June 2, Easter 7, The Power to Be Free

Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 97, Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-26, John 17:20-26

On the old state road between Holland, Michigan and Grand Rapids, as you drive by one of the few hills in that landscape, you pass a large billboard that, if you’re a Calvinist, you can’t help but notice. On the billboard in big letters it says: “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved,” and in smaller letters, “Acts 16:31.” When we drive by it we say, “And thy house.” We assume that the billboard was put there by a Baptist against infant baptism. We know that verse by memory from catechism: “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved and thy house—Acts 16:31.”

Why this emphasis on belief? It is not so in other religions. Is belief in Jesus like knowing the passcode to a computer? If you know the passcode, everything opens up to you. But if you don’t know it you can’t get in. The evangelical deal is that all you do is say that you believe in Jesus, and you’re in, you’re saved, but if you don’t, you’re out, no matter how good and loving you might be—it’s hell for you. So to be saved from eternal punishment, the password is “I believe in Jesus.”

Why do you believe? Both subjectively and objectively? Subjectively, why do you find this whole business convincing or compelling or attractive enough that you are here today? Do you believe thoughtfully, or out of crisis or desperation, like the jailer in our story? And objectively, what do you expect to get from your belief, what is the benefit that you desire, what are you saved from or saved for, what is the content of the salvation that your belief accrues? Why do you believe?

The jailer in our story is about to kill himself. When St. Paul stops him from doing that, he asks the apostle, “What must I do to be saved?” He doesn’t mean the saving of his soul, he means the saving of his neck, and the safety of his household from the retribution of the magistrates. We can tell how vengeful the magistrates were from how they treated Paul and Silas on minimal accusation. Philippi was a city of the army, and what is an army but the organization of violence. But violence can never fully be organized—it breaks out and feeds on itself. The jailer had cause to be terrified.

When he asked the question he was wanting an action plan, something to do to anticipate the magistrates and defend his household against the worst. So St. Paul’s answer will have been a puzzle. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, and your household.” What? So I should quick go to the shrine of your foreign deity and make a sacrifice? But no such shrines are allowed in Philippi, only the temples to Mars and Jupiter and Caesar. Or do you mean that some Jewish general will intervene for us tomorrow morning? Or some aristocrat will make a deal with the magistrates? Are you saying that all I have to do is depend on somebody I do not know to act on my behalf?

This invitation to believe was risky. It offered no action plan other than to believe in Jesus as the Lord who could save him from that very power of Rome that he had been serving till now. It was Caesar who was entitled “Lord and Savior,” especially among the army. The Caesars had saved the Roman Empire from self-destruction, at the Battle of Actium just up the road, and having saved the empire they claimed its lordship. St. Paul is inviting him to a different lordship and a different safety.

There is nothing to do but believe that this other Lord will save you. Of whom we have no proof. Only the ambiguous evidence of the earthquake, and the doors opened, and our chains unfastened, the signs and metaphors of Jesus’ resurrection, and we did already save you from your suicide. This other Lord has been saving you already. You can begin your belief with that.

Has he got a choice? How unlike with Lydia, in last week’s story, whose choice for Jesus was free and peaceful. The jailer’s choice is life and death. But if Lydia’s house became the church in Philippi, tonight the jailer’s apartment becomes a sanctuary—lamps lit, water poured, a space of welcome and safety in the violence, the light of Jesus shining in the dark, like in the stable at Bethlehem.

Inside that sanctuary unfolds a worship service. Already in their chains the apostles were praying and singing hymns, including Psalm 97, you’d have to think, by the correspondence of the imagery with what happened. Then the apostles spoke the word of the Lord to all in the house—the sermon. The jailer washed their wounds, which is an absolution, and then the baptism, and then Communion, the Eucharist, when, in the priesthood of believers, the jailer served the meal and they all rejoiced.

So what was the salvation here, how was he saved? Salvation here means that the jailer has been transferred to a different sovereignty. His household gets moved in place. He doesn’t cross a border but the border crosses over him, and in his baptism he gets naturalized, from the sovereignty of the Lord Caesar to the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus. We don’t know if he was a Roman citizen, but tonight he’s made a citizen of the City of God, the New Jerusalem. Salvation means a new sovereignty.

Lordship and salvation. The one goes with the other. The Caesars were lords of  Rome as long they were saving Rome. And if the Lord Jesus cannot save you, why have him as your Lord? What salvation does he offer you, that you can believe he will deliver for you? There are many salvation stories in the Bible, and many aspects to salvation, like the salvation of your souls at death, and salvation from the fear of death, et cetera. But what’s the aspect of salvation offered in this story?

Salvation here is freedom, and first it’s freedom from your circumstances and then it’s freedom within your circumstances. For example, the circumstance of the slave girl was the exploitation of her spiritual gift, and the circumstance of the jailer was the dominion of violence and the power of death, demanding his suicide. We are not told what happened to the slave girl after her liberation, nor do we know whether the magistrates left the jailer alone or let him keep his job.

But that’s the message here. The jailer was saved from the bondage of death for the freedom of the resurrection. He entered a freedom from the compulsions of circumstance, the freedom that Paul and Silas evidenced even in their shackles as they sang and prayed. So no matter what the magistrates might do to him, the jailer was free from the shackles of fear. That’s a precious benefit of salvation, the freedom of your mind and your soul within your circumstances. And what that freedom results in is joy. The story ends with their rejoicing. Salvation gives you freedom and joy.

The second yield of salvation is service. Not servitude or subservience, but service freely chosen. The guy who had shackled them now washed their wounds and fed them. Their guard became their nurse, their keeper became their host. He exercised his freedom directly within his circumstance. He remained their keeper, they did not run away, but the circumstance of hostility became the circumstance of hospitality. Salvation is freedom for service precisely within and for your circumstances.

That’s important for Old First. It’s a circumstance of our congregation that we have inherited this building. No other Protestant congregation around here has been handed such a heavy gift. A variety of missions is available to congregations, and we choose our mission within and for our circumstance. Our community of Jesus is freely choosing to serve God in paint and plaster. No other Protestant congregation is choosing this, but we are—we are choosing into our circumstance.

We do this for hospitality, for sanctuary, a space of safety, a suggestion of transcendence, and a shelter for souls. And thus our Respite Shelter for Homeless Men this July and August. I invite you all to take turns serving there. I invite you to practice the sanctuary service that the jailer practiced. I invite you all to be Philippian jailers this summer, serving food and hosting rest. And the men who come to eat here and sleep here—you will find them as agreeable as St. Paul.

I like to end my sermons on the love of God. So I invite you to believe that when you freely choose for joy and the service of hospitality, you are yielding to a power that is greater than your own, which is the power and glory of the love of God. So I end with the words of the gospel: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, . . . so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you loved me.”

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 19, Easter 5: The Power to Love II

Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35


The Easter Season is seven weeks long, till Pentecost. All season we repeat that Jesus rose from the dead, in the flesh, spiritually and bodily, no less physical for being more spiritual, more truly human, the Adam of the new humanity, the Adam of the new, improved humanity, the model of what we shall be and the sample of the world to come. In him our familiar fallen human nature has been raised to a glory and power that we wonder at.

He is a wonder and he is a sign. His new physical humanity is a sign of the future physical reality. He is the first-fruit of a new creation, a very-much this-worldly creation. He is the Eve of the new life of the world. It is hard to imagine. We are so used to a fallen world, we are used to reality as corrupted, we are used to nature as bent and life as broken. But try to imagine a real world, a this-world, made holy and righteous, I invite you to believe it and to hope for it and also represent it in your life.

The Easter season counters the conventional take on Christianity that eternal life will leave this world behind in order to be up in heaven with the angels. Because the vision in our reading from the Revelation goes the other way. The New Jerusalem comes down, and the dwelling of God is here with humankind, forever.

This vision from the Revelation confirms the message of the season of Easter that the resurrection of Jesus in the flesh is the sign that points to the ultimate reconciliation of heaven and earth and the transformation of heaven and earth, which means not the obliteration of the earth nor of natural reality but the reclamation and rehabilitation and sanctification of this real world.

Which some people do not prefer. When I was in seminary our most popular professor said that he hoped to spend eternity as a disembodied orb of conscious light. Well, okay, but I can’t see how that is Biblical. Children get closer to the Bible when they ask if there will be dogs in heaven. Well, if the vision is the reclamation of the real world, why not dogs, but not in heaven, rather in the renovated earth, the world transformed, as Jesus’s flesh was transformed in his resurrection.

He is a wonder and a sign, he is the sign that the power of the resurrection is for our transformation. From what to what? From dumb to smart? From flabby to buff? From poor to rich? These aspects may be secondary effects of resurrection transformation, but so also may be persecution, and martyrdom, and exclusion, like for Christians today in some parts of the world.

The secondary effects will differ with where you live, but no matter where you live the transformation is always moral. It is called by such words as righteousness, and holiness, and goodness, so if you are not afraid of such words in your life as goodness and holiness and righteousness, then this transformation is for you.

I confess that there’s lots in my life that I don’t really want transformed. I like my envy and my vanity and my selfishness and lust. You have your own complex of what you don’t want transformed. But the good news about this problem is that the resurrection transformation is also in your confession. It’s not only in your possession of the good but also your confession of the not-good. It’s not an absence of sin but the reconciliation of sin. It’s the reality of your new in the reconciliation of your old.

Your transformation is not in the absence of your old nature but the power of your new nature to manage the old nature still in you, the daily conversion of your old nature into your new nature. Your new nature needs your old nature to be loving of, just as God loves you while you are yet a sinner. Your new nature is distinguished not by innocence, nor by perfection, but by the love which you have for yourself, your vain self, your weak self, even your worst self, and if you can love such a self as yourself then you can love your neighbor as yourself, who really is no worse.

Two weeks ago I said that the power of the resurrection is the power to love, and to convert your love. Today I am identifying that as the power of transformation—when your love loves even what is fallen. If you are nervous about such words as goodness and holiness and righteousness, then think of them as attributes of love, of God’s love, God’s love for the world, God’s love embodied by us, by you. It is a loving kind of righteousness, a loving kind of goodness, a loving kind of holiness.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus commanded his disciples to love. This was on the night before he died. And after his resurrection his disciples had gradually to discover what he meant by this new intensity of love, with its new patterns and expectations.

Which Peter is learning in our first lesson. In his dream he was challenged three times to take the unclean food and eat. Three times to deny his deep convictions, three times to deny, so not an easy dream for Peter, the denier. Should he not hold fast? Imagine how he felt in his gut each time he woke up, his stomach still feeling the dream, and all that disgusting food. Well, it’s in your body where you finally have to face the issues of love, even of spiritual love, Christian love.

What did it mean for Peter to love those Roman soldiers whose job was to oppress the Jews? To eat their unclean food with them? Unclean not just ritually, but morally, because it’s meat and vegetables that the soldiers have taken from his people. Such love will not feel natural, it has to come from the new nature of humanity as in the resurrection. To build a whole way of life on this kind of love is to imagine what life is like in the New Jerusalem.

What stops us? What did Peter have to reconcile? The disgust, and also disdain: They may be on top of us but we’re better than them. We may have less than them but we’re smarter. We don’t need them. Why should we love them? Also the feeling of fear: Look, I gag on rhubarb, I gag on turkey bacon, so I can imagine the fear in Peter’s body, smelling the food the centurions ate, and sitting among such violent men the first time in his life.

The fear in your body can hinder your love. You have constantly to reconcile that. Or the memory of pain, like when the Roman soldier beat you down to take the catch of fish that you were bringing to your family. And now you eat his food with him? Your suffering can keep you from love. Or your bitterness that these outsiders have taken over your land, that they have more success than you do. That they look down on you. And they make you feel ashamed. And you are poor compared to them, from the oppressed economy in Galilee, so how can you love them in your resentment and anger and shame?

What keeps you from love? What shame, what fear, what loss? What sin, what guilt? The point is not to deny these things about yourself but to recognize them, admit them to yourself, confess them to God and to someone you can trust, and then love them, love these aspects of yourself.

Because this resurrection love is not wasted on what is already lovable, but is practiced and proven precisely on the unlovely, on the fearful, on the guilty, and the losers. Just as God loves you, with you still in your old nature, so you can love others just as fallen as yourself, and that is the love that is transforming, the love which transforms them who receive it and transforms you who do it and transforms the world, this world, according to the model of the new Jerusalem.

This transformation is not magical and it is not supernatural, but it is spiritual and ethical. You don’t have to do much to get it but submit to it, because God wants it for you, and as certainly as you come every week, and offer yourself to the words of Jesus, so certainly does this transformation take place in you, constantly, repeatedly, seasonally, in and out, with variations. It is as varied among you as your varied personalities and histories. Yours will not be the same as mine, except in this, that no matter what particular form the transformation of the resurrection takes in your life, it will be in a form of love. Not love as the world defines it, but love as Jesus defines it. Believe it on the basis of God’s love for you.

It is our mission to model this for the world and to welcome people into it. This sanctuary is an expression of love in architecture and decoration. This sanctuary is an intimation of the great halls in the New Jerusalem. It’s a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven in plaster and stone, the Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. We practice our worship and service to offer images of life within that city. We practice the love and the hospitality of God, the welcome home of God, who promises “that the home of God is among human beings, and God will dwell with them, and they will be God’s people, and God’s own self will be with them.”

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 26, Easter 6: The Power to Heal

Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67, Revelation 21:0, 22-22:5, John 14:23-29

The city of Philippi was like Gettysburg—it was known for the battle fought there a century before. Caesar Augustus had defeated the army of Brutus and Cassius. Caesar had made the town a military base, which defined the city’s population, and most of its residents were from elsewhere.

Here was concentrated the spirit of imperial Rome, in its pride and prejudice and arrogant aggression. Here Caesar was worshiped as a god, with Mars, the Roman god of war. Violence was assumed as the means to law and order. There was greed and exploitation but also commerce and prosperity.

The woman Lydia shares in this prosperity. She imports purple cloth, the costly fabric reserved for the ruling class. She owns property, she’s got enterprise and initiative, she has access to cash and capital. She’s an almost modern woman, and the text treats her that way. She is not identified by any husband’s name. She has an independent character, and apparently she does not buy the established religion of the empire, even though she depends on its defenders to be her customers.

Because Caesar was honored in Philippi as “Lord and God,” no synagogue was allowed. So any Jews had to say their common prayers outside the city gates. And only the women dared to do it. But why is Lydia with them? Why is this prosperous Gentile praying to this Jewish god who had been defeated by the gods of Rome?

One Sabbath, on the riverside, some strangers show up. They have a message. She listens to this message, and “the Lord opened her heart.” She believes it, she signs up, she gets baptized, and her household too. That means she puts her whole household under the sovereignty of God, the God of Israel, even inside a city of the gods of Rome. When she said at her baptism that “Jesus is Lord,” she meant that Caesar wasn’t.

Why put her business at such risk? What did she hear in the message, that she should do this, and choose to be identified with the followers of a dead man, executed by the soldiers and officials who were her customers? What in her self-interest was anything that Paul could offer her? We don’t find her miserable and enthralled in sin. She seems to be on top of things.

We can only reason that she must have believed that Jesus really had risen from the dead, and that behind him was the one God who had made the universe, and that his kingdom of justice and righteousness really was spreading in the world, and that she could join up with it. She believed the message and she trusted the messenger. She was skilled in trusting her suppliers and sizing up her customers, she was used to taking calculated risks, she lived by investing her current capital in long-term gains, and she trusted what the stranger told her. Well, faith is that which looks beyond self-interest, isn’t it. Faith is what brings you out of yourself.

She challenges Paul to have faith in her. She says, “If you judge me to be loyal to this lord, then stay at my house.” So direct. So open. This kind of woman you would build a church around. The Lord had opened her heart and she opened her home. Her house becomes the church in Philippi. Her hospitality gave them a sanctuary. Both safety and holiness.

The disciples can gather here for the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and sit around her table and break her bread and pray. The Holy Spirit is among them. God has moved into her house. And for years to come her hospitality and her sanctuary will define that congregation, and it would always be St. Paul’s favorite church.

How strange, that the mighty God of the universe should work this way—compared to the very successful gods of Rome. This one God will conquer the other gods, the gods in power at the time, the gods of pride and prejudice, by means of a small-group-meeting in a businesswoman’s house. How typical, then, that this God’s mighty universal power works through grace and love.

How lovely, that what Jesus promised to his disciples in John 14 came true so quickly with this Gentile businesswoman and her staff and her Jewish friends, that, as Jesus said, “My father will love them, and we will come to them, and we will make our home with them.” The Holy Trinity at home with Lydia.

The Holy Trinity had moved in to Philippi, and was at home in Lydia’s house, and her little community of Jesus was the temple of this new God. The other gods had their splendid temples in Philippi, the temple to Mars, the temple to Caesar, where you could go to make your contact with those gods. But if you wanted to get close to this God of Jesus, you went to Lydia’s house.

Her house was an intimation of the vision of the Revelation, our second lesson. To her house would come the people of every nation who happened to live in Philippi: Jews, Italians, Gauls, Germans, barbarians, army veterans, their wives, their slaves, their sales people. Her house was the city of God inside a city of Caesar. And the food on her table was for healing, for the healing of the nations.

This vision from the Revelation, from the last chapter of the Bible—it has a double application. It’s a vision of the new world of the future, when Christ will come again, and stay, and the Father and the Holy Spirit with him, and the Holy Trinity will bring heaven down to earth. It’s the final answer to our Lord’s Prayer, when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

But it’s also a vision of the church today, the church as the witness and first fruits of the Kingdom, when we practice what we pray. The church as the practice of the City of God. The gates of the city are always open, which means calm security and constant welcome, a sanctuary city, perfectly hospitable to human life as it should be, within the holiness of God. It’s not meant to be the whole world, but the capital city of the larger world, and the nations will walk by its light, and the various peoples will enrich it with the gifts of their own peculiar cultures. The mission of the church.

This enlightened capital city does not conquer nations like Rome did or London or Washington DC, but it heals the nations. “The leaves of its tree are for the healing of the nations.” The Greek word for healing here does not mean a miracle cure, but therapeutic care, attendance—what nurses do in hospitals. It’s what God does among the nations by means of God’s word and by the service of God’s people. It needs no armies and no force. There is no struggle and no battle. It heals the nations by means of grace and peace and a very hospitable kind of holiness. The church’s mission.

In our Gospel lesson, this healing is the peace that the Lord Jesus promised his disciples on the night before he died, and this healing is the peace that he gave them three days later on Easter afternoon. It’s an active peace, and it makes all things well, and all manner of things well, the ultimate healing. Peace with God, achieved by his atonement and communicated by the Holy Spirit, peace with each other, achieved by forgiving sins, and peace for the world, by the Lordship of Christ, to whom we witness. The peace of the city, the peace of the kingdom, the peace in Lydia’s house.

At Consistory on Monday night we were discussing our new mission statement, and whether it’s better to say that we offer “a space of unconditional welcome” or “a sanctuary of unconditional welcome.” The word “space” suggests openness, a community of openness, room for you to be you, and the spacious feeling of this room. The word “sanctuary” suggests safety and holiness, but a sanctuary can be guarded and closed in and restricted to the holy.

And yet our City Councilmember Brad Lander was brilliant last Sunday afternoon when he challenged us to think of “sanctuary” as a verb,  an active verb, a doing, a campaign, a calling. By contrast “space” can be empty, unless it’s the space I spoke of on Easter, the space coming out of the empty tomb, full of the light and power of the resurrected Lord Jesus.

Whatever we end up saying, our lessons today challenge us, that though the marvelous sanctuary in which we worship is a great means of our mission, it’s the community of the congregation itself that by our life together offers active space among us and active sanctuary and active hospitality.

But it also means going outside our sanctuary, instead of just waiting for people to come in, but like St. Paul going out to look for people praying outside the gates, in the exclusion zones, non-citizens, where only women dare to go. There we will find the Lord Jesus in the persons of the Lydias of the world, practicing their healing before the church even notices them, who like Lydia will challenge us. But there too we will find the love of God.

Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 12, Easter 4: The Power to Stay with It

Sister Rosa Parks, a seamstress like Dorcas, also called Tabitha.

Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30

The gospel lesson takes place in the Temple during the Festival of the Dedication, which we now call Hanukkah. Hanukkah commemorates the military victory of the Maccabees 150 years before Christ. The Maccabees led the Jewish war of liberation from the empire of the Greeks, and then they set up an independent Jewish state, which lasted for a couple generations, until the Romans came and conquered them. But their lost independence was remembered with this holiday, their Independence Day, their Fourth of July, only sacred, and they hoped for independence again, with the coming of the Messiah, who would make it permanent, and even eternal, and the thousands of Jews who died as martyrs would be resurrected back to life.

So the people want to know if Jesus claims to be this Messiah. Because if he is they will have to make their preparations—get ready for a war, divorce that Gentile wife, hide some gold somewhere. There will be casualties again, like with the Maccabees, so it’s only fair that he declare himself.

Jesus answers with Shepherd language, which was political language, royal language, going back to King David, the shepherd boy who became the Shepherd of his people. So Jesus is suggesting, on this Independence Day, in the Temple, that yes, he is the Messiah they were looking for.

So you can understand why after his resurrection the majority of Jews would not believe in him. Even if he did rise from the dead, he was irrelevant. What difference did he make? He did not deliver as their Messiah. He did not take power in his resurrection. Where was his Kingdom?

Why hadn’t he shown himself to the high priest and revealed himself to Pontius Pilate? Why was he not taking his throne as the royal Shepherd of Judea? The Romans were still in charge, their puppet Caiaphas was still high priest, the Judean poor were still poor, the Galilean sharecroppers were still in debt, and nothing had changed. Alive or dead, he was no Messiah.

And yet the minority who did believe in him kept believing. At first it wasn’t hard to, right after Pentecost, with those months of signs and wonders in Jerusalem. But the golden days were over. With the stoning of Stephen the persecution started and things got tough and they had to flee Jerusalem. Which is why, in our first lesson, Peter was living in exile in Lydda. And yet the believers kept believing. They must have had a powerful experience of a new kind of life, even in persecution. What special hope and joy was simmering under the surface of their ordinary lives?

The woman Dorcas was one of those who expressed the hope and contributed to the joy. Her name means “gazelle,” so you think graceful and light-footed, and that she was called by both the Hebrew and Greek versions of her name tells us that she crossed the ethnic and religious boundaries in her relationships. She made her living as a seamstress, and she made extra clothes for the widows, who by definition tended toward poverty, and could hardly pay her. Most people had only one set of clothes, and the poor did not have cash. She dressed them in clothing they delighted in. They valued Dorcas so much that when she died they asked the Apostle Peter to come and do the service and honor her in death as she deserved. They show him the clothes she made that gave them joy.

So Peter prays, alone, and in prayer he’s moved to ask God to do the impossible, and resurrect her. This would be the first resurrection after Jesus’ resurrection. Why her? Why Dorcas? Why not Stephen the martyr, the fiery preacher, whose resurrection would have been such a vindication? To me it looks like Peter was making an apostolic decision about the values of the Kingdom and the priorities of the church. Those were not political victories in Jerusalem or vindication before the high priests but the honor of widows in poverty. Is that where to find the power of the resurrection?

It’s not just that Dorcas made clothes, but custom clothing for the poor. That Dorcas will have taken each widow seriously, as an individual, measured her body, chose the fabric, selected the color, cut the cloth, stitched it, and dignified and honored this widow with a tunic to be proud of and rejoice in—such are the trophies of this kingdom and the proofs of the Messiah. Loveliness for elderly women.

Such is the triumph of his power. Peter could see it, he was inspired. “Oh yes, this is what we are about. These are the victories we’re after: Not just welfare, though at least that, but more—dignity and beauty for the poor and honor for the weak.”

The resurrection of Stephen would have been a vindication against their opponents and a proof against the unbelievers, but God has a different strategy intended for us and for how we believers are to get by during this long time between “Christ is risen” and “Christ will come again.” We believers don’t get the privilege of vindication. We don’t get to win.

Not that we lose. I have spoken to you of this before. The point is that we believers are not so much winners of the world or leaders of the world or even teachers of the world as we are witnesses in the great court room of the world, and we are witnesses who give our testimony in a trial where what we say is strongly contested. The verdict and the vindication will be given only at the end. No one has the privilege of resorting to some kind of conclusive “proof” right now, no one from one side or the other, belief or unbelief. So instead of raising Stephen from the dead to prove the Lord Jesus to unbelievers, Dorcas is raised to encourage believers, especially widows, and also to encourage those of us who care for them.

Which is not impressive to the powers of the world. What we look for in power is not going to be the power of the resurrection. Nor is it the kind of revolution that was expected of the Messiah. The world doesn’t look any different. Unless we see the world with different eyes. How those widows looked to the world is very different from how they looked to heaven, and if the significance of what Dorcas did looks small in the measure of what we take as real appearances, it is magnified in the measure of the greater reality behind the world of our appearances, by which I mean this world as it looks from the viewpoint of heaven.

Which brings us to the reading from the Revelation. The Book of the Revelation is so often misunderstood. The vision in this reading is not of the future, but of right now, as viewed from a heavenly perspective. So, from an earthly point of view, we look to ourselves like a ragtag little bunch of half-believing Protestants in a daunting building who are not sure about whether we can pull this off, and worried about too much cost and too many sacrifices. But how you look to heaven right now is a multitude of saints and martyrs who have done great things and are all decked out in shining robes so lovely I can hardly look at them, and when you sing you sound like a hundred philharmonic choruses. That’s what God can hear in your voices. That’s how you look to God right now, from heaven’s perspective.

You are wearing a beautiful robe that the Lord Jesus has made for you, because he is your Dorcas. He has dressed you in a beautiful tunic that you cannot even see upon yourself. Whatever your doubts may be, whatever your shame, whatever your struggles—your rational struggles with believing this stuff or your emotional struggles in trying to love as you want to, or even your struggle to survive, the most critical knowledge about yourself does not belong to you, the truth about yourself belongs to God—you do not dress yourself, and the Lord Jesus is Dorcas who dresses you.

The Lord Jesus is also the Shepherd of your future and your faith. Your own belief does not belong to you, your belief belongs to God, who keeps you believing, no matter how weak and doubting your faith may be and no matter how little difference your believing makes in other people’s judgments and your own.

You are not your own, you belong to the Shepherd whom you cannot see but who will let nothing snatch you from his hand. That’s what he says in the gospel, that nothing will snatch you from his hand.

That’s the promise, and I invite you to believe it. I invite you to believe it once again this week. I have no proof for your belief, but only the analogy of what you have learned of love, and what love wants and what love does. The love that dresses up someone else with lovely clothes. The love that holds on to another and never lets go. So that in even your faulty knowledge of love you can read the analogy of God, who won’t let go of you. “You are not your own, but you belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to your faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 5, Easter 3, Power of the Resurrection #2: Power to Love

Acts 9::1-20, Psalm 30, Revelation 5:11-14, John 21:1-19
Heidelberg Q&A 88: What is true repentance or conversion? Two things, the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.

Two conversion stories. The conversion of Saul to Paul, and the conversion of Simon as Peter. The one conversion stops Saul in his tracks and turns his life so hard around as to change his name. The other conversion raises Peter right within the dying of Simon, his two natures always together, which is the conversion that most of us do every day.

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” The Lord Jesus is rough on both of them. Saul loved God so much that he hated Jesus, and Simon loved Jesus so much that he ended up denying him. Both of them are tested in their love.

 Saul was not some Galilean bumpkin. He was born a Roman citizen and was educated. But he used his education and his Roman privilege against the ideals of Rome to support the most rigorous form of Judaism. He had the freedom of the Empire and was exempt from Jewish law yet he joined up with the strictest group of Pharisees. He was zealous for the Temple and jealous for Jerusalem. But these Jesus-people were messing things up, not keeping kosher, eating with Samaritans and even filthy Roman soldiers, and claiming that their unclean cursed Jesus was the Lord now seated on the throne of God. This blasphemous infection must be purged for the holiness of God.

Saul loved God so much that he was willing to hurt people. He loved God in the image that he had of God. Christians have done the same, loving our image of God and persecuting other people for it. All religions do it. You love God according to your image of God. And as it’s a spiritual law that you become like what you worship, your image of God works out in how you treat your neighbor and yourself. Saul loved his image of God so passionately that he persecuted Jesus.

Simon Peter had loved Jesus from the start, and saw himself as Jesus’ right hand man and bodyguard. It was Peter who drew the sword to fight for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was only Peter who did not flee, but followed behind, and got into the courtyard of the high priest, with the charcoal fire, like a secret agent man.

His tactic was to deny his identity as a Jesus follower, and the second time they didn’t believe him, and his cover was blown, and the third time he was vehement, now to save his skin, and the cock crowed, and he was devastated. But he would not have denied his Jesus if he had not been there to begin with, the only one, because he loved him so much. Love can be so wrong. So Jesus converts him in his love, which is why the charcoal fire on the beach.

It’s fourteen days after the resurrection, while Jesus is still bodily  on the earth, breathing its air and eating its food and accepting its gravity, but unbounded and unpredictable. Twice now they have seen him. But now what? What will be the power of the resurrection?

Will Jesus be a new King David, but invulnerable, trouncing the Roman Eagle and liberating Israel, or even a Jewish version of Alexander the Great, leading the armies of God across the world, as the companions of Mohammed would do six centuries later? Saul of Tarsus could have imagined that, and many Christians still do want to fight for the power and protection of Christian civilization in the world. But that is not the power of the resurrection that Jesus shows them during these quiet weeks.

Early morning, he walks onto the beach and sees the men in their boats. He gathers wood, builds a fire, and when it’s burning down to coals he goes into the water and catches some fish (we are not told how), and cleans them and guts them (I love it, God cleaning fish), and puts them on the coals. Then he calls out to the men, and as he gets them finally fishing right, he bends down to tend his fish. He so loves the world. He loves his friends, even that poor Simon Peter. “We’re going to have to have our talk.” Can you imagine a God who looks like this? Can this be your image of God instead of Michelangelo’s? Can you love and serve a God who has this image?

When Simon recognizes Jesus, he acts all guilty and confused. He covers his nakedness, he jumps into the water with his clothes on, and then he hauls the fish in by himself, over-compensating. Simon! Stop trying so hard! The breakfast will have been lovely for six of the men, but hard on Simon. The charcoal fire, that smell from the courtyard seventeen days ago, when he could not help Jesus, when he denied him, the last time out of fear, and then the rooster judged him.

Why is Jesus hard on Simon? Why make him smell the charcoal fire? Why not discuss his denial rationally, why go through his nose and under his brain? Has not Jesus already forgiven him, that he is not guilty in God’s eyes? But Jesus rubs his nose in it. It’s not about forgiveness, it’s for reconstruction, for reconciliation, for rebuilding him.

And for that to happen you have to face your failure and die and rise again. “Do you love me, more than these (who fled when you did not)? Do you love me? Do you love me?” Jesus drives it in until it hurts. Just because Jesus loves you doesn’t mean he will not hurt your feelings! “Yes, you know I love you. Yes, you know I love you. Yes, you know everything, you know my shame, my guilt, my denial, and now in my hurt you know I love you!”

The Lord Jesus is doing Simon a painful favor, like surgery, he’s opening up his capacity for love, a capacity he did not know he had. You too have this capacity, but you cannot expand your Simon-love into the capacity of your Peter-love except by entering it through your suffering and your misery. Where Jesus is. That’s the Christian approach to love as opposed to humanistic love.

Then Jesus adds insult to injury by telling Peter how he will grow old and weak, and die. What a strange ending for the Gospel of John, with the prediction of a death. Jesus predicts that this strong disciple will end his life in weakness, and this born leader will be led around like an animal on a leash. Simon Peter is looking at nothing left, not even his pride.

It’s not only Peter’s shame that has to die, it’s also his pride. Which is worse, which is harder to deal with? They’re two sides of the same coin, and for Peter to be free of his shame he has to be free of his pride. Jesus is hard on him, and Simon begins to die already here, his daily death. You have to accept it for reconstruction, and take it for reconciliation. Why is reconciliation so rare? Because we don’t like the necessary deconstruction first, of ourselves and our self-esteem.

As Peter enters his failure, Jesus already brings him out of it. “I entrust you with my sheep. I give you charge of my lambs. I put my flock in your care. I trust you. You will take over for me when I go. I reconstruct you, I have reconciled you, follow me. You followed me in secret seventeen days ago. Now you have nothing left to lose, so follow me openly. And don’t try so hard. You don’t have to prove anything, you can’t, you don’t have to defend me, you don’t have to conquer, you don’t have to win the world for Christ. I have already won the world. Just live in your love to feed my sheep.” Just as Saul will share in the suffering of Jesus and only in that way conquer Rome.

Simon was an impulsive man, so Jesus did it through his nose. Saul was an intellectual, so Jesus blinded him and turned him inward to his soul. How does the Lord Jesus work on you, to convert you daily and open your capacity for love? Your capacity is distinct and individual, as will be the way that you express God’s love, so let me encourage you, this promise is more trustworthy than your internal whisperings. You are called not just to love but to convert your love.

Everybody wants to love, but your love must have scars and holes and a wound in it, a love that opens up your misery and suffering with the charcoal smell of your shame and your guilt. God will hurt your feelings. But through your daily dying rises up in you the power of God’s love.

Here’s the take-home: To be a Christian is not just to love, but to convert your love. You convert your love by means of your belief. You convert your love not by your attention to your love itself but your attention to your image of God, the picture of the resurrected crucified, of the lamb on the throne, that kind of love, the victim for love’s sake raised in power, so that the power of the resurrection in you is the power of God’s love for you. Your mission is to yield to that love of God and even to submit to it so that it can convert you daily, and to share God’s love, for the reconciliation and reconstruction of the world that God so loves.

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.