ROYALS?
Sermon for Easter 5a, May 18, 2014-05-18(John 14:1-14 with I Peter2:2-10 in b.g)
(note to readers – the first "story" is taken directly from Living by the Word in the Christian Century the May 14, 2018 edition (by Mark Ralls)
A young girl stands before her classmates and teacher. Her teacher has chosen to be cruel. "Is it true," asks the teacher with a sneer, "that your father is a drunkard?" The girl is well aware that her father comes home very late at night. She also knows the condition he is in when he does finally come home. Yet she responds flatly, "No," she says, "My father is not a drunkard."
In one of his essays, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed because he engaged in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, uses this example to ask the question, "What does it mean to tell the truth?" What are we to make of this girl who brazenly refutes an indisputable fact? That's a complicated question, but for Bonhoeffer the answer is clear. The girl did not lie. She spoke a truth that was deeper that what her teacher or classmates could grasp.
Can deeper truths be named or illuminated by the bare facts of surface realities or present circumstances? NO! Deeper truths draw instead upon the full depth of the encounter between people – people who have come to actually know and in that reality actually love each other. The girl speaks truly out of her encounter with her father, a person who is much more to her than someone with a drinking problem. . .
Do we know such truth? And even if we are apprehended, claimed, engulfed by such truth can we, dare we speak of it, give our lives to it? ...
Regularly we gather in this place – to speak of, to sing praises to, to pray with and to God. We even gather to hear a word of God (I would boldly say) the Word of God PROCLAIMED. We come with all of our stuff: our questions, fears, hopes and dreams, grief, celebrations. We come with our illnesses, with the pain and joy of the world around us. This day we come with the news of over 200 Nigerian girls being abducted because they were receiving and desired an education. We come with the reality of 276 miners dying in a fire in a mine in Turkey. We gather alongside the pain and grief of their loved ones. We come with the news of those we love etched into our hearts and minds: news of sickness, of uncertainty, of new births and approaching death. We come in order to speak to God and even miraculously listen to and hear God.
Some may think that we are crazy, that we are wasting our time. COME ON! But are we crazy? Do we waste our time in seeking to both listen for and speak to God in Word and Sacrament?
We aren't the first to wonder. As Jesus tells his earliest followers that he must leave them, that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer and to die, they are beside themselves. Their hearts are troubled. They are awash with fear. Their hopes, their dreams, their expectations that Jesus would magically deliver them from everything they hated: Roman occupation, from a "less than" status, were about to go up in smoke.
But Jesus gives Himself to them, for them. His love, forgiveness, upcoming sacrifice as both God and human is to be, their way. By God's grace they can follow him. By God's grace we can follow him!
Such following is anything but easy. There is and will be resistance from within and without. Our following will not magically deliver us from those realities we hate or seek to avoid – from suffering and death, from inequality and violence. Not at all.
Yet Jesus goes on – both in word and deed. He goes to Jerusalem, to his cross, speaking words of forgiveness even for those who are so violently shaming and executing him: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do". ... Following his death and in the light of his resurrection he returns to those first disciples. Amazingly, He says to them , "Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, so I send you!"
Is it possible that this Jesus is giving us this profound, deep kind of truth – that He is the way now for us, the way for this crazy mixed up world? Is it possible that Jesus is calling us to live this truth in word and deed now, in our families, in our work places , uniquely?
This is not easy to say, pun intended! After all, who are we? At our best, we are aware of our own deficiencies: of thoughts that are less than godly, of desires that sometimes seek to and even succeed in consuming us, of selfishness that doesn't consider others when sometimes we just "WANT" so badly.
But dear people, we are not the first to be limited by our deficiencies! The first disciples fought over who would be number 1. For Jesus' entire life it was inconceivable to the disciples that in seeing Jesus they were glimpsing God. Even in today's text, situated on the night before Jesus death, Philip says to Jesus, "Show us the Father and we will be satisfied!" Really?
But Jesus sticks with them. He continues to stick with those who come after them. Jesus through the Spirit continues to enlist people who in following Him in their living will reflect this profound truth - Jesus is God. His life, death and resurrection are the way to God and the way through God to others, that many may know and experience God!
Our own unholy thoughts and seemingly insatiable desires do not disqualify us from being called. Instead they make us ongoing, daily candidates for death and resurrection as God seeks to daily claim us.
Listen as the author of First Peter tells his motley audience about God's work and claim upon their lives. "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who claimed you out of darkness into his marvellous light."
If you had asked them and those around them, the early disciples were anything but chosen. They were neglected, subjugated, sometimes even forgotten by the Empire. A royal priesthood? Most of them had little training and were as far from being royal in any sense of that word as you and I are disconnected from William and Kate. Yet none of this seems to matter to God who continues to choose fisher men and tax collectors, wealthy and poor, men. women and children of both "good" and "poor" reputation to be God's representatives to all whom they meet, speaking in both word and deed.
By God's grace the people whom First Peter is addressing have been swept up in and by the love and forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ. Now they are to share in their own unique ways that love and forgiveness, that hope against hope with all whom they meet. They are to share the truth: the truth that our little girl in the opening story knows is far beyond the observable facts, or even what others may initially be able to perceive.
We are against all odds part of God's people, a royal priesthood. We are to proclaim the mighty acts of Him who died on that cross calling us out of any and all such darkness of fatalism, despair, apathy into his marvellous light, of forgiveness, love, compassion for all. The powers that be are only temporary. God alone is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. This is the truth – the GOOD NEWS FOR ALL.
How shall we live this? Amen.