We Walk By Faith

We walk by faith.

There is a lot going on this morning: great hymns, beautiful flowers, and a faithful congregation gathered to proclaim that the Lord is risen indeed. So I’ll keep this very simple today: we walk by faith.

The empty tomb does not prove anything. He isn’t there. There is extra-Biblical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and healed and died on a cross. A group of 27 of us from this diocese, including a couple from this congregation, are headed to the Holy Land tomorrow afternoon. We’ll walk in real places along the Sea of Galilee and even out on a boat there. And in places like Capernaum where Jesus preached and healed and taught. Pray for us pilgrims as we make that journey.

But when it comes to the empty tomb, we just have to take the word of those women. There are other (and more plausible) explanations for a missing corpse than resurrection.

The Paschal Mystery uses the present tense to answer the Easter question: Christ is risen. Not he was risen and then went back to being dead again. 

Christ has died. Christ IS risen.  Christ will come again. 

Past. Present. Future. Christ is alive! The cross reminds us of his death and that it was a saving death but if we want to find Christ, we need to keep our eyes open in the present tense. In our daily lives, in the places where we live and move and have our being. And so we walk by faith, trying to keep our eyes open.

I ran into my former Lutheran colleague in Holden this week at the YMCA. I told him I’d be with you all today and he suggested a sermon title for my sermon. (Lutherans like sermon titles.) His suggestion: “Ware is the body?”

I know. But here is the thing: those Lutherans are wicked smart theologically even if their jokes are corny. This title is exactly right and it's what I mean when I say, "we walk by faith." We find the risen Christ, as he promised, when two or three are gathered together in Ware - or anywhere in the world where the bread is broken and shared. In body and blood, Christ is risen and lives among and through this gathered community that does this to remember and to give thanks and to join in the movement he started.

We find him, as he promised, in the face of the stranger, the prisoner, the one who is thirsty or hungry, in the face of the immigrant or refugee. We find him in a cage on the border with Mexico. There we see the face of Jesus. Christ is risen.

In this ministry of reconciliation, between God and humankind, Jesus calls us to continue to do the work he began by becoming ambassadors of reconciliation. So we find him whenever there is healing and reconciliation and new beginnings. We find Jesus, risen, wherever love is stronger than fear. We find him where there is forgiveness and veal piccata for everyone.

My friends: we walk by faith. That is my sermon today. The empty tomb does not prove anything. There are plenty of martyrs out there; good people who die for a good cause. But we come here on this morning not to grieve the death of another martyr but to look for evidence. To find some clues of that Christ is alive. And there is plenty of evidence that Christ is alive if we know where to look.

In a world that peddles in fear, we look for places of hope. In a world where too often it seems impossible to be satisfied because we confuse our wants and our needs and we want more and more and more – more money, more beer, more oil, more shoes– we gather today to make Eucharist. Literally that word means to give thanks. We give thanks for daily bread. To say with our Jewish friends who are celebrating Passover: dayenu. It is enough.  

In a world where people are so bitterly divided, we gather to insist that we choose to be a people who are willing to kneel before one another and wash feet, and to act out the love of God and neighbor not only with our lips but in our lives. When we take this bread and eat it we begin to become what we eat. When we drink from this cup we remember who we are. We are the Body of Christ. The tomb is empty because Jesus is here. Now. Calling us to be witnesses, like Peter.

Do you remember the last time we saw Peter before today? I was with you on Thursday night and as late as then, he wasn’t sure he even wanted his feet washed. As late as the last night of Jesus’ life, Peter wasn’t sure what it all really meant. And then Friday was a bad day for Peter. I don’t know him. I don’t know what you are talking about. Never met the guy.

Cock-a-doodle-doo. There is a church in Jerusalem built on the spot where the Church remembers that Peter denied Jesus the third time. It’s one of the churches we’ll visit while in the Holy Land. It’s called St. Peter Gallicantu – where the cock crowed. It commemorates Peter’s greatest failure. How would you like to have a church built to remember your greatest failure?

But Easter changed Peter. It changed him to become more fully the person Jesus knew him to be all along. Peter has become a witness. He's become a preacher.

Peter began to speak to Cornelius and the other Gentiles: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.”

Peter is preaching just a short time after Jesus walked on the earth and we gather here two thousand years later. But we live as Easter people in the same way Peter did and we are witnesses. We worship a God of second chances. We do not always get it right and in fact sometimes we get it desperately wrong. Cock-a-doodle-doo. But that’s not the end of the story. That’s never the end of the story with our God. Because Peter now, finally, understands that God shows no partiality. That through Jesus, all is forgiven. That we are made alive because He is alive.

This day and the fifty days we embark on today are not primarily about what we believe about the resurrection in our brains. Easter is not even primarily about what we feel about the resurrection in our hearts. Easter is about the call for us to become an Easter people and then to become witnesses, to testify to what we have seen and heard. 

That can only begin once we open our eyes and our ears. Where have you seen the risen Christ at work in your life over the past month or so? Whether you kept the Lenten fast diligently or kind of just showed up today – it’s all good. Because Jesus isn’t locked into the Church any more than into a tomb. So I ask – where have you seen God at work through the risen Christ, in your life?

The late poet, Mary Oliver, once wrote these words that she called, “Instructions for living a life.”  A six-word creed that sums up the message of this day.

          Pay attention.

          Be astonished.

          Tell about it.

In a nutshell that is Peter’s sermon today and that is the sermon you and I are called to preach, not only with our lips, but in our lives.

Pay attention. I was in a Bagel Shop a week or so ago and let me preface this story by saying, I’m not trying to shame anyone here who may see themselves in this story. But I am wanting to offer some advice as an old guy with grown up sons who now live in NJ and NY. I was at the bagel shop and minding my own business and I was watching this mother and child at the next table. My guess he was four or five – I think she was probably taking him from there to daycare and she was then headed to work, based on how she was dressed. But I can’t know that. In fact I know nothing about her except what I saw: as the kid ate his bagel and she sipped her coffee, her eyes never left her phone. She was watching it, not her son.

Now again: no judgement. I look at my own phone a lot, especially in boring meetings. Maybe she was a pastor and a parishioner was dying. Maybe what she was reading was a timely email from her boss that she needed to respond to before work. Who am I to judge? But what I felt and what I thought, was “lady, don’t blink!” Because when you do he’ll be gone and you’ll wonder how the time passed so quickly. And maybe like that old song, Cats in the Cradle, in the updated version he’ll be home from college and be staring at his phone and you’ll be wanting to talk with him. But it’ll be too late because he’ll have grown up just like you.

Pay attention to your life. Open your eyes and your ears and live fully present to each moment, which is gift and gift and gift and which will never come our way again. Savor each moment of this day and tomorrow and the next day after that. One day at a time. And then…be astonished. Be amazed and in awe at what you notice when you are paying attention to your life and the world around you. Awe and wonder and curiosity are all deeply close cousins to faith. I think of Moses at the burning bush and I sometimes wonder: would I have noticed it and stopped? Or to say this another way, how many burning bushes do I walk past in any week. How many did Moses walk by before he finally stopped? To stop, to listen, to be still – is to be astonished.

And when we do that, we have to tell about it. That is what Peter is doing in today’s reading from Acts. He’s telling the world that cock-a-doodle-doo was not the end of his story, because of Jesus. He’s telling what he’s seen, what he’s heard, what he knows in his bones gives life meaning.

My friends – Christ is alive. That’s what we’ve come here to sing about today and to remind each other that in this fragmented and broken world there is also another reality unfolding: the work of the risen Christ. Work we participate in when we give our neighbor a drink of water, or visit someone in prison, or reach out to a friend or put down the cell phone and see the person sitting across from us.

Pay attention. Be astonished.  Tell about it. 

Happy Easter!