Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 14, 2024
Preached at Holy Wisdom Monastery Sunday Assembly, Middleton, WI
Years ago as a young pastor, long before the hair turned gray, I was trying my best to make my church contemporary. I discovered the hymn writing duo of Richard Avery and Don Marsh who had penned a lively tune entitled “Every Morning Is Easter Morning.” And they are right. Every Sunday is Easter. Of course it is. Every forgiveness is Easter. Every birth of hope is Easter. These theological statements are the legacy of two millennia of Christian reflection on what it means that our stories circle around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is a good legacy.
Today’s Gospel and the other two Christian testament texts all give witness to Easter as a continuing legacy. In Luke resurrection is offered as a promise of a way forward for God’s whole people. Like the other gospel writers, Luke carefully prepared to tell the story of Jesus’ death. Yet when that point in the story actually comes, it’s all over very quickly. Jesus dies in a scene that is told smoothly but quickly.
But have you noticed how much more time is given to the resurrection than to the death? In Luke’s story from which our Gospel is drawn this morning, it takes a whole, long chapter to raise Jesus properly. Heck, in Acts, Luke’s companion volume to his gospel, it takes all of forty days.
And the biggest thing I notice in all of this is that the resurrected Jesus comes to a community of followers. If you read the entirety of Luke chapter 24 the resurrected Jesus doesn’t just come to them. He comes for dinner and breakfast. He eats with them. Twice! The original church dinner!
All of this confirms that every Sunday is Easter and that Easter’s most powerful witness is the community of resurrection to which it came and created. Sometimes we assume that encountering the resurrected Jesus resulted only in people running about to tell each other that Jesus was risen and maybe pausing long enough to break bread together. That happened, of course. But the most lasting reaction and the most powerful witness to the resurrection took the form of a community of faith in which people cared for each other and took care of each other.
The early church was a community of the resurrection. The resurrection wasn’t simply some individualized experience Jesus had. It was a community experience. And in such a community, people transcended differences in order to live in unity and see to it that no one was left alone, left behind. That is the community that turned the world upside down to borrow phrase Luke uses in Acts. That is the community in whose heritage we stand. As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest in their powerful book THE LAST WEEK, “…without Easter, we wouldn’t even have ‘Good Friday,’ for there would be no abiding community to remember and give meaning to his (Jesus’) death.”
Yes, Easter is that utterly central. And central to this is the power of the testimony from the community Easter created. It was their common life that heralded the truth of the resurrection. And the world took notice and listened. The world was turned upside down. Yes, the world took
notice and listened because the world saw in the lives of those early believers a distinct love and a unique identity, a message of love and redemption lived and enacted.
So what does it mean for us to live as a community of the resurrection? What traits best evidence it?
At the center of this community which Easter created resided a conviction that no one can be church alone. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, once said that there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. To be a follower of the resurrected Christ is to be committed to living as a community. Another one of those catchy tunes from Avery and Marsh had a refrain that went like this:
I am the church. You are the church.
We are the church together.
All who follow Jesus all around the world,
Yes, we’re the church together!
Yet sadly, huge swaths of the church today, both Protestant and Catholic, are facing disinterest and decline. There are lots of theories out there and plenty of pundits who will charge big bucks for their seminars to offer explanations. But I wonder if the real problem is that the world isn’t seeing in the church today what the world was seeing in that early Christian community – and that would be unity. Now I’m not so naïve as to believe that everyone in that early community held the same opinion about everything. In fact, the Christian testament is replete with acknowledgement that individuals differed in strengths and weaknesses, in ideas and approaches. What the record reveals is that unity developed as people matched strengths with weaknesses and considered the purpose of their community more important than individuality.
I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that they occasionally offended each other and got mad at each other. But all seemed to know what Fred Kaan captured in a favorite hymn of mine:
Let Christ’s acceptance change us,
So that we may be moved
In living situations to do the truth in love;
To practice Christ’s acceptance, until we know by heart
The table of forgiveness and laughter’s healing art.
Behind that love which they had for each other as sisters and brothers in Christ was a forgiveness at the heart of the One in whose name they had come together, like the letter of John suggests: “See what love God has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
Many of us in the LGBTQ+ community talk about a “family of choice” to describe the circle that has taken us in when some of those related to us by biology would not. I think the church is also like this – a family, a community, a place – where we choose to live out our faith. We are best together. In fact, any kind of Christianity that is just an individualized salvation cult of “I’m saved, are you?” is probably the furthest thing from the real unity faith in the risen Christ creates. Being the church alone is not being the church at all!
The early church took this communal notion so far that even the idea of individual possessions was not as important as communal care. That this approach did not prevail is hardly cause to default to a “show up sometime and give something” approach to church life.
If we want to turn the world upside down (or is it right side up?), then we must still find ways to let the world know we are Christians by our love, a love in action, a love made visible, a love made real and tangible, as in bread for the hungry and acceptance of the outcast and more.
When we live and build community that finds its inspiration in a person-centered gospel of divine love and the universality of forgiveness, then the world will know that we are a people called to get up and live.
The 21st Century presents many challenges to authentic Christian community. And not the least is our culture’s highly individualistic bent where “do it my way or not at all,” is the cry, where me and my ideas and wants and wishes and plans are all that matter. The witness we must make is to another way – to community, compassion, acceptance, forgiveness – acting together in the name of the risen Christ.
I realize this view of church qualifies as a radical concept. It is as radical as the resurrection that gives the church life. But anything less, radically compromises the power of our witness to the resurrection.
Only a community of the resurrection can embody the spirit and compassion of the resurrected Christ, accepting with it all persons no matter who they are or where they may be on life’s journey. In such a community the strong minister to the weak; the assured to the doubting; the calm to the angered; the healthy to the sick – all knowing full well that at any point in time the situation can change and those offering ministry may be in need of some! A community of the resurrection matures as its members discover and are embraced by a family of choice.
Then such a community will truly be a powerful witness to the resurrected Christ – not because of what it says, but because of what it is; not because of its message, but because of its ministry; not because of its hope for some distant future, but because of its present identity; a community that is in the words of a Ruth Duck hymn, “a table of spread with gifts of love and broken bread, where all find welcome, grace attends, and enemies arise as friends” (Ruth Duck, 1991).
[I did not close with this prayer but add it here as these lines by Fred Kaan speak eloquently of our desire for a life together that might witness to the risen Christ:Lord, for today’s encounters with all who are in need,
Who hunger for acceptance, for righteousness and bread,
We need new eyes for seeing, new hands for holding on;
Renew us with your spirit, Lord, free us, make us one! (1974)