every turn failing all the while.

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Second Sunday of Easter Wilshire Baptist Church 7 April 2013 Dallas, Texas Dangerous Obedience Acts 5:27-32; Jn. 20:19-31 I can t remember an Easter Sunday I enjoyed more than last week. Full house. Glorious music. Jesus rose from the dead on cue. Alleluia. And at the end of the sermon, which focused on Christ s appearances to his disciples, I said something to the effect of how he is counting on us now to keep up appearances. If you watch British comedy shows on Sunday nights, you might have caught the reference. The classic show Keeping Up Appearances features the painstaking efforts of a woman from humble working-class roots named Hyacinth Bucket. The name is spelled Bucket, but she insists that people pronounce it in the more uppitysounding way Bouquet. Her hen-pecked husband Richard dances around her obsession with keeping up appearances. She wants so very much to be the socialite, but she never quite gets there. Each episode is one hysterical pratfall after another as she tries to be someone she isn t in order that people will think her important. Hyacinth unfailingly obeys the conventions of high society at every turn failing all the while. Over the seven weeks that make up the Easter season and Easter is a season, not just a day we will follow the early church s attempts to keep up appearances of the risen Christ. And we ll challenge ourselves to do the same. Our texts will come from the Book of Acts, which records the remarkable spread of the gospel by the courageous witness of the apostles. Today we look at Peter and the others who have been told to stand down from their public witness to the resurrected Savior. They just can t. They just can t help themselves. If you re anything like me, you admire and envy the boldness of Peter s statement in response: We must obey God rather than men. That s the way the King James puts it. Our translation makes it clearer but less eloquent: We must obey God rather than human authority. Obedience is a word somewhat out of favor these days. Submitting to authority has been unfashionable since well, I

2 guess since the Garden of Eden, don t you know?! But the 1960s made obedience itself seem like a moral offense when so many believed that government officials were lying to the American people. Whether the secret bombing of Cambodia by Lyndon Johnson or the dirty tricks of Richard Nixon in Watergate, those who held the keys of power lost the hearts of the people. The watchword of the times became question authority, not obey authority. The phrase Generation Gap was coined to describe a society was torn between those who thought their deepest duty was to be obedient to authority and those who believed it was to be disobedient to authority. Peter and the other apostles must have felt like the disobedient upstarts of their day. The religious leaders of the Jews in Jerusalem had tried to protect their people from being further marginalized by Roman rulers. Rome could crush Jewish life on a whim. The high priest of the Jewish temple and the other leaders wanted to keep order. The Jesus movement threatened the fragile agreement they had with Pontius Pilate. Of course, it wasn t totally altruism that motivated them; the high priesthood had become a political post. Jewish leaders owed their positions to earthly powers as much as heavenly. So, yes, they were looking out for themselves, but nothing is pure this side of heaven. Selfinterested politicians can still do noble things by looking after the interests of others. Or not. The point is, those who are in power are there to promote the wellbeing of those out of power, but so often they act mainly to protect their own well-being. Well, that being the case, the authorities had turned Jesus over to the Romans, who crucified him. Thinking he was out of the way and order could return, they then heard reports of Jesus being alive again and appearing to his disciples. They couldn t verify this statement, but when suddenly the disciples, who had so quickly disappeared upon Jesus arrest, started preaching boldly in the streets and temple, and even healing the sick the way Jesus had, well, it was clear that just getting rid of Jesus hadn t been enough. So then they, with no personal experience of Jesus resurrection, had Peter and the others arrested. They put them in a public jail. And Luke tells us that an angel of the Lord 2

3 appeared to them during the night, opening the prison doors, bringing them out of the jail, and telling them, Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life. I love that angelic line the whole message about this life. If only we thought of witnessing that way instead of thinking we are supposed to argue people into believing. Well, anyway, the apostles did. They started talking about the whole message about this life in Christ. When the leaders woke the next morning and sent to the prison for the apostles, they found the jail securely locked, the guards standing at their posts, but no one inside the cell. Next thing you know, someone came running up from the temple to say that the escapees were back in the temple teaching the people. Now get this: Peter and the others were free. They were not just free from jail; they awoke free from fear. They weren t threatened by anyone who could kill the body. It reminds me of the great lines of Richard Lovelace: Stone walls do not a prison make/nor iron bars a cage;/minds innocent and quiet/ Take that for an heritage./if I have freedom in my love,/and in my soul am free;/angels alone that soar above/enjoy such liberty. 1 Doesn t this just get to the heart of it? They are free in their love. They have no shame. These men who were too ashamed of their Lord at the time of his arrest to stand with him, these men who like Hyacinth Bucket or us were so concerned with what others thought of them, these men have been loved and forgiven by the risen Christ. And here s the most important thing for them and for us: they have forgiven themselves and have gotten on with living the whole message about this life. So the religionists come to find them. The high priest says, We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name [of Jesus], yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man s blood on us. Think about this: the men escaped from jail inexplicably, and instead of asking them about that, all they can do is tell them not to speak of Jesus. Wouldn t you think they would be amazed and want to know where this liberating power is coming from? 1 To Althea, From Prison. 3

4 But that s exactly why it is so hard for us to witness to people in power whether it s a bully at school whose friendship you secretly want or an abusive husband,whose love you still crave; a parent, whose blessing you want at any cost; or elected officials, whom you want to like you so that you can say you know them even if there are supposed to be serving you; or a dictator in Syria who would just as soon kill every last citizen than relinquish power, and yet we are afraid of what other countries might think if we even send humanitarian aid to those who are being slaughtered. Oh, my, it never ends. As long as those with power have something you want or need, you can t speak the truth to them in love. Peter and the apostles said they MUST speak. They must obey God, even if it was dangerous for them. They were compelled from within, not from without. Obedience is always dangerous, one way or another: it is dangerous to obey immoral powers because it means peril to your soul s integrity before God; and it is dangerous to obey God, because it sets you at odds with those who try to make scapegoats of others in order to protect themselves. But look at what Peter and the apostles said: The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right had and Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. In other words, you are not in charge any more. You don t scare us. Christ is our new leader. And here s the best news of all he s not out to get back at you for what you did to him. He s out to forgive you. We know that because that s what we found out directly from him. You are guilty, but so are we. The important thing is not about blaming anymore in order to protect ourselves; if God isn t blaming, and if death isn t even a threat, then let s live this life as free people in love. When we witness to people about the good news of Christ, that s what we are to tell them. We are to tell them just what has happened to us how we experienced forgiveness and learned to love with reckless abandon. When people start hearing that, the church won t have to wince at criticism about hypocrisy and judgmentalism. We are only telling our story 4

5 about how we were imprisoned by our guilt but set free to love by Christ. Elwin Williams died this week. He was a hateful racist who was part of a group that attacked a busload of civil rights advocates, called Freedom Riders, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Hold that thought. Forty-five years ago this past week, Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Memphis to support the sanitation workers who were striking there. The authorities said they couldn t strike. A man whose name I will not name because I don t think he deserves to be remembered a man who represented the bigotry of so many in those days, shot King to death on the balcony of a motel. But three years earlier, King said this about Jim Crow segregation laws: We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. So do to us what you will and we will still love you. I love that. I wish I had that kind of courage. Don t you? He added this: We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appear to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. The columnist Leonard Pitts wrote the story this week of how that came to be for Elwin Williams. Four years ago, Williams told an interviewer about a friend who had asked him, If you died right now, do you know where you would go. Wilson did. To hell, he said. And that led him to seek out John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia who was one of those Freedom Riders he had beaten up. He went to Washington and asked Lewis s forgiveness. The two men wept together as they experienced the whole message of this life. 2 Obedience to God means that we must tell the story of the risen Savior, who s in the world today. And when we do, we will indeed be keeping up appearances in deed. 2 The Dallas Morning News (April 5, 2013): 17A. 5