The end of the Book of Acts is a cliffhanger, leaving us wondering, “What happens next?” 

Acts 28:16-31

Well school has started, and many of our kids are heading back to the classroom. I’ve been talking with some parents who have also just sent their first child off to college, something we’ll be doing next year. It’s an anxious and exciting time, hoping and praying that our kids make good choices and have a great experience full of learning and hope for the future.

At the same time, we know that college has a lot of temptations. Many of us have some memories of our college years that we regret (I can see some of you wincing right now). Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I want to confess to you one of my guilty pleasures during those years in the early 80s—a stigma that I have carried my whole adult life. Here it is: I watched soap operas every day.

That’s right, every day at 3:00pm, I sat in the common room of the dorm or the living room of my apartment and watched “The Guiding Light.” I wasn’t alone, either, my roommates were there, too—all Army ROTC guys, often in uniform. I don’t know why we needed to know what was going on in fictional Springfield every day to the Spaulding and Bauer families and people named Reva and Coop and Harley Davidson Cooper. We all knew it was wrong and out of character for a bunch of tough, aspiring infantrymen, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We needed to know, every day, whose baby that was, who was going to come back from the dead, who was cheating on whom (see how I did that grammatically? At least we went to English class). It was addicting. We saw a young Kevin Bacon on that show, who would wind up being in every show, ever. We especially didn’t want to miss Fridays and Mondays, because every Friday ended in a cliffhanger—with screeching tires, or someone walking into a room with that shocked soap opera look on their faces, or the doctor saying, “I have the results of the paternity test…” You had to watch on Monday in order to see what happened. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was riveting television (well, at least to a bunch of bored and dateless college guys!).

But soap operas have largely gone extinct, with just a few exceptions. Even the prime time soaps are disappearing. Remember when the biggest question any one could take about in the mid-80s was, “Who shot J.R.?” (Go look that up on Wikipedia, kids). Inquiring minds wanted to know! Back in the day, TV shows were all about the story.

Now, with a few notable exceptions, TV is overrun by “reality” shows that are cheaper to make and require less writing and imagination. Every reality show is a confirmation of Andy Warhol’s dictum that everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame and will do any narcissistic or idiotic task in order to get it. We don’t have as much patience for long stories, unless we go to the movies where a cliffhanger is a sure sign that you’ll be paying $12 to go see the sequel.

A good story will always leave you wondering what’s next. What will happen on Monday? What will happen in the next book? How will it end?

The end of the book of Acts is a cliffhanger. After Paul appears in front of a small parade of Roman officials in Jerusalem, he sets sail for Rome, having appealed to the emperor in the case brought by his Jewish countrymen. Appealing to the emperor was the right of every full citizen in the Roman judicial system—think of it like appealing your case before the Supreme Court, but in this case the court is one man who rules the world as a tyrant. In last week’s text from chapter 23, Jesus tells Paul that he will, indeed, go to Rome as a prisoner, but that he will “bear witness” there to the risen Christ.

In chapter 27 and the beginning of 28 we read about Paul’s journey to Rome—a story that rivals anything the Guiding Light could ever come up with. Paul gets shipwrecked on Malta, where the natives rescue the ship’s company. They build a fire and out of the fire comes a deadly poisonous snake that bites Paul on the hand. The natives think he’s a murderer to deserve such a fate, but Paul shakes off the viper into the fire and suffers no ill effects, like a soap opera character who never really dies. Eventually Paul arrives in Rome, where he’s put under house arrest while awaiting his time in front of the emperor. It would take two whole years. In the meantime, Paul receives visitors and, as we read earlier in today’s passage, he continues to preach about Jesus to both Jews and Gentiles.

But don’t you want to know what happens next? What happened when Paul went before the emperor Nero? There has to be another installment to the story! I want to see that scene, especially given the fact that the Emperor Nero was one of the great soap opera characters in history. Here’s the backstory:

The Emperor Claudius married Nero’s mother Aggripina after she had poisoned her second husband Passienus Crispus. Claudius adopts Nero as his own son, whereupon Aggripina poisons Claudius as well, making Nero the heir by the fact that he was older than Claudius’ younger son Brittanicus. Nero thus becomes emperor at the age of 17, the Justin Bieber of his day. He is influenced by his mother and his tutor, Seneca. Nero’s friends advise him that his mother is trouble, so he bumps her off after she transfers her loyalty to Brittanicus, whom Nero also has killed. Nero had an affair with the wife of a friend, and had his first wife murdered. He then reportedly kicked his new pregnant wife to death. Nero had other affairs, both male and female, engaged in Roman entertainments, acted in the theater, played the string lyre, and generally lived the soap opera life of a debauched Roman emperor. When a large part of Rome burned, he blamed the Christians for starting the trouble, when it was quite likely the Nero himself had the fire started in order to clear a part of the city for construction of a new palace.

Now, imagine Paul—bedraggled, roughed up after years of beatings and imprisonments, older, balding, poor eyesight, standing in front of this melodramatic dictator, eating grapes while a servant fanned him. What would the conversation have been like? Would Paul have shared the good news about Jesus, his resurrection and Lordship? Would Nero have laughed or gone into a rage? Nero was the most powerful man in the world at that moment. How would he have responded to Paul’s message about a greater power than himself?

Luke doesn’t give us that story, however. Why not? Scholars have speculated about that. Some have said that Luke had merely caught up the story to where it was and went no further, since he was an eyewitness to some of the events (notice how the narrative shifts to the first person about 2/3 of the way in). Another theory suggests that Luke dropped dead before he finished the story (which is the same theory that some use to explain the abrupt ending of Mark, by the way—interesting to imagine that, Luke keeling over before getting to the final chapter). Others tried to fill in the blanks, saying that Paul went to Spain and then was beheaded by Rome within the next couple of years (in 2009 the Vatican said they confirmed finding the bones of Paul in Rome). Some suggest that Luke was writing a third volume, which was lost, or that the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are actually that third volume (though they say nothing about what happened in Nero’s palace). But those are all arguments from absence and weak arguments at that.

No, it seems like Luke intended to end his story this way, with a great Friday cliffhanger, but without the Monday resolution. Then again, maybe there is a resolution to the story after all…

Look back at Acts, chapter 1. The story is written to Theophilus, which is Greek means “friend of God.” Luke begins with this statement:  “In the first book, Theophilus ( which is the Gospel of Luke), I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day he was taken up into heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.” In 1:6 we see the disciples wondering when Jesus would “restore the kingdom to Israel,” but Jesus has a larger agenda in mind. “You will be my witnesses,” he says in verse 8, “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts is the story of how, in the power of the Holy Spirit, these apostles carried out Jesus instructions. The localized story of Jesus as Israel’s messianic king had become a worldwide movement, moving from the margins of the world to the center of it—and in those days the center of the world was Rome.

But even though this is a story about the apostles and the Holy Spirit, it is still a continuation of the Gospel story—it’s still a Jesus story. Acts is still about Jesus. As we said last week, the resurrection of Jesus is the key theme and message that drives the book and the preaching of Paul and the others. The words and deeds of Jesus continue in the work of his disciples. The cross, the tomb—none of that could silence Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit the disciples continued to speak of the kingdom of God made real by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Throughout Acts, we’ve learned how that kingdom isn’t just being restored to Israel, but to the whole world. Rulers, religious leaders, howling mobs, stonings, beatings, prison bars, shackles and chains, intellectual philosophers, snakes and shipwrecks—none of that could stop the proclamation of the good news about Jesus and his kingdom.

And, as Luke implies here at the end of story, neither could the debauched dictatorial power of Caesar. The story of Jesus would continue to break out, even if Paul and the other apostles met their untimely deaths at the hand of Rome. Jesus had died on a Roman cross, but the story kept going. Paul would die, and the story would keep going, too. It would go on because it was a Jesus’ story, a story for the whole world.

And that means that it’s our story. I think that’s what Luke is doing here—he leaves the end of the story open as if to say, “Now it’s up to you to carry the Jesus story forward, to live it, to tell it, to give it to someone else.” It’s a story that can change lives, even those lives that others might think are too far gone. Think about what the story of Jesus has done here in Acts:

• It changed a bunch of scared fishermen into a global missionary force.
• It changed a group of self-serving people into a church that shared everything in common.
• It changed an Ethiopian eunuch into a whole person with a new purpose in life.
• It changed a murderous religious zealot named Saul into an apostle of the very Christ he persecuted.
• It changed a Gentile Roman Army officer into a Christ-follower.
• It changed sick and broken people into people with hope for their present and future.
• It changed people who dabbled in magic and other dark arts into people who followed the light of Christ.
• It changed the hearts of Greek philosophers and idol worshippers.
• It changed the perspective of governors and kings.
• It was a story that could have even changed the emperor, had he been willing to hear it!

And it can change us and the world that we live in as well. Luke runs the story of Acts, the story of Jesus and all he had done and taught in and through his disciples, up until the end of chapter 28 and then, in a wonderful literary flourish, he hands that story over to us the reader. What will we do with that story?

You know, we come here every Sunday to hear that story again. We hear it through reading the Scriptures and preaching. We hear it sung, we pray over it. We celebrate the sacrament of the Word and Table, reciting the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection every time we share the bread and cup. We share the story in Sunday School, in classes and small groups. Every Sunday is a reminder of that story.

But that story remains a cliffhanger unless we finish it on Monday. Monday is when the story continues with us—at work, at school, at home, on the road, on the bus, in the restaurant, at the store. Monday is when we get to see how the story plays out in our lives and when we get to see how that story can change the hearts and lives of the people around us. Sunday is exciting, but at the end of every service we ought to be anticipating what happens on Monday! Lives can be changed, the world made different, because we pick up the story on Monday.

You know, the Guiding Light was canceled in 2009. The story kept going long after I stopped watching it in 1986, but eventually it came to an ignominious end, the victim of disinterest and poor ratings.

The guiding light of the Jesus story, however, will never be canceled by any person or power, be it the TV networks, the skeptics, or even the modern day emperors of the world with their power and lives of constant drama. It can never be canceled because it lives in you.

You’ve heard of appointment television. Well, tomorrow is Monday and we are appointed to be storytellers and story livers. How will you continue the story?