What can we say April 24? Easter 2

    Acts 5:27-32 portrays in a scene of social, political and religious conflict what the resurrected life looks like. Willie Jennings (in his terrific Acts commentary) eloquently portrays Gamaliel as “the quintessential compromised intellectual who reads history from the wrong side and politics from the sidelines.” He goes on to say he is an “exceptional,” an excellent man – so he’s looking for the divine in what is exceptional. No wonder he missed God showing up in the common, in the flesh.

   What determination could be more pertinent today than “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” With political ideology as our idol, our people do this all the time!

   Notice also that God exalted Jesus – but why? So we can get into heaven? No: “So he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins.” In our Gospel reading we stumble on this same dynamic: Jesus is risen, the Spirit is given – so forgiveness can start happening! We are forgiven, we forgive, forgiveness becomes the very air that we breathe. Correcting confusions about forgiveness matters in preaching. It’s not kiss and make up, it’s not letting bygone be bygones, it’s not saying Oh, it doesn’t really matter. It’s costly, daunting labor. Check out this talk I gave to my church trying to open up why and how forgiveness is a huge thing for us. The turnout was massive – indicating there is a real hunger to explore not just the idea but the real happening of forgiveness.

   Like the Gospel lection to come, where the disciples are locked up by choice but locked up all the same, here in Acts the apostles are locked up – setting God up to prove how “the power to incarcerate will be trumped by the power to free” (Jennings). God indeed is “accustomed to moving through locked doors.”

   Psalm 118:14-29. Such a great text. Feels so Jesus-y, so Christian-ish that it’s crucial to try to hear it in its original context before rushing centuries forward to Holy Week! Mitchell Dahood, in his quirky Psalms commentary linking everything to Ugaritic poetry, rightly points out the tenses in verse 17 should be past. It’s not “I shall not die, but live,” but “I didn’t die, I survived.” Preachers might invite our folks to ponder the mere surprise and gift of having made it thus far. ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far… This simply surviving as a cause of gratitude is at the heart of Frederick Buechner’s eloquent wisdom – which I’ll cite below after we look at Epistle and Gospel.

    The rejected stone becoming the corner can be read as who we are to be as the Body of Christ. 1 Peter 2 speaks of the church as “living stones.” And Paul clarifies that in the Body, it is the weakest member who is the most valuable. Do you have stories of a church, or your church, where some unlikely person becomes the most valuable to growth in compassion and joy? I think of a young girl with various disabilities, or a homeless guy who joined and then took on leadership in my very highly-educated and well-heeled church.

   Revelation 1:4-8. I preached on this for Christ the King back in November! Check out my sermon. We probed how Zeus frequently was spoke of similarly: Zeus was, is and will be. With Jesus it’s is (current reality first!), was, and is to come. It’s the coming that’s peculiar, unique, and saving. God, unlike Zeus, doesn’t remain aloof in the penthouse of some Olympian heaven, tossing down an occasional thunderbolt, but he came down. – my sermon from X the King?

   I also took a fresh approach to the Alpha & Omega. It’s the first and last, so comprehensive – but it’s also a different language. Jesus introduces a fresh way of thinking, talking, listening, requiring some re-training, practice, quite a few stumbles but then some startling new mode of communication and living.

   John 20:19-31 is always a fruitful Easter 2 text, and maybe especially in the pandemic setting, people locked indoors – and then Jesus breathes on them! My earlier blog on this text has lots of illustrative stuff, with Rachel Hollis, Graham Greene, Elie Wiesel, Walter Brueggemann, Simone Weil and Caravaggio!

   We can always ponder what we sing: “Crown him the Lord of love; behold his hands and side, those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” How striking that the scars remain – eternally. Jesus breathed on them! Notice afterward they don’t feel emotionally jazzed up! The gift of the Spirit (as we’d divine that) isn’t about how we feel. No: he breathes on them and seems clearly to be granting to them the power to forgive. The historic “power of the keys.” Don’t think this is a fossil from some guilt-ridden religious past. Our power, our opening to forgive, to invite forgiveness, is huge, and always will be.

   Doubts interest us with Thomas. We cherish them, and lionize him! But it’s a clinging to control, insisting I am the arbiter of truth! Of course, we can urge people to doubt their doubts. Thomas’s doubting wasn’t generalized intellectual questions about God, but simply if the risen, quite physical Jesus really is out and about.

   I’ve never tried it in a sermon, but reflecting on “Much more happened that didn’t make it into this Gospel” could be amazing. If you want your first “for example,” read chapter 21! Isn’t the whole history of the church itself the ongoing account of the other things Jesus did, does and even will be doing?

   OK, here’s the Buechner quote: “In one sense the past is dead and gone, but in another sense, it is not done with at all, or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere. A scrap of some song, a book we read as a child, a stretch of road we used to travel, an old photograph. Suddenly there it all is. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell. 

     We are all such escape artists. We are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except what really matters, except for what is going on inside our own skin. We chatter. We hold each other at bay. It is the same when we are alone. We turn on television, or find some chore that could easily wait. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. We get tired.

   But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened. Remembering means a deeper, slow kind of remembering, a searching and finding. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ goes the old spiritual – but we know it. We are to remember it. And the happiness we have seen, too – precious times, precious people, moments when we were better than we know how to be. 

     And then, we will find beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well. We have survived. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved people too much for their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I remember times I might have given up, but I didn’t. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far. A love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. We are never really alone.”

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   Check out my book on, not how to preach, but how to continue preaching, The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.