This week the sermon was borrowed and slightly abridged (with acknowledgement) from a different Peddie, my sister the Rev Dr Barbara Peddie (at that time on secondment to the Presbyterian Church of St Ninians in Christchurch)
(Thoughts on Acts 3: 12-19 and Luke 24: 36b-48)
We’re still in the season of Easter – the season of celebration. And we’re also in the season of autumn and endings. Later this month on ANZAC Day, much of this nation will remember the tragedies of war and celebrate the courage and commitment of many. Part of that remembering will include honouring those of our own church families who were courageous in their commitment to pacifism. Yes, Easter is the church’s season of celebration, but, just like those early disciples, we celebrate in our own context, with our own reminders of sorrow and hardship. Do you think those early followers never woke up in the mornings and said: ‘if only we could go and have breakfast with our friend on the shores of the lake.’? Do you think they had ceased to mourn despite their growing confidence in the good news of the gospel?
We read the stories about the first disciples announcing the good news, and we gradually come aware that we’re challenged to be about that same business of announcing and living the good news of the resurrection. Maybe it does when we come together on a Sunday morning. But why do we find it so hard to do beyond these doors?
We’re not even very good at celebrating Easter. We make much more of Christmas, that unashamedly pagan festival. We ‘do’ Christmas thoroughly, but Easter is another story. After all, we can’t have Easter without Good Friday, and there’s no getting around the realities of death and grief. We can get through Christmas without thinking of the realities of pregnancy and poverty and displacement, but we can’t get round the realities of death.
Our very secular society doesn’t make Easter any easier. Easter, like Christmas means ‘holiday’ –from work and school. It means ‘food’ – Easter buns dripping with butter and rather too much chocolate. Unlike some other denominations, we don’t hold all-night vigils. And we don’t even, all of us, feel that Easter and Christmas are the two great occasions in the year when we must be at church. Recently one of our Korean presbyters said to me: ‘Kiwis are so strange. I have 180 people on the parish roll, and there were only 21 at Church on Christmas morning’. I wonder how many he had on Easter Sunday? So – what is it about our Westernised society that makes celebrating resurrection so very challenging?
Some of it is, I think, because we live in a highly technological society. We carry with us the weight of the scientific discoveries that have changed our world view so greatly. It takes some very strange contortions of thinking to think of a world that is physically layered, with heaven, and God, out there somewhere, ‘beyond the deep blue sky’ – as one of my Sunday School choruses had it. We know about the galaxies, and the long history of the very rocks under our feet – and we know rather a lot about the mortality of our own bodies! It’s as if we know another story of creation, and we struggle with the stories of the resurrected Christ. Between us and the gospel writers lie 2000 years of mortality. Our dead do not return.
Perhaps this isn’t the way to read and experience the Easter stories. If we try to force the two worlds – that of the biblical narratives and that of our current knowledge into the same mould, we’re bound to come to grief. Somehow, we have to find ways to see the truths behind the stories in our sacred books, starting to realise they won’t be literal truths.
Those long-ago disciples weren’t primitive people. They may have been unsophisticated and without status in their own culture, but that culture was highly organized and highly intelligent. There’s nothing primitive about the Hebrew scriptures! We haven’t really made so very much progress in thinking since those days.
I don’t find it disconcerting that the evangelists gave varying accounts of the resurrection. You need a vocabulary to be able to share discoveries. Let me tell you a story about some children in Christchurch. There’s a Decile 1A primary school about 1 km from Brighton Beach. The children at that school come from a suburb with the lowest annual household income for our city, and they are so deprived of experience outside their small world, that the first thing the school has to do with new entrants is to extend their range of experience. Their principal took a group of new entrants to the beach. They literally did not have a word for sand. They had never seen it, never been to the beach, never paddled or picked up shells and seaweed. They had no words to describe their day. You need a vocabulary to be able to take an experience into yourself and make it part of your own life story.
It’s important to tell the stories. But – it’s also important to let the stories speak to us of the truth behind the words. Like a Native American storyteller who always prefaces his stories with the words: ‘I don’t know if this happened – but it’s a true story’, we can say of the resurrection narratives: ‘I don’t know if it happened like this, but it’s a true story.’
Something new happened at Easter, and the evangelists – and the disciples struggled to find the words for it. Apart from Mark, who simply picked up on the fact of the empty tomb and the women running from it in terror and amazement. (The longer ending of Mark’s gospel seems to be a précis of the stories from the other three Gospels!) When you think of it, terror and amazement would be the natural reaction. In the other accounts, there’s a thread running through several of the narratives, where Jesus’ friends don’t recognize him. Mary in the garden had to hear her name spoken: the two sad people trudging back to Emmaus held a long conversation with someone they thought was a stranger until he picked up a loaf of bread at their table and broke it. The friends out fishing talked with a stranger on the beach until he said and did something that brought earlier experiences to life again. It’s as if all of them were too preoccupied with their own grief and too anxious about their own future to be able to think of any other possibility or even to look out beyond themselves.
The disciples and the others gathered in Jerusalem after that Friday disaster had to sort out fact from fiction. What happened? Who can we believe? What comes next? (The same questions that we ask today?) They were immersed in chaos and confusion – fear for themselves – wondering who would be next to go, probably doubt about whether they had been taking the wrong path when they followed the man from Galilee, grief for a dead friend, confusion, suspicion, and the nagging question of what to do now. Their leader was dead and his body was missing. And, Luke says, in the midst of all this, Jesus showed up. What would you do?
It’s not surprising that they needed to be reassured. ‘Peace be with you’, Jesus said. Calm down, take it quietly, take a deep breath and concentrate. And put your fear to one side. And, Luke says, Jesus asks, in effect, ‘What’s for dinner?’ an overpoweringly ordinary question. It’s as if Luke is emphasizing the reality of the experience of the risen Christ. ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ as some say today. Get with it. We have no way of knowing what happened on a particular day in a particular city to a particular group of people. What we do know, is that whatever they experienced, shattered their mood of despair and sent them out into the streets and marketplaces to proclaim God’s new, here and now, kingdom.
We heard some of that in the reading from Acts. We need to put it into context – as Luke clearly expects us to do. In Acts 2, we have the event of Pentecost, which sent the disciples out filled with holy fire. In the opening scene of Acts 3 Peter and John heal a crippled beggar outside the temple’s Beautiful Gate. Naturally that brought the curious crowds around, and Peter got launched into his second sermon. This is the same Peter who, only a few days before had denied any knowledge of the man Jesus. In this sermon, Peter repeatedly uses the same Greek word for ‘rejected’ that he had used for that denial.
It’s quite a sermon that this supposedly uneducated fisherman delivers. We need to remember that this is Peter the Jew speaking to fellow Jews about Jesus, who was also a Jew. He is speaking a few days after a major Jewish festival to a Jewish crowd gathered in Solomon’s portico, along the east wall of the temple complex. Try to imagine yourselves as Jews listening to Peter. He’s one of you, and he’s arguing from your own scripture and tradition about one of your own about what it means truly to be Jewish – to be the true people of God. And then try to imagine how you would react.
Luke goes on to say that thousands believed. It was a crowd that had clamoured for Jesus to be crucified, and it was a crowd that now embraced the new belief in the power of faith in the name of the Messiah, God’s Holy One. Luke says ‘thousands believed.’ Luke is an adroit storyteller. It wasn’t the private refusal of Messiah’s gifts that got Jesus killed, but the public rejection of him before Pilate. Peter took the communal life seriously. As the church has always done, even when she gets it wrong. We belong to a community of faith, we don’t hug private beliefs to ourselves.
The challenge to us, in both the gospel account and in the story from Acts, is to take resurrection seriously – to take the challenge of new life seriously. At Easter, God proclaimed a new thing. The old patterns of life and death were broken. It’s like what happens when you turn a kaleidoscope. All the patterns change. After the Easter event, everything in life needed to be reviewed. If God has shattered the bonds of death, then all dying, no matter how tragic and no matter what the cause, is no longer the final word. It’s a totally new approach to the whole of life. And we humans instinctively don’t like totally new approaches to the whole of life. It’s frightening.
We often affirm that God never gives up on God’s people, and God will bring them home rejoicing. But – we would prefer that homecoming to be to something comfortable and familiar and comprehensible. Not to something that completely turns the familiar on its head.
We humans have always tried to limit God – to keep God under control. God should operate within the bounds we have set, and fit into our rituals, and be controlled by rules and regulations and religious practices and Parish Councils and Boards of Managers and Conference and Assembly. God should be under the control of human systems that say: ‘Do this and God will be pleased with you. Otherwise – look out!’
But the Resurrection changed that. God is free – free from religious systems, free to meet us on God’s terms. Jesus said: ‘The wind blows wherever it wishes; you hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. It is like that with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ When we look at the empty tomb, our deeper instinct tells us – even if we kick against the knowing – that any attempts we make to control God through religion are doomed. Our cherished traditions aren’t the last word. God has the last word. The last laugh, if you like. Christ is risen: God is free.
God is on the loose, and God is here and now. The Resurrection is God’s now. Even more than the Incarnation, it’s God with us in an entirely new way. There’s something in the Resurrection story that speaks of a death that isn’t accidental, but required a conscious decision to end what went before, and open the way to transformation. And we have to make that sort of decision – to end what went before, and commit ourselves to a new beginning.
It’s not easy. What communal sins do congregations hold on to, preferring the familiar round of guilt and relapse to the strenuous exercise of new life? How do we respond to challenges to the faith we grew up with? Do we turn our backs, even when the challenges come from God’s own messengers? Are we so afraid of getting things wrong that we ignore any messenger whose name is not in the Bible?
Or maybe some of us are so unfamiliar with the words of the old prophets that we’re not capable of recognizing God’s new prophets. And I’m fairly sure that in any congregation there will be some who like the church so well the way it is, that any newcomers will be seen as threats to the established family of faith. How would Peter’s sermon work on us today?
It’s never easy. But – we live and move in the knowledge that God moves with us. That love is stronger than hate, and that from the destruction of death, new life rises. That is God’s promise to us.
We are called to walk from the darkened hill
to the light-filled empty tomb.
We come seeking surprise and wonder
in the dawning light of Easter Day.
Let us go out with the risen Christ,
and take up the work of the kingdom.
Bless the Lord, O my soul. And bless God’s holy name. And may God bless each one of us and teach us to bless each other. Amen.
(As always, comments and discussion will be welcome.)
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