Sunday, April 6, 2008

A New Way of Seeing

03 Easter A 06
April 6, 2008

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

I have one of those friends. I don’t know, you might have one yourself. Years ago I went through a particularly bad patch. I guess you could say I had a nervous breakdown. I fled to Deltaville where my aunt had left me a little house. I got a job working at a convenience store and started hanging around with people who had boats.

One of them was a guy I’ll name Bob. Bob has a screw loose. He has a similar history actually, a bit of a nutcase, and we started hanging around together. Bob, well, there’s no other word for it, Bob is just obnoxious. He’s not really dangerous and he doesn’t really hurt anyone, but boy, most people can’t be around him for more than about ten minutes before they just want to pick him up and throw him in the river.

As it happens I was enough of a nutcase myself that I could more-or-less get along with him. At least until we decided to take an offshore cruise together on Bob’s 27 foot boat. I can’t say there has ever been a time in my life when I have sincerely considered murder, but on that cruise I came close.

But then, not long after, Bob decided to sail on out of Deltaville and go on an adventure. I think he made it as far as Manteo and decided to stay there for a while.

Meanwhile, the good Lord saw fit to help me along, mostly through the ministrations of inexplicably good and generous people who loved me, and through an amazing, almost biblical sequence of events, I ended up being called as the pastor of the Philippi.

God has been good, and things have gone well, and I seem to keep on getting better. I have a lot of friends of all types now, and while I have a boat, I almost never see it and probably will sell it. Just too busy, and too happy being busy, I guess.

Well, who should sail on back into Deltaville but Bob. Bob had gotten worse. I can’t go into all the details, but Bob’s life was really a shambles. And if it is humanly possible for a person to go beyond obnoxious, Bob had. He tried to move back in with his parents for a while, but they threw him out and he came back to live on his boat.

Finally, he called me, because, he said, he didn’t have anyone else he could call.
I have to say, it made me groan. Everything was going so well. And here comes Bob out of the past to mess it all up.

Everything I had to do for Bob embroiled me in the turmoil of his crazy life. Eventually, I was able to find a treatment center that could help him, but of course it was 150 miles away. Given that we had trouble finding it, I ended up being in the car with him for more than four hours.
I think the only reason I didn’t strangle him was I had my hands on the wheel of the car. When I dropped him off at the intake of the hospital I couldn’t wait to get home.

St. Peter is our preacher this morning in the book of Acts. This was his first sermon ever, and it puts to shame all us poor preachers who came after. But then we didn’t have Jesus himself as our seminary professor. Peter had been following him for at least a year, maybe a couple of years, and for most of that time, of course, he didn’t have a clue what Jesus was talking about.
And when Jesus was arrested, Peter lost his nerve and ran. When Jesus was tried, Peter denied him. And when Jesus was dying, Peter was in hiding, and he was still in hiding when Jesus rose from the dead.

This sermon is preached fifty days later, in the immediate aftermath of that great wind that blew through the house on the day of Pentecost. What drew the crowd was the spectacle of twelve Jewish peasants preaching the gospel in all the languages of the Empire.

Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Can you imagine such a sermon?

When I heard these words, I found myself thinking of other strange sermons Jesus preached. And I found myself thinking about the strange stories of his resurrection.

I bet you can think of some sermons Jesus preached that really surprised you, stories that took strange twists Jesus often left unexplained, so that they end up haunting you and coming back into your mind again and again.

How about the Prodigal Son? The son who was disobedient and rebellious is the one the Father throws the party for. How strange. How about the parable of the sheep and the goats? “When did we see you, Lord?” Remember? “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”
And what about the stories of resurrection? One of the stories in the lectionary today is from Luke’s gospel, the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Now these disciples had known Jesus for years and had been in his company, but Luke says they were kept from recognizing him until the breaking of the bread.

And remember when Mary sees the gardener in that strange dawn light, but then realizes that he’s Jesus? And remember how in Matthew many saw the risen Lord, but quite a few doubted?
And remember the parables of the kingdom? The kingdom of God is like a treasure in a field or a beautiful pearl or a woman who has lost a coin.

The Spirit of God is here in these stories and in this sermon and in this community and in the church, and the Spirit, if it is anything at all, is a new way of seeing.

Peter does what all great sermons are supposed to do: he gives the people a new way of seeing. Jesus, the dangerous and blasphemous criminal, as it turns out, has been raised from the dead by God. There can be only one conclusion we can draw from this reality: he is Lord and Messiah, the one we have crucified.

Is there someone in your life that really makes you mad? Is there someone in your life who has done you wrong? Is there someone in your life who has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed? Is there anyone in the world you count as your enemy?

Could it be that enemy is the risen Christ for you?

Peter’s sermon resulted in 3,000 baptisms that very day.

I looked up our region’s records and saw that there were 250 baptism in 2006 in the 189 congregations of Virginia. Philippi had one baptism that year and that was a little below average. Bill Lee’s church, Loudon Avenue in Roanoke, had the best record, twenty-five.

Now if we look at our whole denomination in 2006, there were 8,520 baptism in the US and Canada in Disciples churches. That works out to about 163 baptisms per Sunday morning. That’s pretty good, really.

Still a bit short of 3,000 in one day. Could it be we have forgotten that the gospel is a whole new way of seeing, a way so radical it is like being wounded. The scriptures says “They were cut to the heart.” When was the last time a sermon cut you to the heart? Sermons like that lead to baptisms. How many have you had here this year?

My friend Bob has since come out of treatment. I wish I could say he was a great guy today. He isn’t really. He’s still pretty obnoxious. But I woke up this morning thinking about this sermon of Peter’s, and Bob came into my mind.

Could it be I have seen the risen Lord?

Amen.

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