Certain Truth for Uncertain Times
Acts 5:27-32
Much like spring, which lasted about 24 hours, Easter Sunday has come and gone. All that buildup through the 40 days of Lent, from the solemnity of Ash Wednesday, to the betrayal and broken promises of Maundy Thursday, to the sorrow of Good Friday, to the tension of Holy Saturday, culminated at long last with the joy of Easter Sunday and the empty tomb and the risen Christ. Alleluia!
And then came Monday. Back to reality. Back to the real world. Has anything truly changed? Is anything different? The headlines seem much the same, if not worse.
What about in your life? Has your life changed in any meaningful way? Are you happier? Holier? More filled with the Spirit? Have your relationships with family, friends, and neighbors improved? Do you feel different? If not, then wasn’t Easter just a superficial spiritual sugar high (not counting the literal sugar high of all the Peeps and Cadbury Eggs)? The problem with Easter Sunday is that it’s always followed by Monday.
This is why I feel the need to remind us that Easter is not merely a day but a season. If you look at the front of the bulletin, you’ll see that next to the date it says “The Second Sunday of Easter.” There are in fact seven Sundays of Easter. The Easter season begins on Easter Sunday and lasts all the way until Pentecost, which this year falls on June 8, making the Easter season even longer than Lent.
The Easter season is the story of the biblical book known as the Acts of the Apostles. All four Gospels end with Jesus appearing to the disciples in some way. But it’s the Book of Acts that then picks up the story of what followed after the risen Jesus appeared to Peter, James, John, and the other disciples. The Acts of the Apostles is the story of the early church. It’s the sequel to the Gospel of Luke because it was written by the same author. In Luke, the story moved inevitably toward Jerusalem, whereas in Acts the story begins in Jerusalem and moves out into the wider world.
During the Easter season, there are no readings from the Old Testament in the Revised Common Lectionary. In place of the Old Testament is the Book of Acts. Yet the Lectionary does preachers no favors by beginning the story of the church in Acts chapter 5. It’s like watching a two-hour movie but beginning 30 minutes in, after all the exposition has taken place. We’re left wondering, How did we get here? For example, the forceful and confident Peter we see here in Acts 5 seems a far cry from the Peter who three times had denied Jesus. How do we account for this transformation? We need to get our bearings.
That’s why before we delve into Acts 5, I want to start with the Lectionary’s Gospel reading for today, which is from John 20. In fact, this passage from John 20 is the Gospel reading for the second Sunday of Easter every year. It was the passage that I chose for the first sermon that I preached here two years ago on this very Sunday.
John 20:19-23 tells of what happened when the risen Jesus first returned to meet the disciples. He returns to find the disciples hiding behind a locked door. They clearly have not believed the report of his resurrection that they heard from Mary Magdalene. Why not, you may wonder? Let me underscore again a point that I made in last week’s Easter sermon—no one was expecting Jesus to be raised from the dead, certainly not the disciples. That’s why they’ve barricaded themselves inside the house. They just watched their teacher be crucified. They’re terrified that they might be next. When Mary Magdalene comes to them with this crazy tale about the empty tomb and her having encountered the risen Christ, they probably think that that she hallucinated the whole thing.
There is power in what we believe…resurrecting power.
The disciples are hiding because they’re afraid. They’re disoriented, disillusioned, and confused. They’re having a kind of collective existential crisis. The world as they understood it no longer exists. All their expectations for who they thought Jesus was and what they thought he would do died as surely as he did upon the cross. They thought that Jesus was leading them to victory against their Roman occupiers. They believed that he was going to Jerusalem to be crowned as king and that they would be his inner circle, his royal court, princes in waiting. The glory days of Israel were about to return!
And then in a flash, it was all gone. Jesus had washed their feet on Thursday night and by Friday afternoon he was dead, nailed to a Roman cross. Imagine what it would be like to have your whole world thrown into chaos and confusion. Your dreams crushed to dust. Your expectations burned to ash. Imagine the anxiety and the uncertainty that would produce.
We too are living in anxious and uncertain times. These past three months have seen an upheaval in this nation that has rippled throughout the world: mass firings throughout the Federal government; the elimination of virtually all aid to the world’s poor; fragmenting of our international alliances; people with legal standing to be here as graduate students, asylum seekers, or even citizens seized off the street, denied due process, and detained or even deported; economic policies that turn on a whim and then just as quickly turn back again.
The sheer amount of chaos and the pace at which it has been unleashed are disorienting and overwhelming. It’s enough to make you want to bunker down and lock the door. Maybe watch a bunch of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes mysteries on BritBox. That’s what I’ve been doing.
Like the disciples did after their world was thrown into upheaval with the crucifixion of Jesus, we also face a temptation to hide behind locked doors, to retreat from the changing world, to keep silent and out of sight and maybe pretend that none of this is really happening or that it will soon pass.
But no matter how thick the door or how strong the lock, no matter how dark the room, the light of God’s presence can and will enter as God wills. Into the fear and confusion that swirls among the disciples in that locked house walks the risen Jesus. You see, a locked door is no obstacle for one who has risen from the grave. He says to them, “Peace be with you.” He shows them the wounds in his hands and his side and says again, “Peace be with you.” Then he breathes on them, filling them with the Holy Spirit.
After this, everything changes. No, all the wrongs of the world aren’t suddenly righted. Rather, a change takes place within the disciples. Gone is the fear, the hesitation, the uncertainty. In place of their narrow vision of an earthly kingdom centered in Jerusalem, they receive a vision of the kingdom of God breaking into all the world. Rather than seeing in Jesus a crucified victim, in his resurrection he becomes their victorious Lord. Rather than a symbol of Roman terror, the cross becomes for them a symbol of a love that conquers even death. Rather than remaining silent out of fear, they now fearlessly raise their voices. Rather than locking themselves inside, now they are willing to be locked up for Christ.
When we catch up with Peter and the other disciples in the Acts passage (finally!), we learn that they have recently been locked up. Actually, Peter and John are repeat offenders because they were imprisoned earlier as well. When the disciples are miraculously freed from prison by the hand of God, they head straight for the temple and continue proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus, the very thing for which they were imprisoned in the first place!
The temple police quickly round up the disciples and bring them before the high priest, who is none too pleased. “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” The high priest is so enraged that he goes out of his way not even to say the name “Jesus.” “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name.”
But Peter is unbowed and unapologetic, answering, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” This is the same Peter who, following Jesus’ arrest, had denied having any association with him. What had once been Peter’s greatest fear—suffering the consequences for his association with Jesus—is something that he now willingly endures.
For Peter and for all of the disciples, because they now speak in one voice, this is an astounding, a miraculous transformation. And it is not of human origin. Peter and the other disciples do not dig deep within and find a courage that they didn’t know they possessed. They are given a power that now possesses them. They are given the Holy Spirit, and through the Spirit they are given the gift of faith in Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead. And they are empowered by the Sprit to become unashamed witnesses of God’s resurrecting power.
There is power in what we believe…resurrecting power. Through God’s resurrecting power we who were dead in sin have received forgiveness, and death itself has been defeated. No matter the state of the world or the state of your life, that is a truth of which we can be certain. That is the source and substance of our faith. And you do not come to this faith by accident. You have been chosen, as surely as Peter, James, and John were chosen. The Holy Spirit has chosen and empowered you to be a witness. And witnessing to the grace of Jesus Christ in an anxious and uncertain time like this is the calling of every disciple.