Sermon: Sunday, April 7, 2013: Second Sunday of Easter

Texts:  Acts 5:27-32  +  Psalm 150  +  Revelation 1:4-8  +  John 20:19-31

The preacher has some choices to make during the season of Easter, a season of 50 days, seven Sundays and then the festival of Pentecost.  You’ll have noticed that our readings are a little different than usual.  Instead of the first reading coming from Hebrew scripture, we’ve read a portion from the book of Acts, which is really an abbreviation for the book’s full name: the Acts of the Apostles.  The second reading came from the infrequently read book of Revelation; and the Gospel reading came from the Gospel of John, which doesn’t get a year to itself in our three-year cycle of readings, but instead gets read in every year during the high holidays and festival seasons.

Further, this pattern will hold throughout the season of Lent.  Each week for the next two months we’ll be reading from Acts, Revelation and the Gospel of John.  In Acts we’ll be following the story of the explosive growth of the church following the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  From Revelation we get a message of hope and life to the struggling churches of the first century written in a kind of code that is one part poetry to one part dream.  And in John’s gospel we will hear how Jesus came to those he loved and led following his resurrection to prepare them for the power of the Holy Spirit, with flashbacks to moments from his ministry in life that pointed ahead to his expectation that it would be us, the Church, that would continue his work.

If we had an extra hour each Sunday, I could preach on all three stories, and I know some of you think I’d love to give that a try, but I promise you I won’t.  So, I’ve made a decision to focus on one set of these readings throughout the fifty days of Easter, the story of the Church’s earliest days, the Acts of the Apostles.

Clearly this morning’s story has dropped us in the middle of some intense action.

When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in his name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” (Acts 5:27-28)

Here’s what you need to know:

The book of Acts begins with Jesus alive among the disciples after his resurrection, and the promise that God will send the Holy Spirit.  The disciples stick together in Jerusalem, waiting for that moment, and select Matthias to replace Judas in their inner circle of twelve.  Then, in a familiar story that we’ll return to at the end of this fifty day season, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the disciples at the festival of Pentecost and Peter preaches his first great sermon, at the end of which the scripture says, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)  And if that pattern sounds familiar to you, it should.  It is the pattern of worship, and this is the birth of the Church.

The disciples’ worship leads directly to action, which is the source of the trouble we read about in this morning’s portion.  In those early days of the church there was a fire burning in the hearts of the people such that it says,

They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.  And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:45-47)

So one day, as they were headed to the Temple for more of this intense communal fellowship, worship, prayer and praise, Peter and John come across a man who had been lame since birth, whose lot in life was to lay just outside the doors of the temple and beg for offerings from the people coming in and out of the Temple. You know who I’m talking about, the people we pass on the way to and from church, or the office, or the gym.  The ones crippled by disability, or war wounds, or mental illness, or addiction.  Going from soup kitchen to pantry. Living off the handouts of others.  This man sees Peter and John coming to worship and asks them for money, but they have none since all that they had was now being held in common by the community of believers, so they offer that instead.  Peter tells the man,

“Look at us.  I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And leaping up he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.  And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and recognized him as the one who sat at the [door of the Temple begging]. And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. (Acts 3:6-10)

Recognizing that the healing this man truly needed was not a life of ongoing dependence, but instead of unconditional welcome, Peter and John heal him by raising him up and bringing him inside the walls of the Temple — no longer unclean, inconvenient, embarrassing, or irritating.  Now one of them, a member, an equal, a brother.

And Peter, who had three times denied Jesus on the night of his betrayal now just can’t stop preaching.  With everyone looking at him in awe and wonder following the healing of the man born lame, Peter says,

“[People] of Israel, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk? … the faith that is through Jesus has given this man this perfect health in the presence of you all.” (Acts 3:12,16)

And this is what gets Peter arrested (the first time).  The powers that be thought that by killing Jesus on a cross, by making a public example of him, that they would silence the power of God being unleashed in the world, a power set loose for the sake of healing and reconciliation.  But, filled with God’s spirit, the church picked up right where Jesus had left off, and the power that had been contained in one man was now multiplying — loaves and fishes.  By the time Peter was thrown in prison, the community of the Church had already grown to five thousand people.

When they bring him to stand trial the next day, they ask him by whose authority and power he has worked this miracle, the same question so often directed at Jesus, and in reply Peter says,

“If we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead — by him this man is standing before you well.” (Acts 4:9-10)

And scripture says that the priests were astonished because these were “uneducated, common men.”  As though only they, in their long robes, could act as God’s agents in the world.  But, no, here were ordinary people, moved by the power and the presence of Christ to do extraordinary things.  Here were ordinary people, no longer content to see other ordinary people begging for food at the doors of the church, the end of the off ramp, the alley behind the store, inviting them to stand up, to come inside, to be a part of this new fellowship of people who shared everything in common and who were increasing in faith and in numbers day by day.

The Temple authorities want to know by whose authority these things are being done and Peter says,

“we are doing them in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who you killed, and whom God raised.”

And this is where things must have felt crazy to those in authority, this is why I love this story and chose to preach it over all the other options, because they thought they’d taken care of their Jesus problem.  But now there seemed to be a little Jesus in everyone who had known him, and even in those who — like us — had only come to know him through the stories and actions of his disciples.  They’d hung him on a cross and buried him in the ground, but there was more Jesus in the world now than ever before, so they tell Peter and John to stop teaching and preaching and healing.  To stop using that name: Jesus!

And Peter tells them,

“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)

Jesus had told them, “you will be my witnesses,” and now the apostles begin to understand the meaning and the power of the resurrection.  That seed once planted in the earth had begun to sprout.  That tree on which had hung the salvation of the world had begun to flower.  And now there would be no holding back.  Life was rising up from the ground, healing for those who’d been left outside the doors of the church, a new community for a new world.

I love this next part of the story.  After Peter and John were released from prison they returned to the company of the believers and they shared their account of what had happened.  Immediately the community begins to pray with them, and the scriptures record the words of their prayer in a form that suggests an early Christian hymn, so I take it that they sang as they prayed.  They prayed,

“And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus”  And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:29-31)

Don’t you know that’s why we’re hearing this morning, to pray for boldness?  Don’t you know that in the week since we last gathered, people in this room, people in our church, people throughout our city and across the world have been standing before the powers and principalities of the present moment and teaching and preaching in the name of Jesus, who is not dead but alive, in you and in me, for the sake of healing and reconciliation.  We are here this morning because we’ve all just come from one prison or another and we need to be fed with this Word, with this bread of life, not because we are so weak, but because we are so extraordinarily strong.  So strong, together, that we can hardly believe it.

God answers the community’s prayers for boldness by expanding their mission and ministry.

God answers prayers for boldness by expanding mission and ministry.

Though he’d been put in prison for preaching and teaching in Jesus’ name, and for healing one man born lame; now Peter and the disciples were performing more signs and wonders than the scriptures have space to individually record, so instead they just say,

And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, so that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them.  The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed. (Acts 5:14-16)

So Peter is put in prison again, to try to shut him up by shutting him in, but in the night the angels come and open the prison doors (though I happen to think that Peter preached to his captors and made converts of them, because when you’re filled with the power of God’s Holy Spirit, every prison becomes a place just waiting for God’s reconciliation to take hold).  The next morning, instead of finding him in his cell, they find Peter in the public square, again, preaching Jesus (because, of course, faith is public not private — which is why Peter went to the public square, and not back to his home).  And this is where we finally join up with the passage assigned for this morning.

Knowing that he has become too popular with the people, that they cannot have him taken by force, they bring Peter before the Council for questioning, reminding him that he’d been given strict orders not to teach in Jesus’ name, and Peter basically repeats what he’d already told them, that he and the community of the faithful now answer to and live their lives according to a higher authority.

People of God, we are all witnesses to what God has done.  We are all apostles with acts of our own too numerous to tell.  Baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, we are part of the great, ongoing uprising that is Christ’s insurrection — err, I mean, resurrection in, and from, and for the whole Earth.

Just outside our doors there are people begging for a little of the bread, a little of the community, a little of the life that we experience when we are together.

Why make them settle for a little?

Why not give them a lot.  A whole lot.

Why not take them by the hand in invite them to stand tall, to stand proud, to remember the dignity that is their birthright as children of God.  Why not bring them inside the temple to pray, and sing, and dance with us?

Brothers and sisters, the new life God wants for us is the new life God is creating through us.  We are here this morning to pray for boldness, because we know that God answers prayers for boldness with an ever and ever expanding mission and ministry.  We are here this morning because we know that when God’s Holy Spirit takes hold of the church, it is called to act.

Come, Holy Spirit, Come.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, June 3 2012 — The Holy Trinity, 1st Sunday after Pentecost

Texts:   Isaiah 6:1-8 and Psalm 29  •  Romans 8:12-17  •  John 3:1-17

Pastor Erik, 16, on summer tour with Nexus in Charleston, SC, circa 1989

When I was in high school, each summer — right around this time of year, in early June, just after school had let out, but before summer had kicked into full swing — the high school choir from my church would go on a choir tour.  We’d spend the spring putting together, choreographing and rehearsing a show and then we’d take it on the road.  We went to Texas one year, Tennessee another.  We even came here to Chicago once in the late 80s — maybe you’ve heard of us?  We we called “Nexus.”  We were sort of the 80s church-based equivalent of Glee.

The summer tour was the highlight of the year.  It was the thing that kept us all motivated to come to rehearsals each Wednesday night.  But tour wasn’t all about the concerts we’d do each evening, or the people we met in each of the stops along the way.  No, mainly, tour was all about what happened on the bus.

In order to transport 30 kids, 5 sponsors, 6 sets of risers, drums, guitars, and all the suitcases for all the singers and sponsors, you needed a tour bus.  But we were low-budget.  We weren’t traveling in the sort of luxury tour busses you see pulled up outside the Vic or the Riviera on a Friday night.  No, we traveled in used school busses, purchased by the church and repainted white and red with the name of our congregation on the side.  They were low tech.  They lacked air-conditioning.

It was on the bus that our group of 30 played out all our high school dramas.  We fell in love over the tops of stiff-backed chairs with green plastic upholstery.  We played I-Spy and 20 questions.  We told stories and jokes.  We flirted, we teased, we fought, we made up.  We were a society on the bus, we were a microcosm of the world.  We were popular and we were awkward.  We were studious and we were slackers.  We were fair-of-skin and we were be-speckled with pimples.

If we’re lucky, we’ve all had “summer tour” experiences in our lives.  Maybe it was a sports team that went to regionals, or a debate team that competed in the out-of-town tournaments.  Maybe it was a group of fraternity brothers or sorority sisters that shared a house (and a bathroom).  Maybe it’s the group of friends that goes to Vegas or rents a house on the beach.  Maybe it’s the group that gets together for breakfast once a week at the diner, or maybe it’s the people who gather on Friday nights to play poker or Scrabble.  Whatever the pretext for your grouping, it’s the people you share life with.

Life is meant to be shared, wouldn’t you agree?  Life isn’t really life if we isolate ourselves from the world, if we simply endure time spent in the company of others so that we can get back to being alone.  Sure, there are introverts and extroverts among us, we all have different needs for solitude and levels of tolerance for social situations.  Yet, even the most introverted of people finds some pleasure in human company of one sort or another, even if it is simply sitting close to one another as one reads a novel and the other other a newspaper.  There is joy that comes from being in community.

Biologists and sociologists would say that the human being is a social animal.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu talks about the African idea of ubuntu.  Roughly translated ubuntu means, “people are people through other people.”  It means that apart from community, there is no humanity.  It’s something we all forget in ways both big and small.  In our actions and our attitudes, in our foreign policies and in our household relationships, we can begin to treat each other like objects, like tools that exist simply to meet our individual needs.  The notion of ubuntu reminds us that it’s not so simple, that every human action has reactive consequences for the rest of us.  When a person remembers this, when a person lives in a way that respects her or his impact on the rest of us, they say that person has ubuntu.

One of the ways we talk about this theologically comes up today in the church’s observance of The Holy Trinity.  For the last half year we have traveled with Jesus, from the preparations for his birth during Advent through his passion and resurrection during the Three Days and Easter.  As the end of his earthly ministry drew near, Jesus promised his disciples that he would not leave them orphaned but that he would send an Advocate, the Spirit of truth.  We celebrating the sending of that Holy Spirit last week with the festival of Pentecost that brings to an end the fifty days of Easter.

Today we begin the second half of the church’s year, a season the church calls simply “Time after Pentecost” or “Ordinary Time.”  The sanctuary, which has been draped in blue, then white, then green, then purple, then white, then red will soon be dressed in the greens that symbolize growth in the life of faith throughout the summer and the fall.

But this season begins today with one last festival, a white day in the church’s calendar, the festival of the Holy Trinity.  The day is white like the robes traditionally worn for baptism, to remind us that in baptism we have entered into a new kind of life, the kind of life that can only be lived in community.

Paul’s letter to the church in Rome puts this to us so beautifully, combining not only the communal life of God — the Creator, the Beloved, and the Spirit — but also the ways we are drawn into this life with God when he writes,

When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

When we say, quoting Genesis, that humanity is made in the image and likeness of God, this is part of what we are saying as well — that God, who exists in the community of the the Parent, the Child and the Spirit, has created us for community as well.  That we are not only parents and children, but by the Spirit we are adopted into a family of being that includes everyone, everywhere.

This was the part that was always so hard for us to remember on the summer tour bus, which had a sort of predictable arc to its storyline.  After months of late night rehearsals we boarded the bus with lots of energy and excitement.  Seats were claimed with purses and pillows, with seniors always asserting their right to the prime seats in the back of the bus. The first few concerts would go well enough, but we didn’t really hit our stride until about half way through.  Early tour romances were quick to burn out, but provided plenty for the rest of us to talk about.  By halfway through, we had established a new way of relating to each other.  We were a unit.  Hours spent on the bus driving from Iowa to Ohio had forged a new identity, and our closeness came through in our performances.

Then it would start to unravel.  Friendships fell apart over jealousies.  Condescension devolved into bullying.  Things were said and done that were hard to forgive and the bus started to feel like a prison on wheels.  We lost our ubuntu and started living for ourselves, nursing hurt feelings and wounded pride.

You’ve probably seen what it looks like when teenagers have a big falling out with each other, when they lose their ubuntu.  It’s not pretty.  It’s even worse when adults do it though.  When we lose our ubuntu we have all sorts of ways of taking it out on each other.  Our cliques become more brutal than any school lunchroom or tour bus, as we sell each other into poverty and bomb each other into oblivion in the name of self-interest and self-defense.  Our ubuntu is so obscured that we lose track of our common humanity.  We need to start over.  We need to be reborn.

That is the case with Nicodemus, a leader among the Jews — caught between the demands of empire and the passionate new vision for humanity and all of creation taking the country by storm as the Jesus bus stops in one town after another.  He know in his gut that no one could do what Jesus was doing without God’s power and purpose on his side.  But he can’t imagine how to cross the distance between the ways things are and the way things are supposed to be.  He asks, “how can anyone be born after having grown old?”

Don’t we know this question all too well ourselves?  How can we start over at this age?  How can we become new people, now that we’ve already bought a house, or finished a degree, or raised a family?  How can we become new people when all we’ve ever known is this way of being, these passed down prejudices, these categories of us and them?

Jesus says the answer is love.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The only way our tour bus ever made it back to Des Moines in one piece was by the power of love.  Somewhere, out on the road together, we remembered that the God we were singing about each night in each of those churches was real, and so was that God’s love for us.  We were still young enough for our hearts to be open to the possibility of forgiveness, and repentance, and reconciliation.

As our church enters the second half of the year, the long green season of ordinary time, we are called to remember the white robes of our baptism that symbolize our adoption into the community of God — our Maker, our Savior, our Power.  It does not matter if we have grown tired and hopeless, if our have grown bitter and angry, if we have grown jealous and fearful.  In Christ Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God is making us new.  We are being born again, in and for and through one another.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, April 15, 2012: Second Sunday of Easter

Texts:  Acts 4:32-35  •   Psalm 133  •  1 John 1:1-2:2  •   John 20:19-31

I may never have been a Boy Scout, but I have gone camping and canoeing and backpacking with family and friends over the years and, based on those experiences, I’m going to share one piece of advice that I’m sure the scouts have heard plenty of times over the course of their scouting careers: stay together.

That is my advice to you today: stay together.

This advice seems fairly obvious and self-explanatory say, if you’re out in the wilderness and get lost.  The scouting websites I reviewed went so far as to say, never move out of eyesight or earshot of each other. You stay together for safety and to increase your chances of being found.  But what is the value of staying together in the everyday contexts of our lives?

Those who followed Jesus weren’t Boy Scouts either.  In fact, they weren’t all boys.  And, in the first days after the crucifixion and death of their leader, Jesus, they were in a state of crisis.  Just a few weeks earlier they’d rode into Jerusalem with Jesus, ready to see the world change before their eyes.  Then it did.

The teacher they loved had been betrayed by a member of their own fellowship and handed over to the Roman authorities.  He’d been set up for a death sentence by his own country-people, who’d alleged that he was committing treason against the empire by claiming to be a king.  Perhaps worst, as they looked back at what had just unfolded, he’d been abandoned by his own friends.  When the moment of crisis came, this troop did not stay together.  Instead, they split up, and the one they loved most ended up dead.

You can imagine the mood inside that locked up house, can’t you?  I suspect it was a pretty quiet place, each of the disciples reviewing in their minds what had happened, what had gone wrong.  Each of them replaying that moment when they had split off from the group and run for safety on their own, hoping not to get caught by the Temple authorities and nailed to a cross.

But, even in those early days of fear and crisis, they hadn’t all stuck together.  Mary Magdalene had slipped away to visit the tomb, perhaps to confirm one last time with her own eyes the unbelievable truth that Jesus was dead.  She’d arrived to find the tomb open, and went immediately to get Simon Peter and another of Jesus’ beloved disciples. After confirming that Jesus’ body wasn’t in the tomb, the men returned to their home.

How do we suppose the gathered disciples felt then?  Not only had they abandoned their teacher in his hour of need, but even after his death they’d been unable to safeguard his body.  I suspect they were not only afraid for their lives, but ashamed of themselves as well.  When Jesus had been alive and with them, they’d felt a new kind of life taking hold in them.  They’d been drawn together by the promise of a world transformed, but they’d also been scattered by the threats of the world as it is.

It is so hard to stay together in this world, as it is.  Some of the forces pulling us away from each other are so commonplace that they feel almost like natural law.  We grow up in a family, but we are pulled away from each other as we leave for work or school.  We begin to know ourselves as children, but we are pulled away from each other as we come to know ourselves as adults. How do we leave enough room in our relationships for those we love to grow and become themselves, and still stay together as families?

As we pull away, or are pulled away, from our families we find ourselves again in new communities of friends or co-workers.  We begin to recreate the families we’ve known as young people out of the people who now surround us.  But, almost as soon as we have our newly constructed families put together, they are torn apart by graduations, moves to new cities for new jobs or new relationships.  How do we invest ourselves fully in the people who come into our lives, friends who become family, and then watch them leave us?  How do we stay together in this age of frequent relocation?

For many people, the community of close knit friends is replaced by the conjoining of marriage.  Unable, or unwilling, or uninterested in staying put, we pin all our hopes and needs for community on one person, and we promise that at least we two will stay together as everyone else moves on to establish their new lives.  High divorce rates over the last century suggest that marriage is not the panacea to our problems with staying together.

For most of human history, people were born, grew up, married, raised a family, worked the land and died in the same place.  In some sense, these centripetal forces that work so hard to tear us apart are a relatively new phenomenon.  The move from rural centers of production to urban ones, the rising need for specialized education to stay competitive in the marketplace, advances in communication and transportation, have created new contexts in which it is harder and harder to stay put, to stay together.

Others of these forces though are very old.  Debt and poverty have always pulled families apart.  Whether we look at families torn apart by the shelter system after a wage-earner loses employment today, or families torn apart by poverty during reconstruction as younger generations moved north to find work, or families torn apart in biblical times by debt that required them to sell the rights to their own children’s labor, debt and poverty have made it incredibly difficult to stay together.

This is part of what makes the story told in the fourth chapter of Acts so amazing.  Far from the huddled band of disciples hiding behind the locked door in the days after Jesus’ death, the early church is described in the Acts of the Apostles as a community of radical solidarity.  They are people who are testifying to the power of the risen Lord in their lives precisely by the way they stay together.  The scriptures say that “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.”

Acts ties these things together, that powerful testimony and radical generosity go together.  It was not enough to simply say that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  It was not persuasive.  But, when people saw the kinds of transformed lives that led people to sell what they owned and share their wealth with the neediest among them, they began to believe that something truly amazing had happened.  That something new was alive in the world, and that the world as it was might finally be passing away to make room for something new. A new heaven and a new earth.  A new future here and now.

How did the community of Jesus followers, who in time came to be known as “Christians,” get from the fear of the locked house to the joy of the beloved community?

I think it happened, in part, because they stuck together.  Mary stayed by the tomb a little while longer after Peter and the beloved disciple returned home, and in those moments she experienced the living Lord who told her to return to his “brothers.”  He reminds her that this community of friends has become a family, and he sends her to be with them.  Only once they are together does Jesus appear among them, breathing peace and sending the Holy Spirit.  Even then, they aren’t all there, Thomas is still away and unable to believe what he hears.  This unbelief is no barrier to God. So, once again, when the community is together Jesus appears among them, and when Thomas sees the evidence of Jesus’ body, still wounded and still more alive, he comes to believe.

Much has been made of Thomas’ doubt, so much so that he is remembered as “doubting Thomas,” but let’s be fair — everyone in this story has doubts, just like you and I.  We doubt the story, we doubt God, but I think more than anything else, we doubt ourselves. We all know what it’s like to live inside the locked house, doubting that life could be any different than it is today.

What is your locked house?

Is it the dynamic between members of your family?  Is it your job?  Is it the community of friends you’ve grown to love, scattering to the four winds?  Is it your marriage?  Is it your heart?

Where in your life are you hiding, convinced that “the world as it is” is “the world as it will be?”  That nothing new could ever come to life?

Every life is filled with these kinds of crises.  If that isn’t true for you now, then perhaps it already has been.  If it hasn’t happened yet, just wait, it’s coming.  But, like our Boy Scouts have been taught, so we are reminded: stay together.  Help is on the way. God does not leave us alone in the locked houses of our lives, but finds us when we are gathered together.

This is why, as we gathered at the font this morning to baptize Aidan Morley Smith, we asked his parents to promise to live with him among God’s faithful people, and to bring him to the word of God and the holy supper.  Because we know that every life will have its share of locked doors, and we want to be there to share the burden.  We want to be the kinds of friends that are family.  We want to see and touch the wounds that will inevitably come his way so that we know how to care for them.  We want to stay together.

Sisters and brothers, so much of Christian faith seems tied up with belief.  You tell someone that you’re a Christian and they want to know if you believe all that stuff about miraculous births, and magical resurrections and sacraments being body and blood, and whatever.  Think on this: the very disciples who knew and followed Jesus while he was alive had trouble believing.  That didn’t bother God at all.  In the presence of doubt Jesus’ first words were, “peace be with you.”  Then he did whatever needed to be done to bring people to faith.  And all of this happened while they were together.

So, whether you are here this morning filled with fears and doubts, locked up in your house or in your heart; or you are here this morning filled with joy because your needs have been provided for and you are living, by the miracle of God’s grace, as proof of the beloved community, we are simply glad you’re here.  Because it is when we are together that we see the risen Lord, still wounded and still alive.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!