The Lutheran Hour

"We Can’t Stop Talking"

#91-35
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on April 28, 2024
Speaker: Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: Acts 4:20

The first thing I noticed about Albert, besides his pressed slacks, white shoes, dark skin, and elderly gait, was his baseball cap. It was navy blue with the bill bent slightly and prominently displayed on the front in white stitching it said, “I love Jesus,” with a red heart standing in for the word “love.” Now, what can you safely assume about a man who wears a baseball cap declaring his love for Jesus? That he’d served as an usher in his church—or that he’d had a crack addiction that almost killed him? That he’d retired after 20 years as a mailman—or that he was a public school teacher with 20 years in that profession, or that he was a migrant worker who picked tomatoes in Ohio, oranges in Florida, and apples in Carolina? Would you assume that he’d served in the army—or that he’d served time in an army prison? Would you assume that his mother was a prostitute who’d held him down while her boyfriend beat him—or that his mother was a beautiful woman who’d made sacrifices to send him to the local Catholic school where the nuns told him that Jesus loved him?

In Albert’s case, after 78 years of struggle and transformation, it’s all true. But I’d never know it if I hadn’t had a conversation with him. He’d just be an elderly black gentleman with a “Jesus love” hat on. Turns out, Albert has at least two of them, two hats. First time I saw him, he wore a navy one with white lettering, and on the day we met for breakfast, he had a white one on with navy lettering. The heart on both was red, and both said the same thing. And whatever you or I might assume about someone who wears a “I love Jesus” hat, you just won’t know unless you talk with them. Because like anyone else, Albert has a one-of-a-kind story unlike anyone else.

And yet there are some things you can safely assume about someone like Albert who’s willing to say that he or she loves Jesus. First, is that that person is undergoing a transformation—because no one can embrace the Name of Jesus and not be transformed in some way. Second, you can assume that this person is facing some opposition, enduring some struggle that’s trying to separate them from the love of Jesus. And third, a person who’s been embraced by the love of Jesus finds themselves in conversations in and around Jesus.

To see this pattern, all you have to do is listen to the biblical book, the Acts of the Apostles. For example, take these excerpts from Acts chapters 3 and 4. Listen and notice how those three characteristics stand out: transformation, opposition, and conversation. The scene sets up like this.

It’s in Jerusalem, in the temple, the most holy site for Jewish people at that time, around 33A.D. For centuries, there’s been a gathering rainstorm of expectation about the Messiah, this figure who is to fulfill all the ancient promises God made to Israel, the descendants of Abraham, promises to transform the world, to rescue us from opposition against each other and against God, to faith in God and love for God and for each other. Now, there was this group of Jewish people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth is the guy, the Man, the Messiah. But there was also opposition against Jesus because they thought His claims to be the Son of God were too much. And when the opposition turned to open hostility, culminating in Jesus’ crucifixion, His followers cowered in fear, unwilling to be identified with Him.

But now two months later, two of these Jesus followers, Peter and John, are back in the temple, transformed, telling people that God had raised Jesus from the dead. And then God provides a miracle. There was this middle-aged man who’d been crippled, couldn’t walk since he was a boy, and he was there in the temple, and Peter and John, they heal him in the Name of Jesus. And he’s restored before their eyes. And when the locals see this crippled man standing there transformed next to Peter and John, who’ve also been transformed, now they want to be in on the conversation. And Peter and John, more or less tell them, “Look, it wasn’t by our power or because of our devotion to God that this man was healed. It was Jesus whom you all handed over to be crucified, but whom God raised from the dead. It’s by His Name, the Name of Jesus and by faith in His Name that this man was transformed.” And then while Peter and John are in the temple talking to the people, telling them how they too can be transformed by faith in Jesus, here comes the opposition.

The Jewish leaders come upon them, annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. So they arrested them and took them into custody until the next day since it was already evening. But of those who heard the word, the message about Jesus, many believed and the number of men came to about 5,000. Now, the next day, the leaders of the people with their religious experts assembled in Jerusalem and summoning Peter and John, they questioned them saying, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, answered them: “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being questioned today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, how this man was healed, let it be known to you and to all the people of Israel that it is by the Name of Jesus, the Messiah, of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. By Him, this man is standing before you, well. This Jesus is the stone rejected by you, the builders, that has become the cornerstone. And there is rescue; there is salvation in no one else because there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.”

Now, when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were unschooled ordinary men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus. And seeing the man who had been healed standing there beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. So they dismissed them from their presence and conferred together about this, saying, “What are we going to do about these men? For that a notable sign has been performed through them is evident to everyone living in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it. But so that it may spread no further among the people, let’s warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.”

So they summoned them again and charged them not to speak and not to teach any more at all in the Name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered, “Whether it is right in God’s sight for us to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge. But we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.” When they had threatened them some more, they let them go since they had no way to punish them because of the people, because they were all praising God for what had happened, for the man on whom this sign of healing had taken place was more than 40 years old. And when they were released, they went to their friends and reported to them what the religious leaders had said to them. And when they heard it, they lifted up their voice together to God and said, “Sovereign, Lord, You who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, You who spoke by Your servant David, our father, by the Holy Spirit saying, ‘Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?’ The kings of the earth set themselves together and the rulers of the earth gathered together against the Lord and against His Anointed, His Messiah. For truly, in this city both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the nations and the people of Israel, gathered together against Jesus, Your holy Servant whom You anointed to do what Your hand and Your plan decided in advance would take place. And now Lord, look upon their threats and grant to Your servants to continue to speak Your Word with boldness while You stretch out Your hand to heal. And signs and wonders are performed in the Name of Your holy servant, Your Child, Jesus.” And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and continued to speak the Word of God with boldness.

That’s from the two-thousand-year-old book, the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4. And maybe we take it for granted that all these years later, halfway around the world, people are still talking about Jesus today, this Name, once banned. It’s amazing, improbable, bordering on unbelievable and yet here we are because His followers found themselves transformed and despite the opposition, they couldn’t shut up about Him.

So also today, people are still talking about Him, arguing about Him, censoring Him, slandering Him, and wearing hats declaring their love for Him. Albert, the man I mentioned at the beginning with the hat, his story is one of a kind. It’s different from these first followers of Jesus, but those three threads connect them: transformation, opposition, conversation.

Albert is a man transformed, but he’s also faced opposition to faith in Jesus. Like that crippled man in the temple, Albert has had reasons to doubt God’s love, or to doubt that God’s love is also for him, or that there is such a God who loves. Albert was one of his mother’s 13 different children, only a few of them had the same father. “My mother,” Albert told me over breakfast, “was a busy woman.” He didn’t get to know his father, but his mother’s boyfriend became sort of a surrogate father, although Albert says, he was an evil man. One day his mother’s boyfriend was chasing him. Albert was around nine years old. He ran out of the house stark naked, wearing only his shoes. The man crashed through the back door like a Mack truck after him into the alley. Albert, his heart and his ears sense the man’s heavy treads behind him and then a skid, a crash, and a howl. That murderous truck had hydroplaned, tipped, and rolled onto the asphalt, and it gave Albert the half second he needed to escape. He darted into a vacant lot and hid under a cardboard box. Moments later, he heard the man and his mother calling for him. “If he had found me, he would’ve killed me in his rage,” Albert’s sure of it.

Not long ago there had been a rainstorm. Many of the students were getting ready to walk home. Sister Mary Jane, the principal at St. Anne’s, the Catholic school, had pulled Albert aside and asked him if he had a raincoat. He hadn’t. And so she went to the school closet, pulled out a shiny yellow coat and said he could have this one. They went to Mass every day during school, but in those days “It was all in Latin and we didn’t understand none of it,” Albert says. But the nuns, they spoke English and they teach about Jesus if nothing else. And Sister Mary Jane, the one who had given him the raincoat, told him, “Jesus loves you, Albert. And whenever you need Him, you can call on Him.”

And hiding naked in a muddy vacant lot under a cardboard box with his mother’s murderous boyfriend a few feet from him, threatening to kill him, Albert prayed. And all the man had to do was kick the box, but he just walked right on by. But the more serious opposition came from within, his own careening out-of-control nature that opposed him. Albert got into drugs as a teenager. That’s also when he met Bud. One day they were playing dice, and Albert was on a hot streak and he had all their money in a pile. So Bud pulled out his .38 revolver, put it against Albert’s head, and said, “Give me back my money!” When Bud left, Albert’s auntie gave him her pistol. “Go kill him,” she said. Albert found Bud out in the street just after he had shot up. Albert’s pistol shot only grazed Bud, and he got away. “Good thing too, I would’ve killed him if I’d had the chance,” Albert told me remorsefully, between sips of coffee, reflecting on this fifty-year-old memory, and many more like it.

Runaway desire plus addictive substance plus slippery company is a potent concoction. And Albert was hydroplaning from one disaster to another, assaulting a drill sergeant and incarcerated in an army detention center, on probation at the post office for drug abuse and dereliction of his duties, begging his wife not to take the children and leave him, bedridden in a twenty-seven-day drug rehab program in 1991, 45 years old, when hope for transformation was improbable, borderline unbelievable. Albert did as Sister Mary Jane had said and called on Jesus, “Lord, help me please, because I can’t help myself.”

Now, I’ve never seen a crippled man healed, transformed in the Name of Jesus but I did have breakfast with Albert 33 years after that desperate prayer. And there is no better word to describe what Jesus has done, working faith in Albert’s life. Transformation.

And that is part of what you can assume about someone who’s been with Jesus. And you can assume struggle. Because transformation comes with opposition. Just read the book of Acts chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. Not only persecution from without, but colliding desires from within. Transformation and opposition are part of our stories in this life. And it’s not for us to know the times and the seasons of healing set by God, by His own authority. But God doesn’t leave us to struggle alone. God gives us conversation, words to tell our stories.

You remember the first thing Peter and John did, and presumably the man who’d been healed with them did after they were released? They went to their friends, to their sisters and brothers in the faith, and told them what happened. And together they brought that conversation to God and prayed.

I share these stories with you to invite you into this centuries-long conversation, into this struggling community being transformed by the love of Jesus. Peter and John and these first disciples have given us their stories to share, and Albert gave me his story to share with you today. So we don’t have to struggle alone. The opposition is real. It’s not ultimately against people, but against the spiritual forces of this present darkness and against our own out-of-control nature. Total transformation is coming because God raised Jesus from the dead and He will raise us, too. But Jesus says, it’s not for us to know the timeline, but it is for us to tell the story and to share the struggle. Do you have an Albert in your life? Ask him or her to share their story and listen. Let their words and their witness transport you and transform you.

Listening to Albert’s story, I’ve become part of his, and he’s become part of mine, and now you too, all of us in Jesus. Because we can’t stop talking about what we’ve seen and heard.

Now an elderly man, Albert has new struggles. Staying healthy is hard after a long bout with diabetes. Practicing the faith is hard because he’s seen a lot of hypocrites in the church and has been one, too. Life at home can be hard and teaching full-time in a public school at age 78 is no walk in the park neither. “Kids these days act crazy,” Albert says, doing like I used to do. And so he wears his “I love Jesus,” hat every day, alternating between the blue one and the white one. Sometimes someone asks him about it and somewhere in the conversation that follows, Albert tells them, “He loves you too, you know,” like Sister Mary Jane told him, and so on back to the apostles, through this centuries-long struggling yet transformative exchange in the Name of Jesus, of which you and I are also a part. Because we can’t stop talking about what we’ve seen and heard, can we? In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

Reflections for April 28, 2024
Title: We Can’t Stop Talking

Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. Once again, here’s Dr. Michael Zeigler.

Michael Zeigler: We’re visiting today with Dr. Jeff Gibbs, an emeritus professor of New Testament at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and still teaching Bible class for his local church. Welcome back, Jeff.

Jeff Gibbs: Thank you, Mike. It’s good to be back.

Michael Zeigler: I think it’s interesting that as Jesus sends His followers out in Acts and they’re supposed to share the Good News and be His witnesses, you never hear them tell anybody about how to go to heaven. And this might be a little surprising. It was surprising for me when someone pointed it out to me. You pointed it out to me, actually, Jeff.

Jeff Gibbs: Glad to take the blame. Yeah.

Michael Zeigler: What is heaven referred to in Acts and what does that have to do with the Good News of Jesus?

Jeff Gibbs: I think because our culture, when it thinks about salvation or spiritual things, it thinks about them in, again, here’s one of my favorite technical terms, a floaty sense. Salvation is kind of up there, right? And salvation doesn’t have much to do with bodies and physical stuff. And many people think and Christians too, that the big goal is to just get the heck out of here. And if I can just speak bluntly, that is simply not at all the way the Bible thinks and the way the biblical writers think, nor the way Jesus taught or anything.

So, the goal is not to escape. The goal is to follow our Lord Jesus in dying and rising from the dead. That’s the goal. And that’s actually the focus in Acts, the resurrection of Jesus. He is our Substitute. And so, just as He died in our place, He rose in our place. His death became not our death because He suffered God’s punishment, but His resurrection becomes our resurrection. And so, Acts teaches us to be so grateful that our new life has already begun because Jesus has been raised from the dead, and to look forward to the day when He comes again, as we say in the Apostles Creed, “to judge the living and the dead.” That’s the focus. Heaven interestingly in Acts is most often, I think this would be accurate, most often spoken as a place from which good things come to us. God sends His Holy Spirit, Christ will return from heaven. Heaven, it’s kind of where God is and where His gifts are stored up or something. But we don’t go up there to get them.

Michael Zeigler: They come down.

Jeff Gibbs: They come down to us. And again, the Creed is so beautiful: “who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven.” I like to call that the direction of salvation.

Michael Zeigler: Thank you so much for being with us today, Jeff, and for helping us be more attentive to these beautiful promises and the many ways to say the Good News that we find as we read Acts.

Jeff: It’s a pleasure to be here and to try to believe it with you.

Michael Zeigler: Amen.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.

“At the Lamb’s High Feast” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.