Sermon May 3, 2009

Easter IV

Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23, 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Last week, you'll remember, we heard the first part of this story from the Acts of the Apostles, where Peter defends the healing of the lame man before the Jewish council by trying to draw out for them the significance of their actions in the story of Jesus.

Today's a continuation of that scene, containing again the reference that, by now, should be familiar to all of us - the connection between cross and resurrection: Peter refers to "Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, [but] whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is 'the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.'"

There's heavy irony here in what Peter says. In effect he's saying "You're the ones responsible for this - you crucified Jesus on the rejected rock of Golgotha, but God vindicated him - now everything I do is through the power of the one you thought you'd gotten rid of!"

And it's significant, too, because of when it's being said. According to Luke this is very early on in the life of this new community of believers.

This is a community that's had their whole world jerked into stark relief by the initial experience of crucifixion. And doesn't death do that? For all of us? Death puts everything in perspective. Death shows us the value of life.

Last night, as I was driving home about 8 o'clock I turned on KUOW and heard an very poignant interview with Jim Sheeler, author of "Final Salute", the story of Major Stephen Beck, a Marine Casualty Notification Officer responsible for notifying families that their relatives have been killed in Iraq.

The final story was when he went back - as he always does - to check-in with the widows and widowers. This particular widow told of how, when she told her five-year-old son that his father was dead, the boy said "where is he". And she said, "he's in heaven." And he said "Can I go there and see him". And she said "not for a long, long, time". And the boy thought for a moment and said "Can I still be five years old when I see him, so he can still put me on his shoulders like he used to?".

Welcome to Golgotha. Golgotha is not a place confined to a moment in time 2000 years ago, there are Golgothas all around us. We see Golgotha in the experiences of others, not just through deaths but through the many desperate trials of life - the end of relationships through divorce; long-term sicknesses that nothing can be done about, like Lou Gehrig's disease, or Alzheimers; the seemingly meaningless accident that leaves someone paralyzed; the mental illness that destroys human identity; the wounded heart or struggling soul.

Yes, if Golgotha is not a present reality for all of us it's just around the corner. And if it were the only story of our lives we would be sad people indeed, people without joy, people without hope.

Yet that story, and the pain it represents, doesn't directly echo anywhere in Peter's speech today. The story Peter not only tells but also lives out is a story of the community he represents. It's a community that, at this early stage, is perhaps only a few dozen people - one, large, extended family.

But a family that has been changed. A family that has been transformed. They no longer live only in the valley of the shadow of Golgotha, they no longer huddle fearfully behind locked doors; now they also live in the verdant pastures outside the empty tomb.

What is different is that this community has become convinced of the truth of the resurrection.

In Peter's brave, bold words we're hearing the strength given him by his fellow believers - we're hearing that community. It's a "Community of Conscious Choice" - it has made an active choice through the gift of God's Spirit to rebuild it's common life out of the rubble of the cross by the power of the resurrection.

That pattern - of resurrection living only through the experience of Golgotha - is echoed down the ages by countless individuals and communities.

And it is for us. The way to the empty tomb lies through Golgotha - all the "Golgothas" of our lives.

Let's look, for a moment at the most beloved of the resurrection stories. When faced with Golgotha two disciples, Luke tells us, chose to flee toward their home - taking the road to Emmaus. But then they encountered Jesus, and discovered two things:

• firstly that their real home was back in Jerusalem, with the other disciples, with those whom Jesus called "my friends"; and,
• secondly, that fleeing death was not choosing life - that to live, to really live, required returning to the community that had nurtured them, held them, had been their family – the community that, even then, was being transformed.

Resurrection living involves that choice - to choose life: to really live, not just to exist. And it involves choosing to live rather than just to exist as a part of a community.

Here's another story about a child - this one is from Quaker Parker Palmer: it's the story of a three-year-old girl, the firstborn, who was told that her mother was pregnant again. The little girl was very excited about having a new brother or sister. Then, within a few hours of the new baby boy being brought home from the hospital the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door closed made her parents a little uneasy but because they had a baby monitor they decided that it would be okay - they could intervene at any time. So they let the little girl go into the baby's room and close the door. They heard her go over to the crib, and then say to her three-day-old brother "tell me about God - I've almost forgotten."

At an early age we can so easily lose our sense of connectedness with God, our sense of joy, our sense of resurrection life. All of this is, of course, just fine with our contemporary world, which, like most cultures in human history, works pretty hard to control us and sever us from our connection to each other and to the Holy.

Resurrection living is, at least in part, about freely accepting the challenge of this world that constantly tries to dehumanize us. It's about re-connecting with that sense of God that we had as very young children but have lost as adults. At its heart, resurrection living is about transformation - the transformation of Peter's community, of which we are all heirs; of living through the Golgothas to get to the empty tombs; of choosing the life that is really living, not simply existing; choosing a life centered in God, in the Spirit, in Christ, a life in which we place front-and-center the fact that we come from God, and to God we will return.

If we can do this, if we can, as Frederich Buechner says, "live our lives from the inside out, rather than from the outside in", then we are entering into the borderlands of the holy, into the sacred experience of resurrection, because we're becoming a part of the resurrection community, we who have been crucified with Christ on our own Golgothas, and buried with Christ in our own tombs. For now, we are being raised with him too. Alleluia! Amen.