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Written by The Rev. Karen Evans
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Easter 3 Lesson: Acts 3:12-19
April 26 , 2009 Psalm 4
The Rev. Karen Evans Epistle: 1 John 3:1-7
St. James’ Church, Marietta Holy Gospel: Luke 24:36b-48
I speak to you in the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the hazards of being clergy is that even your best friends do not ask you how your garden is growing this year, or if you heard the report that the Milky Way contains a chemical that smells like raspberries. I was riding home from Kiwanis the other day with a good friend and she what I was going to say in my sermon this week. By the time I had explained the lesson from Luke that I just read to you, I had a much better idea of what it was about. What I want to talk about is that lesson and I see it as having Part I, and once you get everything that is in Part I, then you move on to Part II. That is the structure of what I am talking about.
What Luke is trying to show in Part I is the nature of Jesus as the Risen Christ. There are a number of factors involved in that. We see them developing them in the various stories he tells, starting with the story of Easter morning. On Easter morning in Luke’s Gospel, the women go to the tomb and they find it empty. That is pretty universal. In the tomb, however, are two angels who tell them that Jesus is not there; he is risen. They go away wondering. The disciples think it is an “idol” tale, and do not believe them. But Peter goes to check it out and he does not find anything but the empty tomb. That is the end of the first story.
Then two of the disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus; that is the second story. As they go along, a man joins them and they talk about what has happened in Jerusalem, they talk about the Scriptures, and how the Scriptures explain and show what is necessary, and how all of the Scriptures are fulfilled. It turns out that he is Jesus, but they do not recognize him.
Then the third story in today’s Gospel is where the disciples are talking about the stories that these other people have come back and told them, about Jesus being raised and appearing to them. All of a sudden, Jesus is there in the middle of them and they are scared to death. They do not get it, yet. They are totally surprised by his showing up in the middle of them, and they think that he is a ghost.
It is not an unreasonable thing to think because the last time they saw Jesus he was dead. He appeared to them seemingly out of nowhere. In some of the Gospels, they even say that the door was locked. So one minute they are talking about him and the next minute he is standing there. I, too, would wonder whether it was a ghost or not.
But there is another thread to those stories. In the garden, the women were at least partially convinced by the message of the angels. They went back to the disciples to say, “He’s not there, and we’ve been told that he is risen.”
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus finally did recognize Jesus when they sat down at table. Now let me tell you a little side note. I think why they recognized him was by the patterns of what he did, and how that related to what he had done when they were with him when he was alive. Dom Gregory Dix wrote a wonderful book years and years ago, and he talks about how in the feeding of the 5,000 and then in the story of the Last Supper, Jesus did some very specific things. He took bread, he gave thanks to God, he broke the bread, and he gave it to the people.
Now in the story in the road to Emmaus, when they get to the house and sit down to dinner, this man who has been walking with them all this way, takes this bread, gives thanks to God, breaks the bread, and then passes it out to the people at the table. It is in that pattern that they recognize that this is not just some ordinary man, but that they are in the presence of the Risen Christ. If you listen carefully, you will hear that same pattern repeated when we bless the bread and wine at the Eucharist.
I remember one of my seminary professors saying, “The problem with the Resurrection is that it is a unique event.” Something that is unique is hard to describe because we describe something by saying it is like something else. But something that is unique is not like something else. So we are forced to say that it is kind of like this, but it isn’t. Or else we just give it a name and go from there.
Luke is trying to say in this that Jesus was not like he was, but he is. He repeats the same things that he did. He proves that he is not a ghost by having them feel him, seeing that he is flesh and bone, and by eating something. Ghosts do not eat, so he is not a ghost.
Luke wants us to know that Jesus was not like Lazarus. Lazarus was resuscitated, but Jesus is resurrected. Jesus was truly dead and he passed through death to be raised at the Resurrection. He is not a ghost. He is not who he was, but in continuity he is something new that is still the same. You see how hard it is to talk about the Resurrection because it is a unique event. Jesus was the first and the only.
Once the disciples realized that this was, in fact, Jesus, and that he had been raised, it is as though Jesus could then talk to them and remind them of what he had said to them before, and give them the important message that he had to pass on to them at that moment.
James Limburg, in one of the commentaries, titles this section “Dynamite.” I was totally intrigued by that. I thought, Okay, let’s think about dynamite for a little bit. I did some research. Dynamite comes from the Greek word for “power.” That word is used in the last line of our lesson. Jesus says, “Power will come from on High,” and in a sense, he is saying spiritual dynamite will come from on High, and give you power.
What I learned about dynamite is that it is an ordinary, everyday material, originally sawdust that has been soaked in nitroglycerin. If you have watched the same movies and TV programs I have, you know that nitroglycerin is very unstable. I remember an episode of “Little House on the Prairie” where they had these two things of nitroglycerin and they are bumping along in a wagon, going over these rough roads, wondering whether the whole thing was going to blow up on them before they ever got to where they were going.
If you mix nitroglycerin with something ordinary, like sawdust, it makes it more stable. Then you have to have some kind of small explosion to trigger the larger explosion. What it needs is a blasting cap, which is either a small chemical or electrical explosion, and that sets off the larger one. Then the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in nitroglycerin combine, and they free the nitrogen. The hot gas expands rapidly and BOOM! you have an explosion.
Things can be made to explode outward, or to implode inward. It depends on the way the structure is prepared, and that is what I think makes this all relevant to the Gospel. Jesus promised his disciples that if they stayed in Jerusalem, power from on High would “clothe” them. He prepared them to receive that power by first teaching them about how all that was written in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms had been fulfilled in him. He showed them in the Scriptures how the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.
Then he talked to them about sin – that is anything that separates us from God. He invited them to repent and to accept the forgiveness that was now given in his name.
Finally, he reminded them that they were witnesses of all that had happened. He commissioned them to proclaim what God had done to all nations, starting in Jerusalem.
So to put it in a different way, Jesus promised them spiritual dynamite. On the Day of Pentecost when they received it, because they were prepared, they exploded into the world and proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins, and the eternal life which it accomplished. They went, starting in Jerusalem, throughout the whole world.
That same spiritual dynamite is offered to us. We are the ordinary material in which the power from on High is clothed. The question is, will it cause an explosion or an implosion? Are we preparing ourselves as Jesus prepared his disciples to explode into the world with the Good News? Or are we on our way to implosion by thinking that we are just fine the way we are, and we can handle the dynamite all by ourselves? God continually makes the offer of the power from on High. We need to decide whether we will prepare to receive it, or not. Amen.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 May 2010 )
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