Washington Community Fellowship
Season of Easter 2017 – April 23 – May 28 (6 Sundays): Beyond the Easter story!
Easter 2, April 23, 2017
Scriptures:Acts 2:14a, 22-32; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
Sermon title: Choosing the right side/team
Preached by Del Glick, WCF pastor
In the movie, Boycott, about the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King Jr. and local civil rights leader E. D. Nixon are standing outside Nixon’s house as it burns to the ground. Civil rights leader Nixon knows that white supremacists are behind the arson but he also seems to know that they will go unpunished. Adding fuel to the fire, literally and figuratively, the fire department has arrived at the burning house but the white firefighters elect simply to lean against their trucks and look on white it burns.
As King stands beside Nixon, both of them helpless as the house goes up in flames, Nixon asks King how he can stick to his nonviolent principles. Or if he even should as he and his family are physically threatened and attacked by the powers opposing them. King doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, speaking slowing as though it pains him to do so, he quotes from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 39: “But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed but to those who have faith and are saved.”
King is remembered as a great leader, a great speaker, a man of great moral courage. It is worth remembering that he was also a man of faith, observes Disciples of Christ author Ayanna Johnson Watkins. King took his faith seriously and its role in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. King worked for civil rights because he believed that the rights and privileges of Americans should actually apply to all Americans but also because he believed in upholding the God-given dignity of blacks in America, even if whites and their accompanying power structure refused to acknowledge it. He hoped for a day when racism would be eradicated and the world would be safe for African Americans, safe for the poor, safe for everyone.
These last few years, months and weekshave felt like reliving the history of American racism and global discrimination in some twisted, condensed version. Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighbor who saw himself as the law; Michael Brown by a police officer who saw himself as a victim; both shooters went free without convictions, as fatal shooting of African Americans and other minorities continued. Syrian people died in their communities and died trying to get out as we watched on TV—the way we watched Rwanda and Bosnia and other horrific killing fields in recent years. The Pulse shooting targeted the club’s LGBTQ clients; the election rhetoric targeted women, Muslims, people of color and folks with disabilities.
These collective experiences take their toll. Many of us feel it in our bodies and souls: a sadness, a pain, a loss, a reopening of scarred places. We hear it in the words of our neighbors and friends; a sense of tragic loss, helplessness, fear and anger. Those of us who count ourselves as people of faith have the challenge of maintaining this identity while also managing all these feelings. We stand and stare at the burning places, wondering if we chose the right side, the right team.
The disciples of Jesus must have felt something similar in the hours and days after Jesus’ death; “beyond the Easter story” which we celebrated last Sunday! The gospel text for this Sunday, John 20:19-31, describes them hiding behind locked doors Easter evening “for fear of the Jews.” And this is after Mary Magdalene, The Apostle of the Apostles, proclaimed to them, “I have seen the Lord!” In their pervasive atmosphere of fright and shock, the disciples have not given much weight to Mary’s testimony.
As these disciples are trembling behind locked doors, they seem to be seriously questioning the wisdom of their decision three years earlier to follow this radical carpenter-turned-prophet. Despite the dramatic “the Lord is risen” proclamation, the male disciples still perceive Jesus as crucified, dead and buried in a tomb. They too must have been wondering if they chose the right side, the right team.
This wonderment is further played out “beyond the Easter story” in the next paragraph (vs. 24 and following). Most of us are familiar and feel badly about how “poor Thomas” has been depicted throughout the ages. He is the classic example of the old saying, “Make just ONE mistake and you’re labeled for life!” Or in Thomas’ case, labeled for something more like FOREVER! But honestly, would any of us be so different were we faced with what Thomas confronted? Probably not. We’d be skeptical too. After all, his fellow disciples were not asking Thomas to embrace something commonplace. We’re talking about the history-shattering truth of the resurrection here in John 20 “beyond the Easter story!” It is SUPPOSED to be an amazing, unique and a VERY HARD thing to believe.
So let’s stop pigeon-holing poor Thomas with the adjective “doubting” for saying exactly what we’d all say if someone came up to us three days after Michael Augsburger’s funeral or Ruth Frey’s memorial service and tell us they ran into these once-dead persons. Not one of would say, “Wow, that’s wonderful! Thanks for telling me!” No, we’d say, “Right!” I’ll believe that one when I see it!”
Thomas did too and it is wholly understandable. The notion that a dead person was back alive again was not exactly something you grabbed hold of and easily believed in a minute or two. So Thomas plays it safe but also then speculates aloud as to what it might take for him to believe this after all. As he talks, his rhetoric gets more and more exaggerated (verse 25, John 20). “My friends, I have to see with my own eyes the nail holes in his hands. No, tell you what, I need to touch those holes with my own finger. Better yet, I want to stick my whole hand right into his side where the sword pierced him!”
Thomas kept mounting up an ever-larger heap of evidence that he thought he would need to believe!
Of course, once he meets Jesus a week later (verse 26), all that evaporates. To paraphrase a traditional maxim, “if you don’t have faith, then there will never be evidence enough to convince you and if you do have faith, no evidence is needed. Without faith, no evidence is sufficient; with faith, no evidence is necessary.”
Jesus himself knows that faith is both a blessing and a miracle, claims Calvin Seminary preaching professor, ScottHoezee. That’s why he says in verse 29, “Have you believed because you have been seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!”In other words, while it was one thing for Thomas to believe with Jesus standing right in front of him, it would one day be quite another thing to believe without such undeniable physical proof standing in the same room.
So the gospel writer John seems confident that he has given us enough evidence for such faith to be born. That’s why he immediately follows this comment by Jesus with his own commentary beginning with verse 30. “Now listen friends. I have left out a ton of stories and details “beyond the Easter story!” Jesus said and did lots of other really amazing things that I just have not gotten around to even mentioning. But what I have given you is enough. Read it and believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and that through believing you may have life in his name!”
Now I don’t know about you but when I read how much John left out, there is a part of me that wants to cry out, “Tell me!” It’s like reading a story to a little child. If we skip or leave out the best parts, the child will call us on it!
There was so much more to say but John through the guidance of the Holy Spirit in writing the Jesus story seems convinced that he had said and written enough. Sometimes we may find ourselves wanting more but by faith we need to be satisfied with enough, which is exactly what our God in Christ gives us.
John 20:30-31 looks powerfully like the end of the gospel. Jesus’ ministry is summarized as John admits that he’s written down only a portion of what all Jesus said and did. In his words, John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book” and follows that up with the purpose statement for the whole gospel: “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
You can almost see the credits steaming on the screen as the words “The End” wraps up his gospel. But then comes the surprise . . . John writes another entire chapter about breakfast on the beach with Jesus and his disciples . . . it’s almost an though John finds it challenging to bring down the curtain on his gospel story for at the end of that chapter, John repeats himself but more dramatically, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if everyone of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written!”
It seems to be John’s way of reminding us that when he quits writing and we quit reading, what remains is for us to go out into all the world to tell the world, “We have seen the Lord!” To proclaim, like Thomas, that we have indeed have chosen the right team, the right side, for resurrected life is here for us to embrace, celebrate and share! We need to live into and “beyond the Easter story!”
The other two readings this morning reflect the impact the Easter story of the life of the disciple/apostle Peter. In Acts, just days and weeks, we hear Peter’s extensive sermon place the details and meaning of the resurrection in the historical and biblical context of salvation history. We all share, Peter claims, in the culpability for Jesus’ death on the cross. Yet Peter’s sermon isn’t primarily about human actions and cruelty. It’s about God from first to last and everywhere in between. Peter, in fact, spends far less time talking about what people did to Jesus than on what God did to, for and with Jesus. In other words, God chose Jesus to be the team, on the side which brought salvation and shalom into the world.
Later as the maturing apostle writes to the early churches, 1 Peter 1:3-9, it’s clear that we are seeing Peter’s celebration of the resurrection and its history-shattering reality. This was a concrete, tangible event to which Peter was an eyewitness. Given the shameful way Peter himself had acted following Jesus’ arrest, no one knew the transformative power of the grace of Easter better than Peter. No one knew better that Peter that he was choosing the right team, the right side! Peter sings out as it were, “Don’t forget our living hope. Don’t forget the good news that transforms everything! Remember the resurrection! Remember your baptism into Christ. Even though you have not seen him, love him and believe him! Following Jesus is choosing the right team, the right side!”
When Martin Luther King Jr quotes Hebrews in the story I shared earlier, we hear him saying that our faith is not meant to keep us from responding to the violence inflicted upon us. Our faith is the response to this violence. We feel the pain and sadness, even helplessness and loss. But we don’t let our feelings make us shrink back from our values. We don’t succumb to the fear that our opponents are stronger than we are. Instead, we believe and are saved. We believe that our God is strong, that what we stand for is true, that God is honored by our resistance to injustice, that God is pleased when we refuse to submit to fear and helplessness. This belief is our salvation.
The Apostle Peter unpacks this as the precious gift we have in faith. It is faith that allows us to persist through struggle, while at the same time the struggle tests and—if we allow it—refines our faith, making it stronger than before. Untested faith is not as valuable as faith that’s had to stand and stare at a burning home—without turning around and introducing yet more violence, more death, more hate and more loss into the world. Tested faith trains us to believe more in God’s ability to give us life than our enemies’ ability to extinguish it!
Tested faith, I believe, is what God will be looking for when it’s all said and done—not whether we won all the fights we entered but whether we could be found fighting faithfully for justice, truth, compassion and love beyond the Easter story! Whether we believe and have faith regardless if Jesus is standing in the room or not for without faith, no evidence is sufficient; with faith, no evidence is necessary.
Beyond the Easter story, on this side of the resurrection story, are you choosing the right team, the right side?