University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Second Sunday of Easter           April 19, 2009

            New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa says that the Christian Church has made two principal errors over the centuries in trying to understand the passage we just read.  The first is to try to make it a rule for all Christians in subsequent generations.  The second is to wish it away.[1] In between the two errors lies a path of faithful discipleship, I believe, and that is the path I want to map with you today.

One person who has explored such terrain in a way is Eve Birch. I knew nothing about her until she did an essay for NPR’s Weekend Edition last Sunday. Ms. Birch is a librarian in Martinsburg, West Virginia; to make ends meet and live out a new but deep-seated belief, she also runs a remodeling business that provides day work for neighbors in need. She shared with NPR the circumstances that led to her decision about how she should live. She said this:

I used to believe in the American dream that meant a job, a mortgage, cable, credit, warranties, success. I wanted it and worked toward it like everyone else, all of us separately chasing the same thing. [Then one] year, through a series of unhappy events, it all fell apart. I found myself homeless and alone. I had my truck and $56.

I scoured the countryside for someplace I could rent for the cheapest possible amount. I came upon a shack in an isolated hollow, four miles up a winding mountain road over the Potomac River in West Virginia. It was abandoned, full of broken glass and rubbish. When I pried off the plywood over a window and climbed in, I found something I could put my hands to. I hadn't been alone for 25 years. I was scared, but I hoped the hard work would distract and heal me.

I found the owner and rented the place for $50 a month. I took a bedroll, a broom, rope, a gun and cooking gear, and cleared a corner to camp in while I worked.

The locals knew nothing about me. But slowly, they started teaching me the art of being a neighbor. They dropped off blankets, candles, tools and canned deer meat, and they began sticking around to chat. They'd ask if I wanted to meet cousin Albie or go fishing, maybe get drunk some night. They started to teach me a belief in a different American dream — not the one of individual achievement but one of neighborliness.

Men would stop by with wild berries, ice cream, truck parts and bullets to see if I was up for courting. I wasn't, but they were civil anyway. The women on that mountain worked harder than any I'd ever met. They taught me the value of a whetstone to sharpen my knives, how to store food in the creek and keep it cold and safe. I learned to keep enough for an extra plate for company.

What I had believed in, all those things I thought were the necessary accoutrements for a civilized life, were nonexistent in this place. Up on the mountain, my most valuable possessions were my relationships with my neighbors.

After four years in that hollow, I moved back into town. I saw that a lot of people were having a really hard time, losing their jobs and homes. With the help of a real estate broker I chatted up at the grocery store, I managed to rent a big enough house to take in a handful of people.

It's four of us now, but over time I've had nine come in and move on to other places from here. We'd all be in shelters if we hadn't banded together.

The American dream I believe in now is a shared one. It's not so much about what I can get for myself; it's about how we can all get by together.[2]

            Hearing Eve Birch’s story stirred me, in part because of the times in which we are living, for hard times often make us reassess what is essential, what is important, what we value. Her story also got my attention this week because of its secularly-framed resonances with the passage we read a few moments ago from the Book of Acts, about how the profound good news of Easter reshaped the lives of that early band of Christians:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ³³With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. ³⁴There was not a needy person among them….³⁵

            It is a truly remarkable description of the power of Christ’s resurrection at work, but it certainly is not quite like any church most of us have ever encountered.  “Even leaving aside the remarkable willingness to give up private ownership and share with others in need, the vision of a faith community being ‘of one heart and soul’ [almost] stretches our credulity to the breaking point.  We just do not know any human community – let alone a church – like this!”[3] Says Cynthia Campbell,

It would be all too easy to dismiss a passage such as this, or even to use it to critique the tendency to romanticize a bygone era, rather than deal with the contemporary situation. But doing so would be to overlook the potential of this text to make us think deeply about the effects [Easter and] Jesus’ resurrection might actually have on our lives.[4]

And that truly is the challenge this text presents us: to make us ask, how has Easter transformed us individually…collectively?  Are our lives – yours and mine – different because we believe Christ rose from the dead?  Are there tangible expressions of our Easter faith to which we can point?  Luke’s description of the early Christian community certainly describes such expressions in terms of heartfelt witness and a desire to hold everything in common in order to meet people’s needs.  That description still sets before us a manner of being, a way of living together, that could shape and inform all our experiences as a Christian community.  

            Luke says in our passage: “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was laid upon them all.” Biblical scholar Sam Balentine says that verse stands at the very center of the passage. “The resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (which we celebrated with chants and alleluias last Sunday) is the “great power” behind the signs and wonders that the early community has witnessed.  It is the source of the authority given to the preaching of the apostles. It is this power that gives birth to the church and defines its mission.  “The imperative of this mission, however, is not only to proclaim the resurrection gospel but also to embody its redemptive truth by caring for one another in ways that secure the fullness of life God intends.”[5]  In other words, it is to practice what we proclaim.

            But do we do so? Do we embody the truth of the resurrection in the manner of our caring?  Does the resurrection of Jesus Christ still have the power to transform us?  Does it make a difference in our lives that is visible to and influential on those we encounter day by day?  It seems to me that our Acts passage presses us to sense that folks ought to be able to look at the way we act as a church and know without a doubt that we are people of the resurrection.

            I offer two hints as to where this passage and the transformative power of the resurrection might lead us.  The first is Lutheran pastor Heidi Neumark’s story about a woman who came to her attention some years ago in the life of the congregation she was serving in the South Bronx.  The woman’s name was Angie, and she first showed up on Neumark’s radar when she sent her son, Tiriq, to the church’s summer program pretty much to get him out of the house.  Neumark visited her to get acquainted and found Angie mired in depression over a deep-rooted history of childhood abuse and over her status as someone living as HIV-positive.

            Angie told Neumark she wanted Tiriq to be baptized, so the pastor prepared him and his mother for the baptism. They read from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians about God who “out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead…made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him.”  The power of the resurrection, you see!  Bit by bit, says Neumark,

Angie rose up, coming to worship, to Bible study, to volunteer at our shelter where homeless people can eat good food and sleep in warm beds….She enrolled, along with [other] adults from around our synod, in a two-year leadership class called Diakonia.

Part of the class involved writing and presenting a paper that answered the question, “Why are you a Lutheran, and what does Lutheran theology mean to you?” One night in that class the student who was supposed to give his presentation at the last minute wasn’t able to get there.  The teacher asked if someone else was prepared to make his or her presentation.  Angie didn’t have her paper (no one did), but she volunteered anyway.  Neumark recounts:

Angie got a glass of water and set it in front of her.  Then she slowly opened a Mary Kay jewelry case and took out a pink pouch that was filled with multicolored pills. She took out about ten pills and swallowed them, one by one, in silence. The class was riveted by this unusual theological presentation.  When the last pill was swallowed, Angie stood up.  “That’s my HIV medication,” she said.  “I’m a Lutheran because the church welcomed me as I am, an HIV-positive, recovering addict, and a child of God filled with grace.  Taking care of my health is part of my stewardship. Now, by the grace of God I want to live.  I want to live for my son.  I want to live for the people still out there on the streets as I was.  I want to live because Jesus Christ lives in me and through me.  It’s just not my body anymore. I’m part of his body, a temple of the Holy Spirit.[6]

“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”  The first hint as to where this passage may take us is the reminder that what we hold in common, our experience of the resurrection and the extravagance of God’s grace, is powerful, transformative stuff when it leads us to embody generosity … and hospitality…and openness… and grace… and welcome to all God’s children in need.

            The second hint as to where this passage and the transformative power of the resurrection might lead us comes by way of metaphor… a metaphor that came this week in an emailed video of a public theater event that was staged several weeks ago in the Central Train Station of Antwerp, Belgium.  In all, it seems, about 200 dancers were recruited for a magical event that turned the dull daily routine of an urban train station into a magical moment at 8 a.m. on March twenty-third. 

            The video begins with commuters scurrying through the station and announcements over the station’s public address system. But then there is music; it’s Julie Andrews and “The Sound of Music,” and more particularly the song, “Do Re Mi.”  As the music begins to play over the station’s P.A. system a number of folks glance around to see where the music is coming from.  Then, comes the dance.  It starts with a single man, who throws up his arms and begins to dance in place; in just a moment he is joined by a young girl, who takes his hand and dances along.  Then another adult and another child.  And soon, a couple of dozen dancers join in the music.  The train station’s commuters and workers stop and stare.  Some pull out their cell phones and start snapping photos and videos. Others actually drop their bags and start dancing along. 

Soon another round of dancers come rushing down the central stairway to join the cast, and the center hall of that train station is awash in lively, smiling dancers.  Their joy is contagious, and before it all ends and people go their way, the whole room is full of people clapping, laughing, and dancing along. The whole room is transformed.[7]

I have read that the dancers pulled off this public performance with only two rehearsals. And yet their act completely transformed the day for so many commuters.  So, here are the questions that video raises for me, for us:  how long have we been rehearsing the Easter story?  How has it transformed us? How has it changed our way of living? How has it shaped and reshaped what we believe we hold in common? How has it filled our life with joy and generosity and grace and laughter and dancing?  And maybe most importantly, has anyone seen us and noticed the difference it made in us and felt drawn to join our dance?