SERMON
PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and
St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN
FOURTH
SUNDAY OF EASTER (22nd April) 2018
READINGS:
Acts
4.5-12
Psalm
23
1
John 3.16-24
John
10.11-18
The document we know as Acts reminds me of film makers whose
first movie was great (or at least okay),
but the second and subsequent additions were at best lamentable. I have not
been, you may surmise, a fan of Acts. One scholar I have heard redeems the
issue by suggesting that Acts was written before Luke’s gospel-account, and
that therefore the sequence does improve after all. Perhaps that’s just
academic chicanery!
But what do we do with slices of the scriptures we don’t like?
Unlike the compilers of the New Zealand Prayer Book I believe we stand judge
over the scriptures of our faith at great peril. The scriptures depict darkness
and light, and if we deny there is darkness
alongside the light in our lives then we deceive only ourselves.
Yes, there are occasional glitches in the text that we must
approach with caution, but even a would-be cynic like me should not dare to
chuck out or at best avoid whole texts because they don’t suit our
comprehension of events. I find Luke’s emphasis on exponential growth in the
Christian community to be both disheartening and dubious; though the early
Christian faith undoubtedly did spread rapidly I doubt there were many if any
occasions on which thousands of people were converted at a single Petrine
sermon.
Luke’s story is psychologically and even architecturally
improbable. Yet I can’t jettison Luke because I don’t like his second volume. I
must wrestle with the text: what is going on as he depicts the phenomenal
growth of Christianity across the Empire? This passage I think gives us a clue.
Moments before our scene today,
five thousand individuals have converted to Christianity after hearing one of
Peter’s sermons. Disheartened? Moi? Beyond the rather situation-specific
crusades of Billy Graham few of us called to preach have or will ever see such
impact from our words. Are we then failures, and are our churches failures (I’m
not letting you off the hook) because we don’t see such growth?
I think Luke is being more
subtle than that. In this Acts passage we do not see a mass conversion, though
the message Peter delivers, the central, universe-altering miracle of the
resurrection, is central to both speeches, the one we heard and the one before
it. Peter’s second audience, though, is cynical. Peter and John have cast
gauntlets at the feet of corrupt, decaying religious and civic leadership. To
one audience, hungry for meaning in life, they have spoken of the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ, the Easter message. The spiritually hungry populace has
absorbed their authenticity, opened their hearts and been transformed by the
proclamation.
But the second preachment falls
on hearts of stone. Corrupted by power and self-interest the audience seek only
to plot and destroy the Jesus movement and its message. Truth is suppressed, as
it always will be by evil leaders. Democracy, The Washington Post warns us, dies in darkness. So too does hope
and meaning to existence. Luke, sometimes more subtle than I give him credit
for, makes it clear that very fact that the cynics do not succeed is
authentication of the gospel. As John puts it elsewhere, darkness does not
overcome.
The word of resurrection hope,
with all its ramifications of reconciling love and justice, will not be
suppressed. It will not be suppressed by my petty cynicism about the Book of
Acts. It will not be suppressed who by those whose desire to make God
manageable leads them to preach a meaningless, resurrectionless faux-gospel. It will not even be
suppressed by the evil of leaders who call truth “fake news” and attempt to silence
truth-speakers. In the end, as Paul puts it elsewhere, every knee shall bow
before the truth of Jesus.
But what do we make of Peter’s proclamation
“no other name”? For much of the history of Christianity this has been turned
into a loveless, bleak message of “turn or burn.” Believers whose loved ones
fail to embrace their faith are ... (if we believe in an afterlife at all, and we
should, for reasons I will explore another time) ... are left with the horror of
contemplating something called “eternity” divorced from those to whom they have
given love and life. Is the good news of Jesus Christ good news if its reach is
incomplete?
I think not. I do not believe
that is the implication of Peter’s “no other name.” I do believe that the event
of Jesus Christ is unique. I do believe that alone in all of history the life
of Jesus of Nazareth is God’s redeeming intervention into human darkness. I do not believe that its impact depends
solely on our response, nor that the response of those who do not get the Jesus
thing, or who find meaning on other paths, is the gateway to some sort of
eternal condemnation. Some
of you may have seen the video of the Pope assuring a young boy that his
recently deceased atheist father has a very special place in the heaven of God.
So what for us? Certainly, I
must accept that thousands will not embrace the faith I try to proclaim each
time I preach. We may all have to accept that the institutional church that we
love and rightly struggle to keep afloat, may sooner or later collapse into the
morass of meaninglessness, even corruption, that it sometimes seems to
represent. That may or may not be the judgement of God, and all we can seek to
be is authentic in our lives, individually and collectively. Not perfect – or I
for one would long have been condemned. But as we seek to follow and proclaim
the Good Shepherd we are warmed by the integrity of his voice: my sheep –
probably the Dorpas or Barbados that I write of elsewhere[1]
– recognize, connect with my voice, says Jesus. Even where our institution fails
to have integrity, and it often does, we must search our own lives and strive
to find integrity there. Sometimes we will fail, and there again and again we
will meet the beckoning Good Shepherd. But we must strive, and strive together,
to be the authentic bearers of good news that Luke depicts Peter and John as
being.
[1]
From my notes on the readings: “The Good Shepherd was no purveyor of candy
floss. The Palestinian shepherd fought brutal heat, brutal cold, and brutal
predators to preserve his flock. His sheep weren’t pussy cats, either. this
Shepherd was more a rampaging Jonah Lomu than the sweet- lamby-cuddler of
Romantic religious art. For those in the know, the Good Shepherd was more of a
Maremma sheepdog than our toga-wearing friend in the St Peter’s [Queenstown]
west window, and the sheep were more Dorper or even Barbados than docile
Perendale or Romney.”
