Easter Faith, Easter People
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Text: Acts 4:32-35
When the brass section of the TSO has returned to their normal work, when the flowers that adorned our sanctuary last Sunday in such great numbers have been taken to those who are shut-in and in need of pastoral care, when the hyperbole of the glorious words of Easter have calmed down and become more mundane, the question that arises for us is: Is Easter still alive? Theologically, we always answer this, and biblically as well, with an absolute categorical “Yes!”
Indeed, Easter Sunday is nothing more than the remembrance of a day that occurred two thousand years ago or more. It is the celebration of the day of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and for two thousand years, it is that very day that has been celebrated over and over again. Easter Sunday then is simply a day in the calendar that reminds us of what happened, but we bask in the glow of the Risen Christ's presence for those two thousand years. Today, those in the Eastern Church of course will be celebrating this Resurrection and we celebrate it with them, for our difference is only in the matter of the day that it is celebrated, not the fact that it is the cornerstone of our faith.
I always like what Dr. Hunnisett says, and she says it many times throughout the year as a reminder to the rest of us. She says, “Every Sunday is Easter Sunday and we should treat it in exactly the same way.” She is right! She is right theologically, she is right biblically, and she is right experientially. I believe that in fact this is just as much Easter Sunday as last Sunday was Easter Sunday, and those of us who believe fervently in the Resurrection know that to be true.
After all, we went back to life on the Monday after Easter Sunday, as I predicted, with the realization that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is as important on Easter Monday as it is on Easter Sunday. I saw this so vividly this past week, when at eight-thirty on the morning of Easter Monday, I was called to a hospital to visit someone who was dying - a blessed soul, who was a believer, she didn't make it through the day. I thought to myself, “The Resurrection, you see, is still powerful on Mondays!” When a person came into the office this week after having been evicted from her apartment and facing financial difficulty, she came to the church for help, she needed some hope in the midst of a very broken life. I thought, “The Resurrection, it is still very much alive!”
It is not then just theologically or biblically that we say “Every Sunday is Easter Sunday.” It is not just because we are repeating something by rote that every day is Easter Day: when you live in the basking glow of the presence of the Risen Christ every day is Easter Day. There are of course those who are cynical about such things and believe it to be untrue, but for the early Church, if we really looked at those who witnessed the events of the Resurrection, we can see for them that their Easter faith led them to become an Easter people. What they had experienced with the Resurrection of Jesus translated into a community of faith that lived that Easter experience every day. It was out of the encounter with the Risen Christ that they became the courageous witnesses to Christ's living presence, and they formed themselves into a community of faith around the Resurrection.
Rather than being cynical, rather than treating the Resurrection Day as the big day that they were going to celebrate, it was more than that: it became their life and it affected their every day. Now, I realize that there are some who are cynical about such claims, and I don't mean sceptical, because people who are sceptical simply have their doubts, but people who are cynical look at it in a pejorative way, in a negative sense, that religion is something that should in fact be cast to one side completely because it has no meaning.
I have heard people say, even this week in radio call-in shows and elsewhere, “Look, Christians celebrate Easter and they have a big day, but it is nothing more than a day in the calendar when they remember something that happened.” Well, it is a day in the calendar, but Christians do not just look at that day in the calendar, they look at the very presence of the Risen Christ and how it moulds us and shapes us, and turns us into Christ's followers, for “the Church is the body of Christ on earth,” to quote the Apostle Paul. This is what the Church is to be: A living reminder of the presence of the Risen Christ.
Cynicism is nothing new, cynicism existed for five hundred years even before Jesus, when Antisthenes, the Greek philosopher who came up with the idea of cynicism, which literally means “to live like dogs.” Diogenes, who was his great disciple also suggested that we should live cynical lives. Cynical lives for them are lives that are based on living as nature would have us live.
In other words, live according to the forces and the powers of nature: whatever is natural is good, so live by what you feel is natural and that is what life should be like. It upheld that the greatest happiness is found in self-sufficiency. Never mind anyone else, be self-sufficient, that is all you need, for in nature you simply need to survive and be self-sufficient to be happy.
They argued that there was no moral foundation to life, because a moral foundation to life has something that is exterior to nature to guide it and they didn't believe that existed. They also questioned all powers and all authorities and wondered if there was any need for social conventions. Many extreme disciples lived very bizarre lives. They did unseemly things in public, which normally one would do in private. They would be unclean. They would flaunt social conventions and etiquette as if it did not matter.
They would only be concerned with themselves with the exclusion of everybody else and they questioned the validity of the gods or of God. In other words, these cynics believed in sort of a natural, self-contained life, a life of self-sufficiency, and it didn't matter what anyone else thought or what anyone else did, it was simply a case of being natural and surviving.
There have been some biblical scholars who have come along to suggest that Jesus was one of those cynics. John Domenic Crossan, Burton Mack and other writers have suggested Jesus was a cynic just like them, influenced by their Greek ideas and philosophy. They would point to the fact, for example, that Jesus said to his disciples, “When you go out, don't take anything with you.” In other words, “Don't rely on earthly things or on earthly powers” just like the cynics believed. There was a sense in which Jesus flaunted social conventions. He opposed power - that exercised corruptly by Rome, or hypocritically by religious leaders. So Jesus questioned authority and power like the cynics did.
That is only part of the story, though. Jesus, unlike the cynics, was pious. He believed in the law - the law that was engraved in the heart that had even greater demands than the law that was written down. It would be the law of God inscribed in the heart, as I mentioned before Easter from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jesus was someone who wanted his disciples, rather than to live in accordance with just what nature wanted, to point to nature as a way of seeing the revealed hand of God, the Maker and Creator. That is affirming God rather than denouncing God, and Jesus, rather than simply believing that people should rely on natural instincts to drive them, wanted people to live holy lives.
Jesus wasn't a cynic; Jesus was a faithful Jew. He understood the power of the law and of covenant. Jesus wanted it to live in the heart. Jesus was different, because he wanted his followers to live a different life, an even more abundant life. Jesus had created in those first disciples a very anti-cynical church and you can see it in today's passage from the Book of Acts. As Effie and I commented coming into Church this morning, it is a short passage, and I said, “Effie, it might be a short passage, but it is a powerful one.” She agreed.
This is because it describes in just a few words what the early Church, after the Resurrection was like, and it was anything but cynical! We get a glimpse of how the people saw Jesus by the way that they lived once he was raised from the dead. With regard to that early Christian community, I know that Luke to some extent gets a little carried away with the “feeling” aspect of that new community and becomes a little romantic at times. Nevertheless he knew its power.
Look at that earliest Church, look at that post-Resurrection community, because therein lies our inspiration today. When the brass is gone and the flowers are removed and the hyperbole is turned down a bit, this is what we should look like. First of all, we should look like a community that is a unified movement. The earliest Christians had a great unity about them. They had a great sense of being able to work together and do things together.
In fact, if you look at the text, it said that they had the same heart and the same soul. They were the first, to use a phrase that is used way too much these days, soul mates. They genuinely loved one another and their love was the product, not of sameness, not from the fact that they had come from the same background or were of the same socio-economic grouping, but because of their common belief in the Lordship of Jesus and his Resurrection from the dead. They were of one soul and they were of one mind.
If we want to live in a cynical world that does point to the frailties of the Church, and can point to many of the errors that have been made over two thousand years, if we want to bear witness to the Risen Christ, then the unity of heart and soul among the members of churches is absolutely critical. If we want to live an Easter faith, we must be an Easter people, who have this heart and soul for one another. It is critical or else we are not being true to the Resurrection.
It goes even further. We are told that they shared their resources. Now, I know it is easy to look at this text backwards through the lens of the ideology of Communism and try to extract from the text something that is part of Communist ideas, but Communist ideas were old ideas in many ways, far preceding Communism in their ideals. They were there in the early Church, not in the political form that it would take in the twentieth century, but based out of this “heart and soul” a heart and soul that loved people and loved one another.
As I suggested, the earliest Christian community was a heterogeneous community: there were rich and there were poor. They were mainly Jews to begin with but Greeks and Gentiles were added to them. There were male and there were female: the women who had gone to the tomb and the Apostles who had heard their word. They were the ones who were gathered in Jerusalem to receive the Spirit and recognize Jesus, but they came from different backgrounds. They shared their possessions. They took care of one another. They went beyond the giving of alms, which was in fact one of the traditions of the pious to actually make sure that no one in the midst of them suffered.
Isn't that what the Church is about? Isn't that what congregations are about? Are we not at our greatest when we share with those who are in the greatest need? I think we are and I think when we are like that the witness to Christ is the strongest.
I was reading an article that had appeared a number of years ago in The Los Angeles Times about a businessman who is a hi-tech guru called John Tu. Along with his very good friend, David Sun, he had created a massive company in southern California. They made Kingston Technology Company a very famous and a very big corporation. However, there came a time when they decided to sell 80% of their shares in this company, and they sold it for $1.5 billion in 1996. That was a lot of money in '96!
What did they decide to do with some of their profits? They took $100 million of it and gave it to their workers. Each worker received a bonus of $75,000. They said, when asked why they did this, that it was because they could never have done this alone and that they had to recognize that none of us are self-sufficient they did not succeed on their own and they needed to recognize it. These men are smart - they bought the company back for $450 million a few years later and it is still going strong!
They did the right thing. They recognized what Christians have recognized since Acts Chapter 4: that none of us do this alone. We are not cynics! We know we need each other and we care for each other because the Risen Christ is the one who unites us.
The thing that the early Church did more than anything else was to bear witness to the Resurrection. Luke tells us in Acts this is what they did: they bore witness to the Resurrection. It might have seemed absurd and there were cynics in those days that were in fact quite frightening who couldn't stand what they were saying, but they said it anyway because they believed it to be true. They knew and they understood that the thing that drew them together, the thing that gave them power, the thing that gave them hope, the thing that gave them an identity was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This past week on The Agenda on Monday night, I was watching an interview with five religious leaders and thinkers who were talking about the Church and how it is growing throughout the world. The phenomenon of the growth of Christianity, we forget this! This is a very fast growing faith we have, particularly in the southern and the eastern world. It was a fascinating interview. One of the people interviewed is an Anglican Bishop here in Toronto.
Bishop Patrick Yu is someone who I have admired for quite some time and when asked about the Church made this comment. He said, “You know, we worship in the north in a different way than people do in the south and in the east and in the west.” Churches have many different styles of liturgy even within their own Anglican tradition, never mind when you look at the great kaleidoscope that is the Christian Church. He said that it does not matter where you are or what style or form of worship you may have, the thing that unites us is the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. How we live and take care of one another and love one another arises from the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is not just a disembodied Easter faith; it is an embodied Easter life. That is what I pray for us this day. Amen.