Sunday, April 27, 2014

Acts 2:14a,22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

O Lord, we pray, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and in the longing of our hearts, by the words of my lips and in the thoughts that we form. Speak, O Lord, for your servants listen. Amen.

How different this day seems to be from Last Sunday. One week ago we sparkled and smiled - we sang and we soared as we took part in the Great Festival of our Faith - Easter Sunday and our Celebration of the Resurrection.

But today - today seems to be just another Sunday.

Gone too are the secular aspects of Easter

- the chocolate bunnies have been consumed
- the gaily coloured eggs which were hidden have been found and eaten
- the jelly beans have been mashed into the carpet and removed, and our children were just as much trouble to rouse from bed today as they ever have been on those days which are not special.

Gone too is the contrast between the sombre sanctuary on Good Friday with the black drapes and low lighting and the beautifully arrayed communion table of Easter Day. Gone is the aroma of lilies - and our choir, which swells so much for Easter - well it seems to be entirely on holiday.

Indeed, I suspect that most of feel as though we are right back where we were before Easter - fighting familiar frustrations and bearing well known burdens, as if Easter had never occurred.

That is precisely why we need to grasp the message of this the Second Sunday of Easter, the message concerning how the Risen Christ gave new life to the disciples, how he gave them the Holy Spirit and energized them and gave them confidence, how he made them into people who were filled with both peace and power.

I think it is important for us to understand just what the disciples were like after the first Easter Sunday.

The vast majority of Churches around the world today, and every Sunday following Easter every year, read the same text, the same scripture, the same story, that we heard this morning: the story of how Jesus appeared to his disciples in the Upper Room.

We all know that the first generation Christians did not hesitate to preach the good news of Christ's resurrection. They knew what they had seen, and they knew God had sent them to tell others what he had done in Christ - and they did so - with verve, and conviction, and courage - so much so that they converted thousands of people to the new faith.

But it was not always that way.

At first the disciples were scared, they were afraid, and insofar as they met together, they met behind closed doors - behind doors that were locked, so the scriptures tell us, because they feared the authorities; because they were afraid that what had happened to Jesus might happen to them.

They knew already that Jesus was risen - the women had told them about the empty tomb, and about encountering Jesus in the garden, and they had, over the previous years, witnessed many great miracles performed by Jesus.

Peter had himself managed to walk on water with the help of Jesus - and everyone of the 12 faithful followers had brought healing to the sick in his name - each one had commanded demons to come forth from the possessed - and many more had eaten of the bread that seemed to never end, the bread and the fish brought to Jesus by a small boy to help feed a crowd of thousands.

The disciples had witnessed much and taken part in much and been commanded by Jesus to do much.

But after Good Friday - and indeed even after Easter Sunday they were powerless people.

They could not make themselves do what the Lord had commanded.

Their frail faith could not be made formidable simply by declaring, "We have seen the Lord". They could not be made strong by another requirement from the Redeemer. They could not be made dedicated through demands.

Certainly Jesus knew that. So he did something else.

When he appeared to them he not only blessed them, saying "Peace be with you". He not only told them "As the Father has sent me, so I send you". He breathed on them - he said "Receive the Holy Spirit". And by his presence - by his command - by the breath of live in him, he gave the breath of life to them.

As one commentator puts it - he gave power to the powerless.

You and I often share the feeling of hopelessness of those persons who huddled in the upper room till the Spirit came to them.

We, too, are often shattered by the strain of battle, the strain of living, the strain of trying to make sense of out things, the strain of trying to do what is right - but of not being sure of just how to do it, where to do it, and when to do it.

Like the first disciples before the Spirit came we are often fearful, and in our fear we cling together, spiritually hiding ourselves away behind closed doors, behind locked doors as it were, so that what little energy, what few resources, what slender hope we have left might be kept safe.

We regard the church as important - and its mission as important - but we have no energy - no life - we feel worn down.

We are fearful because the whole matter of God, and of heaven, and of resurrection and re-birth just seems a little too much to believe in, in a world of multi-culturalism, mass communication, and myth debunking science.

We are fearful because of our declining numbers, our empty Sunday School class rooms, and our drained bank accounts.

We are fearful because we know that the world scorns us - and because we realize that as we are get older each day the world itself is getting ever more hostile, ever more unfriendly.

And in fear - we come to believe that no program, no promise, no plan, no powerful preaching, no perky youth ministry, no parking lot, no persistence, can possibly save us.

And we are right in this belief.

When all is said and done we are no different than the first disciples. We have absolutely nothing going for us that the world does not have going for it - perhaps in fact less - except, that is, for one thing - The Risen Christ and the Spirit he gives us.

And that is the point of today's story from the Gospel of John.

In the final analysis, it is a story of how the risen Christ pushed open the bolted door of a church with absolutely nothing, of how the risen Christ enters the fearful chambers of every church, of every believer, and fills the place with his own life.

What we are asked to recognize - what I want you to realize, is that every church is this way!

No matter what a church says about itself, if it is left to its own devices, if it draws only upon its own resources, it is nothing.

Apart from the Risen Christ the church is an empty place. Apart from the Spirit that Jesus breaths upon us we are hollow vessels - with nothing to offer - nothing of significance to share, no different in the end than any social agency or service club.

Indeed the ceaseless and frenetic activity of many congregations with various programs for their congregations, is often the lonely attempt of a group of scared and hopeless people, to fill in the void where God, "the most missed of all missing persons" should be.

A doomed attempt - because in the end - the Shopping Mall, and the YMCA, even, dare I say it, the government, offers better facilities than can our church.

The answer my friends is not in better programs, plans, promises, or projects (though all of these have their purpose and their place in the church) it is in the person of Christ Jesus - and in the gift he brings us even when we are hiding behind locked doors out of fear.

The fundamental reality of our faith lies not in what we believe,

- it rests not in our acceptance of dogma and creed
- or even in thinking that resurrection happened and that miracles can still occur.

The reality of faith - the significance of our faith lies not in these things, nor in our belief, but in who we believe in.

The power that transformed the first disciples from fearful people into men and women who were unafraid to speak to crowds of thousands - unafraid to testify before the very authorities who crucified their Lord - willing to travel vast distances and endure stoning, imprisonment, and poverty - and able to convince men, women and children that something important hinged on their acceptance of their message concerning the person of Jesus Christ, was not the power that is unleashed by their being reflective - by their writing down their dreams in a journal - or even by their praying a lot, it was the power granted by the one in whom we believe - the power that he gave to them in their locked room when he breathed the Holy Spirit upon them - and then again poured out that Spirit upon all believers on the day of Pentecost.

For thousands of years, my friends, there have been many men and women and children who have huddled together out of fear.

- They have seen their hopes and their dreams in this world turn to ashes
- They have believed in God and in bitterness and in grief gazed upon what seems to be his death.
- They have locked the doors to their hearts, afraid of experiencing one more pain, one more disappointment.
- They have all but given up hope.

And for two thousand years their have been men and women and children in this situation who have experienced what the first disciples experienced.

As they have assembled to worship, as they have sought the face of God, as they have striven to understand what it is that God is about, they have experienced Christ suddenly standing among them, they have heard his word - peace be with you and felt his breath touch them and fill them and they have gone out and - with nothing else but this experience, this encounter in the deep and silent place within their hearts, transformed their homes, their communities, and indeed their world.

All of us - if we have an ounce of conscience long for something more than what we see now around us - within the church and within the world.

The renewals that have happened and which most surely will happen again, happen not because of us and our inner strength and purpose, they happen because of God - and his love; they happen because Jesus is alive, because he has been able to burst out of the sealed tomb and to enter into locked rooms and fill hearts that need him.

The good feelings of Easter Sunday may be seven days in the past, the afflictions of daily life may have returned full force, but the reality of Easter - the Risen Christ - is still with us.

He has not forsaken us.

Trust him. Give thanks to him - knowing that as he has risen to new life so he is here to bring new life to us all.

He is here - and he will bring that life - even though there be locked doors in his way.

Blessed be God, day by day. Amen.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 28:1-10

Bless thou, the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts that they be of profit to us and acceptable to thee, oh our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Where the Gospel according to Matthew ends, the Christian faith begins - in the resurrection of our Lord.

The resurrection exhausts our capacity to imagine and it pushes our reasoning ability to the breaking point. However we don't have to explain the resurrection. Rather it explains us, it establishes who we are and why we are here today. Because Easter happened, because the resurrection happened, the church happened.

The story of Easter is so familiar that we sometimes fail to hear some of the details of the account. Today I want us to look at three of those details as they are found in Matthew's account of the first Easter morning.

First, the stone was rolled away - not to let Jesus out - but to let us in.

I say this because the idea that God rolled the stone away from the door to let Jesus escape is inconsistent with the resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded elsewhere in the scriptures - appearances in which he suddenly appeared in the midst of the disciples, even when they were behind closed doors. Closed doors never kept Jesus in or out.

Matthew makes this clear in today's reading. In his account of the resurrection it was after Mary Magdalene and the other Mary had come to the tomb that "there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord rolled away the stone and sat upon it."

For centuries the curious have always wanted to look into the dark depths of death, but the tomb has been sealed with secrecy. The tomb has always mocked us. It has always stood as the "dead end" of all our efforts to peer beyond this life into the life to come.

The angel tells the two women on the first Easter morning to look inside the tomb, saying to them: "do not be afraid, I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised - as he said. Come, see the place where he lay."

Easter rolls the stone door of the tomb away for us so that we might penetrate the mystery of death. It makes of the tomb a tunnel - a tunnel into the heart of the eternal and shows us that the holy heart of God is love and life. God rolls the door of the tomb away not to let Jesus out - but to let us in - to allow us to see that Christ's promises are true.

Second - the tomb is not completely empty - Christ's body is not there, but the place is filled with the words of the angel, the words we just heard, the words that say, "Look, he is not here, he is risen." The words that continue on saying:

"Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples - he has been raised from the dead and is going ahead of you to Galilee, and there you will see him."

If the women on that first Easter morning had looked into an empty and silent tomb, then our resurrection faith would be a belief based on human speculation, an assumption of the moment, an argument based on negative evidence.

But no! Our faith is based on a word spoken to us by God. It is based on God's holy promise, spoken by Christ before he died, and upon God's holy assurance - spoken by the angel on the first Easter Sunday.

That same word that echoed and re-echoed in that Easter tomb still fills the emptiness of world today. "He is risen". The tomb has become a trumpet proclaiming the victory of life over death, and the continuation of Christ's presence and mission in this world - first in Galilee, and ultimately to the ends of the earth.

The third detail is this - because of Easter we can turn our backs on the grave.

Matthew tells us that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, having heard the angelic assurance, "He is risen", turned their backs on the grave and ran "with great joy" to tell the disciples.

Joy is the key word here. Christ was buried, but he wouldn't stay dead. The tomb could not hold him - and because of him - the tomb cannot hold us either.

This indeed is what Jesus promised to us before he died, a promise that seemed at the time totally incredible, a matter, at best, of metaphor, and hyperbole, but which - because of the first Easter morning, we now know to be a matter of fact and substance.

The stone was rolled away from the tomb, not to let Jesus out, but to let us in, to show us that death is not the end - but rather a new beginning.

A beginning that proclaims the victory of life over death, and which allows us to turn our backs on the grave and face our future with faith and hope, confident that all of God's promises will indeed bear fruit. May His Name be praised day by day. Amen!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Matthew 21:1-11; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Matthew 27:1-2,11-50

O Lord, we pray, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and in the longing of our hearts, by the words of my lips and in the thoughts that we form. Speak, O Lord, for your servants listen. Amen.

Crowds. They're sometimes scary. Sometimes supportive. There are cheering crowds. And there are jeering crowds. And there is a "crowd mentality".

You've heard of "mob rule". That's the mentality of a crowd. There is no space for individual thoughtfulness. No time for reflection. Just immediate and mass response.

One thing that's been true, from the very moment the first crowd gathered. And that is this: There are usually two sides in a crowd. Whether its a packed stadium for a baseball game, or a political rally, there are those for, and those against. There are the cheerers and the jeerers.

And sometimes one side or the other takes over. Sometimes, you get a crowd that becomes either supportive, or hostile. And often - the balance is delicate and fragile. A crowd can turn on you.

The crowd that Jesus faced in these days at Jerusalem was both.

It started off as a cheering and supportive crowd. And that's the crowd we meet today on Palm Sunday.

But - watch out Jesus! Because - in a very few days - these same people are going to be a very different sort of a crowd for you! And God help you, my Saviour Jesus. These cheering ones - are going to turn into jeering ones.

Jesus attracted crowds.

He was a most charismatic person, this One who called himself the "Son of Man". People came from far and away to hear him. To see him. To witness to the amazing things he was doing. The great and inclusive and loving addresses he gave. The miracles he was known to perform.

But in any crowd - then and now - you get two kinds of people - the believers, and the doubters. And we see this quite often in the Bible - when we are told of the reaction of the crowds, the behaviour of the onlookers.

For example: When Jesus healed the man born blind by making mud with dirt and spit and anointing his eyes with it some of the Pharisees believed it to be a great miracle. Some believed that indeed Jesus was the Messiah.

But many more did not believe. As we heard before, they kept on questioning the healed man. And his parents. And his neighbours. And then they accused both him and Jesus of being an agent of the Devil.

Some for, some against. The cheerers - and the jeerers.

And later - when we look past Good Friday, past Easter, to the events of Pentecost - to them time when the Spirit descended on the disciples like tongues of flame and they began to praise God and speak in other languages, we discover that some of the onlookers saw it miraculous event. To others it was just a big drinking party! "They are filled with new wine" they said.

But - you know - as a crowd takes shape, as "mob rule" comes into effect, the sentiment of the crowd solidifies. The mind of the crowd moves to one side - or the other - of an issue. It can be very frightening. And if you're in such a crowd - there's only a couple of "safe" ways to behave. Either go along with the crowd, or keep quiet.

If you don't agree, better stay silent, or leave - inconspicuously.

Some interesting experiments have been conducted by psychologists to understand crowds. And these experiments show how readily people will change their opinion to match the crowd. And I don't mean pretend to change their opinion, to fake it. I mean - really change their mind.

The experiment was simple. A bunch of people were seated in a dimly lit room. Onto a screen at the front of the room two straight lines were projected. One was obviously longer than the other.

The task was simple. State which line was longer. However unknown to the one subject of this experiment (let us say unknown to you) all of the other people in the room were involved in trickery. They had been told to lie. So - you had twenty or so other people around you saying that line A was the longer one. Everybody else in agreement. And you can see clearly that line B is longer.

What happens? Well, the experiment showed that you change your opinion, that's what. Pure and simple. And - even after the experiment is finished, and you are told what was going on. You still hold to your changed opinion. That line "B" was longer. That's how persuasive the effect of a crowd is. It will even sway you to an obviously wrong opinion - and keep you there.

There was a big crowd in Jerusalem that day. Lots of people who didn't even know who Jesus was - even though he'd been the talk of the country in recent weeks. It was at Passover time, when many Jews from the countryside would be there - celebrating this special feast.

There would be Jews from far away places too. Honouring their religious beliefs by travelling the great distances to Jerusalem, perhaps only once in their lifetime. Going to the Holy City for the most Holy of Feasts - the Passover. And this crowd - this day - was in a happy mood. They're ready for a parade! They are ready to celebrate.

And Jesus - knowing the mood of the city just before Passover - knowing the prophecies concerning how the Messiah would enter Jerusalem - and knowing what would come later - rides into the city on a donkey - his disciples beside him.

For those who have eyes to see - it is significant this choice of animals. Conquering heroes - generals and kings ride into town on horses - on stallions. The Messiah comes in a more humble fashion - on a donkey. Just as predicted by the prophets.

And on this day - and on this crowd - the Spirit of God had descended. "Hosanna" they shouted "Hosanna in the highest Heaven". "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord".

The disciples must have thought they had it made. Success - at last! Where are those arrogant Pharisees now? We've got it made - with Jesus! The people are all for him. They recognize that he is the promised one - the Son of David - it won't be long now - everything is going to go our way.

But Jesus knew what was to come.

He know even as the people shouted on Sunday - Hosanna in the highest - Hosanna to the Son of David - Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. What was to come on Friday.

He knew what the same crowd would shout out when Pilate asked them "What should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?"

He knew that they shout out "Let him be crucified!" And that when Pilate asked, "Why, what evil has he done?" they would shout all the more, "Let him be crucified!"

And so Pilate released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.

How quickly things can change. One week a hero, the next just another victim, a person, an object, to be spat upon and scorned - to be beaten and killed.

And yet here we are today - the Sunday before the Friday. With our palm leaves and branches - singing praises to Jesus with our children.

We have cheered with the crowd that cheered for Jesus - and rightly so - for Jesus deserves all our cheers.

But we have also -if we have understood aright, cheered with a heart heavy with the knowledge of what is to come.

In that we are closer to Christ and his knowledge of the real situation than the disciples were.

Jesus knew who he was dying for - he knew that Judas would betray him, that Peter would deny him, that the disciples would abandon him and that crowd would call for his death.

He knew what was to come - and yet he ate and drank with Judas.
He knew and yet he prayed with Peter.
He knew and yet he called all the disciples his friends.
He knew and yet he taught in the marketplace and healed those who came to him.

Jesus knew - and we know.

We know his part - and we know our part - and knowing - we have celebrated and I say to you we must celebrate.

We must cheer for life, knowing that death follows. We must praise Jesus and call him Lord, even knowing that we - like all the others have failed him, and may yet fail him.

We must cheer, and we must remember, we must remember that Jesus knows who we were - and who we are, and what we have done and will yet do, and he still lay down his life for us.

Today we handed out palm leaves so that we might celebrate a token memory of the cheering crowd on Palm Sunday when they lovingly spread palms and cloaks and branches into the roadway ahead of our Saviour. And we have handed out palm leaves shaped into crosses.

Look at what you hold - perhaps you have placed it on a seat beside you...

The palms of "hosanna"! The palms of this "day of acceptance" of our Lord are woven into the cross of rejection.

And yet, it is an empty cross - this cross you hold - a cross which bespeaks resurrection - a cross which bespeaks forgiveness.

It is a very holy mystery - this cross that you hold - this cross upon which Jesus died.

It is a mystery which the crowd can never quite accept. A mystery which you and I cannot truly understand - but which, when we accept it in faith - in our heart of hearts turns earthly despair into heavenly triumph.

Hosanna - Jesus! Hosanna - in the brief moment of earthly acclaim.
Hosanna, and may God your Father give you strength for what is to come.
Hosanna, blessed are you who have come in the name of the Lord to save and deliver your people.

Blessed be your name - now and forevermore. Hosanna in the highest heaven. Amen!