4th Sunday of Easter
May 12, 2019
22At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24So the Judeans gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” 25Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; 26but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. 27My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. 30The Father and I are one.” – John 10:22-30
The following sermon was preached in two versions, one at Christ the King on May 12 and the other (as below) was preached at the chapel at the Lutheran Center in Chicago on May 15.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
A couple of years ago when my father died, I called for a pastor.
Even though I’d beena pastor responding to such calls for several years, in the moment facing death I couldn’t have told you why I needed a pastor or what I expected the pastor to do. I certainly wasn’t expecting any miracles. I just knew that people who are part of churches call their pastor when someone dies and something deep inside kept insisting that a pastor needed to come.
There’s something about death, even when it is expected, that is disorienting. It leaves us a little confused and sometimes asking for things we don’t even ourselves understand.
So it is that when Tabitha, a.k.a. Dorcas, great saint of the earliest church, dies, some of the disciples send for Peter, a leader of the church, a disciple of Jesus, a personal direct witness to the resurrected Christ. They insist: “Come to us without delay!” I suspect they aren’t sure exactly what they need or what they want Peter to do. I suspect Peter doesn’t have any idea what is about to take place.
But he comes. He is present to their weeping. He listens to them as through their tears as they tell the stories of what Tabitha did for them, for their community. He, too, enters the disorientation in the presence of death. Then Peter makes some space in the room, and he prays.
It’s here that I don’t know what to make of these few short phrases. Just what does he pray? Are his prayers simply the shedding of tears along with the widows? Or is it some early version of the prayers and scriptures we use today to commend a life back to God? Does the idea to tell Tabitha to “Get up!” from her deathbed come to him from the Spirit or is it something he asks for? Is it moments or is it hours of prayer that move to the moment of Tabitha’s resurrection? What in this moment of prayer moves him from the disorientation of death to the clarity of resurrection? If only we could figure that out we, too, might be able to enter the disorientation that death creates and proclaim resurrection.
What would it be like to stand at the scene of yet another deadly school shooting last week and instead of just being disoriented, confused, hurt, and scared all over again we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?
What would it be like to stand in the face of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or at an ICE detention center, like the one in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where asylum seeker and ELCA pastor Betty Rendón is being held after a brutal arrest last week, or to stand at the border where many people whose names we do not know are being caged or sent back to deadly situations and, instead of being defeated by the power of death, we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?
What would it be like to stand in our own communities, where too many people live in poverty and hunger, and not be disoriented by the death-dealing forces of inequality, but instead we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?
What would it be like to stand in the chaos of an emergency room or a terror attack or a war zone or a natural disaster or a collapsing economy or just to stand up period in the chaos of our world, and instead of being shut down by the powers of death we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?
Because Peter may be a well-known saint, a witness to the resurrection, but so are we, people who have died and risen again in the waters of baptism. So are we, witnesses with the women at the empty tomb. So are we, people who have heard the voice of God speaking to us and reminding us that we are forever in the hands of God.
Maybe we don’t go out commanding dead bodies to rise again. While I won’t deny God’s power to do that, I suspect our call to speak resurrection might look a little bit different.
The pastor who came at my father’s death did not raise him from the dead. The fog of grief was still present. But after the prayers and scriptures he read something was different. Something had shifted. The voice of God, a voice I recognized even in the face of death, had spoken somewhere in all of that and resurrection felt somehow more tangible.
Maybe we won’t fix the whole immigration system, maybe we won’t end gun violence forever, maybe we won’t end hunger everywhere. Or…maybe we will. Maybe it’s possible to raise the dead when we hear the voice of God and it echoes through us into the world. Maybe for too long we have stood as witnesses to new life and failed to realize God’s voice speaking the power of resurrection into being through us.
Maybe with Peter we have an opportunity to pray with the bold idea that God might actually use us to change the world and not just to kinda help out a little here and there along the way. This Easter season we have again been witnesses. We have seen and heard what God has done. We are invited to the table again now to hear God’s voice remind us whose we are as the body of Christ. And then we are invited to stand with the dead and dying. Somewhere in the moments of prayer, in the moments when we ourselves are disoriented and defeated, we hear again the trusted voice of the one who in baptism has already called us forth from death. And then we get to be witnesses in a new way when we experience God’s voice echoing through us, speaking with boldness to the powers of death: Rise again! Get up!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 