Emphasis Preaching Journal

Three weeks after Easter, the "Fourth Sunday of Easter," ought to be a time in which the glow of Easter morning, the odors of the garden, the bread of the upper room, the ecstasy of being around in the face of divine disclosure ought to have kept its sway.

Not so: almost immediately, for all the living hope and holy awe, for all the mutual support and gladness of heart, the disciples get reintroduced to the real world. Often this takes the shape of being alert to outsiders who would deceive them, would tear apart their communities. At other times it seems as if civil authorities are persecuting them. Certainly they are religious deluders and challengers.

What this all amounts to: Easter and the preaching of the resurrection is not a one-shot venture. The language, these weeks, about being "born anew" to a living hope does not imply that a single drama of a life can remain in the back of the mind and does not need regular replenishment and reinforcement.

Christian ethics follow Christian followership. While the writers did not picture Christians as world-beaters among the empires, they did not underestimate the potential power of those whose glad and generous hearts and ways bound them together. One of their main acts was to preach conversion and repentance, to witness to the power of the resurrection. They evangelized. But evangelization did not mean just recruiting numbers. It meant embodying the resurrected life. Jesus was gone. The Spirit was here. Henceforth those who, unlike Thomas, had not seen but yet had believed were to take over and remain models -- even as they are in our time.

Grist For The Mill

Acts 2:42-47

"Awe came upon everyone." Let's talk about awe. Late twentieth century American religion has plenty of room for dazzle but little for awe. Rudolf Otto, who wrote the great book The Idea of the Holy, located it in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a tremendous "numinous" mystery that attracts and engrosses us. Thus: "Take the shoes off your feet, for the ground on which you are standing is holy ground." One senses awe upon entering a great cathedral, whose dimension and aura overwhelm. Or recognizes awe while watching or experiencing childbirth.

What good is awe? Some write against it: awe "reduces" me and I am supposed to have self-esteem. Or awe "occupies" me and I should be noticing other things, other people. Or awe is "esthetic," of no more social importance than whether I get roused by Mahler's Third or rap.

All these are based on misunderstandings of what awe can do. The disciples who encountered the risen Jesus were filled with awe and thus inspired to action. When I am awed I have met the Other who gives me perspective. I can then say good-bye, without tears, to the old self to which I had been clinging. So, after Easter, "awe came upon everyone," because they saw signs and wonders. They engaged in social experiment, momentary socialism that did not work but a judgment on mere selfish individualism.

Awe inspired them to gather for breaking bread, eating with "glad and generous hearts" -- a necessary corollary, and "having the goodwill of all the people." The idyllic portrait is a rare one; most of the time the unawed early Christians took their eye off the resurrected Jesus and turned dull. But when they had the right focus, words like "glad" and "generous" characterized them.

1 Peter 2:19-25

Those who think that Christian faith is supposed to be an instant and complete problem-solver have not read the later chapters of the New Testament or early Christian history. The glimpses we get in 1 Peter, for example, tell us that the glad and good and generous people alienated many around them. There was some sort of persecution going on. Suffering resulted. 1 Peter became a manual, then, for living in a world of people who rejected the resurrection and despised the believers in the resurrection. We do know that some of the ancients thought Christian gatherings, held in awe-full secrecy, were conspiracies. The writer urges them to respect civil authority, so something was going on on that front.

Not everything we would like to see addressed gets addressed in these lines. It would be more refreshing to hear that the resurrection meant the emancipation of slaves, but slavery still seems to be taken for granted. Contemporary Christian feminists would not want this chapter to be their last word. But if people are Christian, they are likely to take inspiration from the way this letter lifts people out of self-concern and identifies them with Jesus and his other-concern.

This Sunday used to be called "Good Shepherd" Sunday, for reasons made clear at the end. "You were going astray," but the wayward had now been returned to the shepherd, the guardian of souls. Whoever knows sheep well may not like to be compared to them, dumb and plodding as they are. But biblical language gives reason for biblically-minded people to identify with ex-strayers who are now guarded in a world that needs guardians.

John 10:1-10

That Jesus is the Good Shepherd is a notion that comes with the territory of faith. Often overlooked is another metaphor John's gospel connects with its central figure. "I am the gate for the sheep." Again, "I am the gate." Establishing that point must have been important.

Ask people on their deathbeds what psalm they want to pray and it will almost always be the 23rd: the Lord is my shepherd. Look at the walls of the pious and see how Christ is imaged. As often as not, this side of the cross, as a shepherd. Often these images are sweet and comforting. But in this passage, the life of the shepherd is described in other than pastel shades. One verse beyond this text Jesus is quoted saying that "the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." But at this point he is still instructing the hearers on issues of leading and following, guarding and guiding.

Behind the scenes must be another drama. Here Jesus says that "all who came before me are thieves and bandits." Evidently the people this gospel dealt with or wanted to reach had been lured by false prophets, competitors to the claims of Jesus. Yet there is also some note of triumph here. The thieves and robbers tried to get allegiances but failed.

A revisiting of this text would suggest that this might well be called "the Good Door," not "the Good Shepherd," Sunday. Through the door followers find salvation. Because the door can close, they can be protected. Thieves and robbers have to stay out.

Almost never is the band of disciples pictured as being secure. Always someone, some force or other, is at hand to try to lure or plunder disciples. The warning that the world around them is not a safe one remains valid.

FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Acts 6:1-9; 7:2a, 51-60 (Lutheran text)

Even with the power of the resurrection breaking loose this side of eternity, it isn't going to take long for the powers of the age to reassert themselves. Sin and death don't surrender without a battle.

So, fresh from the glories that followed Peter's sermon in Acts 2, we are plunged into the sordidness surrounding the story of Stephen. It opens with the dreadfully familiar. Those who shared their property so freely in the afterglow of Easter are now contending amongst themselves along ethnic lines, Hellenists squaring off against Hebrews purportedly for the sake of their widows (6:1) but probably, beneath the pious claims, for themselves as well. The solution to the problem, if it can ever be called such, is an election of more officers, as though that is going to result in more equal sharing!

It doesn't get any more pleasant when Stephen enters the picture. He is an enthusiast in the classical sense of the term, a "God-within-er" who, following Pentecost, believes himself in the possession of if not in possession of the Holy Spirit. Not surprisingly, what follows is a ratcheting upwards of Peter's earlier polemic against Israel: "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do" (7:51). Words like "always," "never" and "forever" are hardly the language of reasoned discourse.

The rest of the story follows accordingly. Maligned, the people of Jerusalem reply in kind, taking Stephen out to stone him to death. And there it is that Saul appears, playing cloakroom attendant at the execution.

Edmund Steimele, one of the great Lutheran preachers of this century, once preached a sermon titled, "From Bethlehem to Bedlam." In it, he contrasts the joyous cry of Christ's birth with the disconsolate cry of the mothers in the slaughter of the innocents. In that story as in Stephen's, we are reminded that wherever the power of Easter enters, the cross is never far away. When life and grace invade the confines of this age, they draw out all the forces of resistance.

But there is still a ray of Easter light shining out of the darkness. Brought back down to earth in the most literal way, Stephen nevertheless calls out to the one behind all the sordidness and, in his name, prays for the forgiveness of those previously accused in such virulent terms. The absolution, Christ's word of forgiveness, is the presence of Easter under the sign of the cross, the light of the resurrection reflected back into an age of self-absorption.