The power given us by the Holy Spirit is purposeful: it helps us promote peace, extend forgiveness, and renew life.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21), because this coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost is an older holiday than Christianity. It was celebrated in Judaism for millennia before Jesus’ followers gathered in some place in Jerusalem to observe the day. We know that they began in some place together. Perhaps later in the day they planned to go worship in the temple. We don’t know. What we do know was that whatever their plans were, they were disrupted.
There was the sound of a rush of a mighty wind. There was something that played above their heads that others later described as looking like tongues of fire. They came outside and began to speak to people about God’s deeds of power in Jesus. And when they did so, they spoke in languages that were not native to them, languages that until that day they had not spoken.
Pentecost became, for Christians, the holiday which celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit. And indeed it’s paired in the lectionary with the twentieth chapter of John (John 20:19-23), in which on the day of his resurrection, Jesus said to his followers, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
There is a lot that can be said and has been said and will be said about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the followers of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is literally the foundation of the church. We exist because the Holy Spirit gathers us and we continue to serve from the power that the Holy Spirit gives to us. But let’s be careful about what that power is.
When Jesus spoke to his disciples, he said to them, “Peace be with you.” So first of all, the power of the Holy Spirit is the power of peace.
Jesus also said, and later Peter would say in that sermon on Pentecost, the the power was the forgiveness of sins: not the power of condemnation, the power of restoration and belonging.
And it is the power of life and of resurrected life. The power of the Holy Spirit is what lifts us up when we are cast down, what gives us strength to continue doing what is good and right and true when we think we have run out. The power of the Holy Spirit is the power to take our bodies when we have laid them down at the end of our lives, pick them back up again in a grand resurrection, and restore us to one another and to God in the realm that is to come.
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.
Suffering is one of the great questions confronting religion – any religion. Christianity, it must be said, doesn’t have as close a focus on it as other faiths. Christianity has much clearer answers to the questions of sin – we are forgiven through Jesus Christ – and death – we are promised resurrection in Jesus Christ. Buddhism, in contrast, concentrates on suffering and offers a pathway out of Samsara, the loop of lives in which people suffer.
It isn’t our prioritized concern, but Christians experience suffering and they think about it. “Suffering is a major theme in 1 Peter,” writes Jennifer Kaalund at Working Preacher. “The word is mentioned twelve times in this short letter. This repetition makes it clear that the audience is experiencing difficult circumstances. And yet the writer wants to remind them that they are not alone in their suffering.”
Nobody is alone in suffering, you know. Suffering is one of the shared experiences of the human condition. We don’t suffer all the time, thank God. But we all know what it is from experiences of hunger and thirst, injury and illness, failure and disappointment, pain and fear, loss and grief.
The easiest way to understand suffering is that if you’re suffering, you’ve done something to bring it on. It’s easiest because, let’s face it, it’s so often true. My parents used to tell a story about a camping trip we took when I was quite young, maybe two or three years old. My mother had been cooking on a camp stove in a cast iron frying pan, and little me walked over and grasped the hot handle. I don’t remember anything about this, but apparently they had to get me to a doctor, which was awkward because we were on an island without one.
You know and I know that we’ve done comparable things with rather more knowledge of the consequences than little Eric not understanding about hot frying pans. We’ve known something was hot. We’ve known it was going to hurt – sometimes hurt more people than us – and for whatever reasons we came up with at the time, we reached out and grasped the handle.
We saw lots of examples of this during the pandemic, people disregarding precautions, avoiding vaccines, even courting illness with dreadful consequences. A number of folks noted, aghast, that we are going to have to retire the phrase “avoid it like the plague” because, it seems, fewer people than you’d think actively avoid the plague.
Often enough, however, the easy explanation that somebody suffers because they did something to deserve it is plain wrong. Illness, including pandemic-borne illness, happens. It just happens. It doesn’t need any human intervention, knowing or unknowing, to make people sick. I see a dermatologist twice a year because my skin is vulnerable to sunlight. What did I do to create that condition? I was born. That’s it. No further intervention was necessary. I’m not going to change it with exercise, diet, or medication. I can decrease the risk of skin illness, but I can’t change the basic vulnerability.
Random suffering isn’t satisfying. It can’t be. People like life to have meaning, and when suffering becomes part of life, it should be meaningful. The simple truth is that sometimes it isn’t. It’s just suffering.
Early Christianity had to deal with a further example of suffering, and that was the crucifixion of Jesus himself. It could not be explained that he had deserved it – that wouldn’t work. And it could not be called simply random. Jesus himself had said it was meaningful, even necessary to his work. As time went on, other early Christian leaders also began suffering, frequently, as Jesus had, at the hands of the authorities. That wasn’t how things were supposed to work in a properly ordered world.
The world, clearly, was not properly ordered.
Dr. Kaalund writes, “[Jesus’] crucifixion was the result of an attempt to transform oppressive systems, to assert the importance of the lives of marginalized people, indeed, to challenge a worldview that suffering of the many was necessary for the pleasure of a few… We share in Christ’s suffering when justice is denied, when righteousness is not realized, and when the conditions for peace are elusive. So the author of the letter reminds the audience that they should not be surprised when they are standing for righteousness, fighting for justice, and are pursuing peace that they are met with obstacles and challenges. Jesus, too, was challenged in this pursuit.”
Dr. Kaalund illustrates two more sources of suffering. The first comes from the deliberate actions of other people. Some of these people harm others from outside the law – we call them criminals, and we have an entire structure of codes, enforcement officers, and processes to determine responsibility and to deal with their actions. Their actions bring a lot of suffering.
Some of the people bringing suffering, however, operate inside the law. Those were the people inflicting the “fiery trial” on the original readers of this letter. They were magistrates, city councilors, governors, possibly even the Emperor himself if First Peter was written during the reign of Domitian. Undeserved suffering has been inflicted by governments countless times over the centuries, and it has probably done vastly more harm than the operations of criminals, because they’ve got a lot more resources to do it with. Remember that Jesus’ crucifixion was legal. Peter and Paul’s executions were legal. Martyr after martyr died with the full assent of the law.
Slavery was legal. Keeping women from voting was legal. The death penalty for gay and lesbian people is legal in seven UN member nations. The Holocaust was legal. The family separations of the first Trump administration were, as far as the courts have weighed in, legal. And the chaotic sweeps that have brought so much suffering to American cities have been, with some contested exceptions, legal. Legal, and by inflicting so much suffering, horribly wrong.
First Peter raises a further source of suffering: suffering as the result of doing what is good, and right, and true. That was the experience of those enduring the “fiery trial.” They were trying to follow the ways of Jesus, and like Jesus, they were suffering. As Valerie Nicolet writes at Working Preacher, “1 Peter reminds us that what is at stake in the sufferings of Christ-believers is not so much what they believed but what they did. Because they believed that Christ was Lord, and not Caesar, they strived to establish communities marked by love and solidarity rather than by hierarchy and a system of patronage and debt.”
First Peter invites us to rejoice in our sufferings, some of the most bizarre advice given us in religious literature. He could do this because so much of the suffering his readers experienced was of that last kind, related not to their mistakes or random chance or prejudice but to their own diligence in following Christ. Suffering can be an affirmation that one is doing the right thing, and that is a source of rejoicing.
But as Jimmy Hoke writes at Working Preacher, “Exceptionalized suffering lacks solidarity with all who suffer… A critical approach to this passage in light of Christianity’s power to inflict systemic suffering demands rethinking whose suffering counts. Instead of moralizing what and whose suffering counts, this requires asking what it means to roar with solidarity for all who suffer.”
Can we come to aid those who suffer randomly, or worse yet, for their own actions? Of course we can. My parents swooped me off to a doctor when I grasped that hot pan. It’s what we do for children. There’s no reason not to do it for adults.
But what about rejoicing? Do we rejoice within our sufferings if they’re random, or self-inflicted, or more related to something we can’t control about ourselves than actual virtue?
We can, I think, rejoice within our suffering if not because of our suffering, because we are never alone in our suffering. We are all beneath the mighty hand of God, or as the old song puts it, God’s got the whole world in his hand.
We don’t rejoice because it hurts. We rejoice because we have God with us. We rejoice because we have more strength, more confidence, more commitment, than we would have otherwise.
And we rejoice because we know that though our road has led to suffering, it leads beyond it to a better and brighter day. “…The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”
It’s a hope and a promise in which to rejoice.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric prepares a full text for his sermons, but he does make changes while preaching. The sermon as written and the sermon as presented are not identical.
The first readers of First Peter were experiencing suffering – some kind of official persecution. They were told not to be surprised, because the ways of Christ (generosity, humility, and compassion) threaten people with means, power, and self-righteousness.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about portions of chapter 4 and chapter 5 of First Peter (1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11). Our section begins with the author telling his readers not to wonder at the “fiery trial” that is taking place among them. Apparently the recipients were experiencing a wave of persecution.
Persecution for early Christians was intermittent. It was fairly rare for the entire Roman Empire to engage in persecution of Christians. But in any given province, the governor might institute some kind of program against this growing faith that the Romans neither understood nor trusted. In the earliest days of the Church, people could be in one place and be perfectly safe while in another place they might be openly pursued.
The question of suffering is one raised in a number of faiths and Christianity is not the only one. First Peter says that the explanation for at least some suffering is in doing what is right, in believing what is true, in following the one who is trustworthy. That isn’t always true. There is plenty of suffering that is, and I’m quite familiar with this from personal experience, self-inflicted. There is other suffering that is simply random. Things happen. And if there is a reason for it, we will not discern that in his lifetime.
But our author was concerned with suffering that was the result of following the ways of Jesus. The simple truth is that when we follow the ways of Jesus, there are some who will be threatened by it. Because the ways of Jesus call for generosity, and there are more than a few people of means that resist generosity with all they are being. And the way of Jesus calls for a setting aside pride and power, and there are people who are proud of their power and have no wish to let it go. The ways of Jesus call for compassion, and there are so many people in the world who vastly prefer to judge.
Is it any wonder that those who follow Jesus may find themselves suffering for it?
I can only echo these ancient words. Do the best you can to follow Jesus. Do the best you can to be generous and to be kind. Do the best you can to set aside your power. Do the best you can to face the consequences. Hopefully you will not be brought up in front of judges and tribunals as happened to all too many Christians over the centuries.
Hopefully, the only judge that you will stand before is the one who gave you the directions to do what you’ve done: Jesus, our Lord, our judge, and especially our Redeemer.
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.
In Acts 17, Paul and Silas had been traveling hard for a while. They’d made a few friends in Thessalonica, which is toward the north of the Greek peninsula, but they’d also found a good few enemies who had stirred up the authorities against them. They’d gone to a nearby community, Berea, and made some more friends. Unfortunately those same enemies decided they hadn’t made enough trouble, with the result that their friends put Paul on a boat and sent him south along the coast to the great ancient city of Athens.
According to Luke, the likely author of Acts of the Apostles, Paul didn’t think much of Athens. “He was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul was from Tarsus, a city at a number of cultural crossroads. The Jewish community he grew up in would have been minority amidst worshipers of Greek, Roman, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian deities. He’d been surrounded by idols all his life.
Well, he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t. He started to speak and argue, first in the synagogue (where folks would have shared at least some of his distress) and then in the public areas where the local philosophers liked to debate. They brought him to the Areopagus, the great square of news and discussion, and prepared to listen – and, I’m sure, to dispute.
Jeremy L. Williams doesn’t believe that Paul’s opening was all that conciliatory. He writes at Working Preacher, “Paul’s statement about the Athenians’ worship practices is certainly pejorative. It would not be unfair to translate his statement as saying that the Athenians are very superstitious (hōs deisidaimonesterous) in an unflattering way (Acts 17:22). They are so bad, to him, that they even worship what they do not know. He uses this as an entry point to launch his message.”
This is the same sort of behavior that led to Timothy insulting his judges beyond their tolerance in last week’s reading from Acts.
Most commentators read this opening differently from Dr. Wiliams, and Dr. Williams himself notes that however inauspicious the beginning, Paul’s sermon grew increasingly effective from there, even though he’d set a challenging task. He had set out to persuade them that a single Creator deity was concerned with human life and behavior, and had demonstrated that concern with resurrection from the dead. I’m not sure I can communicate just how strange that would have sounded to them. Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “By referring to Jesus’ resurrection and implying that all people will likewise be raised from the dead, Paul steers the Athenians toward a notion of communing with the Divine that does not square with their presuppositions. To a crowd interested in the immortality of the soul (and an accompanying contempt for bodies and the limitations they impose), Paul preaches about a God who resurrects bodies. It’s a difficult thing for the Athenians to hear as good news. Why would people want to keep their bodies? It strikes them as icky.”
It was a challenge. He did not entirely succeed. “Some scoffed,” it reads in the very next verse, but also “others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’” Some even joined Paul, founding the Christian community in Athens.
Paul had helped them make connections.
The first connection was within themselves. They had very different notions about the roles of gods and goddesses, about the nature of good and evil, about the relationship between different groups of people. Dr. Williams observes, “Paul’s message about the Unknown God does not deny the Athenians’ wisdom nor does it call for a destruction of their ways of knowing. It acknowledges that from one, God made every family (ethnos) of humans to inhabit the face of the whole earth (Acts 17:26).“
Paul helped them make connections between the things they already knew and the things he was offering to them as new insight. They didn’t have to give up all they knew. They didn’t have to give up the tools with which they learned. They were invited to use those ways of thinking to re-examine what they’d concluded in light of new information.
As you may have noted when trying to teach someone something new, that’s frequently a difficult leap to make. But if you harangue someone with “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!” that almost never goes better.
With Paul’s help, they made new connections.
Then they made new connections with Paul, and with one another. Luke even provides us with the names of two of them – Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris – probably because that man and woman were known in Christian circles. Dionysius and Damaris developed new relationships with this wandering preacher, with those who eventually rejoined him from Berea, with one another, and with those who later made a circle of friends into a growing community of faith.
They made connections within. They made connections with one another. I can only assume – but it’s a pretty good assumption – that they made new connections with God.
We are Paul’s heirs. We are the guides to connection for our generations. We are the ones who will help – or hinder – those who seek to learn, to connect, and to experience God.
“Our world, like theirs,” writes C. Clifton Black at Working Preacher, “is variously if sometimes stupidly religious. Now as then, Christianity faces attackers of all stripes: the sophisticated, the unthinking, and the powerful who are easily threatened. Anyone who considers idolatry dead in contemporary culture has not been paying attention to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, to Hollywood or Washington or Beijing.”
Or, I’d add, to those proclaiming various strains of Christianity, including but not limited to Christian nationalism and the prosperity gospel. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “At our worst, we Christians have isolated and insulated ourselves from our culture’s mainstream. We can be inward-looking, self-absorbed, self-important, and cloistered, instead of engaging people at our contemporary synagogue, agora or Areopagus… But at our best, Christians have followed Paul’s example of living, learning and sharing the gospel in the marketplace of ideas, in bars and board rooms as well as in basilicas, in university lecture halls as well as in church fellowship halls. In an outward, centrifugal movement modeled after Paul at the Areopagus, believers have engaged real people where they really live, work, and think, in order to gain a hearing for their ‘strange ideas’ about repentance, rebirth, and the resurrection.”
Should you find a spot near the Mo’oheau Bandstand and start preaching? I mean, if that’s where you’re called to, go ahead, but you may have noticed I don’t do that. Nor to Liliu’okalani Garden or Lincoln Park – though I have been known to join a march or demonstration downtown.
Where are you called to make connections?
For many of us, the first setting for relationships is our family – our siblings, cousins, and the extended ‘ohana of both kupuna and keiki. How do we help the people we love make a connection between something we both share as true, and something new that they, so far, haven’t accepted as true? How do we build the love between us into something that helps them find new understandings and act upon them?
Who can you help make a new connection?
Who can you help to a new relationship, one which involves them in a community? The obvious community to invite them into is this one – I mean, Jesus encouraged us to do just that two thousand years ago – but there are other communities that engage and support human beings as they find their full humanity. A service club? Go for it. An organization that relies on volunteers to do good things, like the Food Basket, Habitat for Humanity, HOPE Services, the Ku’ikahi Mediation Center, the Human Society. They’ll find work for you, and they’ll find connections for you, or for the person who needs connecting.
Join a musical ensemble. Audition for a play.
Who do you know who would benefit from those connections?
That’s probably a long list. Who are the first five? That’s more manageable. You can help five people make connections with other people, can’t you?
The goal, in the end, is to help people build their relationship with God – but you can’t skip directly there. It’s built on the connections we make in our brains, hearts, and souls. It’s built out of the connections we make with other human beings who affirm us in these understandings. It’s deepened when each of us take further steps toward the One in whom, as Paul quoted from a pagan Greek poet, “we live and move and have our being.”
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching from his prepared text. The sermon as preached differs from the sermon as prepared.
Philip Ruge-Jones writes at Working Preacher, “Back in the day, my seminary professors told us that our proclamation should recreate the effect in our own congregation that the Word had on its first hearers.” He goes on to suggest that the most faithful result of a sermon on the death of Stephen would be, in fact, that you do to me what Stephen’s audience did to him.
I’m pretty sure Dr. Ruge-Jones was joking.
You may be wondering why Stephen was executed at all. Who was he? Who were the people who covered their ears and with a loud shout rushed together against him?
Stephen was one of the first seven deacons, a position created in the Jerusalem church to distribute food among its members. That congregation had committed itself to sharing resources, and that meant that they purchased for everyone and then had to deliver it to everyone. Originally the apostles did all that work, but with the growth of the church and their desire to concentrate on speaking to new potential members, they expanded the leadership group and created this new role. The name “diakonos” (which we’ve rendered to “deacon” in English) was the word used for a table servant.
Stephen, at least, and one assumes his compatriots, didn’t just deliver food. He became well known for his words and “great wonders and signs.” This roused some in the city to formally charge him with blasphemy before the council of the Temple priests. His reply to their accusations was… Well, Stephen accused those sitting in judgment of participating in the murder of God’s prophets. “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”
Stephen found himself on a portion of his faith journey that had turned into a rough road. Up to this point, though the Jerusalem authorities had been concerned about the growing movement of Jesus-followers, they had restrained themselves from major actions, lest they find themselves opposing something inspired by God. With Stephen before them, the mood had changed. It’s worth asking whether Stephen could have expected anything else but a death sentence from them. Luke’s writing suggests, I think, that Stephen’s own words inflamed their hostility so much that they abandoned the judicial proceedings and degenerated into a mob. Jesus, before a court that probably included a fair number of the same people, had not been judged guilty of blasphemy, but brought to the Roman governor for trial as a rebel.
You can read this as Stephen deliberately – or at least foolishly – aggravating his judges to the point they would act against his life. Did Stephen have a death wish? Is that likely to be true of the Christian martyrs who adopted Stephen as the model for their conduct before court after court for the next two and a half centuries? I don’t think so.
What I see in the stories of Christian martyrs is a common theme of a line they would not cross, an action they would not take, a word they would not say, or a statement they would not disavow. They didn’t all share the same line, though many shared one, refusing to recant their faith during the centuries of intermittent Roman persecution. Others refused to wed non-Christians and died for it. Others refused to kill, and died for it.
It’s worth asking: what is the line you won’t cross? What is the truth you will not unsay? What is the falsehood you will not speak, though your life depends on it?
Keep in mind that that may never be tested, and please God it never is. Keep in mind as well that you may not know what it is until it is tested. I am quite sure that if you’d asked Dietrich Bonhoeffer if he’d die for the principle that the Church has to maintain its truth against the dictates of national power, he’d have said, “Perhaps, but that will never happen.” But it did happen.
Where is your line? What is your truth? What will you refuse to do though your life depend on it?
Amy Oden writes at Working Preacher, “The prophetic gaze does not shy away from injustice, or gloss over transgression. The prophetic gaze does not avoid the painful truth. However, its eye is NOT focused on the transgressors. This may be counterintuitive for many contemporary Christians.
“Whereas so much of our own prophetic speech today is focused on ‘them,’ whoever the political or theological opponents are, Stephen’s prophetic gaze is not on the transgressors. Rather, Stephen’s prophetic eye is on ‘the heavens’ or, we might say, ‘the kin-dom’ or ‘the reign of God’ or ‘God’s life here and now.’”
Where is God’s line? Where is God’s truth? What will you refuse to do because your relationship with God depends on it?
Stephen had seen the suffering of the people of Jerusalem. His first task was to see that people could eat – when you have that job, you’ll meet a lot of desperately hungry people. He knew their rough road.
His determination to bear witness to their suffering and their hope set him on a rough road of his own – arrest, trial, and execution.
At the last, he glimpsed a vision of the rough road’s destination, and held to his truth, praying that God forgive his executioners and committing his spirit to Jesus as Jesus had committed his spirit to God.
May God keep you from rough roads, but if you find yourself upon one, may you follow it with courage, faith, greatness of heart, and a vision of the comfort at the road’s end.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally. The sermon as prepared does not match the sermon as presented.
We know from experience that truth is not always obvious, and that plenty of people will try to deceive us. How did the Apostle Paul share his truth? By making connections.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the seventeenth chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 17:22-31): Luke’s account of the Apostle Paul’s speech in the Areopagus, one of the great public centers of the city of Athens.
Paul began his speech by commending the Athenians on their religious practice, on their devotion and dedication to religion and to the Spirit. Specifically, he commanded the fact that they had a shrine to an unknown God. In the rest of his speech, the Apostle attempted to make a connection between this unknown God that they worshiped, and the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ. He concluded his speech by saying that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was a confirmation of the love of this unknown God for all people.
This is one of the few extended evangelistic appeals that we find in the New Testament, which seems odd, but the New Testament was by and large, written by people who were already a part of the faith, for people who were already a part of the faith. That is true of the gospels. They were not written for neophytes, for people who were interested in Christianity. They were written for existing Christians to learn more about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Likewise, the letters were written in Paul’s case mostly to people who already knew, and even when he wrote to strangers, he was writing to members of Christian churches.
This is one of the few times that we hear the words of an early Christian being addressed to a pagan audience. And what did he do?
He met them where they were, and he tried to bring them along a path that led to where he was.
He believed it was important for them to learn these things, and he chose a way that was as likely or more likely to be successful than other means. He helped them make connections between things that they already knew, and things that he hoped they would come to know and believe.
I keep saying that there are things at the heart and foundation of Christianity, and I can’t help saying that because it’s true. One of those things is connection.
Connection in the sense of relationship: Paul was hoping to build actual person to person relations with people in Athens and to build a community of followers of Jesus. To do so, he helped them to make connections within their own lives, things that were familiar, things that were comprehensible, in order that they might move towards things they had not yet experienced, not yet heard about, things that, in the end, are pretty much indescribable, but nevertheless, leads towards making that connection, and again a connection of relationship, between those people and God.
May we find ourselves making those same connections: person to person, ourselves to things that we do not yet know, and most of all, may we find ourselves always connecting to our God, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you are thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
The death of Stephen in Acts 7 is hardly a happy story. Christianity is not always a straight and well-paved road.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the seventh chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 7:55-60), and it is not a happy story. Acts 7 describes the trial and then the execution of Stephen, one of the first deacons of the Christian Church.
While the deacons were selected and assigned to make sure that the members of that Jerusalem Church had enough to eat, it’s very clear that they rapidly had additional duties. Stephen, in particular, was noted for his preaching for declaring the story of Jesus around Jerusalem and saying what it meant for the people, for the faith, for the future.
That got him presented to the temple authorities, arrested, tried.
Most of Acts 7 consists of something we frequently call “The Sermon of Stephen, and it is not a speech designed to make the hearers happy. Stephen accused them and accused their ancestors of resisting the Holy Spirit of God by executing those who had spoken on God’s behalf. Not surprisingly, the judgment went against him. Stephen was dragged out of the city, and they threw rocks at him until he died.
As he lay there — and this is the part of the story that we will be reading on Sunday — as he lay there, he asked Jesus to receive his Spirit, and in a deliberate echo of what Jesus himself had said on the cross, he asked God’s forgiveness on those who were killing him.
The simple truth is that Christianity is not an easy road. It is not a level and graded path for us to follow. It is a winding road. It is a rutted road. It is one in which there are intersections that are not marked, and which way should we go?
Should Stephen have accused his judges in such inflammatory terms? Probably not.
But there was a truth to what he was saying. People in every age, including our own, resist the Holy Spirit of God. People in every age, including our own, set their own interests above those of the people around them. People in every age, including our own, act with cruelty, and with snap judgment, and with a disregard for the truths that they may hear.
Stephen died, yet he died with forgiveness on his lips. Stephen died, and he died with his faith in Jesus.
May we live with forgiveness on our lips. May we live with a sense of Jesus’ constant presence. And when the road does get severely rough, may we find Stephen’s courage and rejoice in Stephen’s faith.
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.
Chapters nine and ten do a lot of heavy lifting in the Gospel of John – that is, they are packed with event and import and tension and meaning. It’s not the most poetic writing in the Gospel – I think we have to say that “In the beginning was the Word” gets the poetry prize – but it is poetic. It’s got a lot of moving characters. John started with Jesus and his disciples and introduced a man who had been blind from birth, then brought in some of Jerusalem’s senior Pharisees and a gathering crowd. The healed man was questioned, his parents were questioned, Jesus was questioned.
As is usual in John’s Gospel, the story begins with a miraculous sign, continues through an extended discussion – which here is pretty much an argument – and leads to one of Jesus’ “I am” statements. Unusually for John’s Gospel, chapters nine and ten have one sign and at least two extended dialogues, but three “I am” statements.
Jesus said the first one before even performing the miraculous sign. “I am the light of the world,” he said, and then applied the healing mud to the man’s eyes. The second appears in the passage read just now: “I am the gate for the sheep.” That’s not so well known, though John Narruhn preached a great sermon about that a couple years ago and folks remembered it during Bible Study.
The third follows this passage right at the beginning of verse 11: “I am the good shepherd.”
That’s a lot of “I am” for one sign and a couple conversations. This passage is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Not everybody was up for it.
Jaime Clark-Soles writes at Working Preacher, “Here John showcases Jesus’ habit of conveying truth not propositionally, but poetically. Jesus carries on about sheepfolds, gates, thieves, sheep, and gatekeepers, strangers, and voices. After five verses he pauses and notes that they haven’t got any idea what he’s talking about (v. 6). So, what is an effective speaker to do at that point? Explain the figure of speech (paroimia)? Drop the use of metaphor? Apologize for using such elevated speech and dumb things down, put it all in simplistic terms? Maybe. But that’s certainly not what our Lord and Savior did. Rather, he again (v. 7, palin) throws out the same word-pictures. The whole Gospel of John is nothing if not a piling up of metaphors, figures of speech. How else are we to convey truth about God? What single image, what single word could suffice? Plain speech (parresia) is fine as far as it goes (see 16:26, 29) – but it can’t go far enough to ‘explain’ God.”
If you’re having trouble following, you’re in good company, because Jesus was trying to describe the indescribable, explain the unexplainable. I have a lot of sympathy. For the last couple weeks people have been saying to me, “You must be so proud about your daughter’s ordination.” I say yes, because I am.
“Proud,” however, is at one and the same time the right word and the wrong word. It’s too little a word to encompass all the love I have for Rebekah and her brother Brendan. It doesn’t quite include the satisfaction I have as a church leader to see a talented and capable person accepted into the ranks of leadership. It doesn’t begin to account for the fears I have for someone I love who will be disappointed many times by the likely failures of the church to fully appreciate her gifts, or that people will discount her for her gender, sexuality, her age, her disability, her ordination (yes, that counts against folks in some areas of life), or simply the fact that she’s blond. I’m her dad. I worry about those things.
There’s no word for all that. No one word. I just wrote 132 words and, you know what? Those didn’t do it, either.
So what can we tease out of all these words Jesus spoke in these ten verses of John?
The point of a sheepfold is to protect the lives of the sheep. Sheep can’t stay in an enclosure all the time – they’ll eat everything in sight pretty rapidly – but they’re safer from the overnight dangers in the sheepfold. It’s not perfect. Jesus warned of thieves and bandits, after all, some of whom trying to imitate a legitimate gatekeeper, and some of them climbing over the walls.
We’re familiar with that, aren’t we? We know the risks of burglars and of con artists, the ones who use threats of violence to extract things from us, and the ones who pretend to be someone trustworthy to tease our resources from us.
We know the suffering of people whose spouses or parents abuse them. We know the oppression of people whose governments decide that a group of people will not be protected, indeed will be abused, by the very ones who claim rightful authority. Christians have been an oppressed minority in some places at some times. The spectacle of Christians encouraging and participating in the abuse of people at the margins is a betrayal of everything Jesus taught and lived, and a moral injury to the Church.
Gatekeepers let sheep into the sheepfold, and out again to pasture. It’s a vital role. In the case of actual sheep, they don’t have the limbs to open a gate. Somebody has to do it for them. In the human world, plenty of people can function as gatekeepers, so the question really becomes: how do we know who to let in and let out? There’s an artist named David Hayward, a former pastor, whose work looks closely at this question, because let’s face it, the Church in many ages has been much better at closing the gates on people than opening them. In so much of Hayward’s art, the figure of Jesus embraces a sheep that has been rejected by the rest of the flock, who watch in confusion as Jesus comforts the one they discarded.
As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “’I am the gate.’ Not, ‘I am the wall, the barrier, the enclosure, the dividing line.’ Not, ‘I am that which separates, isolates, segregates, and incarcerates.’ I am the gate. The door. The opening. The passageway. The place where freedom begins.”
“The sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”
Who will we trust to admit us to a safe sheepfold, and who will we trust to open the gate to a fruitful pasture? One whose voice we know, or whose form we recognize, or whose familiar touch wakes us from our sleep. Last week I spoke of recognizing Jesus as the one who feeds us. This week that’s still true – the gate swings open to the grasslands where the sheep graze.
We recognize Jesus also as the one who protects us: protects us from sin by teaching us good ways, by setting an example to follow, and most of all by forgiving us when we fail to follow lessons or example. Jesus protects us from death by opening a new gate to life. Jesus protects us from evil by giving us resources to keep it from taking over our hearts. I wish I could say that Jesus protects us from the evil acts of others, but Christian history abounds with martyrs who suffered, and so may we. When we maintain our sense of grace and refuse to let evil into our spirits, Jesus stands with us.
We recognize Jesus as one who welcomes more and more into the flock, into the sacred community. In verse 16 of this chapter, he said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” We know the voice of the shepherd and the gatekeeper because it keeps calling new people to join us. If we were to close the gate and bar it, if we were to stand upon the walls and defend them against any trying to join us, if we were to declare ourselves the be-all and end-all of Christianity, well. We would not be growing or thriving, would we?
Most of all, we would have replaced Jesus’ voice of welcome with our voice of rejection. At that point, can we call ourselves followers of Jesus at all?
Every gate on this campus makes a sound when it moves. There’s the ringing clang when it closes and shuts, and when it’s closed, small children have a more difficult time before running out into traffic, and that’s a good thing. There’s a bit of a squeal when it opens, and when it’s opened, we come in to worship, to enjoy a meal, to play a game, to comfort a grieving friend, to learn something new, or to make some decisions about the future.
That’s a voice of Jesus I recognize. As I recognize it in our words of welcome, and our efforts to protect or comfort our needy neighbors. There’s the voice of Jesus. No stranger to us at all.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric writes his sermons in advance, but he makes changes while preaching. The prepared text does not match the sermon as preached.
The illustration is The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner, ca. 1918 – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art. Please see the Gallery’s Open Access Policy., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81324376.
Jesus compared himself to a shepherd, one whose sheep recognized, and one who knew all the names of the ones he cared for.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 10:1-10). This opening section leads toward one of the better known “I am” statements in John’s book, when Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd.”
Leading up to that, Jesus spoke about how sheep recognize their shepherd and how shepherds know the names of their sheep. “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus said.
Names were extraordinarily important in the ancient Middle Eastern world. Moses wanted to know God’s name. Adam gave names to the animals in the Garden of Eden. And Jesus was given a name which means salvation.
Names were important. Names still are important.
Someone who knows you is somebody who will remember your name. Somebody who values you will work to remember your name. Someone who loves you knows your name.
Jesus told those folks 2,000 years ago that he knew their names, that God knew their names. And through John, Jesus still speaks to us 2,000 years later to reassure us that God knows our names. God cares about us. God loves us.
That’s what I am 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 come to this story on the third Sunday of the Easter season. We’re in a “move on” kind of place. Jesus rose two weeks ago, after all. Last Sunday we heard about events a week later – that’s convenient timing, isn’t it? So we’re ready for the next part of the story.
And today, the dear editors of the Revised Common Lectionary have brought us right back to Easter morning when uncertainty, anxiety, and fear dominated the minds of Jesus’ disciples. The Rev. Barbara Messner captured it beautifully in her poem “You on the Road to Emmaus” on her BarbPoetPriest blog:
Sometimes all you can do is walk away: away from the crosses on a hill and a tomb whether empty or not, away from your failures as followers and the loss of your hope and purpose, away from overwhelming emotion, that sink hole of anger, grief and fear.
Rev. Barbara Messner
It’s worth remembering that, on Easter morning, Jesus’ closest friends didn’t expect his resurrection. The Gospel writers all report that Jesus had told them, not once but repeatedly, and that they simply didn’t get it. Every Easter account emphasizes what a deeply surprising event it was.
As we join Cleopas and his unnamed companion, they had left Jerusalem with an initial destination of Emmaus. As Katherine Shaner writes at Working Preacher, “Cleopas and his companion were likely very scared about their future. They had seen the brutality of which the Romans were capable. They were not the most immediate targets of this Roman cruelty, but they were attuned to the stories of those who were. They were probably trying to figure out what to do next.”
Emmaus probably wasn’t their ultimate goal. They may not have had one in mind. Just – get out of the city, away from the priests, away from the Romans.
Cleopas and his friend had stayed in Jerusalem long enough that morning to hear that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some other women (Luke wasn’t clear about how many) had found the tomb open and empty. They’d heard that two figures in white (angels?) had told the women Jesus was alive. They’d even heard that Simon Peter had visited the tomb himself, finding no angels but also no body of Jesus.
Frankly, the likeliest possibility was that the Romans had decided not to let Jesus rest in peace. Desecration of corpses was one of the options for humiliating a defeated foe or condemned rebel – which was how they regarded Jesus. Most of Jesus’ male disciples disregarded the women’s account of angels. They called it an “idle tale,” according to Luke.
All in all, Cleopas and his friend were taking the smart road away from the city where an active campaign against Jesus was likely to start taking in his followers, too.
And then they met Jesus.
Christians reading Luke have spent the last nearly two thousand years trying to understand why Jesus’ two disciples didn’t recognize him. Greg Carey offers at Working Preacher, “I find it more compelling to believe it is the disciples’ expectations that prevents their recognition. This is not the context they expected for an encounter with Jesus.” Michal Beth Dinkler writes, “What if the disciples cannot recognize Jesus because their opinions are already fully formed? Like all humans, their assumptions shape what they talk about, and what they talk about shapes what they see.”
Honestly, I’m not sure it makes a difference. Biblical writers often mention that recognizing the risen Jesus is harder than you’d think. Luke himself, in the next portion of this chapter, wrote that Jesus’ appearance to his gathered disciples terrified them. They thought he was a ghost. Mary Magdalene imagined he was a gardener. The Apostle Paul, felled to the ground by a bright light, had to ask, “Who are you, Lord?”
I think that’s our experience as well. Recognizing the risen Jesus isn’t easy. The world is complicated and quick-moving. People raise up all sorts of things as good and condemn other things as evil. There are theologies that assert that God directly commands some wars, and there are theologies that claim that God condemns all wars. There are theologies that say that wealth and power are signs of virtue, and there are theologies that say that God prefers the poor. There are theologies that say only a few will be received into God’s realm, and there are theologies that say that everyone will be welcomed into heaven.
With such a range and so many possibilities in between, how do we recognize the risen Jesus?
For hundreds of years, Christians have celebrated a triumphant Jesus. Western art has often shown Jesus trampling demons beneath his feet. John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens with an account of a mysterious Christ figure defeating the legions of Satan. The Emperor Constantine, the first to be baptized a Christian (just a few days before he died, but he was), reportedly carried a shield marked with the Chi Rho, the first two letters of Christ, into the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Later on Christian rulers and even religious leaders would go into battle bearing Christian symbols. Bishops eventually encouraged the Crusades, which brought so much death and suffering to the Middle East and poisoned relations between Muslims and Christians to this very day.
Triumphant Jesus seems very curious to me, given that he went to his death without resistance. Triumphant Jesus seems very curious to me, given that the word “triumph” appears only three times in the New Testament, and never in reference to military success. James used it to write, “Mercy triumphs over judgement.”
I think there’s a better possibility in Christ the healer. For Mark the Gospel writer, Jesus’ power to heal and willingness to heal marked him as the Anointed One. It’s worth observing again that in Mark, Jesus instructed those who had been healed to praise God for it and not himself. The point was their wellness, not Jesus’ own reputation. Far more than triumph, I think you’re more likely to find the risen Christ when healing has taken place.
Then there’s Christ the teacher. “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures,” Luke wrote. All four of the Gospel writers made sure to emphasize the power, the wisdom, and especially the truth of Jesus’ teachings. They worked to support them with Scripture, sometimes as Jesus had done, and sometimes because they’d found those Bible references themselves. As a child of a Galilean village, Jesus grew up in an environment in which proper religious practice was based on knowing the Scriptures, considering the different ways they might be interpreted, engaging in spirited discussion of different ways to act based upon them, and choosing what you do and how you live based on those learnings and conversations. Honestly, shouldn’t Cleopas and his friend have recognized him right there? That’s what they were used to. That’s what they’d been hearing Jesus do. They even wondered at how they’d missed it. “Were not our hearts burning within uswhile he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
That’s not what did it, though, was it?
Eric Barreto writes at Working Preacher, “For Luke, however, Jesus is most Jesus at a quotidian table, at an ordinary meal infused with significance because of the people gathered around the food. Jesus is there at this table but so also all the sinners and tax collectors with whom Jesus shared meals… So, it’s instructive that it’s not his teaching that open their eyes. It’s not his presence. It’s his sharing of bread with his friends. It’s his blessing of food. In this sharing of bread at an ordinary table, we catch a glimpse of Jesus’ transformative kingdom.”
The moment of recognition came when they were fed.
Our moment of recognition comes when we are fed.
Others’ moment of recognition comes when they are fed.
As Mahatma Ghandi said, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
I think it’s about more than the deep hunger of extreme poverty. I think that the setting of a meal, of a table, is one in which relationships get formed and strengthened – also, I grant you, it can be a place where arguments and conflicts get formed and aggravated. When we feed one another, we at least begin in a space of caring, of compassion, of love and sharing.
When Jesus broke the bread for his two not-so-observant friends that day, he broke through to their hearts. They knew their minds had been expanded. They knew their bodies would be satisfied. Now they knew also that the one who had done that was the One in whom they had hoped, alive again beyond hope, alive again beyond despair.
“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”
May we always recognize Jesus at the table, in the breaking of the bread.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally.
The image is The Supper at Emmaus by an Anonymous Genoese painter, active in the second half of the 17th-century – Acervo de Obras de Arte Europeia em Coleções Brasileiras (Plus Ultra): info; image, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30310751.
