We who are disciples, baptized into Christ, belong to Jesus’ Way, and that means who are, how we live shows ourselves to be part of that Way.  Here is Jesus’ Way: taking broken sinners, forgiving them, and sending them out to find more.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Third Sunday of Easter C; texts: Acts 9:1-20; John 21:1-19

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

That was a chilling opening to our first reading today: “Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord . . . .”  Luke goes on to say that Saul took that hatred and obtained permission from the high priest to bind and bring to Jerusalem any whom he found in Damascus who “belonged to the Way,” men or women.  Then if you look back to chapter 8 of Acts to see the other reference to Saul’s attitude and behavior, you find this in verse three: “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house.”  Paul himself, known to us much more by his Roman name than his Hebrew name, says this in the first chapter of Galatians: “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” (Gal. 1:13)  This Saul of Tarsus, this Roman citizen named Paul, was an angry, vengeful man, a religious zealot who was willing to do violence in order to punish those whom he felt were evil in the sight of God.

It’s hard to read such descriptors today and not think of angry young men going schools and malls with guns, entering room after room, eager to kill, or angry young men and women blowing themselves up on buses in the Middle East.  Surely the images in so many videos the perpetrators will often make before they act can be summarized in these same words: “breathing threats and murder.”  And likewise the actions when they do what they are planning could be described by those other words: “ravaging, by entering house after house.”  In both our modern day and in this story of a young Saul, we find people who are acting in a way that only can be described as deranged, acting in hate and self-righteous, often religious arrogance, seeking the destruction of others.

Isn’t it stunning, then, that one of these young men became a powerful advocate of the Prince of Peace, a preacher of the unlimited and unmerited grace of God given to us in Jesus, and the clearest articulator after Jesus of the Lord’s message of self-giving love and a way of living in the grace-filled fruits of the Spirit, not in rage and hatred.  Paul was completely transformed.  In fact, the Way of Jesus made him into a new person, almost unrecognizable from who he used to be.  Paul goes from murderously seeking those who belong to “the Way,” to joyfully and fearlessly inviting people all over the known world to join him in belonging to the Way themselves.

We need to understand why and how Jesus did this, and continues to do it.  It won’t change the tragedies we continue to see in the news every day, not at first.  But if we who claim to belong to the Way ourselves can understand what Jesus is doing and calling us to be in this Way, maybe we’ll begin to see and be a part of the new creation Jesus promises to make in the world.

To better understand what our Lord Jesus is doing, let’s back away a little from the picture of Paul’s story and look at it next to the Gospel story today.

There are remarkable parallels.  In both stories, sinful people are forgiven by the risen Lord and offered life.

Peter and the other disciples failed miserably, and betrayed Jesus.  But, alive again, Jesus offers them breakfast – a sign of his forgiveness – and fellowship again.  They are welcomed back as friends, as beloved.  And of course Paul, we’ve seen his sinfulness.  It’s described in detail in today’s reading and before.  But in this story there is also this remarkable call of Jesus.  He looks at this awful persecutor and sees potential, gifts.  Jesus sees an instrument to bring God’s love to the world.

And so in both stories, people who are forgiven by Jesus are sent out, are given a task.

Peter is told to live his love for Jesus by feeding Jesus’ flock, his lambs, those who need God’s love.  Ananias is sent to bring the grace of Jesus to someone who has been persecuting Jesus.  We’ll speak a little more about him in a moment.  And Paul has a small job, too: all Jesus needs him to do is bring the whole Gentile world the Good News of God’s love in Jesus!

Think of who these two become, and what a marvel this is: there are not two more well-known or beloved leaders of the early Church.  And yet today it is clear to us that they weren’t heroic figures at all, they weren’t people to admire.  Peter and Paul were broken, sinful people who were transformed by the risen Jesus.  It’s as simple as that.

A critically important part of the Way of Jesus, then, is this: it seems that sinful people are needed, are necessary, for the future of the Way.  Jesus’ redemption projects are central to his Way for the world.

This is so important for us to understand, for two reasons.  First, it gives us hope and promise: even though we know our own sinfulness before God, our Lord Christ looks at us and sees potential, sees gifts in us we can share, has need of us.  But second, it also takes out the “me-only” aspect that Christian faith sometimes gets.  “I believe so I know I’m forgiven, and that’s all I need to know.”  We don’t have that option anymore, because we are forgiven so that we can go out and bring others into God’s love.

And that we learn from the crucial part of both these stories: what happens to the forgiven ones after they’re sent.

What’s interesting is that we don’t learn that from Peter and Paul today; we actually don’t see what they become.  Not in our readings today at any rate.  What we know so far as these readings go is that they both answer the call of Jesus.  But at the point these stories stop, neither has done anything.

It turns out that today Ananias is our central character, the one we should pay attention to.  Ananias, one who “belongs to the Way,” obeys his Lord, and is sent to become the love of his Lord.  He acts toward Paul as Jesus would act, as Jesus asks him to act.  It’s the only thing we know about him from Scripture, but today it’s enough: Christ sends Ananias to be Christ to an enemy.

And we also notice that he doesn’t want to.  He knows who this monster is.  He tells Jesus, “I’ve heard from many about this one, his evil, what his authority is.”  He wants nothing to do with him.

Yet Jesus just says, “Go.  Go, because he will be an instrument for me to bring my name to the world.”  Ananias becomes Jesus’ intervention into Saul’s life, Jesus’ words of grace for Paul.

Imagine what it meant to Paul to have this leader of the Damascus church come and offer kindness and grace in Jesus’ name, knowing what he would have done to Ananias if Jesus hadn’t stepped in.

Imagine what it meant for Ananias to embody Christ, to act in the love of Christ even though he was terrified of this man, and probably disagreed with the Lord’s assessment of him.

But it is in the actions of the disciple that the love of the Master is known in the world.  This is the heart of belonging to the Way.  In the actions of the disciple, the heart of the Master is known.  This is the center of Jesus’ hope for us.

In some ways this brings full circle some of the thoughts I’ve been working through in these past four weeks.

I didn’t quite know that would happen when we came up to Passion Sunday.   That we’d end up considering more than once the problem of evil and terror in the world and our response to it. And what it means for us to faithfully follow our risen Lord with our lives.  And even the reality of the transformation that happens to disciples of Jesus when met by the risen Lord and filled with the Spirit, something we’ve seen in each of the past three weeks including today.

But today, once again, the readings lead us to these questions and truths.  And once again we are reminded that as followers of Jesus, people who belong to the Way, we, along with Jesus, reject using power or violence or force to effect even God’s will in the world.

We instead learn to live without fear of death – though death is real – because we know Jesus is alive, and all our lives are forever capable of being lived without fear.

And that leads us to Ananias and Peter, and eventually Paul, though it took him a little more time.  It’s the difference between Ananias’ actions and Paul’s earlier behavior, the difference between vengefully defending our idea of God and reaching out to all in Christ’s love, even those who hate us.

This is the mystery of our baptism: we ourselves become anointed ones, literally Christs.  We become and are Christ to each other.  And to the world, sent to bring God’s love and grace into the world.  Not with force or violence or power, but by living, embodying, like Ananias, Jesus’ self-giving, sacrificial love.

So Christ our Lord, risen from the dead, calls to us as he did to Ananias, to Paul, to Peter.  He calls us to become Christ ourselves, to belong to his Way.  And to live by that Way in all we do in our lives.

And this is why our Lord needs sinful people, seeks sinful people, to be a part of the Way.  If the heart of the Master will be seen in the actions of the disciple, his disciples need to know that heart.

How better than to find broken, sinful, evil people and love them into life, forgive them into grace, embrace them into a new Way of being?  Transformed by the forgiving love of the risen Christ, we are filled with the very thing we need to witness to such love in the world.

Here are the words you and I need to hear today from our Lord:  “Feed my sheep.”  and “Go.”

No more hedging, no more waiting, no more thinking it’s someone else’s job.  God’s lambs – the people of this world – need feeding, need love, need grace.  Even the ones we think are bad.  Because the Lord has need of their love, too.  It’s all part of the plan.

And yes, that’s frightening, to consider responding with love to hatred, responding with peace to violence, responding with justice to oppression.  But like Ananias, Jesus is simply saying to us, Go.  Do it.  I will be with you.  I will fill you with all the love you need.  But go.

You’re the only ones, he says, you’re the only ones who know what it means to be so forgiven, so you are the only ones who can share that with others.  So go.

And I will change the world in you.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

When we meet the risen Christ, we are given peace and life and a relationship of love and life with the Triune God, which gives us peace and confidence to trust God’s authority in our lives and follow it, to act on our faith in the world. 

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Second Sunday of Easter C; texts: Acts 5:27-32; John 20:19-31

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

This is a remarkable change.  An amazing change.  A surprising change.  Pick the adjective you want, the apostles in Acts 5, our first reading, are very different from the ones of John 20, our Gospel.  In John, they’re frightened, locked behind closed doors, fearful of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council who had condemned Jesus and urged his execution.  In Acts, only a few months later, they find themselves under arrest for preaching about Jesus’ resurrection, and they stand before that very council of their own authorities and fearlessly refuse to stop their preaching.  In effect, they challenge the council to do what it has to do, but they will not stop telling everyone they can about Jesus.  They have no fear of earthly authority.  They know who the true authority of their lives is, and they won’t back down.

It’s nothing short of miraculous, this transformation.  From cowed, hiding followers to brave, fearless leaders in only a few short months, something happened to them which changed them.  And the Bible says that what happened is they met Jesus alive, after they had seen him killed.  And nothing was ever the same for them again.

All of which raises the question for us: do we share such faith?  Do we have such confidence in the authority of God in our lives that we can be so fearless?  Willing to face death rather than disobey God?  Unafraid of anything anyone could do to us, and completely focused on our call to proclaim and serve the risen Lord?
Maybe we have to start with another question: do we even want such zeal?

Our living out of our faith can sometimes be a quiet one.  And we can, at times, be fine with that.

In a pluralistic society it’s not really even a question anymore whether we’ll be challenged in court to defend our faith and our discipleship, our actions.  And since we aren’t persecuted for our faith, arrested for our faith, we have the luxury of considering faith a completely private affair if we want.

In a tolerant America, about the only offensive faith action you can do in the eyes of many is try to convince your neighbor to believe what you believe.  Groups which proselytize, which loudly proclaim what they believe in public, on the air, in the media, make a lot of the country uncomfortable.  Perhaps including us.

In fact, given the rationale many terrorists give for their actions, that of obedience to the commands of God, and adherence to the dictums of their faith, many Americans, perhaps including us, find unquestioning obedience to God distasteful, if not downright dangerous.

Add to this the reality that some Christians in particular are trying to, as they put it, re-claim this country for Christianity, in effect re-writing our history to suggest the founders intended this to be a Christian nation, and trying to assert that we should be again.

So last week in North Carolina some legislators introduced a bill which would exempt North Carolina from the federal constitutional mandate that no law may be made respecting an establishment of religion.  They wanted to make Christianity the state religion of North Carolina, and be exempt from federal laws prohibiting any such favoritism.  The bill has since been removed from consideration.  But I’m sure they believed they were acting according to the mandates of their faith.  I’m sure they looked to Peter and the apostles today as their proper forebears.

So here’s the hard thing: if we disagree with the obedience terrorists claim to God, if we disagree with these legislators, then potentially this means we believe what the apostles are doing in Acts is unacceptable to us, inappropriate, perhaps dangerous.

And that puts us in a bit of an awkward spot, doesn’t it, given that we call ourselves disciples of the same risen Lord Jesus?

The witness of the early Church got the witnessers into trouble at many turns.  They were considered rabble rousers, and many were executed for their preaching and teaching.  They harmed the economies of towns and villages and cities by preaching against false gods which threatened the economic system that the worship of such gods generated.  They harmed the quietness of the same places by preaching about this risen Jesus and inviting, exhorting, calling to people to leave all they believed and come to a new faith, a new life.

The last thing faith was to these early believers was private.

It seems there’s a gap between our expectation of how one should live out one’s faith in the public sphere and the expectation of the disciples of Jesus.  And as soon as someone’s faith convictions lead them to involvement in politics, in urging the government to act, in speaking out for what they believe and trying to influence public policy, many of us get nervous.

As the events in North Carolina show, recently it has been right-wing Christians who want to inflict their views and beliefs on all of us.  Many of us think that is wrong of them to do.  But are we thereby shirking our call as disciples?

This actually is a familiar American difficulty with nuance and subtlety.  We’re not very good at that.  This is not a question, it turns out, of complete quietism and keeping one’s faith to oneself on the one hand and terrorism, Nazism, fascism, or American Christian theocracy on the other.

Somewhere in between those two convenient extremes which permit outrage without intelligence and criticism without discernment, somewhere in between lies this reality: to have faith in God at all means that God has a say in how we live our lives.  That’s the truth.  If we have faith in God, God has a say in how we live our lives.

And to live as a believer in God in a free society, where we are all expected to participate in governing ourselves, means that our faith will of necessity shape our politics, our votes, our public speech.  Or there is no faith to speak of.  Again, this is simply truth: if we believe, our faith will shape how we are.

It is not an integrated faith to be a believer in the risen Lord Jesus and keep that to oneself.  It is not an integrated faith to be a believer in the risen Lord Jesus and not act on Jesus’ call to love God and love neighbor in a public way.  Loving one’s neighbor inside the confines of one’s house and never stepping outside to help that neighbor is hardly love.

And once we step outside, once we act on the love of God that we know, we have become politically involved in some way.  That’s just the way it is.

So the question remains: If we’re involved the moment we step outside, what will that look like?

This week we commemorate Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the 68th anniversary of his execution by the Nazis.  He was a very important theologian and preacher among those who opposed Hitler.  He was a pacifist and an ethicist, and his writings still inspire and teach today.

He also was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  What’s powerful to me about his involvement as I understand it is that he believed it was a great sin to do this.  He had no illusions that somehow this was exempt from God’s law.  But he also believed that doing this sin was the only right choice he had as a Christian.  And as it turns out, he was arrested, among many others, after the plot failed, and was executed only weeks before the war with Germany ended.

Whether Bonhoeffer was right in doing a sin to try to save others is not the question for us today.  The question for us is: can we even conceive of such a dilemma in our lives?

Can we even consider what it means to be so convicted by our faith that we act in a way we believe God desires us to act, even if it means others will not like us, others will be offended by us?  I’m not envisioning we’ll be arrested.  But it seems that even offending others can be a daunting fear for us sometimes.

What changes the question for us is what changed it for those first disciples: as these disciples found out, the risen Jesus comes through the locked doors of our fears and offers us peace.  What happened to the disciples, the thing that changed them forever, has happened to us: we have seen the risen Jesus in our midst, he’s come through our defenses, and calms our fears.

There is a deep, abiding peace that Jesus offers his followers – not just the peace of knowing that he is risen and has defeated death, though that is the heart of our lives.  But that peace leads to a deeper peace: knowing that if in fact Jesus is Lord of all, and has defeated death, we need not fear anything.  And that means we have no reason not to follow Jesus’ call.

He comes through the locked doors of our lives and then invites us to open them and step outside ourselves.  To be witnesses to his love and life for the whole world.

And that’s where we begin the conversation together.  With questions like these:

• What does it mean to follow the Son of God who calls us to be peacemakers, who asks us to follow the prophets’ call to do justice and walk humbly with God?

• What does it mean in a pluralistic society to follow the Triune God’s authority and not human authority?  How do we know what God wants, for that matter?

• How do we follow God’s authority as we understand it, and still have respect and tolerance for those who believe differently from us?

• What would it mean for us to take our faith out of the private sphere of our living rooms and act in the world as people who are filled with new life from God and a message of God’s love for all?

I don’t know what our answers will be to these questions, or others like them.  I only know it’s vital that we ask them of each other.

It’s why congregations periodically take time to do what we’re beginning now, to have a process of visioning and discerning, to ask from time to time the question “what is God calling us to be and do now, in this place, in this time?”

It’s simply the only honest way to deal with the faith we claim to have.  There has never been a time when the Bible told believers that the highest aspiration of their faith was to keep it to themselves and not bother anyone.  Jesus has always done something after giving peace and hope and faith to his followers: he’s sent them out to change the world.

That might make us uncomfortable.  That’s good.  And we might not be ready to risk our lives for God, so it’s a good thing we probably won’t be asked to do that this week.  But we could start by taking baby steps of faith.  We could be a little more courageous and willing to talk with each other about how we live as faithful people in this world.  Let’s not allow ourselves to imagine that suddenly, in our generation, God’s plan is that we stay home with our faith.  Let’s walk through the door Jesus has opened for us.

Most of all, let’s rejoice in the peace our risen Jesus gives us and ask him to keep giving us this peace even as we begin to seek a deeper discipleship and obedience of faith.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Our experience tells us that death is the end, and though we proclaim the resurrection of Christ, we too often live in fear as if it was not true; our risen Lord comes to us, alive, and tells us we need never be afraid, for he has come to bring life to the whole world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, The Resurrection of Our Lord C; texts: Luke 24:1-12; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Isaiah 65:17-25

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

It’s time we gave these disciples a little slack.  The men, anyway, since they’re the ones who are struggling to believe here, and since we sometimes can be a little hard on the male disciples, when compared to the faith and actions of their female companions.  The women go to Jesus’ tomb early Sunday morning, to finish the burial rites.  And they find the tomb open, and glowing beings dressed in white tell them that Jesus is alive, just as he said he would be.  But when they run back to tell the other disciples, they run into disbelief.  Or at least skepticism.  Luke says, “These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”  Now Luke and John both record that Peter (and another, according to John), think enough of it to run to the tomb and see for themselves.  But their first reaction is clear: this can’t be true.

From our perspective, we can tend to be critical of the disciples throughout this week.  How could they betray Jesus?  Run away from Jesus?  And why didn’t they remember that when he predicted he would die, he also told them he would rise again after three days?

But we’re no different from these folks.  We live and operate in life on the basis of our experience.  We interpret the actions and understand the words of others based on how we think and how we are, what we have experienced, how we feel.  We tend to doubt things that we haven’t seen or heard ourselves, or have been told by someone we trust that they saw or heard it.  And if there’s anything our experience tells us about death, it is that death is the end.  It’s permanent.  And everything changes.

We’ve all experienced this.  We know this.  When people we love die, they’re no longer with us, at our table, in our living room, walking in the sun, having conversations.  We don’t see them again.  This we know.  And so did those disciples.  Of course they thought it was an idle tale, imagination, wishful thinking.  And of course they didn’t hear it when Jesus said he would rise again: once he told them he was going to suffer and be killed, that’s all they could hear.  The rest just slid past their ears.  That’s how we are.

So for us, like those disciples, it really is the same.  We know reality.  We know that death is the end.  And then we gather here today and are told something completely different.  We’re told that there is one, the One whom we call Lord and Master, Jesus, who has broken through the end wall, who has broken the power of death.

And the question for us is also the same as for those who first heard the women: do we think this is an idle tale, wishful speculation?  Or do we believe that everything is changed, and live our lives accordingly?

You see, either way, however we believe it will affect how we live our lives.

If we live with the understanding, the belief, the certainty, that death is the end, we will live in fear.  And that’s exactly our problem.  Whatever we proclaim about Easter, whatever we say we believe about the resurrection, too often we act as if we don’t believe it.  We act and live as if death is the end.  As if the worst thing that can happen to us is death.

And so we live in fear.

We make our personal decisions too often out of fear: fear we won’t have enough money.  Fear we haven’t planned enough for our future, fear we don’t have enough insurance.  Fear we might lose our jobs.  Fear our families won’t be safe.  Fear we are going to get sick.

We make our decisions as the Church too often out of fear: fear of the other, the one different from us.  Fear that there won’t be enough money, enough resources.  Fear of the culture, fear of other faiths.

We make political decisions too often out of fear: fear of terrorists.  Fear of other enemies.  Fear of the other, those different from us.  Fear of an election.  Fear of the future, fear of the unknown.

It’s hard to find an area of our lives where fear of death, fear of loss, doesn’t shape our decisions and our actions.  Even in personal relationships, we can hold back from others out of fear of being vulnerable with them.

And that’s what we want to avoid above all, being vulnerable, that is, being “able to be wounded.”  We know we are vulnerable.  We can be wounded in so many ways by so many things.  And death always stands at the back of everything.

And when someone speaks out of hope, speaks without fear, speaks of the possibilities of trusting in God and stepping out in life, there’s a part of us that hesitates.  A part of us that wants to be “realistic,” which often comes off as cynical.  Isn’t it cute that this person actually believes that God is working life in a world of death?

Because we think it isn’t true to “reality,” to the world as it is, the world as we’ve made it, the world that has the ability to wound us, and eventually kill us, we tend either to discount such faith as naïve or idealistic, or build walls around our hearts so that we don’t dare hope in God and then be disappointed.  Because, we say to ourselves, we know how the real world works.  We understand reality.

But this is what we cannot escape today: the idea of “reality” for these disciples was completely taken apart by the risen Jesus.

Whatever we say about the early Church, its core reality was forever altered on this day.  Everything they thought true about how the world is was shattered by the real presence of their beloved Lord Jesus in their midst.

Not an hallucination.  Not a wish-fulfillment.  Not even some non-specific sense that he “lived on in their hearts.”  He was there: physically tangible (“able to be touched”), able to eat, able to embrace.

He was alive.  And just as the reality is that death changes everything for us, this reality, that Jesus who had died was now alive before them, changed everything once again.  This is now a new creation, they realized, a new heaven and a new earth: the prophet Isaiah was right about this (in those words we also heard today).  This is now a world where death is no longer the end reality, they realized.

What we face this Easter morning because of this is a complete redefinition of “reality.”  Because it’s not what we thought.  Reality is that we are no longer faced with death as the end.  It has no ultimate power over us.

Reality is that being wounded, being vulnerable, is not a bad thing.  It’s a way to life because our God is vulnerable and was wounded for us and now lives and heals.  And only by being open to being wounded can we be open to being loved.

Reality is that there is nothing that can ultimately harm us.  So we can begin to live without fear.

There is an ancient prayer for peace which we pray at every Vespers liturgy.  And one of the things we pray for is that we “might be defended from the fear of our enemies.”

That’s the wisdom of God’s reality, the only reality that matters, as it turns out.  That we might still have enemies, and we might not always be defended from them.  They might even kill us.

But that we can and will be defended from our fear of them.  Our fear of others.  Our fear of the unknown.  Our fear of loss.  Our fear of death.  Which Paul promises us is the last enemy to be destroyed.  That is the way to peace, this prayer understands for us.

So the first thing the risen Jesus will do when he appears in the Upper Room to these very disciples on that first Sunday night – our story next week – is to give them the gift of peace.

This, then, is our peace: there is no need to be afraid.

Ever.

Paul says today that if we hope in Christ only for this life we are to be pitied.

The challenge we have today is to live as if we believe what this day is all about.  As if the hope in Jesus’ resurrection isn’t an idle tale.  But that it is hope in a new reality, God’s reality, where the wounded and crucified Lord of Life now lives, and nothing will ever be the same.  A reality where we need not be afraid.  Ever.

From this moment, this day, this experience of the new reality God had made in Jesus, all the disciples went out without fear and changed the world through the power of God’s Spirit.  Believing changed the way they saw the world, saw reality, and changed how they went out into it as disciples and what they believed and expected God could do with it.

Somehow, I think Jesus is hoping we do the same.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen