Sermon for April 18, 2021 - The Third Sunday of Easter, Year B, The Rev. Elise A. Feyerherm

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter, Year B - 18 April 2021

The Rev’d Elise A. Feyerherm

 Acts 3:12-19                                                                           

Psalm 4                                                                                              

1 John 3:1-7                                                                                       

Luke 24:36b-48

 My sermon this week emerged as a letter. Here’s how it goes:

 Dear Simon Peter and Luke, friends and followers of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

 I am so moved and encouraged by your love for Jesus, and by your passion for sharing the good news of the new life that has become ours in Christ. You are my brothers in Christ; without you I would not have known this good news, would not have met the Jesus whom God raised from the dead on Easter. Thank you for this.

 Thank you, Simon Peter, for leaving your nets and daring to follow Jesus. Thank you, Luke, for telling the story of Jesus in your gospel, and for continuing that story in the Acts of the Apostles. You planted the seeds of the community in which I have grown and thrived, even 2,000 years later.

 But my dear brothers, every time I hear Peter’s speech to his fellow Israelites in Solomon’s Portico, I cringe. Your words, Simon, cut me to the core – you blame your people for rejecting Jesus and handing him over, and accuse them of killing the “Author of Life.” You basically exonerate Pilate, a man of considerable power who is part of the violent and repressive Roman Empire. You let him off the hook, and you scapegoat your own people, whose necks have been pinned and suffering under the knee of Rome for decades.

 I hear your words, Peter, and I know that you, Luke, had a hand in shaping and passing down those words for posterity, and I wonder, why did you have to do it in that way? I know, my brothers, that you must have been angry and hurt. Peter, you just healed a man through the power of Jesus’ name, and were met with the disbelief of those who saw the miracle firsthand. Your own family of faith rejected someone who had transformed your life. Luke, you were trying to make sense of this decades later, and were also trying to create a safer space within the Roman empire for your beloved community of Christ. I get it.

 But did you have to blame the victim? Did you have to let your own hurt add fuel to the fire?

 Neither of you could have known that centuries later, Christians would take your words and turn them into swords. You could not have imagined that your charge of killing the Author of Life would prompt vicious persecution, torture, and massacre of Jews by Christians. You had no power at the time, and you were, deep down, lashing out from love, as distorted as it might have been. You could not fathom that the descendants of Israel would be accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies, and that they would be herded into ghettos, victims of both random and institutionalized violence. You could not have known.

 But your words have mattered, and they have had power. On this day, the third Sunday of Easter, as we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, those of us who hear your voice two thousand years later know the consequences of those words. I wish you had not said those words, Simon Peter. Luke, I wish you had not written them.

 I will also, my brothers, acknowledge the responsibility of my Christian ancestors – and contemporaries – for allowing your words to inflame their own fear and hatred, and for perpetuating the Church’s legacy of antisemitism and racism. They – we – did not have to take your words in the direction we did. We did not have to use them as fuel for white Christian supremacy. We could have listened more closely to Jesus’ voice of love, more closely to the Torah when it taught us that all people are created in the image of God. We could have seen ourselves in the figures of those who saw you do wonders in the name of Jesus and turned away. We could have acknowledged our own tendency to scapegoat, to look for the enemy outside ourselves. But we did not.  And I cannot entirely blame you, my brothers, for that.

 So, my dear Simon Peter, my dear Luke, we all have work to do. I would like to do that work together. To begin that work, I want first of all to thank you as I did in the beginning of this letter, for loving the Lord Jesus and sharing his gospel. For it is here that we will discover our common purpose, our common mission. It is here that we will find the strength and wisdom to share the good news of God’s abundant love for all creation.

 So thank you, dear Luke, for allowing us to see Jesus eat a piece of fish – after he died and rose from the dead. Thank you for Jesus’ hands and feet, for his flesh and bones, for the joy of knowing that this was no mere resuscitation that would eventually decay back into death. Thank you for reminding us that Jesus was really, fully human, not a mirage.

 And thank you, Simon Peter and Luke, for naming Jesus the “Author of Life.” In doing so, you remind us that Jesus of Nazareth was the human incarnation of the Eternal Word, God-with-us. Those three simple words remind us that Jesus is a window into God’s very being, that it was God who shared every aspect of the human condition, from birth to life, from suffering to death. You keep us tethered to our faith that new life is possible for us precisely because it was God, the Divine Word, that became incarnate in Jesus. You remind us that because it was the Author of Life that hung on the cross and was raised, death no longer has dominion over him, and thus has no dominion over us.

 Thank you, dear brothers in Christ, for your witness to the power of repentance and forgiveness of sins. Simon Peter, you knew the shame of failing and falling, of denying your friend and Lord, and you knew the joy of God’s forgiveness. I wish you had remembered that during your speech in Solomon’s Portico. Thank you, brother Luke, for the call to proclaim the good news not only to people like us, but to all nations, and for reminding us that the Holy Spirit speaks in every language known to humankind, as we’ll hear again on Pentecost in a few weeks. And thank you especially for including us in Jesus’ commission to the disciples to be witnesses of these things. It is because of you that we can claim that mission – we too are witnesses of these things, in our own time and place.

 Dearest Simon Peter, dearest Luke, I imagine that now you see things more clearly, not in that dim mirror available to you during your lifetime. I imagine that perhaps you see God face to face and now understand the damage your scapegoating has set in motion. I imagine that this too has been repented of and forgiven, but of course not forgotten, for we still have work to do that will not let us forget.

 So I ask you now to be with us as we live in the resurrection, as we will pray shortly. We know that even the saints are not perfect, and that their – your – our – stumblings will help us learn and grow. So, dear Peter and Luke, join us on our journey – we depend on you. It is your witness that makes our witness possible. Finally, dear Peter and Luke, please pray with us this morning, as we chart our course out of death into life:

 Gracious God, Source of all that was and is and shall be: we thank you for Jesus, who was flesh and bone and also the Author of Life. We thank you for the power of his resurrection over all that is death-dealing in this world. Cleanse us of our resentment, our desire to blame, and kindle in us the fire of love that is ours in the resurrection. We ask all this through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, of whom we are your witnesses in the world. Amen.