The risen Christ whom we proclaim is Lord of all things has the only authority over the scope of God’s salvation, and claims that the Triune God’s plan is to make all things new in him.  Our job is to love the world as Christ, and proclaim this Good News to all.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Fifth Sunday of Easter C; texts: Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

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

The post-Easter followers of Jesus were continually confronted with changing realities, with experiences that profoundly shifted their world-view, their faith, the foundation of their lives.  Realities such as the fact that the beloved Master whom they saw killed was now alive.  Experiences which taught that things they believed to be true about God and the world were in fact not true, such as, the power to kill someone isn’t really as strong as they thought.  And they were repeatedly forced to recognize that they still had a lot to learn about the love of God revealed in the risen Jesus, a lot to learn about what God’s intentions for them and for the world were.

An example of this is our story from Acts today.  It’s the story of Peter defending his decision to eat with non-Jews, Gentiles, and in fact to welcome them into the church through baptism.  The event actually happens in chapter 10.  Today’s story from chapter 11 is Peter re-telling what happened and why to the leaders of the church in Jerusalem.

Peter describes yet another earth-shaking, faith-changing reality they all now had to face: God intends the kingdom, the rule of the risen Christ, to extend beyond the boundaries of the Jewish faith.

This is a massive shift of thinking: never had they contemplated this was the goal.

The record of Scripture suggests that whatever the disciples believed about Jesus it always assumed and lived in the reality that he was Jewish.  Even the religious leaders who had him executed likely didn’t consider the possibility that his mission was to the whole world.

That’s kind of understandable.  The Messiah was a Jewish concept, a promise to God’s chosen people.  Jesus was a Jewish teacher, with Jewish disciples.  He was killed because the leaders thought he was blaspheming the God of the Jews.  The one true God, but still, the God of the Jews.

But had they read their Scriptures more carefully they might have noticed something.  The Jews were God’s chosen people for a reason, a purpose: to be a blessing to the nations, to the whole world.  It’s central to God’s original covenant with Abraham in Genesis, repeated several times.

And in Isaiah it’s stated clearly in chapter 49, in one of the servant songs, where the prophet speaks the word of the LORD regarding the work Messiah will do: “It is too light a thing,” says the LORD, “that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (49:6)

So from the beginning it was in God’s plan to bring light to the whole world in Jesus.  But no one really seemed to be thinking much about that, not Jesus’ opponents, not even his followers.

I suppose it’s natural.  Human beings love being part of “in” groups.  We want to be the insiders, the special ones, and to do that we need to know who the outsiders are, the ones who aren’t us.  It’s how we ever justify war, or oppression, how we know we’re part of a good group, by claiming that “they” are a “they,” not an “us.”  But God’s plan in Jesus was to end “we” and “they” permanently.  That’s what Peter needed to learn.  And then teach to the rest of the Church.

This is God’s new reality (or at least a reality of God’s plan that is new to us) which we also need to be prepared to face.

The most profound part of this story is actually not the vision Peter has, but what the Holy Spirit does, and Peter’s deeply wise recognition of his own limitation.

Peter saw the Holy Spirit become present in the lives of ones he thought were outside God’s salvation.  He saw that the Gentiles received precisely the same gift of the Spirit he and the other believers received from Christ.  And he wisely realized it wasn’t his decision to make anymore about who got that gift.  Who am I, Peter said, that I could hinder God?

This is the wisdom we need to find.  In the Revelation to John, the part we heard today, the risen Christ, the One sitting on the throne, says “See, I am making all things new.” (21:5)  All things are made new in Christ Jesus, all things.  And, like Peter, we need to understand what that means.

The risen Jesus has brought this hope to the world: all peoples are in God’s love and care, all things, all people, all creation, will be made new.  After the resurrection, there are no “in” groups, no “out” groups.  No sense that Christians are the only ones inside God’s love because they know the truth.  All of God’s people are welcome, even if they don’t know what God has done in Jesus for the world.

And if God chooses to bless and to offer life to the whole world, who are we to hinder God?  When we understand this, we begin to see this truth in many places, and other questions occur to us.

What if Jesus was right in John 3:16 and 17, that God loved the whole world, the cosmos, the universe, enough to send the Son to save it, not to judge it?

What if Jesus was serious when he called Paul to become God’s messenger to the Gentiles, to non-Jews?

What if Jesus meant it when he said he intended to draw the whole world to himself in his death and resurrection?

Of course we’d be foolish not to believe Jesus and take him seriously.  But that’s just what we do.  We treat the Church as if it’s an exclusive club, and as if we get to make the rules about who’s in and out.  We treat those who do not believe in the lordship of Jesus as if they were lesser people, not worthy of God’s love.  Or if we’re feeling benevolent, we worry that those who do not believe are condemned to eternal torment after they die.  And we treat those with whom we disagree about issues of faith as people unworthy of our attention and love and respect, let alone God’s.

But it’s actually quite simple: we proclaim that the risen Christ is Lord of all things, and has drawn all creation into the life of the Triune God by his death and resurrection for all.

If that’s so, then perhaps we might actually want to reflect that we believe that to be true.

This is the point where Christians start asking with concern, “Are you talking about universalism?  To that we can only say, it’s not about labeling, or anything anyone else might or might not define as universalism.

If God the Father so loved the whole cosmos that he sent the Son, through whose death and resurrection, as the New Testament writers persistently affirm, the entire universe is subject to his rule, then the entire universe is subject to his rule.  And then all Jesus’ words about the limitless love of the Father, about the fact that the will of God is that all are found, all are saved, not judged, all these words also apply and are valid.

A cosmic view of the Lordship of Christ Jesus demands that we, at least, cannot put limits on his ability to love and save all whom he wishes.  And frankly, it doesn’t really matter what we call it, or whether or not we believe it.  God will do what God will do, and saying “who am I that I could hinder God” is not magnanimously saying, “We need to let God be God.”

It’s actually saying we don’t have any power to alter God’s plan anyway.  I’m sorry if this is news to anyone here, but we don’t get to vote on the shape and scope of God’s plan of salvation.  Which is probably a good thing for a large part of the world.  So it would be wise for us to get on board with what the Triune God actually says is the plan.

Of course, we don’t know precisely how Christ is going to do this, make all things new, draw all people to himself.  We don’t know how he’ll bring in people of other faiths, or people of no faith.  But we believe he will, that he intends to.

And I think that what Jesus says to us today is that it’s not our job to figure out how he’s going to do this, to come up with some theological plan that explains how it will work.  Paul tried doing that for three chapters in his letter to the Romans and ended up tied up in knots, sure of only one thing: God will save the Jewish people because God promised Abraham.  Paul never could figure out exactly how it would happen, though.

And that’s OK.  Because that’s not our job.  Our job, according to Jesus today, is simple: Love each other and the world as he loved us.  When we do this we’ll be a sign to the world that we follow Jesus.  When we do this, we will let the world know about Jesus’ love.  And we’ll be a part of Jesus’ plan.

When we understand what the risen Christ actually wants us and needs us to do, we then have a chance to begin doing what we’ve been anointed to do.

When we spend our time trying to set rules for who’s in and who’s out, we miss God’s deep and abiding insistence that all are in.  When we live as if we believe evangelism is getting others to agree with us we miss our call to do the only evangelism – good news telling – we need to do, and that is to love as Jesus loved us.  And when we spend all our energy trying to sort out just how Christ will make all things new, all people new, and draw all people in, we waste energy needed to be loving people in the world, signs of God’s love for all.

And that’s our call.  To see the world, and other people, as God sees them, not as we’ve been used to seeing them.  And to love the world, and other people, as God loves them, not as we think they deserve.  We mostly can’t figure out how God is going to accomplish this, and we don’t need to.  (Which should be a big relief.)  All we need to do is obey, and love, and watch God’s plan unfold.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Research has shown that in the womb, babies learn their mother’s (and father’s!) voice.  Similarly, in our baptism and rebirth we learn to distinguish God’s voice from worldly voices because only the voice of God comforts, protects, and gives new life where the was none before.

Vicar Neal Cannon, Fourth Sunday of Easter, year C; texts: Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30

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

I love being an uncle.  So far, I have one niece and nephew on Mary’s side of the family, and one nephew on my side, all under the age of six, and I gotta say being an uncle is one of the best jobs in the world.  As an uncle, I often get invited over to give Mom and Dad a break awhile.  And usually when I see my niece and nephew they’re really excited to see me and I’m excited to see them, because my role as uncle is to be the fun guy.  I’m the guy that can be silly and goofy around them, I’m the guy that plays games with them, and I’m the guy that takes them to the zoo or to the movies.

But one thing that I’ve always noticed as an uncle is that whenever a niece or nephew gets hurt, whenever they bump their head or scrape their knee, it’s not Uncle Neal they come crying to.  It’s almost always Mom’s voice, and sometimes Dad’s, that comforts them.

There’s actually a biological/scientific explanation for this.  I recently read an article that cited a study by Canadian and Chinese researchers who recorded pregnant women reading a poem out loud, and then played the recordings to the babies in utero.  The heart rate of babies who heard their mom’s voice speeded up, while the heart rate of those who heard the tapes of another mom’s voice slowed down.  The research team thus concluded that children even from the womb know their mother’s voice.

One mother, reacting to this article, said, “I remember when my son was born, they put him in his little hospital bassinet by me and I called his name and talked to him.  He turned his head and looked at me right away.  This was just a couple of minutes after birth!  Then they did his hearing test and told me his hearing was perfect.  I was like, of course it’s perfect! I  already knew that!” 🙂 [1]

Think about that.  As infants and even from the womb we know our mother’s voice and mothers know that their children can hear them.  And this is why children seek out Mom’s voice.  Mom’s voice comforts us, protects us, and it’s Mom’s voice that we recognize as the one that gives us life.

This is actually a common theme in the book of John.  This is the theme of hearing Jesus’ voice and recognizing that his Voice, is the voice of our Creator. The first verse in John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is John’s way of telling us that Jesus is the voice of God.  Jesus embodies the voice of God.  And we recognize that voice, as the voice of our Creator, the one in the beginning, the one with us now, and the one who will be with us in the future.

John continues this theme in chapter 3 as Nicodemus approaches Jesus and says, “‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’  Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’”

The term ‘born from above’ is sometimes translated as ‘born again.’  Often, when people hear the term ‘born again’ we think of in-your-face evangelists, who ask you when you were ‘saved’ or ‘born again.’

But think about the term ‘born again’ in the context of a mother to her child.  Like a child in the womb, being ‘born again’ is the place where we re-learn the voice of God. We re-learn that the voice comforts us.  We re-learn that the voice protects us from danger.  We re-learn that the voice sustains us and give us new life.

Jesus goes on to tell us that this rebirth happens with water and Spirit.  In other words, in our baptism we’re given the gift of the Spirit, and through the Spirit we hear the voice of God.  We need the Spirit to help us hear the voice of God because in our sin we’ve listened to countless other voices and forgotten what God’s voice sounds like.

In our Gospel lesson today, the people gathered around Jesus are essentially asking about this voice and wondering where it comes from.  They say “Quit keeping us in suspense and tell us who you are!”  Jesus essentially responds to them by saying, take a look at all of the things that I’ve been doing.  Don’t you recognize them?  The hungry are being fed, the weak are protected, and everywhere I go I create new life.

What does that voice sound like to you?

The people who were listening to Jesus should have known what that voice sounds like.  The voice that comforts, protects, and gives life is the voice of God.

Jesus goes on to say that the reason they don’t believe that Jesus is God’s Son is because they’ve forgotten what God’s voice sounds like. “My sheep listen to my voice,” Jesus says.  Put another way, my children recognize me when I speak.

But in truth, this isn’t really a problem that THEY have.  This isn’t a problem that somebody else has.  This is a problem that WE ALL struggle with.  We all struggle to hear the voice of God because as Jesus says, we need to be born again to hear it because other voices have taken over.

As many of you know, I was a youth director for several years before I decided to go to seminary and become a pastor.  It was a privilege for me to work with youth as they experienced extreme joy, but also as they experienced extreme hardships.  Some of the hardships that several youth were going through were eating disorders and self-injury.

And I remember one youth in particular whose problems became serious enough that she needed to be hospitalized so she could receive counseling and treatment.  One week I went to see her in the hospital and she was telling me about the program that she was in and some of the treatment/counseling methods that she was going through.

One method, she learned, was to give your issue a name.  The name the doctors suggested was E.D. or Ed, which stands for eating disorder.  The doctors had the patients do this because they found that giving their problems a name helped people recognize that their self-destructive thoughts and feelings were coming from a source outside of themselves.

I learned two things from this.  The first is that we are constantly listening to other voices that come from outside of us that shape what we believe and think.

Sometimes it’s the voice of a friend.
Sometimes it’s the voice of magazines and television.
Sometimes it’s the voice of culture.

Sometimes those voices tell us that we’re not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or worthy enough to be loved unconditionally by our Creator… or in fact, by anyone.  And these voices in our lives shape our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves.

The second thing that I learned is that it’s crucial for us to listen to and follow the voices in our lives that build us up.  Lesser voices tear us down, and attack us, and suck the life out of us.  God’s voice does the opposite of those things.

The Bible tells us that the Creator’s voice, comforts us, protects us, and gives us life and anything that is not that, is not our Creator’s voice. That’s how we recognize if something is really from God or not.  We ask the question, does this give us life, or does it take life away?

And that’s how we know that God is in this story in Acts today, even though God or Jesus is never mentioned.  In this story, a woman named Tabitha who is deeply loved by the community falls ill and dies suddenly.  So they rush to get Peter, and Peter prays over Tabitha and the story tells us that she is given new life; she is miraculously raised from the dead.

As Christians, we proclaim that God is in this story, because only God can give new life where there was none.  And so we claim it was not Peter’s prayer that gives new life to Tabitha, it’s God’s word, it’s God’s voice.  This is incredibly important for us as Christians to believe because this tells us that God’s voice makes impossible things possible.  It creates life where there was none before.

And as Christians we say that because this voice has the power to raise the dead to life, God’s voice also has the power to heal entire communities.  God’s voice has the power to heal us and comfort us in time of need because if God’s voice can give life to the dead, then God’s voice can accomplish ANYTHING.  And not only do we receive healing and comfort and life from this voice, but when we hear it, we are able to heal and comfort others in their time of need.

One organization that helps young girls with self-injury, eating disorders, and other issues is called “To Write Love on Her Arms”.  I want to share with you this organization’s vision.

The vision is that we actually believe these things:
You were created to love and be loved.
You were meant to live life in relationship with other people, to know and be known.
You need to know your story is important, and you’re part of a bigger story.
You need to know your life matters.

What does that voice sound like to you?

As Christians, we say that God’s voice, that Jesus’ voice, creates love where there was none before and that voice accompanies us wherever we go.  That even in the midst of tragedy and our darkest hours, we can trust in the words of Psalm 23, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

In this, we learn that God joins us in our suffering.  We learn that when we are going through difficult times, it’s not that God is absent; it’s actually that God is walking right alongside us in the valley of the shadow of death, and even though we can’t see God in the darkness, we can always hear God’s voice.  Sometimes God’s voice comes through an encouraging friend; sometimes we hear that voice in scripture, prayer, and in church, sometimes through an organization like “To Write Love on Her Arms”.

And when we hear God’s voice beside us, we proclaim the words from Revelation today as well which read, “for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  And when we hear God’s voice in the pit of our lives, when we learn that God’s voice is good.

So today, here in worship, let us quiet our hearts and listen to the voice of God who even now is seeking to comfort us, protect us, and lead us out of the valley, and into new life.

Amen

[1]  http://www.babycenter.com/404_is-it-true-that-babies-can-recognize-their-mothers-voice-at_10323727.bc

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