Easter 3B, 14 April 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Acts 3: 12-19. You Israelites.
- 1 John 3: 1-7. We should be called children of God, and that is what we are.
- Luke 24: 36b-48. And the psalms must be fulfilled.
God of hope, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
The Gospel of Luke is often viewed as kinder and gentler than the Gospel of John, when it comes to anti-Jewish or anti-Judean rhetoric about the life and death of Jesus. Written for Gentile audiences, Luke’s rhetoric seeks to prove Jesus as one who can stand up to and prevail against other Gentile deities or semi-deities, including Caesar. Luke insists that every claim made by Caesar was also true of Jesus, and even more so: miraculously born, son of God, Savior, God from God, Redeemer, Liberator, Prince of Peace.
If the writer of the Gospel of Luke stopped with volume one of his work, we wouldn’t have much record of the details of family-feud-like conflicts of the first generations between the small groups of Jesus-following Jews and large numbers of non-Jesus following Jews. The writer of Luke saves all of that for volume two, The Acts of the Apostles. It’s in Acts that Luke the Evangelist places anti-Israelite words in the mouths of Jesus’ friends who were, of course, all thoroughly Jewish. The results of Luke’s writing have been devastating and deadly to Jewish people at the hands of people who call themselves Christian. It was not Isrealites who killed Jesus. It was the Romans. And it’s Christians who have killed Jews in the millennia following Jesus’ death.
During Eastertide, the Church lectionary schedules readings from Acts which are chock-full of libelous anti-Jewish language. So even though Holy Week is over, we still have a mountain of work to do to grapple with the causes and effects of anti-Jewish rhetoric in our Christian scriptures. I’m always conflicted about whether we should read the passages out loud at all. I think we shouldn’t, but if we never hear them, it’s too easy to not even know they are there. One result of not reading them is to effectively cede them to those who will not preach against them at all. Although I will tell you, next week when Rabbi Shire is with us as our preacher, we will not be reading the appointed passage from Acts in worship, because preaching against anti-Jewish texts is not his work to do, but ours.
Christians have a moral imperative to make clear that the Book of Acts demonstrates that the Church is inextricably tied to God’s chosen people Israel rather than serving as a pretext for our separation from the people who first taught us to look for the Messiah of God. You know, there’s a growing body of evidence that Christians and Jews didn’t fully separate before the fifth century of the Common Era when Christianity had gotten in tight with the corrupting military might of the Roman Empire. No matter when the distinctions developed, though, we must be clear that Israel’s story is not subsumed or superseded by Christianity’s story. Christianity did not replace Judaism, just as Islam did not replace Christianity or Judaism.[1] We are like siblings or cousins whose sacred stories are not the same, but whose core values and teachings are very similar, and whose histories are woven together, for better and for worse. That’s not a hard argument to make from this pulpit; but still, I can never leave it unsaid. As a Church we must continue to “repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” [2] Customarily, we do not say a corporate confession in joyful Eastertide liturgies, but sometimes I think we should.
Early Jesus followers interpreted their Holy Scriptures (the Torah, Prophets, and Writings) through the lens of their experiences after Jesus’ senseless death. They had experiences of Jesus’ uprising after his death, which is another way to translate the word resurrection. I say experiences, because there were many stories about the resurrection of Jesus. Some stories were written down, and some of those have survived. Not only are none of them the same, some aren’t even compatible! The only thing clear to me is while these early writers struggled to describe or define what resurrection meant, it most often involved sharing food. The power of love stronger than death was most evident when fish and bread were shared with strangers in remembrance or honor of Jesus. Sadly, (for me, anyway) broiled fish has been dropped from the Eucharistic menu!
Our Gospel passage this morning is from the end of the sensually evocative Emmaus story. Just before this passage, a stranger had eaten a meal with the two who had invited him to join them after their conversation on their walk to Emmaus. They didn’t recognize Jesus until he took a loaf of bread, blessed it, broke it into pieces and gave it to them. As soon as they recognized him, he disappeared from their sight. A very short time later, here’s a still-hungry Jesus asking for and then eating a piece of broiled fish. I can almost smell it, can you? Here is Jesus in the flesh, immediately recognizable to the disciples (but presumed to be a spirit), absolutely famished! And you can almost hear the argument that this account is answering. Jesus wasn’t really resurrected; his followers were just seeing things, apparitions.
This story answered that argument with an offer to see and touch the marks where the nails had been, and a request for food then consumed in their presence. See, hear, touch, smell, taste! These are the strongest possible images of embodied reality in response to accusations of idle tales. This might seem impossible to us. The story goes that it seemed impossible to them, too. Jesus’ earliest followers were confused and dubious. What I think they learned over time was what I have taught you to say, just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. [3] As far as I can tell, the writers of all of our scriptures, first and second testaments, had far less interest in the factual, objective, and literal than in new discovery, metaphor, and deep meaning, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Revelation to John. The question our scriptures urge us to ask is not, “How did this happen?” but “How is this true?”
What might be true about this story of friends of Jesus, sticking together after his most gruesome and shameful death? I imagine them talking about how their lives had been changed by him, how their lives were continuing to be changed by him even after he died. They had been fed by Jesus and had witnessed him feeding the multitudes; and now they were being coaxed into doing the feeding. They were realizing that their minds were being opened to new understandings of old stories and old songs. Mark Davis translates the Greek here: “He made open-minded their mind to the like-mindedness of the writings” (or scriptures). [4] Having had their minds opened, they were seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting things in ways they never noticed before. Here is a story of folks coming to an understanding that it was now up to them to witness to the redemptive and palpable power of Love – not just to and for themselves, but to and for all the nations, all the peoples. So resurrection is an experience that is so powerful it can be experienced in the body; it often involves feeding others; it is mind-opening, mind-expanding; it involves repenting – turning around toward the Divine, toward Love; it involves forgiveness of sins; and going out to spread the Word with senses fully engaged to fulfill the Torah, fulfill the prophets, fulfill the psalms! What I love about the idea of fulfilling the psalms is that they are songs of both lament and celebration. We are called to hold both, to sing both, to fulfill both.
It’s arguably irrational to believe that the Risen Lord appeared to Jesus’ followers, and it’s probably more than a little bit crazy to believe that the Risen Lord appears in the turbulence of our own lives. But let’s not get so preoccupied or suspicious, or despairing, or too busy to actually recognize the palpable presence of the Redeeming Urge of the Divine, the Christ, in our post-modern world of fact and matter. (Hopefully we have learned by now that objectivity is a mirage; it’s a fiction.) It’s more than a little bit crazy to lean into mystery, meaning, and relationship with their associated risks and attendant pitfalls but in the midst of life and death, mystery, meaning, and relationship matter most. [5] And we can learn to know ways in which this story is true if we pay attention to our own experiences of life after death with all our senses.
Albert Einstein once said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is mystery. Discovering and marveling in deep truth, startling beauty, confounding mystery, also known as resurrection is not the end of the story, of course. The experience of the Risen Lord is never meant to be a private gift or a purely personal experience. The command to go and tell is explicit in so many places, and it is clearly implicit in this morning’s texts. In case we’re not entirely sure what to tell, Jesus explains in Luke, “That repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in the name of the Christ to all nations…being witnesses of the power of love.” It’s always more about beloving than it is about believing. It’s about belonging in Love.
When we get stuck and beloving is too difficult, there are things we can do, steps that we can take. Last week one of my spiritual guides, The Rev. Lisa Cressman wrote, “Even when we can’t find a way forward, we can still: write a thank you note; offer a small act of kindness to someone nearby; …pray for someone you don’t want to pray for; forgive someone (maybe yourself); extend generous assumptions that people are doing the best they can.” In other words, we are being called to go out and live in the love of God. Live in a way that draws others to Love – love that casts out fear and love that casts out sin. We already have everything we need to behold the redeeming work that Love is capable of doing. It is up to us. It is up to us to be witnesses to the truth of the power of Love again and again – to all peoples. Let’s recommit ourselves to bear witness to the goodness of Love with sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste!
- William Willimon, “Acts,” in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1988), p. 89.
- “Confession of Sin”, Morning & Evening Prayer section, Enriching Our Worship (NY: Church Publishing: 1998), p. 56. Available online.
- Paraphrase of a line attributed to contemporary novelist Tim O’Brien.
- See Mark Davis’s translation blog: Leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com.
- Susan R. Andrews, phrases from “Holy Heartburn”, Christian Century, April 7, 1999.