As our reading from the Acts of the Apostles opens today, Paul has been his usual, busy self. He has been traveling for years throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and churches have flourished under his leadership. That was then, but, as the saying goes, this is now….

The scholars suggest that Paul may have ended up stranded in Troas for up to two years, cooling his heels, waiting. Some have called this “Paul’s mid-life crisis.” I don’t know about that, but what we do know is that this was a crisis for the mission. After astounding success on the mission field, Paul, this consummate man of action, was stuck in idle. A man of faith, he knew that this was no accident. He knew that his way was barred because God did not want the mission to go off in the directions Paul wanted. A new phase in the mission awaited, but what that was, no one knew. They only thing to do, then, was to wait.

Have you ever been in this situation? Have you ever known the frustration of not being sure what your mission was, what you were supposed to be doing in your life, or even whether you would ever be sure again? Perhaps it was a time after high school, or in mid-career, or after the last of the children left the nest, or when you came home from the job on the last day of work, and now the seemingly featureless horizon of retirement stretched out before you for the first time. Or perhaps, even, it came when you moved out of the family home and into a retirement village or assisted-living facility, and you asked yourself, “What’s next?”. If you have ever been in one of those situations, then you can likely sympathize with Paul in Troas.

But as so often has happened throughout the ages, God’s call to a new mission, a new task, a new direction comes to Paul, this time in a vision or dream. During the night, Paul has a vision, a vision of a man of Macedonia – of Greece – saying “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Understand the radicalism of this new call to mission – here was a new direction, to take the good news of Jesus Christ out of Asia, out of the continent where it had its roots, out of the hinterlands of empire to the very center of civilization around the Mediterranean, to a new continent, to Europe, to Greece and then onto the seat of empire, to mighty Rome itself. No longer would these followers of Jesus be a tiny sect on the margins of civilization and empire – with the crossing into Greece, the door was open to phenomenal growth and impact.

Paul rejoiced that the waiting was over, that the time in Troas had come to an end, and he and his companions immediately set sail for Europe, and the mission was launched anew.

I am not sure any of us relish being in Troas, restless occupiers of that liminal space between what was and what we hope will be, waiting for a new vision of God’s purpose for us and our lives, as individuals and as a church. But Troas is never far away, it seems. In fact, take a walk over to Jenkins Hall after worship, and you can find Troas right here, somewhere between the Frigidaire refrigerators and the ovens. The time was in the early 1960s, and it was a time in this country where the federal government was providing assistance to those who wanted to build housing. Even as early as the 1960s, there were those here on the Cape realized that there was a danger that the housing stock would become concentrated to a greater and greater degree by those at the upper end of the economic scale, making the Cape unaffordable to many who had lived here all their lives. And then (and this is from a document forwarded to me by the Rev. Doug Showalter, of the First Congregational Church of Falmouth), “a group of ministers met in the kitchen of West Parish Church in West Barnstable and said among themselves, ‘If church groups in other places can build retirement housing projects under government subsidy, why can’t we here?’ And they answered themselves, ‘We can.’” As a result, on October 28, 1962, the Barnstable Association in the United Church of Christ voted to form a corporation to build middle income housing on Cape Cod. And over the coming decades, we built over 600 units of affordable housing across the Cape, including Mayflower Place over in West Yarmouth. And it all started in that kitchen right over there.

Troas is never far away, and you can even find Troas right here, in this Meetinghouse. The time was the late ‘90s, and I had been here a couple years. This church had been working diligently to rebuild the membership and balance the budget, and while it had never let giving to the wider church and outside organizations flag, the church really had very little hands on mission involvement. Having come from congregations which had been revitalized through mission partnerships and hands-on mission, this was something that I longed for here at West Parish. We were, in that sense, stranded in Troas. And yet I also knew that this was not a case where human initiative was needed or helpful – indeed, too many pastorates are undone when the new pastor forces his or her pet mission project on a congregation. What we needed to do was to wait for the vision.

And then, on a Sunday remarkably similar to this one, it came. Those of you who were blessed to be here will remember it. In late 1999, a former missionary to the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India in Sri Lanka, Ben Bavink, attended worship here. He was in the country for a meeting up in Boston, a meeting which was to be attended by the Bishop from Sri Lanka and a number of his countrymen. In the time of sharing prayer concerns at the start of the service, Ben told us that as a result of a bombing at the airport in the nation’s capital, the others could not come. He then told us about the horrors ongoing in that beautiful, civil war-torn island nation – about the way the Tamil Tigers and the government forces kidnapped men and boys from the villages to join their armies, about the poverty and oppression, about women outnumbering men in the villages by a ratio of eight to one, about displaced people living in tents in the jungle. Ben was our own man of Macedonia, calling us to come over and help. No one doubted that God was speaking to us, and just as Paul the Apostle was moved to immediately cross over to Europe, we were moved to begin a mission partnership with a pastor and a church in Sri Lanka.

Our mission partnership was tremendously energizing and inspiring for many of us here. So many were involved: the church school sent photographs and letters, the youth started a campaign that has fully funded the education of three young women, the Board of Outreach sent annual donations, the respective women’s groups struck up a correspondence, and the first $15,000 of our capital campaign went to build a parsonage and fellowship hall at the church. In return, the pastor and congregation in Jaffna kept up a steady stream of correspondence, relating the challenges and joys of ministry there, enlarging our understanding of what it means to be church. In 2004 Christie and I visited Jaffna. We worshipped in the church, visited many of the schools and hospitals planted by the American Ceylon Mission of the predecessor of the United Church of Christ, and observed first hand the fraying cease-fire agreement.

But now, it seems, that mission has run its course. As the civil war moved to its climax, the church in Sri Lanka understandably shifted its concerns elsewhere, to the plight of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians, to issues of how to relate to the government in the changing circumstances, to its own governance issues. Over the past 18 months repeated attempts to reinvigorate the partnership from this end have fallen flat. Once again, it seems, the Spirit has is telling us that it is time for a new direction in mission, a new stay in Troas. A new time of waiting.

Paul was, as I began this sermon, a man of action, and I expect he found that time in Troas to be among the most difficult of the many difficult times he faced over the course of his ministries. Maybe it is the same with you; I know it is the same with me. But we can all take heart in the good news, that the mission is not our mission, it is the mission of Jesus Christ, and in his good time we can expect that a new way forward in mission together will come. A new vision of the man from Macedonia will be granted to us. And perhaps you have already had inklings of this new vision, in the mission trip Kathy and Tim Warren took to Chile, in the recent involvement with Habitat for Humanity builds here on Cape Cod, in the planned mission trip to New Orleans next April, in the vitality and over-enrollment of the Board of Outreach.

In the midst of new dimensions, in the face of changing ways, who will lead us forward out of Troas, into a new mission, into new ways to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ not only through our words, but through our deeds and our lives, and not only as a church together, but also in our individual lives?

You know who. The same God who abided with Paul in Troas, and who abides with us still. Amen.