Emphasis Preaching Journal

Pope John Paul II wrote his doctoral dissertation on a philosopher named Max Scheler. Scheler liked to talk about the meaning of repentance, the change that must come from within, under the agency of God, if there is to be newness of life.

Let me rework the theme, based on clues from Scheler and later improvisations. Most people think repenting is to be long-faced and sad. Yet New Testament stories show it to be an act of joy: here is a bridegroom; why be sad? Here is new wine; doesn't it
need new wineskins?

Repentance has to do with the past. But the past is past, we say. Yes, but it lives in the minds of the present. The repenter first makes amends to the one offended. But still, most people remain haunted. They say, "Alas! What have my ancestors done?" Columbus, and so forth. That is not repenting. Or, second, "Alas! What have I done?" Not much more helpful. But "Alas! What kind of person was I that I could do that?" That is better. Best: "Alas! What kind of person am I that I am capable of doing that now?"

In these Easter stories people get described in the patterns of their capabilities. Peter, in Acts, clearly pictures the hearers capable of repenting for their complicity in the act of crucifying Christ. In 1 Peter they are to see their casual life turned around so that they live with "reverent fear." And finally in Luke we find two disciples who have to have their eyes opened, their minds changed, their hopes lifted, so that they can comprehend the resurrection event and share it.

It would be a good idea in all that follows to keep asking just what needs changing, and how it gets changed among the reverently fearful.

Grist For The Mill

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

The resurrection stories are not merely chronicles of events external to those who hear them. They have to be proclaimed, listened to, and believed. To believe them, hearers have to change their expectations. Our expectations are of a sort that tend to limit God. God: here are the boundaries we will put around our hopes. God: we do not expect you to do a new thing; we'll make the best of what we can do with the old, spruced up and pumped up a bit.

Changing from disbelief to belief or, for a worse start, from half belief to belief is not simply an intellectual matter for the New Testament preachers and writers. The resurrected life gets screened out not because we are too smart for it, but because our chosen ways of life block it out. We have ways of thinking and clinging to that old set of ways that do not permit us to be readied for the changes God would work.

So it is that, in this continuance of the Pentecost Day story and sermon, Peter is described as calling "brothers" and, presumably, sisters to the new way. We may feel only indirectly involved as we hear Peter say to Israelites, fellow Israelites, co-descendants of David, the entire house of Israel of this Lord and Messiah that he was "this Jesus whom you crucified." Of course, they were stand-ins representing us. So we might also well be "cut to the heart" by what was said. "What should we do?"

What an opening! Certainly this is a stylization of a complex scene. But there is an inner simplicity to it all. "Repent, and be baptized ...." Repent: this is a total turning around of life, an abandonment of all that served as our security. The same world
is out there, but we look at it as if we had fallen in love, and a new reality is there. We have. There is.

1 Peter 1:17-23

When the lectionary committee gets a hot streak started, they keep it going. Last week they opened the pages of 1 Peter, a thin document of uncertain provenance but very certain point. This week they continue. Some have seen this letter to be a document prepared for people getting ready to be baptized. It is a "how-to" manual for people who live in hostile settings.

The author pictures the struggling community as living "in exile." Exile in this writing is not always literal. Figuratively, every Christian was somehow in exile. They were seeking an eternal city, a place of safety away from persecution. But they also were not to evade the human city, but to witness and remain strong in it.

Therefore, they were to live, as are we, in "reverent fear." Last week it was "living hope," as if hope could be other than live and life could be lived apart from hope. But reverence and fear are a bit more easily separated. One can have unholy fear, mere fear, though no doubt true reverence always connects with a kind of fear. This is not the fear that goes with terror but the kind that comes with awe.

Before reverent fear came along, we had been victims of "futile ways inherited from our ancestors," ransomed by the precious blood of Christ. Suddenly we are back to the lamb imagery.

And we are back to the idea in a text about Nicodemus last month: We must be "born from above," Jesus had told him in John's gospel. Now we "have been born anew," through the word of God. The author piles idea upon idea, but they come down, in the end, to the combination of reverent fear that helps us give up the old person we were and the newness of life in Christ.

Luke 24:13-35

We anticipated this story when talking, last week, about "living hope." For here is a story of people who "had hoped," which meant their hope was dated, and thus dead.

I confess to a prejudice for this story. Give me a single Rembrandt reproduction and it would be the scene of the disciples and the stranger at the inn at Emmaus. Sometimes I am tempted to say that, once the New Testament plot has been scanned, if I could have only one story as an example of literary art this would be the story. Try it on.

There is a kind of blissful anonymity to its central characters. We never meet Cleopas again, and never find out the identity of the other: Mrs. Cleopas? His brother? A friend? Never mind: the one whose identity is in question is the stranger who overtakes the two on the road.

Is there is a more pathos-engendering line than the one about having hoped, but no longer hoping, that the one who was crucified was to have redeemed Israel? All the shutters had been shut, the shades were pulled, the lamps of hope extinguished, the meaning of the devotion to Jesus shattered in their lives. There was nothing to do but take a walk. Oh, yes, "Some women of our group astounded us," they said, by talking of a vision of angels at his tomb. A lot of good that was doing them.

So the stranger had to wake them from sleepwalking, help them remove their blinders. First he did this by expounding scripture in a way that moved their hearts. But at the inn, he "had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread." Eyes get opened, and hopes come alive in such circumstances.


FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Acts 2:14a, 36-47

If things had gone the way they generally do, the reaction to Peter's sermon in Acts 2 -- another portion of which provides today's first lesson -- would have been more typical.

"Nice sermon, Pastor," some would have said, "that's just what we say in the Masons," or "It's so wonderful that you can preach without notes," or "Don't you think you were a little hard on the Jews? I mean, after all ...."

But something different happened. The power of the resurrection got loose in Peter's proclamation. It is just that, power. For Easter is the declaration that "... God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified" (v. 36).

This is the announcement that at the center of the universe there is not machinery or a set of dictums concerning the survival of the fittest but a person, the person of Jesus of Nazareth -- the one who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me," who became angry at the sight of leprosy, who intervened on behalf of the woman caught in adultery. To say, "Jesus is Lord," as in the Apostles' Creed, is to say just this: the controlling principle in everything is no principle at all, but one whose grace spills over every edge.

The normal reaction to such news is hardly normal human behavior. Instead of business as usual -- self-assertion, self-justification, self-defense, self-care, self-preservation, the common evidences of the in-curvedness of sin -- there is a letting go, the surging of new life. "... They were cut to the quick," they could hardly believe that they had missed it, they couldn't figure out why they hadn't seen it before, and they
said, "... what should we do?" (v. 37).

With that, as Luke tells it, it was as though heaven itself started to break loose. People by the thousands were baptized; they could hardly contain their interest in God's good graciousness or the Spirit's gifts in one another; there were signs and wonders to indicate the power of the resurrection surfacing again on this side of eternity; the normal marks of human community -- status and rank, riches and poverty -- became irrelevant in the joy of having been carried beyond the dog-eat-dog, you-get-what-you-pay-for world of death into a community where "praising God and having the goodwill of all the people" was all that mattered.

Sound realistic? The power of the resurrection may have so pervaded Luke's sensibilities that he couldn't see anything else. But Easter is power, there's no doubt about that -- the power of the new creation. And when it gets loose, there's no limit -- literally. For death has lost its dominion: Christ rules, so that grace undermines the old order as the new emerges.