Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, AMEN

Transcription

1 Sermon Acts 7:55-60 Synod Assembly Peter 2: Easter A John 14:1-14 April 20, 2008 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, AMEN God s beloved people, This sermon is prepared for you during the weekend of our Synod Assembly, happening today in Spokane. 800 to 1000 members from across our synod are gathered along the Spokane River to praise and thank God for glorious lives of opportunity, forgiveness, and service. These brothers and sisters are preparing to come home to you full of fresh ideas for your congregation. Yesterday 45 workshops were conducted, each one offering a tool for congregational growth and revitalization. I hope that you will take the opportunity to speak with your voting members and others who attended Super Saturday. If you were part of Super Saturday yesterday, I hope you ll raise a hand so members know who to talk with! Our Synod s mission statement is, Equip God s People for Ministry and each of these workshops was intended to be part of that equipping. I pray that the ideas will stimulate your imaginations and draw you more deeply into the adventure of faith in God. Ours is a hurting world and we as Christ s church are called to be faithful bearers of a word of hope in the midst of loss, misunderstanding, fear, and violence. God bless you and all the members of your congregation as you seek to be the very body of Christ for your community. Careful now! Don t let these good ideas go to waste! Find a way to debrief those who attended the event so that their reflections are saved for your planning! If you don t revisit these ideas until the fall they likely will be lost! Find a process for identifying the 2 or 3 best ideas that fit your congregation and set a subcommittee to work so that when you are ready for planning these ideas are available to you. Why? Let s answer in the words of 1 Peter: [because] you are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God s own people [you are] proclaimers of the mighty acts of the one who called you out of darkness into the marvelous light of God You are God s

2 people. As God s people Jesus promises that we will not only DO his work but do greater works because of our belief. What a wonderful challenge! I said a moment ago that ours is a hurting world. It was a hurting world like ours that Jesus addressed in the lesson from John. These words are part of the Last Supper discourse that Jesus had with his disciples. His disciple s hearts are troubled. Jesus offers words of assurance, meant to tie the disciples to Jesus during the time of his crucifixion. Jesus knew that the disciples would miss him and so he told them words that would carry them into the future. Though we overhear Jesus words in a very different world, we too miss Jesus and long for his return. We would rather be disciples of someone alive and present than pursue our discipleship by faith. In order to reassure his disciples about his departure, Jesus tells them that there are many dwelling places in his Father s house, that he is going to prepare a place for them, and that he will come back to take them to himself so that they will be where he is. (Quoting Raymond E. Brown). We often read this text at funerals for its promise of a place with Jesus. Where is the dwelling place you long for? Is it some kind of grand castle to which Jesus will escort you after your death? Is it Jesus accompanying you to the clouds and St Peter s check-in desk? Or, as some others read this, is the dwelling place of God actually your own heart, in which case he is already with all those who trust him? I m thinking of this because of our new Bible: Book of Faith initiative in the ELCA. We re asking our church to become fluent in the first language of faith, the scriptures. One of the invitations of the initiative is that we dwell in the word, that is, that we take such conscious time that we gain a sense of living in scripture. My guess is that few of us do that with enough discipline to really feel at home in scripture. Mostly we flit and float through various texts looking for a shortcut or a magic text that will speak to our hopes or fears.

3 But I ve had another thought about that in these last few days. What if scripture finds a home in us? I think this is what happens when the Holy Spirit puts before us a text that draws us closer to God. The word itself becomes a kind of home where our confidence in God resides. Here s the example from my own life: When I am anxious and scared I need a dwelling place, a safe place, a retreat place. In answer to my prayer God has raised up a text, just a portion of one verse! Listen: Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3) My life is hidden with Christ in God. This sounds like a dwelling place to me! And what a wonderful picture it is, curled up tight in fear, I am embraced by my Lord who bears me into the life of God! This is a scriptural home for me, my dwelling place inside the promises of God. What s more, it is available now, not just when I die! I have been thinking of Stephen the martyr, the focus of our first lesson. What gave him so much confidence in the midst of the stoning? They were stoning him and he was praying! I wonder if he had already found his dwelling place and was so completely safe that he could turn his focus to God, and not just for himself, but turn himself to God on behalf of those who were stoning him! Astounding! Powerful! Stephen was dwelling in the word as the very Word of God, Jesus, was already dwelling in him! This gives me hope that we already have the safe place we need within us. Entrusting ourselves to Jesus, we find a home and we are safe. And here is the way we can understand Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus is the way because it is by Jesus that we are borne into the heart of God: Our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Jesus is the truth because this is exactly what we need to withstand the assaults of the world. Stephen shows us this way, entrusting himself to God even while praying for his enemies. What greater intimacy could there be!

4 Jesus is the life because we are only fully alive when we know what and whom to trust. Jesus has become the center of our trust because, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been drawn out of our self-centeredness and into the embrace of Jesus. To say Jesus is Lord is to say he is our ultimate trust, he is our path, he is all the truth that the world needs, he is our life. This is what Jesus was trying to say to his disciples on the night of his betrayal. Thomas, standing in for all of us who aren t sure we understand, says to Jesus that he doesn t know where Jesus is going. Jesus, in reply, says he isn t going further away than his Father s house and that, as he goes, he is blazing the path that all of us are invited to follow. Philip seizes the opportunity to ask about God and the human desire to see God. I remember as a boy not knowing whether I believed in God. I hadn t seen God and I didn t know yet what it meant to trust something so much. What I did know was that I loved and trusted my pastor, Glenn Groth. He was a funny and imperfect man but he loved me and respected me and cared about me. I knew Glenn Groth trusted God so I decided that I would trust Pastor Groth s faith. I don t know whether my pastor knew I was using him this way but I don t think he would have minded. I think this is one of things we do for one another in the Body of Christ. When one part of the body is sagging the rest of the body carries that sagging part! I will always be grateful to Pr. Groth for letting me borrow his faith until my own could blossom. In something of the same way Jesus is saying to Philip and to the rest of us that to trust him to trust Jesus--is already to know the Father. We sing this reality in the Christmas proper preface before Holy Communion: In the wonder and mystery of the Word made flesh you have opened the eyes of faith to a new and radiant vision of your glory, that beholding the God made visible, we may be drawn to love the God whom we cannot see. Jesus is inviting us into intimacy with God by means of his life, death, and resurrection and then promising us that the power of this belief is beyond the

5 power of death. That is the power that Stephen was tuned into when he made his witness. He was a martyr, which means witness. God is still calling the church to bear witness. Most of us will never face the martyrdom of Stephen, but we are called to bear witness. Only as the church bears the light of Christ to the world do we have the confidence of a sure home in Christ. Otherwise we re like searchers who know the address of God but don t follow the directions to the dwelling place he has prepared for us! This is the life of aimless wandering and it bears little satisfaction and less joy! Our sure guide is our Lord Jesus. He is the way. His way is truth. His truth is life abundant! God bless you this day and always, AMEN Pastor Martin Wells