AND SO WE RISE Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12 The First Reading for Easter begins, Then Peter began to speak to them Who are them? Them are the Gentiles. And who are the Gentiles? Gentiles are those who are not Jews. In Peter s world there were only two kinds: Jews and Gentiles. The New Testament portrays Peter as initially not thinking very highly of Gentiles, and for awhile he is of the opinion that Gentiles who want to be Christians must first become Jews as a way of making themselves acceptable to God. Paul challenged this way of thinking and apparently prevailed, because we find Peter saying to them, the Gentiles, God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God. If God shows no partiality, then Jews are no better than Gentiles in God s sight. Such is the education of St. Peter. This, I trust you can see, is a great breakthrough, and there would be no Christian faith without this breakthrough. Why did Christianity survive and spread? At least one, and, I would say, a primary reason for this was because the Christian faith was in principle open to everyone. Anyone who found God in Jesus could be a member and receive the blessings that come with such membership in the body of Christ. Does this then mean that God is partial to Christians over Jews or Pagans or anyone else? Not at all! It simply means that those who find God in Jesus will understand God in a certain
way, will understand God to have a certain character. Peter says that Jesus is the one ordained by God as the judge of the living and the dead, and that everyone who believes in Jesus receives forgiveness of sins through his name. Peter is speaking here as a Christian, speaking out of his Christian understanding. According to the Christian faith, the life of Jesus sets the standard for what it means to live a godly life and as such Jesus life is the principle of judgment for our lives. Those who believe this about Jesus know God as merciful and forgiving, which is what it means when Peter says that those who believe in Jesus receive forgiveness through his name. Are non-christians forgiven and forgivable? Of course! Why not? But they re not forgiven through Jesus name, because it is not through Jesus that they look to God for their forgiveness. The essential point here is that God shows no partiality, that the love of God is for all. This shouldn t be hard for a Christian to understand or to accept for that matter. And yet, for many Christians it apparently is hard to understand and accept. Many Christians see God as distinctly partial to them because they believe in Jesus, and they contend that there is no salvation apart from believing in Jesus. They will tell you that this is the meaning of Easter: that Jesus died for the sins of the world and was raised by God from death, and that all who believe in him and only those who believe in him will also be raised from the dead to live everlastingly with God. Those who don t believe are doomed. But people who think along these lines confuse their opinions with the opinion of God, and in so doing suggest that God is bound by certain rules of religion and is consequently not free to love and forgive and save anybody God wants. This, of course, was precisely the mistake Peter was making before he came to see that God shows no partiality.
The matter of salvation is commonly thought about in two ways. One way is reflected in the question, What happens when I die? In response to this question many Christians think about their faith as their ticket to heaven. They are concerned about what will happen to them when they die as all of us one day must. Death is the unknown, and the unknown can and often does make us anxious and afraid. If, they think, Jesus was raised from the dead, why, shouldn t they be able to catch hold of Jesus coattails and also be raised from the dead and have their own Easter? According to this scenario, this life is the staging ground for the next life and is lived with the purpose of getting a good outcome when this life is through. Salvation is thus understood as everlasting life in heaven. The saved are saved from being dead. A second way to think about salvation is reflected in the question, What happens when I live? According to this way of thinking, life in this world is more than merely existing. We are meant to live lives that are worth living, lives that are full. This question is more about the quality of our living than it is about the quantity of our years What is a worthwhile life? What is a full life? What am I living for? This way of thinking about salvation is less concerned about physical death and its aftermath and more concerned about the spiritual death of pointless living in the present and how one might rise above it. A person who frames the question of salvation this way is inclined to see life after death as something that is entirely in the hands of God and not a matter of human concern. Christians of Lutheran persuasion should be especially inclined to think that whatever is to come when our days on earth are through, the grace of God will prevail and, as a consequence, we have nothing to fear. What is to be feared, however, is that we would live thoughtless and pointless lives, that we would spend our energy going after
that in life which is false and unsatisfying. This is a very real possibility, and the Christian faith is offered to save us from such a fate, to raise us up from the death of futile and fruitless living. But before we can feel this benefit of our faith, we must be able to feel the force of the question What happens when I live? Another way to pose this question is to ask, What is there to live for? and asking it this way is, I think, helpful in appreciating the Christian answer, which is this: The purpose of life is to learn how to love. To love means that I am happy when you, the other person, are happy. And when you are unhappy or suffering, then I also suffer. Life is a brief period given to us freely to learn how to love, with the obligation to work against evil. The meaning of life is that love responds to love (Abbe Pierre) From a Christian point of view, this is it! This is the purpose of life and what it means to be alive. This is what happens when I live. And Easter is the ritual in the Church that reminds us that God is love, that God is to be found in loving and that love is the opposite of fear and is the means of overcoming the forces of death in the world. If you don t believe this, if you have no sense that this is true, you will not understand Easter. You will think of this day as nothing more than the answer to the question, What happens when I die? And you will, I think, leave this sanctuary missing the point. Our Gospel for today depicts Peter sprinting to the tomb of Jesus to find out what had become of Jesus. He peeks in, sees the tomb is empty, and we read, he went home, amazed at what had happened. But however amazed Peter might have been by the empty tomb, I think it is safe to say that Easter had not yet dawned for him. That would not occur until he came to understand that God shows no partiality, that as Jesus embraced Gentiles as well as Jews, which is to say, as Jesus embraced all people, that the
love of God is for all and that godliness is the imitation of this love. On Easter Sunday, we recall the amazement of that first Easter. But the Christian faith is what we make of that amazement, the realization that love is God s way with the world and that love is stronger than death, that it is love that saves us and makes all things new. This is the essence of Jesus life and teaching. It is the essence of Christian life and teaching. It is very simple. And it is amazing! Whatever happens to us when we die, life is what happens to us when we love. This is the faith that rises at Easter and the hope contained in the Easter greeting, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Amen. Easter Day, April 8, 2007 Emanuel Lutheran Church