Kendall's Notebook, Page 52Sermon: The Vision Thing
Date: April 23, 2006
Text: Acts 4: 32-36
By; Kendall Brown
Easter gave birth to a new vision for the followers of Jesus. The resurrection offered the disciples a totally reoriented vision of who Jesus was. The Risen Christ also gave those early followers a new vision of who they were.
After Easter, the one, who had been known to the disciples as Jesus of Nazareth, became known them as Christ, the Risen Lord.
Every year it seems around Easter and Christmas, we read stories in the news that endeavor to shape and mold our understanding of who Jesus is. A couple years ago, the DaVinci Code was the hot item, raising the suspicion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene gave birth to a secret holy child who began (begot) a long line of descendents for Jesus.
This year, the hot ticket item has been stories that reshape the relationship between Judas and Jesus, portraying Judas as Jesus best friend and closest disciple. According to the news this spring, Jesus asked Judas to betray him as a part of his overall salvation scheme. Jesus could only ask his closest and most trusted friend to take on this odious task and to carry the price of being the scapegoat for the rest of all time for betraying the Son of Man.
People are always asking me for my opinion of these most recent ideas. So here it is in a nutshell. The Gospels themselves do not give us a full and accurate picture of who the historical Jesus of Nazareth was. For all intents and purposes, there is no accounting for twenty-five or more of his thirty-three years. That leaves lots of room for interpretation.
Over a hundred years ago, Albert Schweitzer gave a noted effort to generate a picture of the historical Jesus in his little and at the time earth-shaking book entitled, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer gave up on the credibility, worthiness and value of such efforts to which he had given so much of himself and went off to Africa to serve, if you will, not the historical buried in the past Jesus of Nazareth, but the risen living Christ of the here and now, who called Schweitzer into the task of new community building even as the disciples in the Acts story were so called, and even as we are called today.
In recent decades there has been another quest for the historical Jesus of Nazareth that has been receiving much attention. Carl Robinson, your previous pastor, studied under some of the principals in this movement and brought their teaching to this pulpit and his teachers to our wider community in a well remembered workshop. One well-known leader in the current Jesus of history movement is Marcus Borg, who is a prolific writer and a very interesting speaker. His work can help people struggling with faith find their way through some of the religious hocus pocus, that often stand in the way of faith, and get to the nitty-gritty.
Those twenty-five years of missing accounts in the Gospels about who Jesus was and what he was doing leaves plenty of room for interpretation. And such interpretation has been going on for two thousand years. There is nothing about this stuff like, the stories of the fifth gospel, or Jesus relationship with Mary, or his relationship with Judas, that is new. As they say, “Everything that has been around, comes around.” This kind of work and reflection will continue to happen for the rest of time here on earth.
This interpretive work need be no big deal to a person of faith and here is the reason. These theories and stories, some of them with a large measure of scholarly credibility – I am not going to debunk them – are about the historical Jesus of Nazareth. (REPEAT)
Our faith is in the Risen Christ. Through the risen Christ, God is still speaking. (Hallelujah) If there were no Risen Christ, there would be no Christian faith; there would be no Church. All the interpretive work that has been going on for 2000 years and that will still go on for many more, exploring the mysteries surrounding the historical Jesus will not change the faith experience of the Risen Christ, who transcends history to begin with and because of whom all history has been rewritten anyhow. Because of the Risen Christ our purpose in history has been given new meaning and vision. All of the mysteries, suggested, uncovered, or explained about the Jesus of history will never change the eternal Risen Christ or who he is to people of faith in his community.
The Risen Christ also gave birth to new vision of community to the disciples – the likes of which they had not known before. The new community was based on love and inclusion and hospitality. The story of its early days is found in the book of Acts. It was a radically different community. The Jesus of history students and teachers like Marcus Borg and his colleagues have offered a deeper understanding of the radical difference of this new vision and community. They have uncovered and brought to light the depth of how the ancient world was governed by purity codes.
The importance of purity is the underlying raison d’ệtre of the rules and regulations that are so predominate in the Old Testament. The purity codes led to building a community that was highly exclusive and prejudicial to anyone a little different. The ancient world was divided into insiders and outsiders and one’s purity was the determining factor. Just recall the well known exclusion of lepers. In those days anyone with a skin disorder might be called a leper. You could be on the outs for having a bad case of pimples! People like me would need to avoid eating chocolate if we lived in the ancient world.
Also excluded were women during the menstrual cycle. The Levitical Codes offer lengthy prescriptions for women to follow to be cleansed or purified after the cycle. Shepherds were very low on the pecking order of the purity obsessed society. It is no accident that Jesus, who constantly put himself in solidarity with the lowest in the order of things according to the conventionally defined purity system, described himself as a shepherd. That description was far more than a metaphor for a style of leadership – which is the way we usually think of it. Jesus’ describing himself as shepherd was an act of radical disobedience and social commentary as he made himself one of the lowest and most disdained. One historical fact about the historical Jesus that is affirmed over and over in the Gospels is his total disgust with the purity system. He had no use for it. He established a new system of community based on the grace of God and not on one’s being pure.
The book of Acts is all about that new community. The book of Acts tells over and over stories of the early church discarding the purity rules as new and different people were welcomed at Christ table. The risen Christ shaped a new vision of community for the early followers of Jesus. This vision was given strong witness in the ministry of the historical Jesus. We need to look at the historical Jesus as given in the Gospels to fully understand the nature of the risen Lord’s call.
This morning’s lesson from Acts encapsulates the essence of that new community. The community was one where the early believers shared all their possessions and made sure that everyone, even the least among them (who might have been a shepherd) was provided for. Never before had there been a community like this! The Risen Christ not only offers everlasting life in the hereafter, but calls us to new life in the here and now!
What a promise all this is for Christ Church. Right now everyone of you who loves this church has more reason to be filled with awe and excitement than a small child at 4:30 in the morning on Christmas.
Can you remember that feeling? There is a tree downstairs. Presents awaiting to be opened. And you have to stay in bed for another hour. Every fiber of your being is filled with get up and go.
That is where we are at Christ Church right now. This is a season of resurrection. This is a time for energy and excitement. A vision of new community is bursting before us. Christ is Risen! God is still Speaking! (Hallelujah!)
We have a crafters group working on a vision for our church – an important and vital piece of work. But I think that the Holy Spirit is spending some time around here also working on a vision for us. That spirit is leaving signs, cues and clues and sometimes I think just plain hitting us right over the head.
Last week we had a number of guests among us. That was great. Some came in response to some of you simply walking through the neighborhood for a couple hours, saying hello and inviting people to come for Easter. Look how easy that was. What has ever kept us from it before?
We would like to see more guests and still more guests who make repeat visits. That can happen. But we have got to get beyond thinking that what we are doing is inviting people to come to church and be one of us as we have always been.
We have got to get beyond thinking that our business is coming to church (ie: worship) and getting others to come to church, and realizing that our business is not coming to church, but BEING church.
That means being the new community that the book of Acts offers us and being the place where others can find new community. The world offers lots of communities, place to be and spend your time and perhaps waste your life or have it wasted. But those places are cheap thrills to the genuine love, grace and welcome that disciples are called by the Risen Lord to offer to others. We are the Body of Christ. We are the ones through whom others can learn that God is Still Speaking. (Hallelujah.)
There is a vision of new community that the Holy Spirit is putting before us and that the Risen Christ is calling us to in the children that have been here in this place for the past several months. And people, I thoroughly believe if we miss that vision and call, which is so obviously before us, that to put it simply: God will get us.
I had my own visual experience of this new vision with some of you as we delivered invitations last week. Delivering invitations to the apartments behind us, I looked up for a moment and realized that Christ Church is visible from hundreds of homes behind us. We need to be present in those homes. In our outreach we need to revision what it means to be church.
Being church doesn’t mean only inviting others to come and be one of us, it also means finding ways for us to become one with them. That is what the incarnation is all about – the central doctrine of Christianity – that Jesus although he sat on a throne in a heavenly place with God, humbled himself and became one of us – even as he calls us to be one with, in solidarity with, others who can find redemption by our presence and gifts.
I looked at our church from the physical viewpoint of our neighbors just to the south (we also need to consider and reflect on how our neighbors see us spiritually – how they see us and even judge us as being genuine church). I saw a great big field and a row of trees between my observation site and our back yard. What a great thing it would be if we could develop a pathway through that field from those apartments to our house, which is really God’s house, not ours. We are here to be Stewards of God’s house and mission and when we forget that, our forgetfulness becomes another reason for God to zap us.
I also recalled a vision that I have heard expressed in this church. A great one! Perhaps it is time to be re-energized by it. That is the idea of building a community center in our back yard. Indeed there is a community to be served and a mission to be explored right under our noses. Sports, childcare, health programs, community-building programs, job skill programs and many other efforts could all be a part of our future.
There is a saying “Think Globally, Act Locally”
The opportunities to act locally abound. God is being incredibly generous with us. The Holy Spirit is practically hopping up and down until the ground shakes under our feet around here.
The Christian faith also calls us to look at the larger picture. The national news today is filled with debate about immigration. Another theme that one could write books about. All I want to say today about this subject is that I believe that those 6 verses in Acts speak to the issue of immigration and our foreign policy. I believe that if our national foreign policy had more of the Acts vision of wealth sharing we might not have so many immigrants in the first place. All of this is worthy of sermonic comment this morning in the light of the Resurrection Gospel in Acts. But I will leave the work of editorializing and elaboration up to you at your Sunday dinner tables. I only challenge you and beg you to include the Gospel, this morning’s lesson from Acts, in your conversation. Let the Gospel’s vision of community be a part of your opinionating about immigration. It might give you a different slant and bring you to a different place.
But what ever you do, don’t forget that God is still Speaking. (hallelujah) Don’t silence God’s voice by your actions, non-actions, words or thoughts. Amen.