GIVING TESTIMONY – Part 1 of 2

“Jesus said, ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’”  (Acts 1:8 NIV)

From the beginning, putting the Christian faith into words out in the everyday arenas of life has been called testimony or witness. These are the strong and good words… Often when witness and testimony are employed in Christian circles, they refer only to autobiographical accounts of how somebody became a Christian …

Witness and testimony are big words, and we need to recover their full range of meaning. They are borrowed from the world of the law court, and in a court of law, something important is being contested, something or someone is "on trial." …

Jesus is the true and faithful witness, and Christians, as a part of God's people, are corroborating witnesses. Our testimony is, in effect, "What Jesus said and did is the truth about God and about human life, and we ourselves can attest in our own lives to the power of this truth."

A friend of mine, Heidi Neumark, served for several years as the pastor of a Lutheran church in the South Bronx, in perhaps the poorest of all poor neighborhoods in America. Her first Sunday as pastor, Heidi understood what kind of church she was serving when she found under the altar a box of rat poison next to the communion wafers. Members of her congregation include former addicts and undocumented aliens, the unemployed and the recently homeless. It is the kind of congregation Paul was talking about when he wrote, "Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise" (I Corinthians 1:26-27).

During Holy Week several years ago, this congregation decided to reenact in a passion play the whole sweep of Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter.  They began by dramatizing Jesus' entry into the city, borrowing a live donkey and, led by an actor playing the part of Jesus, parading in a long procession around the block of the shabby storefronts and run-down apartments shouting, "Hosanna!"  When they got around the block and back to the door of the church, the Palm Sunday procession ran into a street demonstration protesting police brutality. It was fitting, really, as Jesus and the protesters, the congregation and the street crowds, the cries of "Hosanna!" and the cries of social outrage mingled together in a swirl of movement and noise. In fact, someone passing by on the street, seeing the confusion and fearing trouble, even called the police, whose arrival brought a bit of added color and drama. Somehow the processional managed to make it inside the church, where, as the play unfolded, Jesus was tried, condemned, and executed. But then women returned early in the morning of the first day of the week with the amazing word of an empty tomb and the astounding news, "He is risen!"  The actors playing the disciples remained true to their assigned parts, expressing disbelief and confidence that this news from the women was but an "idle tale."

-- Excerpted from “Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian” by Thomas G. Long

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