Appearances Can Be Conceiving

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Easter Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 31 March 2013 Dallas, Texas Appearances Can Be Conceiving Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18 Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! We all look forward to that little refrain on Easter. It reminds us that this day is more than a rite of spring with colored eggs, chocolate bunnies, and little girls pretty dresses. But have you ever thought about what it means? I mean, not just that Christ was raised from the dead, but that he appeared among us after he was raised from the dead. Without his appearing after being raised, we would be left only scratching our heads about an empty tomb. We might think that someone stole the body and his soul flew away to heaven straightaway to be with God. Then the angels might have just assured us that everything s going to be all right, that Jesus is with God now, and that if we are all good little boys and girls, someday when we die, we will fly away to heaven, too, and be with Jesus and Grandma and our dog Skip because after all, all dogs go to heaven, don t you know?! No, Easter is more than the good news that Jesus was raised; it s the news that he appeared as the risen one in our world in the very world that put him on the old rugged cross. Now, you know the old saying, Appearances are deceiving. We say that when things appear to be different from the way they really are. Like when King Hamlet dies from an apparent snakebite at the beginning of Shakespeare s great play. His son Hamlet is distraught. The ghost of old Hamlet appears to young Hamlet to tell him the truth about the way things went down: Now, Hamlet, hear: 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,/a serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark/Is by a forged process of my death/ Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,/the serpent that did sting thy father's life/now wears his crown. The king was slain by his brother Claudius, who not only inherited his brother s crown but also his brother s wife s bed. The ghost of Hamlet appears in order to set the record straight. Jesus also appeared to set the record straight, but he was no

2 ghost. He appeared to many over 40 days, and first to Mary outside the empty garden tomb. He is risen bodily, even to the point of Mary taking him first for the gardener. And when she wants to hug him and hold him and never let him go, he gently demurs, telling her that things are different now, that he is on the move and won t be held. In our reading today from Acts, Peter is telling the good news about what Easter means. He has just had a spooky experience himself. He was hungry one afternoon, and while the food was being prepared, he fell into a trance and had a vision of all sorts of unclean animals coming down from heaven in a sheet. An angel instructed him to get up, kill and eat. Peter objected, saying that he is a devout Jew and had never eaten unclean foods. The angel said that what God has made clean, he must not call unclean. Then he learned that at the same time, an angel had been revealing to a Godfearing Roman soldier named Cornelius that God had accepted him. Peter realized that God was doing a new thing because of the resurrection of Jesus, breaking down old categories of Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean. He told Cornelius and his cohort the story of Jesus. And right in the middle of it, he said, God raised [Jesus] from the dead on the third day and allowed him to appear. Christ is risen, but the risen Christ also appeared. These appearances were not deceiving; they were conceiving. Christ s appearances enable us to conceive of God, the future, and our own lives in new and unexpected ways. First, think about how this event changes our view of God. Jesus was raised from the dead, and instead of going straight to heaven, he comes back to us. The God who was not content to be in heaven apart from us and so came to be a part of us at Christmas is up to the same mischief of love at Easter. The crucified and risen Jesus comes back to us again as the living Christ. God still can t stand to be apart from us, so he eternally comes to us. We are prone to think of the holy God as the one who lives above us far away, looking down on us to see how we are doing, keeping an eye on us, maybe even keeping a list of whether we ve been naughty or nice. But Christ s appearance lets us conceive of God s holiness differently: the holy God is 2

3 wholly with us; God is not holy by being wholly away from us. God is always coming to us. We do not need to find a way to God because God is forever finding a way to us. Jesus resurrection and his appearances again among us also reveal that he and he alone is Lord of all, Peter says. The risen Christ is loose in the world and determined to get even by making peace with his faithless friends and heartless enemies. He alone is qualified to judge the living and the dead. If Christ is our peace, if he alone is the one who judges, then we can let go of that job. We can no longer make distinctions among us about who is in and who is out, of who is clean and who is unclean, who is friend and who is enemy. God plays no favorites and isn t partial to just our kind of people. Christianity is not the announcement that our religion wins and every other religion loses. Christianity is not the way some of us get to God while others are left behind; it s the way we witness to the world that God is always on the way to us to reveal God s unconditional love for all people. Listen again to what Peter says: I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. The word nation in the Greek text is ethnos, from which we get our notion of ethnic peoples. Peter is laying down something for all believers in the risen Christ to get their heads around once and for all: religion and ethnicity must never marry, because they will produce only evil offspring. As the writer Brian McLaren points out, the result of assertions like To be Indian is to be Hindu, To be Saudi is to be Muslim, or To be American is to be Christian, leads to warfare, not peace. Think of how many wars are fought in the name of ethnic or national pride that is rooted in religion. It s not just Muslim terrorists flying planes into buildings and crying Allahu Akbar God is great. It s also crusaders of every age who raise the cross to conquer others in the name of Christ. Christ was raised and appeared among us in order to stop the very kind of violence that put him on the cross. He returned to teach us the way of forgiveness and called on us to practice it 3

4 and preach it. God is not a Christian, says the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It may sound strange to say it that way, but if you mull it over for a minute and a half, you see at once that he s right. Jesus is Lord of all. And to be a Christian is to transcend all ethnic and religious loyalties as we practice what we preach about the peace of Christ. New Wilshire members Nick and Shellie Harrison sent me a powerful message about this that came as an Easter from our friends at Christ United Methodist Church in Plano. Here s the way The Reverend Don Underwood said it: Years ago I watched an old cowboy movie on television. I don t even recall the name of it, but it was about a cowboy who roamed all over the country looking for his sister s killers so that he could avenge her death. He eventually came to a town where met a young woman with whom he fell in love, and thus began the tension that is always found in a great drama. He found himself divided and ambivalent, inwardly torn between the passion to kill and the passion to love. There was one tender moment toward the end when he and the woman he loved were on top of a hill, and she asked him if he was leaving to go after the men who had killed his sister. His answer was one of the greatest movie lines I ve ever heard: Hate ain't the same with me since I loved you. Love that. Hate ain t the same with me since I loved you. Jesus appeared after his resurrection to command us to let hatred go in the name of love and to settle scores by the peace that passes understanding. I continue to be inspired by the new Roman pontiff, Pope Francis. Baptists will always have our quibbles with the way Catholics understand the church, the hierarchy that governs it, the priesthood, the Eucharist we could go on and on. But we should not let those differences we see so clearly blind us to what binds us in Christ. To have someone in that office who models the humility of Christ allows us to see Christ s appearing even now. On Maundy Thursday this Holy Week, Pope Francis did as all other popes have done he washed the feet of others as a gesture of service. But whereas other popes washed the feet only of the Christian faithful, this pope went to a prison for young offenders 4

5 and washed the feet of 12 men and women ages 14 to 21. Among them were, for the very first time, women and Muslims. When he stooped to wash the feet of a young Serbian Muslim girl who was a criminal, you could hardly imagine a more vivid appearance of the risen Christ. Judgment as mercy, forgiveness with love, compassion with hope: there you see Christ, risen from the dead and afoot in our world washing the feet of sinners. I posted that story on my Facebook page the other night. Among those who liked it was Josh Houston. Josh grew up in our church. He went on to get a joint degree in law and theology from Emory and now works in Austin, lobbying for an interfaith advocacy group. The late Phil Strickland of Wilshire and the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission was his hero. He told me what the story of the foot-washing pope meant to him. Josh: I saw that article about Pope Francis and the Muslim woman right after the Senate Business and Commerce Committee posted that they are planning to hear one of those anti-sharia law bills next Tuesday. Texas Impact, being interfaith and all, has been quietly behind the scenes killing those bills before they even get a hearing for the past two sessions. We bottled up four already this session, but [insert the names of two politicians here] pulled a procedural move and revived one. That bill getting posted was a particularly disheartening moment at the end of an unusually frustrating week. It was one of those weird, irrational, hair stands on the back of your neck moments where I felt God. I'm having trouble putting into words the significance of the hope the Pope's simple actions of washing a Muslim prisoner's feet restored for me. I hope that over the next few weeks when I go to "kill" this bill that makes our Muslim brothers and sisters feel so attacked and discriminated against, I can do so with the presence of God that was present in the Pope and made apparent through his actions. Made apparent through his actions. Appearances can be conceiving! The resurrected Christ continues to appear through his disciples, and he is counting on us to get busy keeping up appearances for real. Alleluia. Amen. 5