Sermon Archive

An Easter People

An Easter People

(Rutgers, May 7, 2000; 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B)

Psalm 133 (OT, pp. 636–637; from 2nd Easter B);

Acts 4:32–35 (NT, pp. 126–127; from 2nd Easter B)

Use has been made of The Living Pulpit, January-March, 1998, and October December, 1994,
and The Library of Christian Classics, I: The Early Church Fathers (Westminster, 1953), p. 249.

Are you ready? OK, let’s do it! Christ is risen! [Christ is risen indeed!] Alleluia! [Alleluia!] Amen! [Amen!] Good! You’re still in practice even after two weeks of rest.

This is the Third Sunday of Easter. And we’re here today in the hope of becoming an Easter people. For it was in large part to form an Easter people that Christ was raised from the dead. As William Sloane Coffin has put it, “Christ is risen…for us—to put love in our hearts, decent thoughts in our heads, and a little more iron up our spines. Christ is risen to convert us…from something less than life to the possibility of…being fully alive.”

So, we’re called by God to become an Easter people, a community of people fully alive in love! But it’s still a Good Friday world we live in—a world filled with suffering and pain and violent death, a place lacking in abundant love for God and neighbor!

But to us who live in this Good Friday world comes this imperative from God: “Become an Easter people! Draw on the energy and love of the Risen Christ so that you may yourselves be transformed and then change the world! Become conduits through whom the spirit of Christ may fill the earth with newness of life! Help to establish here, and now, My reign on earth,” says God. “Help to create a community of love and justice in which the hungry are fed, the oppressed are raised to an equality of status, and the tears of all are turned to laughter.”

It was to create a community like this that Jesus labored and died—to create a harmonious community of reconciled people, like the one of which the psalmist sings in our First Lesson: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!”

And it was to create a community of love and justice—like the one described in this morning’s Second Lesson—that Jesus was raised from the dead. Listen again to Acts 4: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.… With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

Wow! What impressive testifying these early Christians gave to the Risen Christ! What incredible generosity, what bold and loving living the resurrection of Christ made possible! In both word and deed, through lives touched and transformed, those early Christians bore witness to the renewing power of Jesus, the Risen Christ.

Nor was the first Christian community in Jerusalem the only one to have been so transformed by the power of the Risen Christ. Some 120 years later, Justin Martyr wrote this description of the Christian community in Rome (First Apology 14): “ … we who once took most pleasure in the means of increasing our wealth and property now bring what we have into a common fund and share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with [persons] of different tribes because of (their different) customs, now after the manifestation of Christ live together and pray for our enemies.…”

And that which occurred by the power of the resurrection among the Christian communities of the first and second centuries can also occur today, among us, in this twenty-first century! The same power that broke the bonds of death then can cause contemporary Christian communities to become fully alive in love now.

You see, the most eloquent testimony to the reality of the resurrection is not an empty tomb or even the grandeur and beauty of an Easter Sunday service.

Rather, the most eloquent testimony to the reality of the resurrection is a community of people whose life together becomes so dramatically different, so radically changed for the better, that there can be for it no explanation save for the presence among them of the Risen Christ.

The toughest task a Christian has in convincing others of the reality of the resurrection is not the task of explaining how the resurrection of Christ could have happened.

No, the toughest task a Christian has in convincing others of the reality of the resurrection is the task of explaining why more communities of Christians don’t look as “resurrected,” don't look as brought to a fullness of life in love, as those early communities described by Acts and Justin Martyr.

I believe that one of the reasons it’s so difficult for us today to create a community of “resurrection” Christians is that the experience of community—indeed even the basic concept “community”—is becoming increasingly foreign to those of us reared in the industrialized, “corporatized” Western world, a world that encourages rugged individualism and self-advancement and acquisition far more than it encourages the creation of loving, sharing community.

It was the Industrial Revolution that first shifted us away from the earlier social order that stretched back through the first century to years b.c. In that older social order—which underlies Psalms, Acts, and Justin—the basic units for providing persons’ security and economic well-being were the household and the community. But in our present social order, the basic units for providing persons’ security and economic well-being are the company and the corporation.

Whereas in the old order of the household, the household sought to maximize its members’ quality of life and well-being, in the new order of the corporation, the corporation seeks to maximize something quite different from that—not the well-being of its employees, but profits and market share.

And whereas of old the households’ interests closely paralleled the collective interests of the communities they constituted, today corporations’ interests are becoming more and more globalized and are showing less and less affinity to the interests of the communities in which they’re located. In fact the globalization of production and the easy movement of capital and personnel work against attributing value to rootedness within a community.

In the modern market, people are asked to be on the go constantly, and we’re also asked to substitute consumption for service to the community and hedonism for the restraint of ego.

Do you remember that old list of the seven deadly sins—greed, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, anger, sloth? Well, that old list has, to a great extent, been transformed in contemporary American society from a list of sins into a roster of things that make for “the good life.”

Take for example the popular new Fox Network game show called “Greed,” which was this past week even called “Super Greed.” Do you know that prime-time game show? Up to the $100,000 level five contestants cooperate to get the right answers, a kind of “community of players.” But at every level above $100,000, one contestant has to be terminated by another, and that person’s share of the money is then transferred to the terminator.

To attain the goal of climbing to the top of “the Tower of Greed” and winning the $4 million prize, the original “community” of players has to be decimated and to be reduced to a single survivor.

And speaking of sole survivors, CBS intends to field a program this summer that will show us a community of people stranded on an island, a community that has to keep voting out one of its members until in the end only one of the original community remains, and that one’s declared “the winner”!

Both of these TV shows—from Fox and CBS—place a positive value on something Christianity considers to be quite negative—reducing a community of persons to a sole survivor, setting them against each other and calling that a triumph!

I take these two shows to be powerful symbolizations of some dynamics at work in our society that are dreadfully wrong. I take these television shows to be a key to interpreting why it is that American Christians have so much trouble becoming an Easter people.

Quite simply put, some of our society’s most basic dynamics are antithetical to the building of communities that are devoted to creating fullness of life for all persons, and not just for some.

These antithetical dynamics encourage our indulgence in narcissism and our striving for the type of personal triumphs that produce only increased loneliness and isolation.

No wonder we today have such trouble understanding the kind of commitment to community solidarity and well-being that are spoken of in Psalm 133 and Acts 4 and Justin Martyr.

And as another symbolization of where Western society is headed—away from building communities of love and justice and toward exalting individual autonomy—let me share with you this story told by Craig Anderson, formerly the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota, a story about a Native American Christian, a Lakota woman named Zona Fills-the-Pipe.

A group of well-meaning white Christians were visiting the Lakota reservation, and there they met Zona. In due course, they asked her to share with them her life story. She began by speaking lovingly of her family and relatives, and then she described members of her local church.

After she had gone on for about ten minutes, one of the listeners interrupted her impatiently, and said, “But Zona, when are you going to tell us about yourself?”

Quietly, and with eyes cast to the ground, Zona responded, “I’ve been telling you about myself.”

You see, Zona saw herself primarily as being just one part of a community, the community of faith that encompassed her family and friends, those to whose well-being she was devoting her own life. So to describe herself she needed to describe them, the community.

Now, Zona’s self-understanding is much closer to that of the earliest Christians than is our own. For Zona’s culture has prepared her much better than ours to grasp what it means to be a community, a people, an Easter people.

Today, on the Third Sunday of Easter, we are reminded that God has already done God’s part. Easter has happened. The resurrection has occurred, and all of life has been cast into new perspective.

And now the task is ours, the task of allowing the resurrection of Christ to transform us into a community that’s knit together into one heart and soul, into a community that cares and shares, into a community that comes fully alive in love.

As we leave worship this morning, God asks us to choose whether we will continue to live in a Good Friday world or whetherwe will draw on the energy and love of the Risen Christ to help create an Easter world that’s fully alive in love.

Listen again to Justin Martyr’s description of an Easter people, the Christian community of mid-second century Rome: “ … we who once took most pleasure in the means of increasing our wealth and property now bring what we have into a common fund and share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with [persons] of different tribes because of (their different) customs, now after the manifestation of Christ live together and pray for our enemies.…” An Easter people, indeed!

Please join with me now in making a concluding acclamation, for this Third Sunday of Easter, an acclamation that is in part old and in part new.

First I’m going to call out, “Christ is risen!” And you know what to respond to that. Then I’m going to call out, “We shall become an Easter people!” To which you’re invited to respond, “We shall become an Easter people indeed!”

OK now, let’s do it: Christ is risen! [Christ is risen indeed!] We shall become an Easter people! [We shall become an Easter people indeed!] Alleluia! [Alleluia!] Amen! {Amen!]

Let us pray:

O God, it’s such a difficult thing in our society to recover the image of what it is to be a loving community of people devoted to the well-being of all. But grant us that vision, the vision that Jesus came to bring. And enable us, through the power of the Risen Christ, to bring that vision to pass. Amen.

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