2018.04.15 - Raise Your Voices Week 1

Scripture - Acts 3:1-19

Acts 3:1-19 (The Message)
3 1-5 One day at three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on their way into the Temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man crippled from birth being carried up. Every day he was set down at the Temple gate, the one named Beautiful, to beg from those going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter the Temple, he asked for a handout. Peter, with John at his side, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Look here.” He looked up, expecting to get something from them.
6-8 Peter said, “I don’t have a nickel to my name, but what I do have, I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an instant his feet and ankles became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.
8-10 The man went into the Temple with them, walking back and forth, dancing and praising God. Everybody there saw him walking around and praising God. They recognized him as the one who sat begging at the Temple’s Gate Beautiful and rubbed their eyes, astonished, scarcely believing what they were seeing.
11 The man threw his arms around Peter and John, ecstatic. All the people ran up to where they were at Solomon’s Porch to see it for themselves.
12-16 When Peter saw he had a congregation, he addressed the people:
“Oh, Israelites, why does this take you by such complete surprise, and why stare at us as if our power or piety made him walk? The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our ancestors, has glorified his Son Jesus. The very One that Pilate called innocent, you repudiated. You repudiated the Holy One, the Just One, and asked for a murderer in his place. You no sooner killed the Author of Life than God raised him from the dead—and we’re the witnesses. Faith in Jesus’ name put this man, whose condition you know so well, on his feet—yes, faith and nothing but faith put this man healed and whole right before your eyes.
17-18 “And now, friends, I know you had no idea what you were doing when you killed Jesus, and neither did your leaders. But God, who through the preaching of all the prophets had said all along that his Messiah would be killed, knew exactly what you were doing and used it to fulfill his plans.
19 “Now it’s time to change your ways! Turn to face God so he can wipe away your sins, pour out showers of blessing to refresh you, and send you the Messiah he prepared for you, namely, Jesus.
Sermon -
Easter is over - the flowers (mostly) have been taken care of, the leftovers from Easter dinner finished, the Easter candy is pretty much gone or squirreled away into hiding. The day of resurrection is done and finished and we can get back to our regularly scheduled lives, which here means desperately waiting for Spring to arrive, watching early season baseball (or, in my house, playoff basketball), getting ready for the end of the school year - and on Chebeague - we’re already getting ready for summer. True, right? May and June might as well not exist, we’re all already thinking about July.

Easter in the church, though, isn’t one day but a whole season. 50 days, running from Easter Sunday - the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, to Pentecost - the day we celebrate the Holy Spirit pouring out over the disciples. In the early church, where Lent was the season for new converts to learn about the faith and prepare for baptism on Easter Sunday, the Easter season was the period that continued the faith formation of these new Christians.

It’s also a season for the church and for us to think about the question - now what? Jesus lived, died, and rose again.  After the resurrection - what does that mean for us? What does it mean to follow Jesus and be his disciples in light of his death and resurrection? How do we live now?

Throughout this season, we’ll hear stories from the book of Acts as these first disciples tried to figure out the answers to those questions.

What I’d like to do is read our scripture passage again - not that John didn’t do a good job, but I’d like for us to really hear what’s going on in this story. So to give you a bit of background here, this story happens after Peter’s first big sermon, and people were joining up with this Jesus movement in droves. They gathered in the Temple for teaching and prayer, ate in one another’s homes, shared things in common...things were really moving along. They’re in Jerusalem and the death and resurrection of Jesus wasn’t a distant memory - it was a fresh reality, within 3 to 6 months, most likely, of these events.

With that in mind, let’s hear the story again.

3 1-5 One day at three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on their way into the Temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man crippled from birth being carried up. Every day he was set down at the Temple gate, the one named Beautiful, to beg from those going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter the Temple, he asked for a handout. Peter, with John at his side, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Look here.” He looked up, expecting to get something from them.
6-8 Peter said, “I don’t have a nickel to my name, but what I do have, I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an instant his feet and ankles became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.
8-10 The man went into the Temple with them, walking back and forth, dancing and praising God. Everybody there saw him walking around and praising God. They recognized him as the one who sat begging at the Temple’s Gate Beautiful and rubbed their eyes, astonished, scarcely believing what they were seeing.
11 The man threw his arms around Peter and John, ecstatic. All the people ran up to where they were at Solomon’s Porch to see it for themselves.
12-16 When Peter saw he had a congregation, he addressed the people:
“Oh, Israelites, why does this take you by such complete surprise, and why stare at us as if our power or piety made him walk? The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our ancestors, has glorified his Son Jesus. The very One that Pilate called innocent, you repudiated. You repudiated the Holy One, the Just One, and asked for a murderer in his place. You no sooner killed the Author of Life than God raised him from the dead—and we’re the witnesses. Faith in Jesus’ name put this man, whose condition you know so well, on his feet—yes, faith and nothing but faith put this man healed and whole right before your eyes.
17-18 “And now, friends, I know you had no idea what you were doing when you killed Jesus, and neither did your leaders. But God, who through the preaching of all the prophets had said all along that his Messiah would be killed, knew exactly what you were doing and used it to fulfill his plans.
19 “Now it’s time to change your ways! Turn to face God so he can wipe away your sins, pour out showers of blessing to refresh you, and send you the Messiah he prepared for you, namely, Jesus.

We start by seeing Peter and John on their way to the Temple, a normal, everyday occurance. It was part of their habit as observant Jews, and part of the emerging life of this new community of Jesus followers. At the same time,we have this beggar being carried up to his habitual place at the Beautiful Gate to beg, a man on a street corner in his usual place. It’s like when you’re driving in Portland - if you are in town with any degree of regularity and your route is the same, you’ll see the places where people pick to stand and panhandle and there are the usual spots that people choose to be to beg. For this man, it was the Beautiful Gate. And I have to believe that Peter and John know this - this man was not unfamiliar to them. His story was probably not unfamiliar to them. He was the beggar who sat at the Gate at the Temple between such and such a time who was there every day. Crippled from birth, having to be carried and placed in that spot to beg. Everyone going to the Temple would have known this.

And that day, for whatever reason, he asks Peter and John for a handout. Presumably he knows who they are too, just like they know who he is. Peter and John are frequent attenders of the Temple, they aren’t unknown quantities.  There are those two guys who are here all the time, talking about that Jesus fellow. But on this day, he begs from them, asks them for money...he asks for the things he’s accustomed to - money and food for survival, to live and eat.

They don’t have anything, but they stop. Peter takes a moment to look at the beggar and really sees him. Peter looks at him - and sees him for who he really is - he sees the beggar how Jesus would see him. And so he stops and has compassion for this man and Peter tells him to look - to look at him, and the man gets excited because he thinks he’s going to get something from them -- and he does, just not what he expects.

Peter doesn’t have money or food to give, but gives of what he does have - and that’s Jesus, the risen Christ. Peter takes his hand and pulls him up and the beggar finds that his ankles are strong, that they can support his weight, that he has been healed in the name of Jesus Christ. He rejoices and dances and draws quite a crowd around the three of them because everyone knew this man’s story, right? This was the beggar, crippled from birth, the one who sits by the Beautiful Gate and here he is dancing around praising God - now what on earth is going on? They aren’t used to this kind of thing - it’s out of the ordinary, they can’t get their minds around it.

When Peter sees that he’s got a bit of an audience, he launches into a sermon, interpreting what happened for those around him. This is his second sermon that we have recorded here in Acts - he’s finding his voice, starting to become what Jesus knew he was - the Rock upon which Jesus will build the church - and we see him beginning to live into that here. He’s here at the Temple, with all these other observant Jews who are there, and so he begins to talk about what happened to the beggar in the light of Jesus and who Jesus was and is and how their God is the one who is in on all of it. He’s quick to point out that the power wasn’t from himself of John...and it wasn’t their piety that made it happen either. I mean, we’re talking about Peter -- Peter, the one who denied Jesus three times as Jesus was on trial. He’s not exactly the picture of faithfulness or holiness here. Peter and John didn’t do anything special, there was nothing inside of them - no prayers or words or attitude - that made the crippled beggar get up and walk. It was Jesus.

He goes on to talk about Jesus as being part of the Jewish Tradition - as the son of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And we may think he’s being pretty harsh with the crowd here with his pointing of fingers, “you did this, you killed Jesus” and in a way he is - but he’s talking to them as an insider. As a fellow Jew - a bit of an internal family squabble. He’s not calling people out for whatever they may privately feel about the Messiah, but about the public rejection of Jesus before Pilate, the crowd mentality that led to Jesus’ execution. He kind of lets them off the hook - saying, “well, I know you didn’t know any better at the time”....but he brings it right back around and says, “well, now you do because God made it a part of what God was doing in the world, so now it’s time for you to change your ways so you, too, can become a part of what God is up to.”

This whole story is about living in this new reality - this reality where Jesus is alive and risen and active in the world. People are going about business as usual and they don’t see what has changed. They don’t know that Jesus is out and about, they live on auto-pilot. The beggar - asking for a handout as he always did, who didn’t even think healing was possible. The people in the crowds going to the Temple as usual -- the place where they understood God to dwell, the place -- if anything special were to happen -- you’d expect it to happen there -- and even the crowds were surprised to see something amazing happen before their eyes, not expecting to see God show up in such a visible, tangible way.

Don’t we, too, live life that way? Living business as usual, going about letting the world dictate our reality, telling us that we cannot be more than the sum of our circumstances, that we will never be enough or measure up, that our brokenness and the broken systems of the world define us and that we are not worthy of God’s attention and love?

And then, God acts, and we have Peter’s question to the crowd - “why does this take you by such complete surprise?”  This event kind of wakes them up a bit to something more - to a world bigger than what they thought they knew. It’s the world ushered in by Easter, where God’s forgiveness and healing and compassion flows in abundance and not a miraculous exception to the norm. And our response? We’re challenged to be more than merely amazed at its in-breaking - we’re invited to be in on it - to be seen as Jesus sees us - as people worthy of love and forgiveness - to turn away from the broken and sinful places inside us and to believe in the life and love Jesus offers to us...and to become a part of what God is doing in the world, to see God’s hand moving through our lives and our communities not as a one-time event, but as pervasive and sustaining and present as the very air that we breathe.

God’s work is everywhere - in the restoration of broken relationships, children in Guatemala seeing a doctor for the first time, meals shared with friends, neighbors stopping to help one another, nations working toward peace instead of war, in communities carrying one another through times of grief, homeless families putting their lives back together, in challenging white supremacy, in standing with those on the edges in our society, in reaching out for help, in people choosing hope over despair and love over fear, in a million different big and small ways we choose to enter in to suffer with one another in the face of all that life can bring.

God’s work is resurrection. The world Easter ushered in is resurrection life. As Easter people - resurrection is normal. Life abundant is normal. God’s action in the world - healing, restoring, redeeming work - is normal - and work that we are invited into as we follow after Jesus and as he seeks to make us whole.

Peter challenges the crowd in the story to change their ways - and that’s the challenge for us as well - to turn away from thinking that brokenness is the norm and toward this resurrection life which is all around us. Jesus is risen and that means we can’t go back to our regularly scheduled lives or business as usual. God is doing a new thing in our midst - redeeming all of creation and restoring us to wholeness. May we go forth this week to discover God’s abundant life all around us - and may we step out to follow Jesus in that work. Amen.

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