Easter
4; Yr. A, May 11, 2014
Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 peter
2:19-25; John 10:1-10
Sermon
preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
We
come together for a reason. Our Book
of Common Prayer says that in corporate
worship, we unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to
hear God’s Word, to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments.[1] We come together to form a communion, to
become one. My friend’s wife is a painter,
and one day she spoke about her painting in the context of worship. She told the group that she painted in
layers. First one color and then
another. First blue and then yellow on
top of it. From a distance, it looked
green, but if you looked at it up close, you cold see that it wasn’t really
green. It was still blue and
yellow. The colors had blended together
to form something new, something they could not be on their own, but each color
retained its own identity. Worship is
like that. We come together to become
one Body in Christ. We are transformed
as we walk in the door. If we think of
ourselves as unique colors, each painted on the palette of our worship, we each
participate in the transformation, and even as we are transformed as a whole we
retain our own individuality, our own color.
Every Sunday we become one Body, something we weren’t the week before, a
painting we cannot imagine ahead of time.
Together
we listen to scripture and sometimes, like today, we hear things that are all
too familiar and perhaps listening is a comfort, or maybe hearing something
familiar allows our minds to drift to other things. So I’m going to invite you to listen to these
readings in a different way, to hear them anew.
42 They devoted themselves to
the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the
prayers. 1The Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not want.
43 Awe came upon everyone,
because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 2 He
makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;
44 All who believed were
together and had all things in common; 3 he restores my soul. He leads
me in right paths for his name's sake.
45 they would sell their
possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. 4
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with
me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me
46 Day by day, as they spent
much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food
with glad and generous hearts, 5 You prepare a table before me in the
presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
47 praising God and having the
goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those
who were being saved. 6 Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell
in the house of the Lord my whole life long.
Isn’t
interesting how these words fit together, verse by verse. A communion of God’s written word saying
something to the communion of God’s incarnated Word. I usually associate the words from Acts with
how we are to live, and the 23rd Psalm is often read at someone’s
death. Together they say something about
both our beginning and our end. They are
both in God, just as all life is.
We
are to follow in the apostles teaching and fellowship. That’s not an easy task, especially if you
look at those apostles. An apostle is
one who is sent. 7Jesus called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them
authority over the unclean spirits. 8He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a
staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.[2] That’s how it reads in Mark’s
gospel. Go out and get rid of those
unclean spirits, and don’t take anything with you. Depend only on God.
1After this the Lord appointed
seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place
where he himself intended to go. 2He
said to them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;
therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. 3Go on your way. See, I am
sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. 4Carry no purse, no bag, no
sandals; and greet no one on the road. 9cure the sick who are there, and say to them, "The
kingdom of God has come near to you.'[3] That’s Luke’s version. Jesus is sending out 70 apostles, not
twelve. The Body is a little
larger. In Luke, those apostles are
almost like emissaries to lead the way, a foretaste of the thing to come. But whether the apostle is exorcist or
emissary, he is still instructed to go with few provisions, no bread, no bag, no
purse, no sandals.
Go
out on the road. Go ahead, risk your
life. Put your trust in God. Go out, don’t look back! If people don’t welcome you into their homes,
shake the dust from your feet and keep moving forward. In Acts, that’s the kind of people Luke says
we’re supposed to hang out with. Those
are the people whose company we are to keep and whose teaching we’re meant to
follow. The crazy ones, the ones who
actually went out from the safety of the church gathering; who went out from
the town into a world hostile to the traveler with a message that must have
sounded ludicrous to anyone who knew about the recent events in Jerusalem. Imagine
it. The King of the Jews has been
crucified! But we know he’s still alive! In
fact, we’ve seen him. The Kingdom of God is at hand! Rejoice and be
baptized! Yeah, right. They must have sounded like fools.
Christianity
still sounds like a fool’s errand even today.
People don’t come back from the dead.
That only happens in horror movies.
If the kingdom of God is at hand, why is poverty still such an issue,
and why is Rochester one of the five poorest cities in the country? If this is the Kingdom of God, why did we
just have another killing on Chili Avenue?
Why aren’t things looking any better than they are? Shouldn’t things be a bit more peaceful, a
bit more comfortable, a bit more heavenly? We’re still going out there in the midst of
wolves, aren’t we?
Fighting
for the rights of the disabled; advocating for funding and policies that
provide for families with young children; working to make sure everyone’s vote
is counted; helping to provide adequate health care to everyone in need;
helping our veteran’s find healing; addressing the needs of students with
disabilities; building stronger school communities; trying to help our city
government manage it’s resources well, and that’s just a smattering of the
kingdom work that’s going on in some of your vocations.
Mark
wrote most of his gospel in the present tense, a tense in Greek that is
ongoing. We’re always being sent. God’s Kingdom is always coming into being. For Luke, Jesus represented a defining moment
in history. In Jesus, we saw the Kingdom
of God embodied, and so in and through each of us, the Kingdom is continually
being built. It’s not a done deal until
the end of time, but in every moment the Kingdom is posed to break in. So we continue in the Apostles teaching and
fellowship, because if we try to live that teaching in our lives we discover
that without that fellowship, we have trouble staying out there where God needs us to be. We have trouble being apostles.
We
have to be willing to take some risks in order to paint the Kingdom picture. Staying in the safety and security of our own
Sunday fellowship isn’t the be all and end all of a life of faith. It’s the way station. It’s where we claim our life as creatures of
God; hear God’s commission; get a bite to eat and drink to sustain our
strength; seek companionship for the way, and move on out. Returning every week to break bread and be
communion again, to share stories of joy and challenge, to share in the bread
and wine, to be renewed by hope, and inspired by our fellowship… and then we go
out and do it all over again ... like fools for Christ. Worship feeds apostles for the Kingdom. It’s uniting
with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s Word, to offer
prayer and to celebrate the sacraments.[4] And then in the end, the deacon sends us all back
out into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit, to do the work we have
been given to do.
Amen
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