirm incredible potential for the Kingdom.
As some of you know, I have for years been associated with the scholarship ministry of the D. C. Baptist Foundation. Even before I became its Executive Director, I was on the board and a member of the scholarship committee. In that capacity, I noticed that out of the 150 or so churches in the D. C. Baptist Convention, we would get an occasional applicant from this church or from that church. But from First Baptist Church of Gaithersburg, we received a torrent of scholarship applications! Two and three and four every year, people from this church wanting to go to seminary and asking for our help – which, by the way, we were delighted to be able to give. So somebody on our scholarship committee said, “What is going on at Gaithersburg that everybody wants to go to seminary and train for the ministry?” We looked at all the Gaithersburg files and read all the students’ reports about how they sensed their call to ministry. Over and over again we read things like, “Pastor Updike told me he thought I should consider this.” “Charlie Updike encouraged me to listen to the still, small voice.” “Our pastor showed me what doing ministry was like and let me follow him around.” Right here in the bosom of this congregation, you have had a model for the very sort of thing I am speaking about: Pastor Charles Updike respected these young people, he affirmed them, he believed in them, and he reached out his hand to them to salute them and move them forward. He knew how to demonstrate respect, and thus call forth tremendous potential.
If Ananias had neglected Saul, might Saul have dropped into obscurity and never become the magnificent Paul, apostle to the nations and writer of most of the New Testament? If Ananias had brushed off Saul, might this persecutor of the church have turned back to his old ways and used his prodigious energies for all the wrong things? If you know somebody who needs encouragement, and you do not give it, what of God’s work have you stifled? If there is in your heart a call to reach out with open hand and love someone into greatness, and you do not respond to that call, then who will? And what will the world miss if you do not respond?
III
Open hands, to reach out and lead someone to a place of peace. Open hands to signal respect and stimulate potential in those whom God has called for something special. Wonderful ministries, fulfilling things.
But possible only when our hands are open in yet another way. When hands are open in prayer. For the text tells us that Ananias was in prayer when the Lord spoke to him. Ananias no doubt using the style of prayer favored in the East, both hands open to the heavens, ready to receive whatever the Lord might give. And when Ananias opened his hands in prayer, he was empowered and emboldened to do all that was asked of him.
I would love this morning to push you to become an evangelistic people. I would love to demand that you go reach others for Christ. I am tempted to summon you to the hopes of heaven and to warn you of the abyss of hell. I am sure I could rally you to the cause of building up your church membership. I could do all of those things. But I will not. I will not.
I will only call you to be a prayerful people. I will call you to pray for your own availability to God. To pray for an awareness of those around you who are blind and confused and hurting, so that to them you might extend an open hand and lead them to a place of safety. As well as to pray for sensitivity to those whose potential the Lord wants you to salute and nourish. Just open your hands in prayer, and the day will come when those hands will be fully open to all that God wants them to do.
