BELOW EXPECTATIONS THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER APRIL 30, 2017 BECKY ROBBINS-PENNIMAN CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, DUNEDIN, FL COLLECT OF THE DAY O God, your Son makes himself known to all his disciples in the breaking of bread. Open the eyes of our faith, that we may see him in his redeeming work, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. ISAIAH 44:1 8 But now hear this, Jacob my servant, and Israel, whom I have chosen. The Lord your maker, who formed you in the womb and will help you, says: Don t fear, my servant Jacob, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen. I will pour out water upon thirsty ground and streams upon dry land. I will pour out my spirit upon your descendants and my blessing upon your offspring. They will spring up from among the reeds like willows by flowing streams. This one will say, I am the Lord s, and that one will be named after Jacob. Another will write on his hand, The Lord s and will take the name Israel. The Lord, Israel s king and redeemer, the Lord of heavenly forces, says: I am the first, and I am the last, and besides me there are no gods. Who is like me? Let them speak up, explain it, and lay it out for me. Who announced long ago what is to be? Let them tell us what is to come. Don t tremble; have no fear! Didn t I proclaim it? Didn t I inform you long ago? You are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no other rock; I know of none. PSALM 116:1 3,10 17 I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him. The cords of death entangled me; the grip of the grave took hold of me; I came to grief and sorrow. Then I called upon the Name of the Lord: O Lord, I pray you, save my life. How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his servants. O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant and the child of your handmaid; you have freed me from my bonds. I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call upon the Name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, In the courts of the Lord s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem. Hallelujah! 1 PETER 1:17 23 Since you call upon a Father who judges all people according to their actions without favoritism, you should conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your dwelling in a strange land. Live in this way, knowing that you were not liberated by perishable things like silver or gold from the empty lifestyle you inherited from your ancestors. Instead, you were liberated by the precious blood of Christ, like that of a flawless, spotless lamb. Christ was chosen before the creation of the world, but was only revealed at the end of time. This was done for you, who through Christ are faithful to the God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory. So now, your faith and hope should rest in God. As you set yourselves apart by your obedience to the truth so that you might have genuine affection for your fellow believers, love each other deeply and earnestly. Do this because you have been given new birth not from the type of seed that decays but from seed that doesn t. This seed is God s life-giving and enduring word. Copyright notices: The Scripture text (except for the Psalm) is from the Common English Bible, CEB, Copyright 2010, 2011 by Common English Bible. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all other content is original and copyrighted by Becky Robbins-Penniman, 2017. All rights reserved.
2 LUKE 24:13 35 On that same day, two disciples were traveling to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking to each other about everything that had happened. While they were discussing these things, Jesus himself arrived and joined them on their journey. They were prevented from recognizing him. He said to them, What are you talking about as you walk along? They stopped, their faces downcast. The one named Cleopas replied, Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who is unaware of the things that have taken place there over the last few days? He said to them, What things? They said to him, The things about Jesus of Nazareth. Because of his powerful deeds and words, he was recognized by God and all the people as a prophet. But our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him. We had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. All these things happened three days ago. But there s more: Some women from our group have left us stunned. They went to the tomb early this morning and didn t find his body. They came to us saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who told them he is alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women said. They didn t see him. Then Jesus said to them, You foolish people! Your dull minds keep you from believing all that the prophets talked about. Wasn t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory? Then he interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets. When they came to Emmaus, he acted as if he was going on ahead. But they urged him, saying, Stay with us. It s nearly evening, and the day is almost over. So he went in to stay with them. After he took his seat at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he disappeared from their sight. They said to each other, Weren t our hearts on fire when he spoke to us along the road and when he explained the scriptures for us? They got up right then and returned to Jerusalem. They found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying to each other, The Lord really has risen! He appeared to Simon! Then the two disciples described what had happened along the road and how Jesus was made known to them as he broke the bread. Song of the Day: I Come with Joy to Meet My Lord ************************************************************************** For about 15 years in State Government I was measured, year in and year out, by a yardstick that determined my chances for a raise, a promotion, and an office with a window. Every year, in my annual review, my boss had to rank me in about 20 areas, on a scale of 1 to 14, assessing me as Below Expectations, Meets Expectations, or Exceeds Expectations I don t know about you, but even in my loving family, the most devastating words one of my parents could say to me were: Becky, I am very disappointed in you. Add to that our educational system of grading, testing, passing, failing, and ranking human beings against each other, as well as our sports culture of winning, losing, and being a champion, and by the time a sweet little baby becomes a young adult in our culture, we have carefully taught ourselves that our self worth, our very value as a human being hinges on whether we meet other people s expectations. If we sit with this for even a moment, I think most of us will share a couple of thoughts: First is, Well, of course! How else could it be? And the second is the sting of memory maybe one instance, maybe a thousand, where we did not meet expectations. We weren t good enough. We disappointed. We hold these in our minds side by side: the seeming inevitability and rightness of a system where we will be measured by some external authority, and the pain whether just a prick now and then or a chronic experience of not being good enough.
3 In the story of the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus, this system was in full force: humanity judged God and determined he was not good enough. The priests and Pharisees judged he was a failed Jew. The Romans judged he was a treasonous troublemaker and expendable. They killed him. But the judging didn t stop there. The disciples also judged God s Christ, the one, as Peter put it, who was chosen before the creation of the world to liberate us. Liberate us from what? From sin. But what is sin? Sin is that gap between life in the fullness of the Reign of God for which God created us, and the empty life we, in our culture, have chosen. Life in the Reign of God is what we are formed for, as our lessons teach. Isaiah said, The Lord your maker... formed you in the womb, and this Lord will help us all our lives, will pour out his spirit and blessing on us, giving us a life where no one thirsts, no one fears. For thousands of years God has been calling us out of the strange land of oppression, hunger and violence and into the Reign of God. Christ continues this work of freeing us to live fully. As the first letter of Peter says: You were not liberated by perishable things like silver or gold from the empty lifestyle you inherited from your ancestors. Instead, you were liberated by the precious blood of Christ. We don t talk much about the blood of Christ much as Episcopalians, but what Peter means is that God in Christ gives his very life for our freedom to live fully. Putting these two lessons together, we are told that in our very origin, before we have done anything at all, we are assured of God s spirit and blessing. And God will do ANYTHING, EVERYTHING, to keep filling and blessing us, including submitting to being judged, rejected, betrayed, denied, tortured and killed by the very creatures he formed in the womb. So, when Peter says that God judges without favoritism, he is saying that God looks at each one formed in God s image and says, I m doing this for you. Whatever it takes to free you from sin, to close the gap between what I intended for YOU and how you chose to live, I will do, even to giving up my life. It s not surprising that we don t get this. Like I said, even the disciples judged Jesus and found him wanting. What do those two on the road to Emmaus say? We had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. But, obviously, a dead prophet isn t going to redeem anything. On a scaled of 1 to 14, Jesus as a savior and redeemer merits a 1, a below expectations. We don t get this because we don t think like God. There s an old joke that in the beginning, God created humanity in his image and we ve been returning the favor ever since. In our cultural system where we assess everyone and everything, measuring them by the standards we have carefully developed to keep us in control. We have also created a deity who is concerned not with liberation, but with forcing people to toe the line. Religions of all kinds usually eventually succumb to the demonic temptation to worship an image of a false god of limited grace and exacting demands, creating elaborate and often very expensive authoritarian systems governing access to the spirit and blessing of this false image of God, and altogether ignoring the one who is first, who is last, who is the One True God.
4 If there s one thing we need to learn as Easter people, it s that humanity can t restrict the One True God s spirit and blessing. It s so much bigger than we are! God s spirit and blessing are so much bigger than our fears, our panicky need to control everything, to keep things the same so that everything Meets. Our. Expectations. Last week we read in the Gospel of John that Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. He poured out Spirit and blessing on people who had denied, abandoned, and totally given up on him because he was a failed prophet, below expectations. They didn t deserve the Spirit! God chose to give it. This week, we read that Jesus walks with two disciples who had done the same thing: judged Jesus as a failure and who were headed home to figure out what to believe next. They deserved nothing. Jesus spends his first precious hours of resurrected life patiently explaining to his evaluators that they had been looking for the wrong kind of Messiah. Their human evaluation form measured liberation in terms of military victory and religious dominance. Jesus takes them back to life in the Reign of God, promised from days of old, where there is economic justice for widows and orphans, where there is peace, shalom, for all nations - not revenge. Where everyone who yearns for God, who cries out for help, will not only find God, but will discover God was there, present, listening for them long before we even realize we need God. Jesus explains that the prophets taught that God s Christ would suffer the same fatal end as do all of God s faithful prophets, BUT God would affirm the identity of the Christ by raising him up, which, said Jesus, is exactly what has just happened. Perhaps we humans are not very good at evaluating God, and should stop. Likewise, we need to give up the project of evaluating each other. The job of Judge of Humanity has been taken, and none of you got it. This is the most difficult, radical, revolutionary consequence of Easter. Our value as a human being is grounded in one thing: we don t need to strive for God s love; each one of us is utterly precious to God. In one of his poems, St. Francis wrote: [God once] asked me to join Him on a walk through this world, and we gazed into every heart on this earth, and I noticed he lingered a bit longer before any face that was weeping, and before any eyes that were laughing. And sometimes when we passed a soul in worship, God too would kneel down. I have come to learn: God adores his creation. 1 This is the attitude we are to bring to gathering as the church. Not triumphalism, not precise control, but adoration of God and each other. This is what the life of Easter people looks like, a full life, a life that lives already in the Reign of God. These marbles we used during Lent? Those were practice for our life as Easter people. If you d like to take one now as a reminder and keep it, please do! 1 Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Compass, 2002, p. 41.
5 The life based on judging, evaluating and winning, is what the Letter from Peter calls the empty lifestyle of our ancestors, our culture. If we are not to live by external expectations, do we do the flip side and start judging ourselves? Plenty of people do that, too. No, we are to go at things in an entirely different way. We are not to live by self-judgment, but by discernment. In the letter from Peter, as Easter people, we are encouraged to set ourselves apart by our obedience to the truth, which, I believe, is the truth that God adores us and is pouring spirit and blessing on all creation every moment of every day. Day by day, we are to discern what God s spirit, poured on us, is calling us, inviting us, walking with us to become, and in this way we also become witnesses to the liberation and joy of Easter. It s when we do this that the prayer we prayed in the Collect of the Day is answered. We prayed that we may see Christ in his redeeming work, and we become the answer to that prayer when we use the Spirit s power to live the fullness of the Reign of God right here and right now. When we see that God starts all this because God adores not only us, but those our culture carefully teaches us to judge as unworthy, then we can use the spirit and blessing God pours out on us to do what in our culture is unthinkable, but is what God made us for: to have genuine affection for each other, loving each other deeply and earnestly. We start that work, practicing those things, right here in church, with each other. It s kind of amazing how tough church folk can be on each other. We gossip, we accuse, we second-guess, we refuse to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Peter says the Church is, however, to the place we practice giving each other a break, being patient and tolerant with folks who make us crazy, and finding as many ways as we can to pray for each other. We do this not to get a 14 on our evaluation forms, but because we are forgiven, loved, and totally free to live without fear. That blows our culture s expectations right out of the water. Freedom from fear, especially fear of God, has been the message of the Resurrection for 2,000 years. That is still big news to a whole lot of people. Like the disciples who rushed back from Emmaus to Jerusalem: we, too need go out and share it in the strange land of empty lifestyles we ll enter when we leave this place. The Gospel message is simply this: the God who creates you, redeems you, and sustains you is crazy about you. Or, as Max Lucado put it: If God had a refrigerator, YOUR picture would be on it. 2 2 Max Lucado, God Thinks You're Wonderful, Thomas Nelson, 2003. p. 13