2nd Sunday of Easter: Cycle A 22-23

Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:42-47 | 1 Peter 1:3-9 | John 20:19-3

God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Pascal feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightly understand in what fount they have been washed, by whose Spirit they have been reborn, by whose blood they have been redeemed. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The season of Easter is a commemoration, a remembering of an event in history that is so essential, so important to believe in.  We know that human beings have evolved over thousands and thousands of years, and we see a natural progression that moves human beings from isolated individuals, maybe violent toward each other, to people that begin to live together, and civilizations are born.  And for thousands and thousands of years they’ve lived without something, something that God intended from the beginning to give to his people, and that’s what we celebrated in this Easter season, the impregnating, if I can use that word, of a wisdom, a knowledge, an understanding of why we’re here and what this whole world is about.  Religion is the way in which we have an ability to imagine this whole relationship between God and man, and if you’re a believer, if you believe there is a God and you believe this world has purpose and meaning, then it’s so important for you to understand exactly what God has been doing.  

He started off with us by a story in Genesis, and it says so clearly to us that there is, in this world that God has created, human beings, Adam and Eve, and a God who is good and loving and caring, and a serpent or some kind of being that is bent on evil, that works against the work of God.  There are many ways to imagine it, but we could imagine it as a devil, as an evil force in the world.  Yes, I think that’s one way to do it, but it’s also that part of human nature that falls back into a more primitive and self-centered and even very destructive mode.  And so what is set up at the very beginning is a tension between good and evil, and human beings seem to be prone to believing lies that are told to them by maybe, you could say, by the devil, by evil, by a lower nature.  And it’s difficult for us to keep our focus on what is true, what is real.

And so what I love about the whole Easter season is we look at the life of a man who came into the world that, we are told and we believe, was not just a human being but a human being filled with divinity.  He was God himself coming into the world to reveal something that was hidden until that moment, and what was it?  What was hidden?  Well, we know things that are mysterious more by their effect than by how they work, and so one of the things we listen to in Peter, in the reading, it’s clear that he says something has been given to us that creates inside of each of us something new, a birth.  And what he calls it is a living hope ⎯ a living hope.  As you listen to the words as they unfold, he’s talking about something that we inherit, something imperishable, something undefiled, unfading, something powerful, and what it is, and this is hard to grasp, it is the guarantee that, if we believe in this gift, we trust in it, open our heart to it, whatever this thing about life that we’re involved in, whatever life is for ⎯ and we know that it has various trials, and there’s suffering, all that.  Well, whatever that’s all about is somehow about something that comes at the end, at the end of the story, when this world is gone, as we know it, and there is an eternal kingdom.  It’s an amazing thing to hope in, that somehow all of this will make sense one day.  Then we will find ourselves in the world that we all long for, and the minute you try to figure out what that’s like, you’ll get into trouble.  Just imagine the promise is something good is coming.  That’s what’s important, and there’s a living birth of something in you living that gives you the ability to deal with the world as it is when it comes to its darkness, its evil, its pain.

So let’s look at the way this first message was received.  So we’re looking in the first reading, the Acts of the Apostles, the story of what happened after Jesus rose and ascended to his Father, and we see that they did four things on a regular basis.  They were devoted to doing a work of listening again to the words of Jesus through the apostles, trying to understand what he was saying and what he was living out for us, more about what he did than what he said, and then it led to a communal life.  And the communal life was their meals together.  They were breaking bread together, and they were praying together, listening to the story as a community, being fed by that community, sustained by that community, and they were aware of something wonderful happening in that community.  And it was the fact that they were there completely for each other.  They would share everything they had with other people in the community.  What it meant was that there was a new image of the way the world could be, and I don't know what the world was like at the time, but I don’t think it was anything like what you see in his disciples and in their followers.  And we know the famous quote.  “Everyone look at these people and wondered about them.  They’re different, and look how they care for each other.”  

So it seems clear to me that there is this invitation in this set of readings to do what Easter engages us in.  If you do believe that God came into the world, if you do believe these words have life, if you want to live by them, and if you can have something in you that gives you the experience of something that is hope-filled that you will be somewhere, someplace with people that you love in a way that is so much like what our heart longs for, then you’ll have it.  Then you’ll have this gift.  And I love when Jesus came back to the disciples, and this is what he says to all of us who struggle with belief every time we fall into the darkness and don’t believe in anything that’s going to be coming that’s better than this miserable life we’re in, we fall into a depression, into that place of fear and shame.  This presence, this thing, this God ⎯ how do you describe the Spirit of this God that enters into you that gives you this new birth to hope?  It’s not in the words alone.  It’s not just in the Spirit.  I don't know.  To not know is a real interesting disposition to accept, because we can’t know for sure what it’s about.  We know it brings peace, and so into the darkness and the shame and the fear that we often have about the world as it is comes this Spirit and says, “I want you to do something.  I want you to get together and do two things.  I want you to listen and ponder what this world is about.”  Whether you do that in a religion or you do it on your own, it’s important to do that, to have questions and to somehow go to whatever it is that can feed you.  And so you need some kind of encouragement from other people.  It’s the beauty of AA or any meeting or anything that is wanting to change radically who we are inside.  We need a community to help us do that, because we’re not good at doing it alone.  And then we need to do the most important thing: forgiveness.  Everything that Jesus taught can be reduced to this, a way of accepting suffering, everything without anger, without resentment, without fear that it’s all going in the dark, destructive direction that we fear.  You have to forgive, not just receive forgiveness from God, who tells you that your sins will not keep his love or his care away from you.  No, it’s more about ⎯ that’s one thing, and it’s a very important thing, but you have to realize what he’s saying is, “I want you to forgive others.”  And that others is bigger than we think.  It’s not just the person that offends us, but it’s everything that seems negative to us as it’s manifest in ourselves, in the people around us to us, in ourselves as the negative things we do to each other.  We have to forgive that, forgive what’s done to us and forgive God for doing what he's done, and that’s put us in a world that is difficult and painful and dark and hard at times.  And he doesn’t give us enough understanding to say, “Oh, I’ve got it.  I understand it.”  No, it’s got to remain a mystery.  It’s a living thing, this hope that we have in God.  It can die.  It can get sick.  It can get weak.  It goes silent.  And what nurtures it?  Communal life.  Communal life that has a single focus of understanding something that is not clear, not easy to grasp but is essential to finding peace.  If we have people around us that believe that, it is easier to believe, and if we find ourselves with a new spirit that is different than our human nature, it lifts us above what we normally feel, the resentment, the anger, the disappointment, and say, “No, I accept all that, because one day that will be gone.  One day that won’t be there, and life will be what we want it to be.”  

Well, how’s that going to work?  What’s it going to be like?  Don’t ask those questions.  Just trust.  Just hope, and what you’ll see is what Jesus was revealing more than his words.  You saw him doing the most amazing things called miracles.  They came in two forms.  One, they were mostly therapeutic, eyes that could see, ears that could hear, mouths that could speak, hands that could work, legs that could get you somewhere.  But he also drove out demons, and the most interesting thing about that is he addressed the demon in the person and told the demon to leave.  Is that what happens with evil in the world?  Is there a power that gets inside them that starts ruling their life?  Who knows?  I can’t describe ⎯ it’s hard to describe, but it’s important to know that there’s a battle going on.  And we’ve been promised victory.  That’s our hope.  That’s the Easter message.  Amen.

Father, your promise is real.  Your desire is that we believe in it so that we can live a life that has life flowing from it, not darkness, not discouragement.  Keep us faith-filled, hope-filled as we continue to witness, as you witness to the world the future that is coming, the life that is promised.  Amen.