12 The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people. They would come together regularly at Solomon’s Porch. 13 No one from outside the church dared to join them, even though the people spoke highly of them. 14 Indeed, more and more believers in the Lord, large numbers of both men and women, were added to the church. 15 As a result, they would even bring the sick out into the main streets and lay them on cots and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow could fall on some of them as he passed by. 16 Even large numbers of persons from towns around Jerusalem would gather, bringing the sick and those harassed by unclean spirits. Everyone was healed. (Common English Bible)
“The
Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Nine
The video clips on Facebook, Twitter,
Vine, etc. are all more or less the same: some oddball in a t shirt and bathing
suit stands somewhere, usually outdoors, and talks for a little bit to their
friends before proceeding to dump a really giant, huge bucket of ice water all
over them. It is called the Ice Bucket
Challenge, and it has taken social media by storm. Basically, you have to dump said giant, huge
bucket of ice water over you or donate $100 to research for Amyotrphoic Lateral
Sclerosis.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is, I
think, one of the most frightening things ever whose name many of us do not
even know…instead, we know it by another name: Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the
famous Yankee first baseman whose career and, eventually, life were sacrificed
to this illness.
And ALS is frightening for a number of
reasons: its difficulty to diagnose, its lack of known causes beyond family
history, and its deadly prognosis: while some of its targets end up living long
and amazing lives (Steven Hawking celebrated his 72nd birthday this
year after being diagnosed at age 21, with his doctors at the time giving him
only two years to live), the average person lives for only a little over three
years after diagnosis. Only 4 percent of
patients live longer than 10 years after their diagnosis. And those who die from ALS usually end up
succumbing to either respiratory failure or pneumonia as the disease shuts down
their body, beginning with the extremities of hands and arms before ending with
the lungs. It is an incredibly vivid,
harrowing way to go out.
With so much of the deck stacked
against us, it’s perhaps not surprising that we haven’t found anything remotely
close to a cure (or even disease management) yet, but that still hasn’t kept us
from trying, and sometimes, with a disease that desperate, you are desperate
enough to do utterly ridiculous things, like, say, drench yourself in ice water
(and if you’re the CEO of my hometown soccer team, Sporting Kansas City,
drenching yourself in ice water from the MLS Cup your team is currently
defending this season). And it has made
a difference: according to TIME, the ALS Association took in $32,000 in
donations during this particular three week time period last year.
This year? $5.5 million.
For those of you keeping score at home (or in your pews), that’s an
increase of 171 times normal. Not bad
for what ice water with a dash of desperation and hope can do. And it’s the same desperation and hope, I
think, that moved and saved lives for people as far back as this story from
Luke in Acts about how people who were so sick and so desperate for a cure
would seek out Peter’s shadow, of all things, in order to make themselves
whole.
What a little bit of hope and
desperation can do, indeed.
This is a sermon series that has been
ongoing now for a while! We began it
several weeks ago for two reasons. One
is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the
remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we
preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit,
but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that
follow. The other is that it’s summer,
and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly
frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the
original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios
(depending on just how bad the sequel is!).
The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the
Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.
Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name)
precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of
Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far
better than many of the sequels we are used to today! So this is a sermon series meant to take us
through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the
Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s
first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of
rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an
accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the
early church lived out the faith, which contrasted with the standalone story of
Ananias and Sapphira that we studied last week.
This week, we’re back on the move again, as Luke once again zooms out to
gives us a more macro view of what the New Testament church is up to now.
And in a lot of ways, it’s the same old
tricks as before: they’re on the road, healing people, performing what Luke
calls signs and wonders, but this time, a funny thing happens: nobody is
joining them anymore. And we can
probably think, well, no wonder after what happened to those two dopes Ananias
and Sapphira. If getting close to the
Apostles means giving literally everything you own and a death sentence if you
don’t, well, that’s just any marketer’s dream client.
But that doesn’t stop people from
joining anyways, they just maybe are keeping a safe distance from Peter and
John for a bit. And it certainly doesn’t
stop those who are still seeking healing from the disciples; after all, church
membership isn’t a prerequisite to have a miracle happen in your life, it’s
that church membership helps you to make sense of it and process it and live
accordingly afterwards. But when you’re
desperate enough to seek out a band of itinerant heroes who have a reputation
for mysteriously miraculous healings, you don’t care about any of that. For a lot of us, I think, our health and
wholeness comes first, and you’ll worry about all the other stuff whenever that
bridge gets crossed.
And the folks coming to the disciples
now are so desperate that they will bring out their sick loved ones and friends
and neighbors and simply place them out in the street in the hope that Peter’s
shadow will cross over them.
Imaginatively, it sort of brings to mind that “bring out your dead”
scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, only instead of Eric Idle clanging
metal together, you have Peter proclaiming the Gospel. A small but certainly significant difference.
The truly ironic thing, though, is that
Peter himself has argued previously in this series, just two chapters ago in
Acts 3, that his healing abilities did not, as Bible professor Paul Walaskay
says, “come through his (Peter’s) own power or piety, but by the name of
Jesus. In this passage, however, Luke
suggests that Peter himself, even his shadow, was the vehicle of healing.” Walaskay suggests that this may be due to “Luke’s
attempt to make a connection with some of his readers who are outside the
mainstream of early Judaism and Christianity: Gentiles who needed a display of
miracles as an inducement to become believers,” but I’m not entirely sure that
is the case here, simply because Jesus likewise used miracles to induce Jewish
Israelites to believe in Him as the Messiah: in fact, when Jesus is about to
raise Lazarus from the dead in John 11, He says, in effect, “I am doing this so
that they may believe that God sent me.”
So what on earth are we to do with
Peter and his magical healing shadow? I
mean, if he ever lost that shadow, hopefully he could get it sewn back on, and
hopefully whether he sees it doesn’t determine whether or not there are six
more weeks of winter (one too many popular cultural references there? Oops).
No, this can be seen as another consequence of Peter’s piety and faith,
and a consequence that has some pretty big symbolic and theological
consequences.
Because a shadow is inherently dark. It offers darkness, shade, and coolness. None of these things tend to be used as
adjectives by the writers of Scripture whenever they try to describe God. No, God is light and warmth to us; heck, the
very first thing God creates when everything was without form and void in Genesis
1 is...light. God said, “Fiat lux,” let
there be light, but that alone was not enough.
He then saw that the light was good.
Here, though, God (and all of us) are
seeing that a piece of darkness can be good as well, that it can provide
good. Symbolically, that communicates
all the difference in the world. It
means that everything, not just the light, can be used by God for His
purposes. It means that things we might
otherwise be afraid of because of darkness we need not be afraid of anymore.
And I am sure that Luke knew that as he
was documenting this story. And I am
sure that he knew that what he was documenting was, and would be, and could be,
a source of hope for all of his readers.
And, well, this is a world in desperate
need of some hope from some unexpected places and some unexpected sources. It isn’t just the hope that we might have
brought ourselves with something as wonderful but limited as the Ice Bucket
Challenge, it’s the hope that we need to able to find in places like Gaza. Places like West Africa in the Ebola
epidemic. Places like Ferguson,
Missouri.
And places like here at home, in
Longview, in the wake of an attempted murder suicide in town.
These are the places, and these are the
people, living under shadows right now…shadows that do not offer healing, only
further darkness. Shadows which do not
offer any sense or semblance of hope.
Shadows that need what Peter, through God, was able to offer: a source
of wholeness in our fragility, a source of wellness in our sickness, and above
all, a sense of hope that in God, no matter how painful your circumstances, no
matter how crappy a hand you have been dealt, no matter how much this broken and
imperfect world beats you up, that things can and will get better one day
simply because God is God, and God does not allow the hurt from sin and wrong to
live forever.
That is the hope that Peter is bringing
with him in this story. It is the hope
that Jesus not only brought with Him, but that He taught, that He lived, that
He incarnated as the Messiah. And that
hope is why Jesus has followers to this day…why we follow Him to this day. Because of our own hope that God’s love wins
out in the end, and that no amount of evil can last forever. We may be fragile, we may be vulnerable to
it, but that does not mean we have to succumb to it. We may be sick, ill, injured from it, but
that does not mean that God will not offer us a way out, that God will not
offer us a source of healing from it.
Indeed, God already has. It is His love, given and poured out and made
great for each of you. Take it. Place your own hope and faith in it. For it is God’s gift, offered to you.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
August 17, 2014
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