Easter 4, Year A

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark.

Easter 4, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty

In both the Book of Acts and the First Letter of Peter, we get a glimpse into the lives of the earliest Christians and what it might mean to be an Easter people, a people whose lives embody the self-forgetful love and forgiveness revealed to us in the person and work of the Risen Christ. Eastertide--the great fifty days between Easter and Pentecost--is really a time to deepen and renew our commitment to follow after Jesus down the way of love, to become, in the short span of days we have allotted here on earth, a little bit more like the one we call Lord. 

            I love those lines from the First Letter of Peter, “For this you have been called… that you should follow in his steps.” It’s a powerful reminder of the basic disposition of Christian discipleship--that we are to follow in Jesus’s footsteps, to touch with his hands, to see with his love-opened eyes, to stand where he stands and breathe the air he breathes. By him and with him and in him we go towards those society has conditioned us to recoil from. By him and with him and in him we see those who have been rendered invisible. By him and with him and in him we hear the cries of a broken and hurting world and then go to them as oil to heal, water to wash, bread to feed, and wine to slake the thirst of the parched. 

            In the First Letter to Peter, this process of becoming love, of putting on the mind of Jesus Christ, of breathing his peace deeply into the center of our being, really centers on two things: endurance and forgiveness. Endurance is one of those old-fashioned values you don’t hear too much about these days. It’s a kind of acceptance of the facts of our situation and doing our best to navigate it with as much grace, patience, and steadfastness that we can muster with God’s help. As we remain at home, sometimes alone, sometimes with our family, endurance comes from the insight that however long this lasts, it will someday be over. Endurance props open the door to receive God’s grace even in the midst of a seemingly intractable situation. Endurance props open the door for hope--not wishful thinking, but the possibility that the way things are now are not how they are going to be forever. Endurance teaches us that we might actually have something to learn from this pandemic--our interdependence on one another, the choices we have between hoarding up and sharing, how little we actually need in terms of material things to be happy, and the true value of deep relationships with friends, family, and church members--something that perhaps we take for granted when it’s not called into question or disappears altogether. 

My hope as we endure this time of being alone together is that when things settle back down, we won’t just return to business as usual. My hope when we have endured this time of trial we’ll emerge from it with a renewed appreciation for how our consumer-driven culture of social media influencers, of getting and spending, was really leading us down the garden path, like sheep who have gone astray. My hope is that we’ll see our relationships with one another as the precious, Christ-saturated privileged moments of encounter that we’ll never take for granted again. 

But the First Letter of Peter also has much to teach us about what it actually looks like to follow after Jesus in terms of breaking the cycle of violence and retribution, of a kind of tit for tat mentality that seems to hold sway in much of our national discourse. The pointing of the finger, the assigning of blame, the endless search for scapegoats on whom we can hang our fear and anxiety. The author of the letter writes, “When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.” Jesus, through his birth, life, teaching, death, resurrection and ascension is really showing us what it means to be truly human human beings, what it means to fulfill and live from the grand scope of our calling as people who learn to “bear the beams of love” as William Blake writes. By forgiving on the way to the cross, by refusing to meet violence with more violence, vitriol with more vitriol, Jesus opens a door for us to be remade--individually and as a community.

            When we listen to the voice of fear, when we listen to the voice that calls for a scapegoat, we actually become a little less human, a little less like the boundary-crossing love we are called to be for others without exception. That’s one way to hear today’s passage from the Gospel According to John about the voice of the Good Shepherd and the voice of the theif or the bandit. Of course, in our Gospel Jesus says that the sheep don’t listen to the voice of the thief or the bandit. But I actually think we do listen to that voice a lot of the time. It’s the voice of fear and anxiety. It’s the voice of scarcity and lack. It’s the voice of hopelessness that convinces us that the things are now is the way they will remain for ever. It’s the voice of “if only.” These voices steal us away from the gift, the grace, the peace that’s always on offer. These voices rob us our our innate dignity as human being created in God’s image and likeness and trap us in the fear, scapegoating, and cycle of violent tit-for-tat. But the truly Good News is that we always have a choice about where we live from, about whose voice we listen to in any given moment. Jesus the Good Shepherd has opened the gate for us and is calling us each by name--Lazarus, Mary, Peter, you and you and you and you. 

            And how to dispose ourselves to hear this voice that is always calling us into love? How can we cut through the noise, the clamor, and the clutter that steal us away from love? The Book of Acts gives us very clear instructions, “[They] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers…. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God.” It’s a little bit like bird-watching (of which we’ve been doing quite a bit in our backyard these past few weeks.) When you first sit down, it takes a while for your soul to catch up with your body. Our bodies are seated, but our hearts and minds are somewhere else--planning for the future, mulling over the past, worrying, obsessing about what happens when the last roll of toilet paper gets used up.... 

Needless to say, it’s hard to see much of anything when the mind is roiling away. But slowly, slowly, slowly we actually come to our senses and we begin to actually inhabit our bodies, and the space in which we find ourselves. We leave the isolation of our churning thoughts and enter into communion with our whole surroundings. And lo and behold we begin to see--the western jay screeching atop the dead aspen, the chickadees flitting in and out of the cherry tree laden with blossoms and bees, the mourning doves cooing on the powerlines by the parking lot. It’s not so much that the world has come alive, but that we have come alive to it. The world has always been there, bursting with life and joy and mystery, but it is we who have been absent. We’ve been snatched away by the thief and the bandit and life abundant fades behind a scrim of distraction, scarcity, and lack.

The Christian life is really no different. Our job is to open, allow, receive, to listen for the voice of the shepherd who calls us each by name--in good times and in bad. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, when we come to our senses, when we come home to the one who has made his home in us, we find it a place of still waters and green pastures, a place of anointing love and inexhaustible abundance no virus can make a dent in. It’s easy with all the interruptions, the constantly-changing news updates, the Twitter storms, and all the school work we’re expected to keep up with with our cabin-fever children, to forget to make a little time, make a little space in our lives for God to get at us. Making time just to be, to pray, to read scripture, to reach out to friends and neighbors, to worship is really what roots and grounds us in companionship with Christ. That’s what opens us up to God’s goodness and mercy that makes a way ahead of us and follows us wherever we go. Like the Chickadee spring song, the voice of the Shepherd is always calling--under the clutter, the clamor, and noise. Can you hear it? Will you follow?