Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:7-18, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
St. Paul is the intellect, St. Peter is courageous, and St. John is the lover. St. Paul is the Scarecrow, St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion, and St. John is the Tin Man. Yes, I know, that’s a out of order.
St. Paul is the Scarecrow who did have a brain. He loved philosophy. He was educated in both Greek and Hebrew literature. He was trained in rhetoric and argument. So when he gets to Athens he makes his case to the intellectual elite. He appeals to their religion and he quotes their authors. But the Book of Acts reports that his speech was unproductive.
Not that he shouldn’t have done it. We should “always be ready to make our defense to anyone who demands from us an accounting,” and the intellectual coherence of the Gospel deserves demonstration in the court of public opinion. But intellectual argument doesn’t win people over.
The Gospel did not compel the urban elites. The early church grew in the ghettos and villages among wives and servants and soldiers. And not by evangelistic crusades. The sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that the church grew slowly, one by one, by treating women better than their neighbors did, by rescuing unwanted babies who were thrown out on the rocks, and, during plagues, by taking in the sick whom their neighbors abandoned. They modeled a new kind of humanity, caring and compassionate. And gradually, over 200 yeas, their numbers were finally exponential. Against the power of the Empire they demonstrated the long, slow power of love, even during persecutions.
Imperial systems of power resist the rule of love. The persecutions were mild when St. Peter wrote his First Epistle, but already they were suffering. If you love, you will suffer. You suffer from doing wrong, and you suffer from doing right. They suffered from social dislocation and cultural exclusion. Maybe like gay folks have to endure, or a black man in a white suburb. Always the potential for exclusion or for harm.
So St. Peter’s question that opens our second lesson is not rhetorical but real. Let me translate it literally: “Now who is the one who will be harming you if you are zealous for the good?” Because you will be harmed. History is full of examples of those who do good getting harmed by the prevailing powers that preserve their power by doing harm.
St. Peter tells them, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated.” Well, he should know. St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion who did have c’ourage. After Easter and Pentecost he was the fearless leader of the church. And earlier, when the police arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, it was Peter who said, “Lemme at-em, lemme at-em,” and Jesus had to tell him to put his sword down.
But! Only hours later, he denied his Savior three times, from being intimidated by a serving-girl and fear for his own skin. And every Good Friday thereafter he’d have to remember his cowardice. He knows whereof he writes: “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimated.”
Are you afraid of the world right now? I am. Do current events intimidate you? They do me. I’ve got abiding fear right now. Not just for my health, but whether I’m not up to this, that I’m afraid to do the good I should do. For other people, like the early church did. I could say that I’m over 65, with a history of asthma, so I should protect myself.
But my conscience says, “Really?” And what about you? What is your conscience asking you? About anything good you might be doing better?
The issue of conscience is what leads St. Peter to that strange passage that careens through some obscure Jewish mythology about spirits in prison in the time of Noah. In the legend these were the offspring of angels that had intercourse with human women. What St. Peter means by this, no one knows any more. He is mixing metaphors and jamming thoughts in the fluid and pulsing rabbinic style that you can still hear in synagogues in Brooklyn. But his main point is clear, which is to put you on the ark with Noah, with the Flood as your baptism, and your baptism is for your conscience.
Your baptism is your appeal to God for a good conscience when your conscience accuses you of not doing enough good, or having compromised. It’s for the Christian wife of a Roman husband, who had to compromise her faith. For the Christian slave of a pagan master, who had to do wrong things. For the Christian soldier in the Roman army, who had to break the Ten Commandments. For the parents protecting their babies during a plague and not taking in a dying pagan. Your conscience accuses you, but you can appeal to God on the merits of your baptism. Your baptism is your certificate, your birth certificate of being born again, your passport, your ticket for passage on the ark, even when you are an unclean animal.
Which brings us to St. John. He reports that Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” What the Greek actually means is this: “If you love me, you will be keeping my commandments.” Jesus says it for your comfort, he is your Advocate, your Comforter. It’s a confidence-builder, it’s a conscience-clearer. Oh St. John, you’re the Tin Man, but you certainly have a heart.
St. John is the lover, the one whom Jesus loved, Our Lord’s best friend. All four gospels speak of love, but love is largest by far in St. John. And love is largest in the Christian faith among the world’s religions. In the novel The Life of Pi, the author says that compared to the real virtues of Hinduism and Islam, what Christianity offers is the bottomless love of Jesus. On Good Friday at our St. John’s Bluegrass Passion I noticed that those old gospel hymns are love songs. “What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul.”
“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” You keep his commandments just by loving him. “And those who love me will be loved by my Father.” You love Jesus just by being loved by his Father. “And I will love them, and reveal myself to them.” You just be open to God’s revelation of love in Jesus, and trust that love, and you’ll be loving God back, and doing God’s commandments, with your conscience clear. Does that sound too passive? But the Holy Spirit of God is doing the acting within you, and is your Advocate and Comforter.
That’s the sign, the community of love, like you, the sign for the world around you watching and needing and doubting. The sign of the resurrection is your community practicing the love of God as best you can in small and gradual terms on matters right in front of you, supporting each other and bearing each other in your inevitable compromises and even denials, but of which your conscience can be clear. It is not sentimental love, not hippy-dippy love, but God’s love, God’s divine and sovereign and sacrificial love among you. Your community of love is the sign of the wonder of God’s love among you and within you.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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