Sermons Archive

The Fifth Sunday of Easter
The Rev. Janice Robinson
April 20, 2008

It is hard to believe that Easter Day was celebrated five weeks ago. While we are still celebrating the great victory of life over death, won for us by Jesus Christ, we have all returned to our normal routines. Each year our usual patterns are interrupted by Lent, Holy Week, and Easter Day. We focus on “re-membering” through our liturgies our Lord’s critical and unswerving journey to Golgotha, and the heart of his message of love and service.

The people of Jerusalem and its environs also returned to their routines following the crucifixion of the young Galilean, who many said was somehow alive. I’m sure there were intriguing conversations and speculations, and more than a little anxiety beyond the locked door behind which the disciples kept themselves. Yet, even in this environment, the new faith began to grow. The disciples had emerged from the upper room, and their evangelistic endeavors, empowered by the Holy Spirit, began a few short weeks following our Lord’s ascension.

The “people of the Way”, as they were then called gathered to hear about Jesus’ teachings, to have the scriptures opened to their hearts and ears, as they had been opened to the disciples on the Emmaus road. Their hearts burned with fervor for their new understandings, and they supported one another in living in new ways, ways that reflected the Young Rabbi who was willing to give up his life for them.

The growth was significant enough for the disciples to have to appoint others to assist them with pastoral responsibilities, visiting the sick, and helping those in need while they preached and taught what they had learned from Jesus himself. The first such appointment as a deacon was Stephen. He had shown such passion for his new faith, and for the people, that he seemed a natural. He was an educated young Jewish man, not unlike another young man, named Saul. While Stephen embraced the new faith, Saul with the same passion rejected it, and saw it was a threat to the tradition that had been handed down for centuries.

Saul, in his role of defender of the faith brought Stephen up on charges, and the passage we heard read this morning is from Stephen’s last testament given before the Council. He recounted the history of Israel and her relationship with God, beginning with Abraham and continuing to Jesus Christ. He said of them, “You stiff-necked people uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors did. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold of the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You received the law, but you don’t keep it.”

That’s pretty heavy stuff, yet his point was not to stand in judgment, but to challenge them to look at their behavior and how at odds it really was with the scripture and the message of the Messiah. This understanding could help them make the needed amendment of life, for they had already been forgiven, from the cross. Peter himself had also said pretty much the same thing in his inaugural sermon.

But, this was more than the people could bear to hear, and so once again they resorted to killing the one who tried to help them look at themselves and make the needed changes. Our routines may need to be changed. Lent and Holy Week are particularly important times for us to make self-examinations that we might seek forgiveness and amendment of our lives, so that they more readily reflect our Lord, and his message of love.

Once again people returned to their usual routine, while Saul continued his defense of the true religion. He as we know would be confronted in a spectacular way on the Road to Damascus. That was still ahead of him. A couple of decades after Stephen’s death we learn from Peter, through his letter that the environment for the growing Church had turned even more hostile. such that the new sect was seen as politically threatening to the Roman authorities. Increasingly, in some places they were being arrested and brought into the Roman circus where they were attacked by wild animals and mauled to death for the entertainment of the Roman authorities and their friends.

Peter, through is letter tries to reassure the people in their faith. He reminds them that they are a new people, not he same as they were before they had encountered Christ in their lives. While they may have been infants in the faith, requiring continuous spiritual nourishment, they were growing into salvation as they made the needed changes in their lives. He called them “living stones”, who, though rejected by others, were seen as precious to God. If this sounds familiar it’s because it had been said of the author of their faith, that young Galilean rabbi who had been killed some twenty to thirty years before. Yet, he had become the cornerstone of their faith. Through their perseverance they would build a spiritual house and be a “holy priesthood” offering spiritual sacrifices to God.

They were “a chosen people”, “a holy nation”, “and God’s own people”. At one time they were not a people, but now they were God’s people, and as they had been shown mercy they were to show mercy to others. As we continue our celebration of the Easter season it would be important for us to reflect on this message, for we too are “God’s people”, “a holy nation”, “and a royal priesthood”. But these images that speak to our identity are not meant to simply make us feel good, and push our chests out with pride, but remind us of the need to actualize the changes we recognize we need to make in our daily lives.

The resurrection said that things would not go back to life as usual, but that routines are imbued with new understandings and new attitudes that necessitate change. We here in this country are not faced with the Roman circus, but there are places in the world that it is politically incorrect to be a Christian, and many have lost their lives because of it. Our pressure is more subtle I think, but requiring every bit as much vigilance and perseverance as our early ancestors, to whom Peter wrote.

In our pluralistic society, we are often confronted with a plethora of beliefs. It seems sometimes that people choose a bit from here, a bit from there, some created in whole or in part from within ourselves. Individualism, as Pope Benedict talked about seems to have taken over, with little or no concern for the whole. For Christians, or “people of the Way” as we were first known, that is the reverse of where we begin. Community, while made up of individuals, is the foundation. God’s people are no longer a bunch of individuals fending for themselves alone, but are a part of something larger than themselves, a major change in our way of thinking.

Why is this so important? We have been called, just as the disciples were called to go into the world and proclaim the teachings and acts of compassion and mercy of our Lord. As Peter told the early church, “you were called out of the darkness into his marvelous light.” Jesus has asked that we help others to come into that light. The changes we make in our lives of necessity change the way were are in the world. Our lives need to become transparent so that the light of Christ shines through them, and is not blocked by our old routines.

The newness in our lives that helps us to make the changes is the work of the Holy Spirit. John the evangelist reminds us, as he reminded the people of the early church, of the fateful night when Jesus was summing up all that he had been teaching his friends. He told them that having seen him they had in fact seen God. It was God who was speaking and working through him. Through him they had direct access to God, and in fact he was returning to God so that they too would have a place in the relationship he had with God.

Belief in him would bring inclusion in that relationship and God would dwell in them as well, enabling them and you and me to do what he did, and even greater things than he had done. Jesus often talked off saying the things that the Father had given him to say, and that what he said was not of his own, but of God. Through his words and deeds he was reflecting who God is to the world. We, who claim belief in Jesus Christ, are called to do the same, reflect God in our words and actions.

The celebration of this season, is that we are a community, not simply a bunch of individuals who have to go it alone. We are God’s people, not an elite group, but a servant people. We are called to serve one another, and to serve the world too. We need the reassurance and the support of a community, and church can provide this for us, therefore we need to participate as fully as we are able. Whatever may happen during the week, we can come to this community and be ourselves, and receive the spiritual nourishment, the fellowship, the food and the prayers required for the work to which we are called.

We can continue and persevere in our work, because we have a relationship with the risen Christ and thus with God. A relationship that is empowering. A relationship that can excise the foreskin that covers our hearts and our ears so that we might hear and in hearing we might understand, and in understanding we might act as an instrument of God’s love in this broken world.

We return to our routines, but they are different now allowing us to work at making the changes in ourselves and in our world that will lead to peace and reconciliation until they become second nature, and are done as a matter of course reflecting the One in whom our hope rests, the risen Christ.

Amen!