sermon
fourth
sunday of easter – year b
“Peter,
politics, and proclamation”
acts
4:5-11
Let us
pray: May the words of my mouth and the
meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and
our redeemer. Amen.
Within the liturgical year, it remains the Easter season. And whatever else Easter is, let me just say
it is certainly political.
And what is politics but the exercise of power? Politics is about power – who has it and for
what purpose? Easter is very
political. Just consider today’s reading
from acts. The events depicted there
took place just after the first Christian Pentecost – after those first
believers experienced the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit. Peter and John were walking at the temple
when a lame beggar asked them for help.
Peter took the beggar by the hand and said, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I
give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” To the astonishment of witnesses, the man was
instantly healed. A crowd gathered,
wondering how such a miracle was possible, and peter saw an opportunity to
proclaim the gospel.
This upset the religious leaders and they had Peter and John
arrested. Why? Not because of the healing of the lame
person, but because they anticipated the answer to their question, “by what
power, or in whose name, have you done this?” the name Jesus was a common one enough in
that time and place, but the particular ‘Jesus’ to which they referred, was a
name and a power that was a threat to their power, their security. Jesus was the one that they and the roman
elite had crucified, the one some said was the ‘messiah’ and the one some
declared had risen from the dead. And
here were these two uneducated, unsophisticated, men speaking up for Jesus,
standing up to the powerful leaders and having their say.
How does that happen? A power
had been unleashed. Jesus is not only
resurrected. He has also raised up a
people who challenge business as usual.
Easter was not just something that happened to Jesus. It also happened to these lowly men, Peter
and John. Look at them healing,
preaching. They now have the power to
do what Jesus himself did – healing, proclaiming, showing forth the power of God
in the world.
Christianity is always clashing religion and politics. Jesus is very ‘political.’ To the credit of the rulers of this world,
they at least had the good sense to look at Jesus and see that, in him, they
were in big trouble. Matthew says that
when Jesus was born, the moment King Herod heard about it, he called together
his political advisors and “was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.”
Herod had been in office long enough to know the threat to his rule when
he saw one. Herod knew that, in this
baby at Bethlehem, everything his kingdom was built upon was in mortal
peril. So Herod responded in the way
rulers often respond: violence. He ordered the massacre of all the baby boys
in the town. Every Sunday in the
prayer of Jesus we say, “your kingdom come,” indicating that we are in a power
struggle with the kingdoms of the world over who is sovereign over it.
To be part of Jesus’ kingdom is to acknowledge who is in charge, whose
will ultimately counts in this world.
There may be some faiths that
detach the individual believer from concern about earthly matters, who
strive to rise above outward, visible concerns like swords and shields, wine
and bread, politics and power.
Christianity is not one of those religions. Bishop Desmond Tutu once quipped, “I am
puzzled about which bible people are reading when they suggest that religion
and politics don’t mix.”
As C.S. Lewis once noted, Jesus spoke and acted in such a way that one
either had to follow him or else decide that he was crazy.
There was no middle ground in his kingdom. You either had to move toward it, risk
letting go and being caught up in his project, or else you had to move on, like
the rich young ruler, realizing that you wanted to retain citizenship in the
kingdoms of the world. In our reading
from acts, Peter and John have moved toward Jesus’ kingdom. Their healing of the lame man was a sign that
a new power was loose in the world. As
Christians, to us has been given the grace to know that we live between the
times, having seen the fullness of God in Jesus Christ, having witnessed in
Easter, the great triumph of God over the powers of evil. Yet, we also live with the knowledge that all
the world is not fulfilled as God’s world.
That tension, stretched as we are between what is ours now in Christ and
that which is yet promised, is our role as God’s people.
There are two miracles depicted in our story from acts – the healing of
the lame man, but also the bold witness of these lowly, powerless,
uncredentialed, uneducated men who stood up to the authorities to witness to
the power of God.
And I wonder sometimes if Peter and John’s courageous speech to the
authorities is any less miraculous for us, as the church. The church’s speech in our pluralistic
setting is increasingly muted and indistinct.
Yes, we are guaranteed freedom of speech, but that “freedom” works out
to be only operable, it seems, in acceptable times and places: Sunday mornings
within a self-identified arena of worship, but not on Monday mornings in the
workplace or classroom. I read of an
elementary school banning biblical characters in a ‘hero’ essay project after a
child in second grade wrote about Jesus as her hero.
We have become reticent to speak the name of Jesus. Many Christians have lost the capacity to
speak at all because they have become so respectful of public orthodoxy, so
intent on maintaining our respectability.
The voices of our cultured despisers ring loudly, “by what power, by
what authority do you say these things?”
We shrink back and speak only within the privacy of our own homes and
houses of worship. If we speak
publicly, we had better be backed up by the credentials of the academy; by the
support of experts or the successful; or by our good works, our track record of
making an impact in our community. Although
it is our vocation as followers of Christ to announce good news, we are often
silenced by deference to the authorities of our day cowed not so much by fear
of arrest and death – as was the case for Peter and John – but for fear of
embarrassment or social unacceptability, or out of respect for the
sensibilities of those who are not Christian.
But the story today from acts says something different. The world knows that the dead stay dead, and
the powerful get their way by punishing the lowly, and the wealthy consume at
the expense of the poor. But the act of
Peter’s speaking and the content of his words testify to the same irrepressible
reality: the once muted church speaks
because the dead don’t stay dead. The
authorities may have pronounced death on Jesus, but God has overruled their
words by raising him from the dead. Far
more than a one-off anomaly, Jesus is the beginning of resurrection – the
beginning of the Easter revolution that ends the settled order based on
death. The dead don’t stay dead, so
the rule of power and wealth has come to an end. New creation is at hand. By what power does the once-silent Peter
speak? By the power of the resurrection
and God’s gift of speech to the church, Peter and John say, “we cannot keep
from speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
So, what can we learn from the early church about actually speaking our
faith? We need to lay aside our
embarrassment, our discomfort about what some would accuse us of being –
exclusive and disrespectful of non-Christians.
The message of acceptance, of new life, of hope in and through Jesus
Christ is one that needs to be heard in the midst of all the other messages out
there. We don’t have to speak in such a
way that we rule out those other messages in an arrogant way.
Notice that even as Peter is speaking boldly to his interrogators, he
rather politely says they are the ones to judge whether he should obey God or
them.
We can speak our faith, listening respectfully to others, while holding
to our conviction that there is something unique about Jesus Christ. When we do so, then perhaps we too will be
unable not to speak.
