April 15, Easter 3, The Power of God #1: Healing

Acts 3:12-19, Psalm 4, 1 John 3:1-7, Luke 24:36-48

For the next few weeks we will talk about the power of God. This Easter Season we will talk about the power of the resurrection, the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s power that empowers us, and what that power is for. I chose power as the theme for this sermons series when I surveyed the lessons for the Easter Season, where the word and its synonyms keep coming up.

If you can lift a block of concrete weighing 550 pounds one foot high in one second’s time, then you have as much power as one horse—you have one horsepower. Power is for lifting and raising and pushing and pulling and even for throwing. Power moves things, it changes the position and the condition of things. Power does work, be that muscle power for physical work, or brainpower for mental work, or economic power and political power and even spiritual power for cultural work.

We speak about empowerment. If you are created in God’s image, if God designed you for freedom and for creativity, then you need some power to exercise your freedom and do the work that satisfies you and benefits others. Parents empower their children. Teachers empower their students. Bosses empower their employees. People work hard if they can exercise their freedom and creativity. You need empowerment if you’re powerless. If you’re oppressed or suppressed or depressed or just pressed down, you need some power to raise you up. Like maybe the power of the resurrection.

People want power. Individuals want power. Groups of people want power for their groups. Recently on PBS Newshour I heard David Brooks say that liberals have the cultural power while conservatives have the political power, and now conservatives are using their political power to gain cultural power.

Last week I read about a Bible study among some members of the Cabinet. Every week Betsy De Vos and Mike Pompeo and Jeff Sessions meet to study the Bible. They believe that God used Donald Trump to give them the power to change the culture of the United States. They want to serve the Lordship of Jesus Christ, not only in their own private lives, but also in public, for the good of the world. How much should you want the same, and in what way?

What kind of power do you want for yourself? Not superpower, but just the power to be successful, to achieve your goals, to reach your potential, to keep your resolutions, to solve your problems and rise above your troubles and get yourself through hard times.

You know why thousands of people fill the megachurch of Joel Osteen every week and millions more tune in to him. He interprets the Christian gospel for his message of personal empowerment, that you can have the power to meet your full potential. Every sermon is a variation on that message and he packs them in. That’s what Robert Schuller preached. So did Norman Vincent Peale. I figure if I preach on this every week I can make Old First a megachurch. Soon the sanctuary will be too small and we’ll to move into the Armory. It’s too bad I waited till I was 64 to figure this out.

Of course, some power is negative. Consider the first lesson. The Apostle Peter accused his fellow Jews of killing the Author of life, even though they had to get the Romans to do it for them, because they did not have the legal power of execution. Even the powerless can use their negative power and manipulate the law to overpower someone else. Our second lesson calls this lawlessness, when it says that sin is lawlessness. Sin is the Christian term for power in the negative. And the sin we commit gains power over us who commit it, and sin confines us in its power even when we tell ourselves that we are free. This is not just in the Bible—all of world literature tells the tragic tale of this, the stories of one character after another trapped within the faulty choices they have made.

But the message of power that I have for you today is that you don’t have to stay trapped, you can be liberated from this tragedy. That’s the greater message of Peter to the crowds. He’s telling them that although you people killed the Author of Life, you don’t have to be trapped within the negative power of your sin, because God raised your victim from the dead.

His message to that crowd can be expanded as the gospel’s larger message for every human generation, that the resurrection of Our Lord has power to overcome the negative power of human sin. And you access this power simply by your repentance and belief. Your repentance and belief can break the bondage of sin and death and set you free to live as God intended you to live.

Let me take a step back here. The back story of Peter’s preaching was the healing miracle that he and John had just performed, the very first miracle of healing by the early church. They had healed a lame man who was begging at the entrance of the Temple. Peter had taken him by the hand, and in the name of Jesus raised him up. His rising expressed the resurrection. That’s what healings are in the New Testament—temporary evidences in our real embodied lives of Our Lord’s resurrection in the body and his own eternal life, which will be for us as well.

In our Gospel lesson, St. Luke shows us that the resurrection of Jesus was nothing if it was only spiritual, for then the Lord Jesus would be nothing but a very important ghost. His body changed, to pass through doors, but it’s a real body, who can eat fish (which I’m happy to say was broiled instead of fried and thus more healthy), and though his body will never die again, it’s the same body, with the marks of the nails in his hands and feet.

That’s what healing means in the Bible, that even though every one of our healings is temporary, because we first must die before we can be raised again into eternal life, yet our very physical and biological bodies can share in the power of the resurrection.

Healing is real, but it’s always outside of our control. There are faith-healers on TV, but you notice they only work in their own arenas, they never work in hospitals. How come faith-healers don’t work the hospitals? Because the people who do work in hospitals are the real faith-healers, healers who work by faithfulness, by patient hospitality, by long-term care, by hard work, scientific work, mental work, creative work, with the God-given power of medicine. Healing is real.

In the Book of Acts the healing of the lame man was good in itself, but its larger good was to lead to the preaching, and the purpose of the preaching was repentance and reconciliation. That’s the greater healing. Repentance breaks you from the grip and bondage of your sin and reconciliation repairs the damage of the sin and opens you up for the healing of your relationships and the healing of the world. Repentance is a fearful thing, you put yourself at risk when you admit you did wrong, but the power of the resurrection gives you the power to repent and to convert your fears to peace.

When Jesus appeared to his disciples they were terrified. He tells them to look right at his hands and feet, with the marks of shame and pain and cruelty still on them. If we’re afraid to look straight on the awful evidence of sin, the healing cannot start. Every week at Holy Communion, for us to eat the Bread of Life and drink the Cup of Salvation, I first have to say these words: “On the night he was betrayed.” Don’t hide the pain, don’t cover up the sin, don’t be afraid of the awful truth of what we have done with the power God has given us. The greater power of healing is the empowerment to do the hard work of facing the truth about yourselves, and confess it, and the power to raise yourself up from your knees, and the power to move your reconciliation, and then to spread your arms wide and claim your freedom to be creative and do your good work in the world. You have that power.

Every healing is temporary. But everything else is temporary too. You have the power to plant the seeds of transformation that will grow up beyond your own control and bear fruit beyond your knowing. The second reading says that we are still like children, who don’t know yet what we will be. But you have the power to hold on and be faithful without fully knowing and the power to keep believing until it is revealed what we shall be. You have the power to reconcile all the passing realities of life with the promise of resurrection and the world to come. And you have the power to share this with your friends here in Brooklyn.

Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.