From the Pulpit:

Gypsy Church

James Howell is a Methodist minister in North Carolina . (1) Once, when traveling with his family on a British train he thought he’d pop some Trivial Pursuit type questions on his children. You can imagine the eye-rolling, but they played along. The opening lines of the Gettysburg Address, count to ten in Spanish, the books of the Bible in order. His son started, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and continued without a hitch until he hesitated before First Chronicles.  

That was when the man across the aisle leaned over and asked with a strong cockney accent, “Are you a Christian?” Howell said yes, they were Christians, to which the man replied, “What kind of Christian?” Y’all know that can be a loaded question.“ Methodist,” was the simplest answer, to which the man replied, “Where I come from Methodists don’t take their faith seriously. They just go through the motions.” Howell assured him that was not true at his home. And then the man began to tell him about the Gypsy Church .  

I remember reading a fascinating article in Texas Monthly about Gypsies in Texas . (2) At the time of the writing the author estimated that there were as many as 10,000, living all around the state. They took on typical American names and generally flew under the radar. Two of the most powerful families are the Mitchells and the Evanses. The women make most of the money by telling fortunes, while the men trade horses or, more commonly in the cities, recreational vehicles. Honesty when dealing with gadje – that’s what they call non-Gypsies – well, let’s just say it doesn’t play a role in their transactions.  

Suddenly I realized that we must have Gypsies in our neighborhood. Right where I turn just about every day from Burnet Road onto Hancock there is an old wooden house with a big front porch and a large purple sign that says, Psychic Readings, Tarot Cards, Reunites Lovers. I’ve noticed that in the driveway  there are invariably three or four old Winnebagos, they changed all the time, and that across the street is a lot with more beat up RV’s under a corrugated metal roof. I was intrigued.  

So this morning we have a story from the Acts of the Apostles in which a main character is a slave girl who had the gift of telling fortunes. And she made a fortune for her owners. I can’t tell you whether I believe people actually have this gift or not, but this girl is telling the gospel truth every time she shouts out,  “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” You’d think Paul and Silas would have welcomed the publicity, but she had eventually become such a pest, and Paul was so annoyed that finally he snapped and ordered the spirit to leave her in the name of Jesus Christ, and she became nothing but an ordinary slave girl.  

Nothing in this story goes as we think it ought to except that her owners were angry because Paul had killed the goose that laid their golden eggs. They retaliated by dragging him and his friends to the courts and getting them thrown in jail for subverting the government. The same crime for which Jesus was crucified. The story goes on, but I want to go back to the Gypsy Church .  

I’d never heard of the Gypsy Church . Have you? It is an Evangelical Church movement that began in eastern Europe in 1950 and is now spread all over Europe and the United States . It serves the people who are known as the Travelers and Romani, and while all the other mainline churches in Europe are dying in nations that are now largely secular despite being the homes of the great cathedrals of Christendom, the Gypsy Church is growing by leaps and bounds.  

The man on the train  asked Howell if he knew  what the most common and best-paid profession is for Gypsies. Howell didn’t hazard a guess.  The man said, “Fortune teller. And when you become a Christian, you can’t be a fortune teller any more. So people have to give up their livelihood and support of their families,” and people are doing this all in droves over the world. Another point of pride for Gypsies is that they remain functionally illiterate, and yet they are now learning to read and allowing their children to go to school so they can read and preach the gospel of Christ. Their faith is very costly to them. They are joyfully giving up treasured customs of their culture for the love of Jesus.  

We pretty much only read from the Acts of the Apostles during the Great Fifty Days of Easter, and we read Acts as the first lesson, where we usually read from the Old Testament. Next week we’ll celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the disciples were hiding out in the upper room and suddenly were filled with the Holy Spirit and raced out in the street to preach the good news. It is ironic that at the end of this season we read of their initiation as apostles. Acts is filled with story after story of apostles laying their lives on the line for Jesus.  

The church was formed not from people who wrote books but people who dared to share with others the experience they had had when the love Christ brought to the world had entered their lives. Peter is transformed from the bumbling denier of Jesus to the eloquent preacher who will not stop proclaiming the good news no matter how many times he is thrown in jail. No matter that he will be executed for it.  In today’s reading it is Paul and his followers who are locked up in Philippi – remember that Philippi is a completely Roman outpost -- and when the earthquake in the night frees them from their bondage, for the sake of their jailer they stay in place unchained and consequently convert him and his family with their radical love.  

Other than Paul and his followers there are two main characters in this story. One a young girl who is liberated not from slavery but from exploitation. We don’t know what happens to her or to her owners who succeed in getting Paul imprisoned. And the other is the jailer who is so overwhelmed at the sacrificial action of Paul that he takes the prisoners home with him and personally washes the apostles’ wounds with water and receives not only the astonishing message of the gospel from them but, with all his family, is baptized. He’s crossing the line. He’s giving up his livelihood. He is making himself and those he hold dear vulnerable to exclusion, to persecution, to alienation, to execution.  

At the top of one webpage for a Gypsy church there is a quote from the Gospel according to Luke: Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.” Jesus was at a Shabbat dinner at the home of a Pharisee. It begins with the invited guests jockeying for position, scrambling over each other like so many children playing musical chairs to get to the place of honor. Jesus tells them the story of the big fancy dinner to which the guests of honor are too busy, too distracted, too important to stop what they are doing to come to dine. That is when the master tells the slave to go out and round up the people who didn’t rate the guest list, the people in the roads and the lanes, the outcasts, the Travelers, the Romani, the Gypsies, invite them to come in.  And they came, and they ate and were nourished, and they appreciated the meal.  

These days the great cathedrals of Europe are pretty much museums. Worship is attended by pensioners and tourists. Beautiful little country churches in England share overburdened priests who serve too many parishes to make it more than a few times a year for Eucharist. Morning prayer said by one of the aging parishioners is the norm. But the Gypsy Church is flourishing. The Outlaw Church is flourishing because it is costly.  

The great Indian prophet Ghandi said there are seven deadly social sins.

Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without Sacrifice  

Worship without Sacrifice. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart.”

Gypsy fortune tellers can make several hundred thousand dollars a year, and they give it up to become Christians.

I’m not going to try to drive this home with a neat and tidy punch line. I’m certainly not about burdening any of us with guilt. I’m just going to keep pondering something that I hadn’t known anything about until this week, this notion of Gypsy Church .

I’m just going to keep thinking about what it means. What was going on when the cockney man leaned across the aisle and asked the pastor from North Carolina , “Are you a Christian?

What kind of Christian?”

Amen.

(1)   James Howell, What kind of Christian? Christian Century, November 15, 2005

(2)   http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/1997-06-01/feature2

(3)   http://www.care2.com/greenliving/gandhi-s-seven-social-sins.html#