SERMON FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER – YEAR B “PETER, POLITICS, AND PROCLAMATION” ACTS 4:5-11

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.