It’s probably obvious, but in the first days of the Way (before Christians were called Christians) Jesus’ disciples sought to do the things that Jesus had done. They echoed Jesus.
I’m thinking about the ninth chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9:36-43).
Luke followed up his account of the conversion of Saul (we know Saul better by his Greek name, Paul) with this story about Simon Peter’s visit to Joppa, where a woman named Tabitha (known in Greek as Dorcas) had fallen ill and died. She was an important person in that small community of the Way there in Joppa, so they asked Simon Peter to come.
He sat by her bedside. He said, “Tabitha, get up,” and she rose alive and whole once again.
There are echoes in this healing — resurrection, rather — story of Jesus’ raising of a small girl. You’ll find that story in Luke (Luke 8:40-56), and also in Mark (Mark 5:21-43) and Matthew (that’s an error; it’s not found in Matthew). In Mark’s version of the story, there are echoes of the words. “Tabitha, get up,” is what Simon Peter said. “Talitha cum,” or “Little girl, get up,” is what Jesus said to the child of the ruler of a synagogue.
I think that what this is confirming for us — because for certain we should already know this — is that the ministry of the early church saw itself as an emulation and imitation and echo of the ministry of Jesus himself. The followers of Jesus sought to do the same things that Jesus had done, whether that be healing (and yes, resurrection), or whether that be to accept the outsiders, to teach and feed the hungry, to do the things that Jesus himself had done as he walked the earth.
Nobody said it was easy.
And I’m afraid my talents for resurrection, if I have any, have not been demonstrated. But I do hope I’ve demonstrated some ability to speak love and care and compassion to those around. And I hope I’ve demonstrated some ability to bring healing to a troubled spirit.
What is it that God has given you as a way to comfort, to teach, to lead, to serve. How are you bringing life to those around you?
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.
The answer, of course, is yes. You can. You can turn water into wine. There’s a trick to it.
The secret is to add grapes.
I am not the first to make that joke. Augustine of Hippo wrote in the fifth century, “The miracle indeed of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby He made the water into wine, is not marvellous to those who know that it was God’s doing. For He who made wine on that day at the marriage feast, in those six water-pots, which He commanded to be filled with water, the self-same does this every year in vines. For even as that which the servants put into the water-pots was turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the doing of the same Lord. But we do not wonder at the latter, because it happens every year: it has lost its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.”
The world, Augustine observed, is full of God’s miracles, so full that we’ve ceased to recognize them as God’s handiwork.
It seems, however, that somebody goofed among the wedding planners in Cana. They ran out of wine. The hosts may not have been entirely at fault. As Lindsey S. Jodrey writes at Working Preacher, “We may read the story and wonder why the family of the bride and groom failed to provide enough wine. However, it was ancient custom for guests to bring wedding gifts in the form of food and drink to share the burden of providing for such a large group. Thus, the family’s lack of wine may indicate a lack of community support in addition to their own lack of resources. Jesus’ actions are that of a friend and faithful community member; the provision of wine is a sign of shared hospitality.”
When Mary came to her son to tell him there was no wine, his reply, “What concern is that to me and to you?” was a little discomforting. As a guest, he had some obligation to aid his host. Perhaps he had already contributed something to the feast. But perhaps – and John’s narrative of a short time period between Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan valley and his attendance at this wedding some miles away suggests this could have happened – perhaps Jesus and his new followers hadn’t brought anything, or hadn’t brought what his mother considered enough. Even if he had, it’s clear that she thought he could and should do more.
The other half of Jesus’ response, though, was more complicated. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “hour” (“My hour has not yet come”) was the time of his crucifixion. If it seems like a stretch to say that Jesus saw this moment as one that set him on the path to that terrible Friday, I’ll just say that the author didn’t see it that way. Jesus’ mother appears only twice in John’s Gospel: here, and at the foot of the cross; when the hour had not yet come, and when the hour had come.
There was a simple way to deal with the situation. Jesus might have turned to Peter, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael, and said, “Come on, guys. Let’s pool our money and go to the wine shop. Between us we might get enough to last out the evening.” If he was concerned that five of them couldn’t carry enough, Mary was enlisting the servers to help. Jesus didn’t have to do what he actually did.
John called it the first of his signs. He meant something specific by that. It wasn’t enough that Jesus did something remarkable, or powerful, or miraculous. That act revealed something about Jesus. It said something about his purpose. It said something about his nature.
John wrote that turning water into wine in Cana, the first of his signs, Jesus “revealed his glory.”
But hardly anyone recognized it at the time.
The chief server didn’t know. Nobody told him where the good wine had come from. The hosts didn’t know. Nobody told them, either. The other guests didn’t know. The servants knew, but if they told anyone else, John left it out. Jesus’ mother knew. Jesus’ closest friends knew, because they were paying attention.
As far as I can see, Jesus revealed his glory to less than a dozen people.
That tells us a lot about Jesus’ glory, doesn’t it? It’s not a glory for show, to display or to impress. It’s not a glory that cries, “Look at me!” It’s not a glory about ego. It’s not a glory that demands worship. It’s a glory that can go unnoticed. It is, to go back to Augustine for a moment, a glory that can lose its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.
It was also a glory of profound compassion.
It’s not clear just how much the hosts would have suffered if they had, in fact, run out of wine at the feast. Some scholars suggest it would have been shameful, which is no small thing in a culture based on honor and shame. Others don’t think they would have experienced any long-term consequences. At the least, it would have been embarrassing. I’m pretty sure that years later, they’d have blushed when the story came up – again – “Remember when the wine ran out at the wedding? Good times!”
Mary thought that was worth avoiding. In the end, Jesus thought so, too.
I’m afraid that doesn’t mean that Jesus will always act to preserve us from simple embarrassment. I can tell you that Jesus might have done done that at various times in my life, but certainly not every time. I’ve been embarrassed more times than I care to count or remember. It does mean that Jesus cares more about the seemingly trivial parts of our lives than we might imagine. It’s not all about life and death, suffering and wholeness, damnation and salvation. It’s also about helping us through the other challenges of life.
Jesus’ compassion extends not just to our health, but to our joy. As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “Turning water into wine is revealing of abundant grace in this season of Epiphany. And what does abundant grace taste like? Like the best wine when you are expecting the cheap stuff.” Jesus’ compassion delights.
Abundant grace is also easy to miss. How many people were at the wedding feast that day? I don’t know. How many received this grace without knowing it? Nearly all. Nearly all.
So can you turn water into wine?
It turns out you can. You and I just have to work harder to make it happen. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Maybe we can be like Mary. Maybe we can notice, name, persist, and trust. No matter how profound the scarcity, no matter how impossible the situation, we can elbow our way in, pull Jesus aside, ask earnestly for help, and ready ourselves for action. We can tell God hard truths, even when we’re supposed to be celebrating. We can keep human need squarely before our eyes, even and especially when denial, apathy, or distraction are easier options. And finally, we can invite others to obey the miraculous wine-maker we have come to know and trust.”
We can turn water into wine.
We can bring more joy into the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. We can act such that the needs we see get addressed, whether they’re urgent and important or seemingly trivial. We can gather the supports to get things done. We can name and proclaim the acts of grace, the deeds of mercy, the times of transformation, and we can declare, “This is glory, people. Ignore the prattle of the powerful and their pathetic posturing. Glory is compassion. Glory is humility. Glory is love. This is glory.”
Yes. We can say that. We can live that.
We can turn water into wine.
We can also turn wine into water, and for those who have addiction to alcohol, we might have to do that sometimes. There’s a trick there, too. Boil it. The alcohol evaporates first. The point is: Don’t let the metaphor get in the way.
Jesus displayed his glory with compassion, humility, and grace. Let us display our glory with compassion, humility, and grace.
Let us be like Mary. Let us be like Jesus.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric does depart from his prepared text from time to time. Sometimes he’s trying to improve it.
The Book of Hebrews is not the most accessible of the writings of the New Testament. The author spent a lot of time bringing up passages of the Hebrew Bible that most people have never heard of. Just as one example, Sunday School teachers haven’t spent much time of the priesthood of Melchizedek in Genesis 14, while the author of Hebrews spent a fair amount of time reflecting on it.
However, I’m going to give you my one-line summary of the Book of Hebrews. Ready? OK. Here it is:
It’s all about Jesus.
I suppose a little expansion might be helpful…
Are you worried about who to pay attention to? Pay attention to Jesus. Are you worried about death? Life comes from Jesus. Are you worried about forgiveness of sin? That comes from Jesus. Are you worried about whether you should be making sacrifices? Don’t worry: Jesus has made the last sacrifice and no more are required.
Or more simply: It’s all about Jesus.
As Christopher T. Holmes writes at Working Preacher, “The point is clear: Jesus has removed all obstacles that might keep the hearers from entering into God’s presence. The problem, as the exhortation in verses 22–25 makes clear, is with the hearers’ willingness to keep drawing near.”
Let me re-read that exhortation:
“…Let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
Amy L. B. Peeler writes, also at Working Preacher, “’Are there any verses in the Bible that explicitly tell us to go to church?’ Students have raised this question several times in my classroom, and rarely is there an occasion where the answer is so straightforward. Hebrews 10:25 is just that verse…” Dr. Peeler teaches, incidentally, at Wheaton College in Illinois.
But why would people “neglect to meet together,” as the author of Hebrews put it? Well, first of all, gathering for religious purposes looked a lot different in the first century.
The weekly Sabbath meetings of the Jewish synagogues were the exception, not the rule, among first century Mediterranean religions. Most devotional activity for Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians consisted either of rituals performed in the home, or of bringing an offering for sacrifice in public. Public sacrifices, however, weren’t held one day a week. There wasn’t a set time when everybody crowded into a building to pray together. In fact, they rarely went into a building. Sacrifices took place outdoors. Most people never entered a temple building proper.
There would have been a few times during a year when everyone came out to worship, but those would have been festivals. And again, the activity of most “worshipers” was probably watching a parade going down the street to one of the temples.
When the author of Hebrews commented on “some” who didn’t gather, “some” was “most.” Jews who lived someplace other than Jerusalem had developed weekly gatherings for prayer and study in synagogues, a distinct difference between them and the others around them. Christians continued the practice.
Like the synagogues, the meetings of Christian communities had a different purpose than the great festivals of the Greeks or the triumphs of the Romans, or even the rituals of the Jerusalem Temple. The author of Hebrews noted it here. We gather “to provoke one another to love and good deeds… encouraging one another…”
That has remained the reason for the Church’s existence in the nearly two thousand years since.
Why do we gather? To provoke one another to love. To provoke one another to good deeds. To encourage one another.
That’s one of the reasons that the pandemic was so hard on us. In the presence of a virulent and dangerous disease spread primarily through the breath, it wasn’t safe to get together. “We stay separate now,” read one version of a common saying, “so that when we gather later, we will all be here.” Two years ago on this day I was home in bed sick with COVID. I recovered. Have we forgotten that over a million Americans didn’t? That over seven million have died across the globe?
We had good reason to keep apart. But it was hard.
It was hard because the ancient Hawaiians were right: “ha,” spirit, breath, is something that two human beings share with one another for the good of both. When sharing breath became hazardous, we lost something that sustained our spirits, something that needed no words to take place, and what could we share over the wires? Words.
Words suffered as well. I was in my forties when I learned something very important about communication, which is that communication hasn’t happened until it’s gone two ways: forth and back. Without response, communication hasn’t really occurred. Which is why parents get so insistent on getting a response from a teenager.
We used the tools available to us to stream a worship experience to you and to anyone else who chose. It was my decision to use a broadcast-style technology, to use a format that gave worshipers little ability to respond during worship. Mostly I made that choice to keep it as simple as possible for you. I wish I’d created some other more interactive ministries, more than a Bible Study, but alas, I didn’t.
Now that we’re back together, we’ve continued the live stream for the simple reason that people still find it useful. Some work Sunday mornings. Others can’t physically make it to worship. Those people – you people – are important, and giving you an opportunity to celebrate God’s grace is important. We will not neglect you.
Don’t neglect, however, to take up what opportunities come your way to provoke others to love and to good deeds, and to encourage them in the faith.
That word “provoke” provoked a fair amount of discussion during Bible Study this week. It seems an odd word to use of love. Katherine Shaner writes at Working Preacher, “Instead of asserting a community built on sameness and good feeling, the preacher seems to note that provocation and exasperation is part of being a community. She exhorts us to build a kind of community gathering that relentlessly, even irritatingly, suggests that actions of love and deeds are not what create faith, but are rather the responsibility of the community which needs to gather because of their faith in the great high priest — a faith God gives.”
Can we be a provoking community, one that doesn’t settle for a little bit of love? Can we be a community that expects more of ourselves than just a good deed or two here or there? Can we be a community that asks, “How can we do this better? How can we make this good available to more people? How can we equip people to live their lives in fullness?”
It’s the irritating sand in the oyster shell that provokes it to produce a pearl. It’s those pesky other nene that allow us to fly with less effort. It’s those sometimes irritating other Christians who provoke us to do good.
Let us not neglect to gather, to provoke one another to love and good deeds, and to encourage one another.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, and so although he wrote the sermon you just read, it sounded different when he said it.
What is the purpose of Christian gathering? To encourage love and good deeds. It’s that simple and that important.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the tenth chapter of the book of Hebrews (Hebrews 10:11-25).
Hebrews concentrates on theology. Specifically, Hebrews makes the case that in Jesus’ death and resurrection God’s forgiveness is fully accomplished, fully realized, fully obtained. There is no reason to continue older religious practices — ancient religious practices — that invited God’s forgiveness, that requested God’s love. In Jesus, the author of Hebrews says, we have obtained all the forgiveness we could ask for and more.
So Hebrews is not a terribly practical book. It is not oriented towards giving us advice about how to live a faithful life.
At the end of this section, however, much of which is concerned with Jesus granting us forgiveness, the author did invite us to some fairly practical things. The author invited us to consider how we might encourage one another to love and good deeds, and the author also advised that we not neglect to gather together as apparently some were staying apart.
Love and good deeds: these are staples of ancient religion. They go back to Moses and Abraham, and of course it was a central message of Jesus himself.
The gathering together, however, that is an interesting one. It reveals the purpose for which we gather together. We gather together so that we can encourage and support one another in the love and in the doing of good things. It’s harder to love people when they are at a distance, not just because of heartache, but also because of lack of knowledge, of lack of encounter, of lack of that special sharing between people who are dedicated to one another’s welfare.
Didn’t we, in the last four years, experience so much loss in not being able to gather together? And yes, gathering was risky, dangerous even, but in less risky times in gathering together we can encourage one another to love and to acts of mercy.
Christians have been struggling to do this for 2000 years. People of faith have been struggling to do it for millennia. So let us make it as easy upon ourselves as we can.
I invite you to our Sunday gatherings in person or, if you must ,on line. I invite you to be there so that we can encourage one another in love and deeds of mercy.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
We’ve taken a few steps since last week’s Gospel lesson, set in Jericho along the banks of the River Jordan. Jesus had climbed the slopes from there to the environs of Jerusalem. He entered the city in that great Palm Sunday parade. He’d come back to the Temple the next day and overturned the tables of the money changers.
Mark sets this story on the next day, Tuesday, which began with the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders challenging Jesus’ authority to do such things. That wasn’t a good start, and the conversation deteriorated from there. Representatives of various schools of thought as well as various places on the political spectrum tried to trap Jesus into a statement that would put him in legal jeopardy on the one hand or cost him the support of the crowds who’d cheered him on the other. Preferably both at the same time.
Those efforts had failed.
“One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’”
Up to this point in Mark’s Gospel, bad things have happened when Jerusalem scribes have been present. Jesus had his arguments with other religious leaders in Galilee, but when a group of scribes from Jerusalem showed up in chapter three, they accused him of being in league with demons. So you‘d expect another “gotcha” question from this man.
He didn’t ask one.
He asked a big question, for sure. Three centuries later, a rabbai named Simlai would count 613 mitvot or commandments in the Hebrew Bible. Most of those, obviously, amplify or provide detail of one or more of the Ten Commandments with which we’re familiar. To choose one within the ten, or within the 613? That’s a big question.
But he seems to have been interested in Jesus’ answer, not in setting Jesus a trap. At least I think so, in great part because, unlike his responses to the bulk of the challenges Jesus received in chapters eleven and twelve, Jesus answered the question. Sort of. He cheated a little.
He replied with two commandments.
Both were near-quotes from the Scriptures first century Jews held in common: the five books that begin our Old Testament, known then and now in Hebrew as Torah, or Law. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” comes from Deuteronomy 6. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” comes from Leviticus 19.
As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “This exchange reminds the observer that the good news as shared by Jesus was not a clean departure from Jewish law. Rather, it was an amplification of it.”
When the scribe wholeheartedly agreed, Jesus told him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Not far.
Jesus’ basic message, as Mark described it back in chapter one, was, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” In one sense, then, Jesus could have told anyone that they were not far from the reign of God. It had come near, it has come near, to everyone.
But I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think he had a much older idea of the reign of God in mind, a reign of God in which people live out the commandments. What’s the first step toward that?
Knowing how to get there. Love God. Love your neighbor.
That’s how we get there.
As Amy Lindeman Allen writes at PoliticalTheology.com, “The greatness of the love commandment lies not in its surpassing value over and against all of the other commandments of Jewish law but, rather, in its ability to hold up all the rest. It’s less about beating out all of the other candidates and more about helping them to do their jobs.”
Love of God is the foundation for the commandments against worshiping other gods, against worshiping idols, against making false promises in God’s name. Love of neighbor is the foundation of keeping the sabbath, of honoring parents, of the prohibitions against murder, adultery, theft, lying, and coveting. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor;” wrote the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome, “therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Love sounds simple, but exercising it affects everything we do, everything we say, everything we plan, everything we set aside. Love enacted requires patience, effort, resilience, and resources. Love made manifest may call for commitment, hardship, even sacrifice.
Love looks like Ruth.
It’s a funny thing. The word “love” appears only once in Ruth, toward the end of the story, which we’ll read next week. As the book begins, Ruth did not claim to love her mother-in-law. She did not say anything, in fact, about her motives. She said, “I will not leave you,” rather more poetically and emphatically than that. It must have been a hardship. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “I think it would be safe to say that Ruth’s pledge of fidelity is not made to a companion who is, at this point in the story, easy or fun to be around. Naomi is bereft, depleted, forlorn, and bitter. It’s possible that she’s suffering a full-blown crisis of faith, imagining that the God she thought she knew has withdrawn his love, and cursed her with unspeakable suffering.
“Ruth’s vow, then, is a vow of tenacity, fortitude, and sacrificial loyalty as much as it is a vow of affinity, affection, or ‘love’ as our culture might describe it. It is the vow of one grief-stricken, traumatized, and profoundly vulnerable woman to another.”
Or to put it another way: she was not far from the realm of God.
With the love that God has for us, love displayed to us so thoroughly in Jesus, we are never far from the realm of God. But we are closest to living the reign of God when we love God and one another. When we, to borrow Paul’s words to the Corinthians, show patience and kindness, when we act without envy, boastfulness, arrogance, or rudeness. When we restrain our irritability over not getting our own way, when we keep no record of wrongs, when we rejoice in the truth. When we bear all things, believe all thing, hope all things, endure all things…
Then we are not far from the realm of God.
Not far at all.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes from choice and sometimes from chance.
It is a representation of a painting on a wall of the Dialog Hotel Neuendettelsau. The “seven works of mercy” according to Matthew 25:34-46 and Tobit 1:17, are:
Three hundred years ago on the islands of Hawai’i, making a living was not easy. Fishing ran the risks of sudden storm or rogue waves. Kalo farming required backbreaking labor in the most congenial of soils, and even more when the soil was thin or the water scarce. Fruit may simply grow on trees, but retrieving it wasn’t easy.
Homelessness, however, couldn’t be said to exist. When people left their homes they had a lot of options for building a new hale for themselves. The materials stood in the forests, and very rarely would anyone turn up to say, “You can’t live here.”
Homelessness is a product of a civilization in which some people have access to land, and some do not.
Recently the United States Supreme Court upheld an ordinance of Grants Pass, Oregon, banning “camping” on public land by involuntarily homeless people regardless of the availability of shelter beds. Those who have no other place to go – which is basically the definition of homelessness – can be arrested and jailed. I suppose those people could leave Grants Pass, Oregon, but what if the neighboring communities have similar bans? How soon do the options become a single option: Go directly to jail?
These measures explicitly criminalize poverty.
In the opinion of these stone-hearted justices, the United States Constitution permits such an injustice. Mercifully, it does not require it. We must be better than the Constitution here in Hawai’i, and on Hawai’i Island. We must address the problems of overpriced housing, inadequate mental health resources, and overcrowded substance abuse programs.
The Supreme Court has shown us the way of cruelty. Let us take the way of compassion.
God is love, said John, and that means Jesus’ followers should love. Would that it were so.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of First John (1 John 4:7-21). If you’re familiar with this particular book of the Bible, this is also probably the section that you have been waiting for.
This is the place in the Scriptures where it says that God is love. Jesus didn’t say it. Moses didn’t say it. None of the prophets wrote it. The apostle Paul didn’t write it. Here it is in the First Letter of John.
John wrote that God is love to say that God loved us first, and because God loved us we also ought to love one another.
Loving one another is one of the two great themes in First John, the other being the importance of faith in Jesus. Jesus himself did have something to say about loving one another: He told his disciples to do precisely that. “That is how people will know you are my disciples,” he said, “if you love one another.”
How I wish that that were true in our present day.
All too often, however, people identify Christians not by their love, but by their hate, by their self-righteousness, by their judgment. All too often Christians are identified by what would make Jesus weep.
If you can do anything in this life to help at least one person realize that Christianity’s commitments are to love and compassion and care, then you will have done a great thing, partially because yes, it would be good for people to know that these are the Christian commitments — to love one another, to love the world — but also, of course, because you will have followed Jesus’ commandment. You will have loved someone else as Jesus loved you.
God loved us first. Let us love one another.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.
I’m afraid that “Shepherd’s Cornerstone” is a phrase that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Cornerstones are architectural features of buildings, buildings with foundations. Shepherds in the first century didn’t live in buildings with foundations, at least not very often.
Yet the two ideas come together, at least in my mind, in this passage from Acts. Ancient Israel routinely used “shepherd” as a metaphor for the responsibilities of civil and religious leadership. Look through the psalms and you’ll find, over and over again, “shepherd” used to explain the role of a monarch. In the 23rd Psalm, which we prayed through adapted words this morning, the writer described God’s sovereignty in the world as being like a shepherd.
In Acts 4, the senior shepherds of the Jerusalem Temple gathered together. Rulers, elders, scribes, and notably Luke named members of the high-priestly family: Annas, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander. They had gathered to consider the fate of Simon Peter and John the son of Zebedee.
Simon Peter introduced the other word in my odd phrase: “cornerstone.” It wasn’t original to him. Jesus spoke about the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone while arguing with the scribes and the chief priests in the Temple during the last few days before his arrest and crucifixion. It got them angry, because he’d clearly accused them of hindering God’s plans. I have no doubt that some of them were in the room again to hear Simon Peter repeat it. I don’t think it made them any happier to hear it a second time.
Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “These are not rank-and-file Jews who oppose, detain, and question Peter and John. They are the leaders of the temple and the Jewish nobles whom Rome entrusted with ruling and ensuring the peace in Judea. With the high priest atop the pyramid, they are the tiny percentage of the Judean population that possessed an enormous amount of power.”
Let me step back just a moment to explain why Peter and John were in this predicament. It had been at least two months, possibly more, since Jesus’ death and resurrection. The day of Pentecost had come along with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that had led Simon Peter to speak in public for the first time. After that, however, the group of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem stayed relatively quiet. They worshiped in the Temple. They shared meals with one another. They welcome new people into the church. Nobody in authority seemed to notice.
Then Peter and John went to the Temple to worship, and met a beggar who could not walk, being carried to a place where he could beg for his sustenance. Simon Peter told him, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And he did, praising God. People asked Peter to explain it, and he spoke of Jesus’ resurrection and his power to heal.
That’s what got them arrested.
I guess it was okay that they did a good thing for somebody, but they did it in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong theology. Do better next time.
D. Mark Davis writes in his blog, LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “This whole inquiry is rooted in the assumption that the ruling judges are looking down at powerless idiots. The irony is that the powerless idiots have something that the ruling judges don’t: The name of Jesus, whom these judges had rejected, but who has now returned with power. And the undeniable evidence against the judges is simply a man, who was once lame and is now walking.”
In other words, the leadership here has reverted to that most basic of assertions of power: “Because I said so.”
Mitzi J. Smith writes at Working Preacher, “Religious folks who have confused the power of position with the power of God are more likely to reject the power of God operating in others who lack similar position and rank (cf. 4:13), despite how God might use them. We should maintain some humility considering our fallibility, mortality or human condition no matter how high we might climb in institutions. Only God is infallible, inscrutable, and absolutely God.”
The cornerstone of our faith is one that’s often been rejected because it doesn’t look like it will hold the weight. We proclaim as Savior one who wouldn’t save himself. We proclaim as Judge one who endured unjust judgement. We proclaim as all-Powerful one who would not claim that power. Would you build a building on that? Would you build a program on that? Would you build a faith on that?
God would.
That’s the sticky part. God would. And has. And does.
Our cornerstone is a shepherd’s cornerstone, one based upon the role of caring, nurturing, and protecting. Caring, nurturing, and protecting not just human beings, but sheep, who are pretty annoying creatures who don’t have the sense that God gave a… well, something less sensible than a sheep.
While I grant you that human beings are much cleverer than sheep, our talent for getting ourselves into nonsensical situations outdoes anything any sheep has ever done. How do arguments escalate to fights? By the participants adding more energy to the argument as it goes back and forth. By the participants refusing to be the one who will back away. By the participants always being the one who is “right,” rather than the one who is loving.
You’d think that in larger groups we’d do better, but we don’t. So many wars start with provocations going back and forth until provocation has become full scale conflict. National pride is no more rational than individual pride. Given the number of people it kills, I’d have to call it less rational and more evil.
When you know where the provocations lead, why do them? Why?
Why do them when the Good Shepherd told us to love one another?
“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action,” wrote a later apostle, one we know as John but almost certainly not John the son of Zebedee who stood accused with Simon Peter that day. Nevertheless, they did precisely what that writer advised decades later when they extended love, offering healing in Jesus’ name to one who rejoiced in it. They extended love when they spoke to the people prepared to judge and condemn them that God had taken something rejected and made it important. They extended love when they simply said, a few sentences later, “we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).
Our cornerstone, frequently rejected, is the Shepherd’s cornerstone, the cornerstone of love, compassion, generosity, and courage. Our cornerstone, frequently rejected, looks weak to the world but strong to God. Our cornerstone, frequently rejected, is the Shepherd’s cornerstone, upon which we can build a beloved community.
Our cornerstone, frequently rejected, is Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the cornerstone, the Christ of God, the one who loved and commands us to love.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric sometimes omits things while preaching, and sometimes he adds things. Today he added more than he omitted.
