21 Early in the morning, they went into the temple as they had been told and began to teach. When the high priest and his colleagues gathered, they convened the Jerusalem Council, that is, the full assembly of Israel’s elders. They sent word to the prison to have the apostles brought before them. 22 However, the guards didn’t find them in the prison. They returned and reported, 23 “We found the prison locked and well-secured, with guards standing at the doors, but when we opened the doors we found no one inside!”
24 When they received this news, the captain of the temple guard and the chief priests were baffled and wondered what might be happening. 25 Just then, someone arrived and announced, “Look! The people you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people!” 26 Then the captain left with his guards and brought the apostles back. They didn’t use force because they were afraid the people would stone them.
27 The apostles were brought before the council where the high priest confronted them: 28 “In no uncertain terms, we demanded that you not teach in this name. And look at you! You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching. And you are determined to hold us responsible for this man’s death.”
29 Peter and the apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than humans! 30 The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God has exalted Jesus to his right side as leader and savior so that he could enable Israel to change its heart and life and to find forgiveness for sins. 32 We are witnesses of such things, as is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Common English Bible)
“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,”
Week Eleven
The Israeli rabbi’s beard in his news
picture ordinarily would bring to mind, say, Albus Dumbledore from the Harry
Potter series, or maybe one of the members of ZZ Top when they’re all in an
assisted living facility together many, many moons from now. But just above that beard was one of the
biggest, most contagious smiles ever, and you wouldn’t even think it to look at
the guy that he was suffering from something we just talked about together in a
sermon of mine a couple of weeks ago: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: ALS,
better known as either Lou Gehrig’s disease or that thing that has gotten
everybody and their mother to post videos to Facebook of them dumping literal
bucketloads of ice water over their heads in the name of raising both awareness
and funds for the researching of a cure for this seemingly incurable,
inexorable disease.
But today, at least, there is cause not
only for Rabbi Refoel Shmulevitz to smile, but for any and all of us who have
been following the ALS ice bucket challenge as it went viral throughout the
world, because earlier this year, he was given a second round of an
experimental course of treatment aimed at reversing, or at least delaying, the
onset of his ALS symptoms…treatment that at first wore off, but before that had
caused him to show substantial improvement even in being able to walk unaided,
give speeches to audiences again, and to, well, live life again.
And while we live with the reality of
ALS as an incurable disease, we have lived with the same reality with HIV/AIDS…but
with the latter, we have created such advanced medication regimens that HIV
positive people are now able to live out close to a normal lifespan, to the
point that some doctors are beginning to classify it as chronic rather than
terminal. None of that was thought
possible thirty years ago with the medical technology available to us then, but
here we are. Change, evolution, progress,
all of it is always possible even when we are absolutely convinced that it
otherwise cannot be or will not be.
And here, in this final installment of
our summer sermon series, that is exactly the sort of narrow, myopic mindset
that Jerusalem’s religious authorities have once again found themselves in.
This is a sermon series that has been
ongoing now for a while, and we’re wrapping it up today! We began over two and a half months ago, a
couple weeks after the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes
down upon the remaining Apostles), which 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. This week,
though it is not really the end of the stories of the early church (Acts does
go on for 28 chapters after all!), we see the reaction of the religious
authorities to the miraculous escape (by means of an angel of God) by the
disciples after their imprisonment at the hands of those very same religious
authorities…and their reaction does not disappoint. Or, rather, it does, but it should be wholly
unsurprising to us, because it is entirely in character for them despite all
that they have seen and heard so far.
So the newly liberated Apostles are
back to their usual tricks of teaching the public about some dude named Jesus,
meanwhile, the authorities, not realizing that the Apostles had pulled a
Shawshank Redemption escape the previous night, summon their supposed captives,
only to be informed in no uncertain terms that despite the locks, bars, and
guards, the prison was found empty. So
everybody goes through the whole rigamarole of hauling the disciples before the
high priest and his cronies, only this time Luke adds a particularly salient
detail: the guards did not use force to arrest the disciples this time around
because they were afraid of being stoned to death by the people who were
assembled. In other words, the tide of
public opinion has really begun to turn against the powers that be, and they
know it.
That’s why they sound so vehement and,
dare I say it, desperate in this newest confrontation with the Apostles
beginning in verse 27, and I think that we would be right to take those things
away from even a one off reading of the text.
Let’s hear it again: “In no
uncertain terms, we demanded that you not teach in this name. And look at you! You have filled Jerusalem with your
teaching. And you are determined to hold
us responsible for this man’s death.”
Now,
Peter’s response to this spleen generated vehemence is, basically, “Hey, if the
shoe fits,” but we’ll get to that in a few minutes. The religious leaders are in such deep denial
that they themselves cannot fathom that they are in any way responsible for the
death of Jesus, even though they were the ones who not only handed Him over to
Pilate to be crucified, but who also manipulated the crowd into persuading
Pilate to crucify Him (as opposed to the responsibility of all of Israel: a
crucial distinction that is important to make due to the anti Semitism that the
misconception that Israel or Judaism was responsible for the death of Jesus…talk
about blinding ourselves into believing a patent falsehood with terrible
consequences). It’s the “Who took a
cookie from the cookie jar? Who me? Yes you!
Couldn’t be! Then who?” way of
rewriting your own personal history, and it’s awful.
But it’s
the first part of what they say to the Apostles that I really want to break
down. They demanded that the disciples
not teach in Jesus’ name, and of course that hasn’t happened, and now Jerusalem
is “filled” with Christ’s teachings. The
religious authorities have been so convinced for weeks, for months now that
this can only be a bad thing that they are completely incapable of seeing the
good, any good, that can come from, and is currently coming, from such a
circumstance. They simply cannot bring
themselves to believe that an outcome they originally opposed could in fact be
desirable.
In that
respect, at least, we in the church have often tended to model ourselves after
these very same religious authorities with our own, well, religious
authorities. Galileo says that the world
is round instead of flat and revolves around the sun rather than the other way
around? Well, that contradicts
everything we have told ourselves, so he must be wrong. But then Galileo says to them, “Eppur si
muove.” Yet still it (the earth)
moves. We can deny that reality all we
want, but reality is still, well, real, and our fantasies are but merely that:
fantastical.
And I
could go down the line with this, too: Martin Luther comes along and says that
the selling of indulgences to fund gaudily resplendent building projects is
wrong for the church to do? Well, it can’t
be wrong because we have always done that.
Deny, deny, deny.
Or when
the scientific consensus is that the world is four billion some years old, that
dinosaur fossil are over sixty five million years old, and that human ancestors
have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but we say that can’t be
right because the Bible only includes enough generations of people to account
for around six thousand years of existence, and the Bible never omits ANYTHING
(heck, just check out what it has to say about computers and electricity, it’s
a thumping good read), so clearly all of the scientific evidence must be
wrong. Deny, deny, deny.
Or when
just about every professional medical and psychological association came out
and said that so called “reparative therapy,” the abusive counseling process
that tries to force a gay or lesbian person into being straight is an unethical
practice without any basis in medicine itself, well, it still took years and
years for parts of Christianity to abandon the practice, and other parts of
Christianity still haven’t in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. Deny, deny, deny.
That sort
of unbelief is something that we see from other characters in the New
Testament, but nothing along the lines of just how strong we are seeing it here
from the Pharisees. My favorite example
comes from Mark 9, when the father of a stricken boy takes his son to Jesus for
a healing, and Jesus says to the man in 9:23, “All things can be done for the
person who believes,” to which the desperate father cries out, “I believe, help
me in my unbelief!”
I
believe, help me in my unbelief! This guy
may believe, but he knows there isn’t enough…when he has his moments of fear,
or his moments of hate, and in that sort of unbelief, he is humble enough to
beseech Jesus to help him with it. But
no such humility is shown, or ever has or will be shown, by the religious
leaders, and certainly not to this lot that has caused them nothing but
trouble. They have no way of being able
to see out past what they have already convinced themselves is reality to
actually not only embrace but shape that reality for themselves. It is like a disease, an inexorable,
devastating disease, whose only cure is something they are unwilling to reach
for: their own evolution, their own progress.
Which is
why Peter’s reply (I told you we’d get there!) is so important. It gives them a way out. Jesus is always our way out against the
crushing confines of our own constrictions, our own prejudices, our own selves. Jesus offers us sight to remedy our own blind
spots in our lives, wherever they may be, wherever our own unbelief is caused
by our own willing something to be true even when we know, deep down, that it
is not. Peter names the sin of the
religious leaders: of their responsibility in the death of Jesus. But he also names a way out for them: in the
way of Jesus, The Way, as the church originally called itself, they may find
forgiveness for sins.
And as
galling as it may be for us, we share that exact hope with the Pharisees and
Sadducees of our own lives, the people whose own close mindedness and narrow
mindedness shut themselves off from the truth that maybe you yourself can offer
with how you live your life according to Christ’s teachings and Christ’s all
important, all consuming love. We share
that hope because we have to. Because
without it, all we have is our unbelief.
But that is why Jesus, in turn, helps us through it.
Thanks be
to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
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