April 14, 2024 – Second Sunday of Easter
Rev. Gary Percesepe
Turn on NPR, go into any bookstore, read the Religion section of major newspapers, dig deep into the world of podcasts, check out the latest Substack newsletter, or just scroll through your Facebook, Tic Toc or Instagram and you’ll discover that “spirituality” is everywhere.
But here’s an odd thing: The explosion of interest in spiritualty coincides with a massive, post-COVID decline in worship attendance and giving. How often have you heard someone say, “Oh, I’m spiritual but I’m not religious.” Plastic, dashboard Jesus may be breaking sales records, but our churches are mostly empty and young people refuse to darken the door.
Popular fascination with spirituality hasn’t translated into an interest in church. People vote with their feet, preferring exploration of individual spirituality to belonging to a congregation or any organized religious community. Spirituality floods the market and fill the shelves, but the same cannot be said about interest in church. As the English romantic poet Percy Shelley once remarked, “I could believe in Jesus if he did not drag that leprous bride of his—the church.”
What does God want? Scripture tells us. The book of Acts couldn’t be clearer: God’s dream is to form a people, a community, a visible body on earth. Starting with the story of Abraham & Sarah in Genesis, on through the Exodus from Egypt, from Bethlehem to Calvary, from patriarchs to prophets, from the gospel of Matthew to the book of Revelation, God intends to have a people who will bless all people who on earth do dwell. Scripture is not terribly concerned with the spiritual state of individuals, their sparkling spirituality or holiness, or even their salvation. The focus of the Book of Acts is God’s ekklesia, the Greek word for church. God’s dream is to form a people.
The word Hebrew means nomad, or wanderer. Abraham was a nomadic tribesman. The Jewish scriptures repeatedly make clear that the Jewish people were not a people, but God fashioned them into a people for himself, not because they were anything special but precisely because they were not! They were small, powerless, virtually defenseless against powerful enemies and empires, but God plucked them out of (literally) nowhere and made of them a great people. The same is true of the disciples, the most unlikely crew of foul mouthed illiterate fishermen, hated tax collectors, Jewish Zealots who hated tax collectors—God took this mess and made of it the church, and then, shockingly, God calls them a peculiar people, a holy priesthood, the household of God, an undefeatable, glory-radiating, community-deepening, truth-seeking epitome of God’s love and rule on this Earth, against which the very gates of hell shall not prevail! As I’ve said repeatedly from this pulpit since I arrived, the church of Jesus Christ is called to be a parable of true communion, a people who love one another, who offer our lives for the sake of the world. What does God want? God wants human life to flourish in visible communities where love is embodied in ordinary people doing extraordinary things through the power of God.
We find ourselves adrift today in a world where Christendom has been disestablished. The idolatrous union of church and society known as Christendom has produced a pale, sickly, paralyzed, powerless, civil religion which has shattered like glass. Shorn of its glory and power, reduced to American shibboleths like “be nice,” or “love wins,” Jesus has been reduced to a mere “moral teacher,” boxed, commodified and sold as religious merchandising even as thousands of empty church buildings are shuttered and sold each year in America, as the great cathedrals of Europe become tourist attractions. The book of Acts shows the church the way back home, if we are willing to listen with open hearts.
What do we see in the book of Acts? We witness a church on the move, not stuck indoors, thriving in the face of adversity; a people who sell all their possessions to share their common life; a church fashioned by the fire of the Holy Spirit, open to adventure, a church that doesn’t have a mission program, a mission budget, or even a mission statement, but it is itself a mission, a community practicing resurrection.
How refreshing it is for those who find ourselves drained and exhausted to read these stories of adventure and intrigue, stories of a people who flourished despite a brutal military occupation and against the will of a powerful empire that boasted of being an eternal city; Rome in all its prideful glory has been reduced to rubble; every human empire has toppled but the church of Christ goes on, towering oe’r the wrecks of time.
As we read this book together in the coming weeks it’s my hope that we discover a new vitality and dynamism, that God’s mana / power will break out all over the place as in days of old, that we will find the courage to be the church in our time, that we will stop whining about the survival of the church and simply be the church, dynamic, adaptive to changing circumstances, led by the Spirit. Reading Acts, we discover our kūpuna in the faith navigating a new world filled with danger and opportunity, venturing out from locked rooms to engage in fearless speech with boldness and confidence that God was doing something new in this world. Oh people, God is writing an epic poem, and the wonder of it all is that we may contribute a verse or two! The message of Easter is that we are not dead, the stone has been rolled away and resurrected people are emerging into the light of a new day.
So, God’s word to us today, church, is simple: Stop resisting resurrection, and believe the good news: Christ has come for you, Christ continues to come even when we deny, betray, and desert him. The evidence lies in the preacher himself.
Peter’s sermon follows the dramatic healing of a man who was lame. Peter and John stand in the long line of God’s prophets called by God, sent to cry liberation to a world ensnared in illusion. Healing and the proclamation of the word are meant to be read as a single episode. The connection between the sermon and the miracle is made in the opening verse when Peter disclaims personal responsibility for the healing by asking the astonished witnesses, “Why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we had made him well?” The same God who formerly dwelt in the temple has now been unleashed into the world! Peter finds his true voice at last and proclaims to the crowd of fellow Jews that the God of their kūpuna Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is responsible for the miracle, manifesting the glory of God’s servant Jesus. Divine power is no longer confined to the temple, as if any building could hold the glory of God. God is untamed, entering locked rooms, passing through human walls, healing the lame, raising the dead. Peter’s sermon stings. Jesus, delivered up to death by religious leaders who cruelly collaborated with the hated Romans, conspiring in the death of an innocent martyr—you handed over, you rejected, you killed…but God raised from the dead! The people chose the murderer Barabbas over the author of life, because like Rome they preferred death to life, but Easter corrected this gross injustice, which was done in ignorance, and now the only appropriate response is to repent, to have a change of heart, to experience the thrill of forgiveness, after which will come the time of refreshing.
The good news is that we are not a people destined to fail or die, we are meant to live, to have abundant life now, to practice resurrection today and every day. The Romans cruelly murdered Jesus on Good Friday, thinking they had stopped a movement in its tracks, buried it, but on Easter God had other ideas. As the Mexican proverb says, “They wanted to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Amen.