Sermon: Now What?

First Presbyterian Church

May 24, 2020, Easter 7A

Acts1:1-14

 

Now What?

 

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you see one more card

You take it on faith; you take it to the heart

The waiting is the hardest part

 

I can't possibly tell you how much fun it was for this novice pastor when Scripture and circumstance came together in such a fashion that I was finally able to quote a Tom Petty song lyric in a sermon given in that singer's hometown of Gainesville, Florida.

Waiting is one of those things that is easy to overlook unless you're in the middle of it. For example, accounts of D-Day focus on the crossing of the English Channel, the fierce battles to hold the beach at Normandy and finally to move inland against ferocious enemy fire. Less often recalled are the weeks and months of planning and preparation and, yes, waiting, for weather to be better, for the Channel to be crossable. Yet without the patience to endure that time of waiting and preparation – had the invasion been launched against an impassable crossing or impenetrable weather, D-Day would have come to naught (and who knows how different history would look?).

No matter our eagerness, no matter our desperation (or what seems like desperation), no matter what, there are times when we simply must wait.

This is where the followers of Jesus find themselves at the end of today's reading from the book of Acts. A lot has happened in these few verses, where the author Luke has filled in a few details that he didn't include in his first account of the Ascension, at the end of his gospel (including that Jesus spent forty days with the disciples, not just one). The disciples ask a question (one that demonstrates that they, after all this time, really don't get it), Jesus brushes it off, offers up the promise of verse 8 that also includes a charge that will change their lives forever (if they haven't already been so changed), and is lifted up to heaven. Some angels (we think?) chastise the disciples for staring up into the sky (which seems unfair to me; it's not every day you see something like this!) and promise that one day Jesus will return the same way they've just seen him depart.

With those words ringing in their ears, the followers make the short trip back into Jerusalem, return to the "room upstairs" where they have been staying (maybe the same "upper room" where they had that last supper where Jesus broke the bread and shared the cup and gave them that new commandment about doing in remembrance of him, but we don’t know for sure), and there they waited.

Waiting for…what? It's entirely possible, maybe even likely, they didn't know what they were waiting for.

Jesus had told them to wait, way back in verse 4. He told them to wait for "the promise of the Father." In the next verse he tells them that they will be "baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." (This is an echo of a promise from the end of the gospel account, Luke 24:47, in which Jesus says that repentance and forgiveness of sin is to be "proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem") A couple of verses down back in Acts, just before he is lifted up, he makes that big promise that "you will receive power…and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." And finally there was that angelic promise that Jesus would return one day just the way he had left.

Yet it's quite likely, if the disciples were honest with themselves, that they had no idea what any of those things meant. So, not much to do but follow Jesus's orders, and wait.

The eleven disciples aren't alone at this point. Luke observes that "certain women" were joining them, including Jesus's mother Mary, who hasn't shown up in Luke's story since the trip to Jerusalem back in chapter 4 of the gospel, where twelve-year-old Jesus got separated from the family and took up residence as the Temple's youngest visiting scholar. We can guess that the "certain women" probably included at least the same women who had shown up at certain points in the gospel narrative, such as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, an unknown woman named Joanna, and others who were mentioned in Luke 23-24 as coming to the tomb to prepare his body with spices only to find the tomb empty. Also, Jesus's brothers are now included in the company.             

And…they wait.

Biblical scholar Beverly Gaventa makes a wonderful point about verse 14 in its original Greek. The verb for the first part of the sentence actually has a root meaning of "persist"; read this way the first part of the sentence tells us that "these were all persisting together."[i] Persisting together. Now that's an image, made all the more powerful with the addition of the words "to prayer." Persisting together to prayer.

Prayer's never a bad idea, of course, but perhaps in a time of "nothing to do but wait" it's all the more powerful a recourse. I suspect, though, that we're not talking about any old kind of prayer.

There is the kind of prayer that is familiar from your average church service, like this one – spoken out loud, directed toward God, with some statement of praise or petition at its core. We speak the Lord's Prayer together, or there's an opening Prayer of the Day or a Prayer for Illumination before the scripture is read. In Prayers of the People there is a space for prayer that does at least outwardly consist of silence, in which we are all invited to lift up prayers of intercession. Those are all good and needful prayers, but I suspect that's not necessarily the prayer this little company of Jesus's followers was most in need of praying in this time.  

Several years ago the best-selling author Anne Lamont authored a book that developed the idea that most prayers can be boiled down to one of three essential prayers, which were encapsulated in the book's title: Help Thanks Wow.

That's not a bad summary of prayer, and one could argue that the Lord's Prayer actually summarizes all three of those facets quite nicely. Still, though, I'm going to suggest there's something slightly different at play in the followers' persisting together in prayer during this waiting time, and maybe that might need to be a large part of our prayer in our own current waiting time. How's this for a prayer:

Now what?

Yes, Anne Lamont could probably argue it's a kind of "help" prayer, but I think there's something different at play. It's not a prayer about getting help with some specific thing. In fact, it isn't necessarily a prayer where we ask for much of anything at all.

It's not a prayer about getting back to normal or returning to anything, not about restoring or regaining or re-anything at all. The primary principle of this prayer is to wait for that promised baptizing with the Holy Spirit (whatever that means), for that power (whatever that means). Somehow, we trust that there is something wrapped up in Jesus's words that we don't understand or grasp in any way, but we trust, somehow, that whatever is behind it really is the Lord's doing.

Now what? We wait. We persist together. We pray. We can't say for sure exactly what we wait for, or what we pray for. But we wait, persist together, pray. And what happens?

To be continued.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #264, At the Name of Jesus; #---, When they saw their Teacher lifted; #260, Alleluia! Sing to Jesus

 

 

---

[i] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Acts (Abingdon New Testament Commentaries Series, Abingdon Press, 2003), 68.

 

Sermon: You Had Me Until That Resurrection Bit

First Presbyterian Church

May 10, 2026, Easter 6A

Acts17:16-34

 

You Had Me Until That Resurrection Bit

 

 

Paul found himself in Athens as today's reading begins, and it wasn't exactly his idea. First he had been run out of Thessalonica on a rail, then when he and his partners seemed to be making headway in Beroea, some of his opponents in Thessalonica found out and traveled there to stir up opposition and (hopefully) violence against Paul as they had in their own town. The newly-hatched community of believers in Beroea got Paul out of town fast, while his partners Silas and Timothy stayed behind to help get everything back in order. Ultimately Paul was deposited in Athens, more or less with the instruction to sit tight and stay out of trouble. As you can imagine, Paul was not the type who had even the slightest inclination to stay out of trouble.

Athens did have a synagogue, so Paul went there first, according to his usual pattern. His usual pattern of getting in trouble, though, got interrupted when some of the regulars in the marketplace got wind of what he was up to. Athens had what might be called an active public debate scene, and Athenians of various religious or philosophical systems (including some Epicureans and Stoics, as our author notes) jumped into the intellectual fray. Finally it was decided by the locals that this babbler of foreign deities might at least have something different to say, so he was hauled off to the ancient hill of debate known as the Areopagus.

At one time being hauled off to the Areopagus could be a matter of life or death, but by this time that no longer appears to have been the case. At any rate Paul was granted the opportunity to explain himself before the council there, and this speech became one of his most famous, even if it was one of his least typical.

What stands out about this speech is the degree to which Paul adapted his message to the intellectual and philosophical background of his hearers. He begins by acknowledging the plethora of idols offered up by the city, perhaps with tongue somewhat in cheek. By seizing upon one such idol – the one with the unprepossessing label "to an unknown god" – Paul forms a quick connection with his hearers, and from there proceeds through Athenian thought to approach the idea of a god unlike those the Athenians tended to idolize (and here that word really is being used literally). He quotes from their own literature; the phrase "in him we live and move and have our being" is taken from the ancient poet Aratus (although it was requoted many times in their literature), and the following "we too are his offspring" also appears in Greek literature frequently. And if we are the offspring of this god, it makes no sense to think of this god being reducible to wood or stone, does it?

Things seem to be going pretty well, initially. Paul actually identifies with his audience about as much as possible and certainly shows respect for their own intellectual and philosophical traditions. Still, there's only so far you can go in "accounting for the hope that is within you" before you end up having to say something that your interlocutor will disagree with, and Paul is now to that point.

First there is this notion of repentance and judgment, which wasn't really a part of most belief systems among the Athenians, and probably brought about some grumbling on the part of his audience. But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. Who's going to be the one who carries out this judgment in righteousness? No less than "a man who he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance by raising him from the dead." This is what broke up the meeting.

Some, as our author tells us, scoffed. Scoffing can take many forms; outright out-loud mockery, or a subtler but more dismissive "pfft" and walking away, or even just an incredulous facial expression. Whatever it was, that element of the audience was gone, intellectually if not physically.

It's important to understand something here. It isn't merely the idea of resurrection as a thing itself that underscores all the mockery. It isn't just about the reaction "bodies don't rise from the dead!"; there is, as would be the case with any good audience steeped in Greek philosophical traditions, an equal if not greater reaction "why would you want a body to rise from the dead?", or perhaps more by the far more succinct expression "oh, gross!" Greek thought (or at least some corners of it) had no particular problem with the idea of living beyond death, but frankly one of the good parts of such a post-mortem life was being free from the physical body. Disembodied spirit was the ideal.

We should be honest here; we're not always free of such an idea. After all, what is reflected in a saying like "shuffle off this mortal coil" besides the very idea of being rid of this broken-down old body? And if we're honest about it, it's not hard to be sympathetic to the idea. After the various breakings-down my body has experienced in the past decade-plus I can understand wanting to be rid of it, and I'm guessing some of you can too.

Paul goes into more detail on this in some of his epistles when he speaks of how "we will not all die, but we will all be changed" in writing to the Corinthians. But here, the event dissolves over this notion that a large part of the audience just can't accept. A large part, but not all; some were curious to hear more, and even a few followed, including one of the Areopagus regulars named Dionysius and a woman named Damaris. Sounds like a mixed result, I suppose, but at least they didn't chase him out of town.

But again, there comes that point when our testimony has to tell the whole story, even the parts that seem wild and fantastical and unbelievable to some of those with whom we share. As we make our way through this season of Easter, that one thing – the whole God-raised-him-from-the-dead business that so offended some of Paul's audience at the Acropolis – is still too much of a hurdle for many moderns to get over. But as Paul put it, again writing to the Corinthians, "if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain." It's hard to make any kind of good news out of a resurrection-less gospel.

And, even in this time with death a far more immediate companion than we normally acknowledge, our hope is still in the assurance that death did not have the last word for Jesus and will not have the last word on us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #244, This Joyful Eastertide; #251, Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia; #485, We Know that Christ Is Raised

 

Sermon: In the Breaking of the Bread

First Presbyterian Church

April 19, 2026, Easter 3C

Luke24:13-35

 

In the Breaking of the Bread

 

 

One of the characteristic features of Luke’s gospel is that Jesus and the disciples spend an awful lot of time at the dinner table or otherwise gathered around food.

More broadly one could argue – and at least one author has – that one of the underlying themes of the gospel is hospitality – both the ways in which Jesus sought to minister to those around them through the practice of welcome, the practice of enabling others to feel “at home” in his presence, and the ways in which such hospitality was (or was not) extended towards Jesus – whether Jesus was made welcome or not.

But the specific hospitality context of a meal does come up awfully frequently in Luke’s gospel. There are at least ten different accounts in Luke in which the action taking place is either a meal or is something that takes place in the context of a meal; six of those stories are unique to Luke, not found in any of the other gospels. In addition, another seven accounts in Luke feature meals or eating or food in the context of Jesus’s teaching to the crowds or to the disciples, or sometimes in the context of conflict with the religious authorities, such as the incident in which Jesus’s disciples were criticized for plucking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the first appearance of the risen Christ that Luke records in his gospel features a meal as its turning point.

We start on the road, though. Two of Jesus’s followers – not among the twelve, but clearly followers who had been with Jesus for some time – were, for reasons we don’t know, walking from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus. We might wonder if these two are guilty of the same breaking-fellowship error as Thomas in last week's gospel reading

This is on the third day. We find out later that this is after the women have come back from the empty tomb, as recorded in the first part of this chapter, but at this point no one has actually seen Jesus. We have accounts from the women of the tomb being empty, but no sign of the risen Christ.

We hear that these two, one of whom will be called Cleopas a few verses later, are talking about “all these things that had happened.” We tend to presume that “all these things” are those events that happened in Jesus’s last week in Jerusalem, particularly from the Last Supper forward through the crucifixion. It might also have included that curious report from the women and Peter, who each went to Jesus’s tomb and saw it empty.

Whatever their subjects of discussion, they were so caught up in them that they didn’t notice the man who had caught up with them from behind. (Remember, we know it’s Jesus, but they don’t.) When he asks what they’re talking about, the two followers act as if it should have been impossible for anyone in Jerusalem to have missed the events surrounding Jesus and his crucifixion. They recite those events to him (again, not recognizing that it is Jesus), including the odd reports about the empty tomb. In doing so they reveal, in the words “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” that after all this time they might not have truly understood just what it was for Jesus to be the Messiah – not the military conqueror, but indeed a suffering servant and a true spiritual redeemer of Israel and of all.

It is this that Jesus picks up on and expounds upon as he begins to teach them, one more time, how all the things that he had said and done had been “necessary.” Going all the way back to Moses and working through all the law and the prophets he proclaims to them once again how all of his life and his teaching and, yes, his suffering and death, had been “necessary.”

What happens next, as the two travelers come to their destination, demonstrates that for all that the two disciples might have forgotten or misunderstood, they had remembered one thing, perhaps the most important thing. They had remembered how Jesus taught and showed them how to be his followers.

They remembered the table.

Not just the table at which Jesus had only days before broken bread and poured a cup and talked about his body and blood, and kept using words like “do this in remembrance of me.” Surely they remembered that one, but they seem to have remembered all those other meals and all those other tables – the one with five thousand fed by just a few loaves and fish; the one at Zacchaeus’s house, where a skinflint tax collector suddenly started making alternate plans for the distribution of his estate; the banquet at the home of another tax collector, Levi, who had dropped his whole business at a word to follow Jesus; the evening at the home of Mary and Martha, with Martha fussing over every detail while Mary presumed to sit at Jesus’s feet with the other disciples; a dinner at the home of a man named Simon, with some of the most disreputable people around.

They remembered, and they wouldn’t let the stranger go without breaking bread with them.

The rest of the story is fairly familiar; the stranger, the guest, takes over as host and breaks the bread – I know that breaking of the bread – that’s Jesus! – only for him to disappear from sight; the rushed return to Jerusalem, where the disciples tell them about Jesus appearing to Simon (we tend to assume they’re speaking of Peter, but we don't know for sure); and then, in the remainder of the chapter beyond this reading, Jesus himself appearing before them and teaching them, one last time.

In the breaking of the bread they recognized Jesus, yes; but it was in Cleopas and the other disciple reaching out to the stranger, inviting them into their own meal and their own room and sharing their resources with him, that Jesus was welcomed and able to break the bread.

One is reminded of the stories from Genesis, how Abraham and Sarah unwittingly entertained angels and even Yahweh himself in welcoming the stranger. We are also reminded of Jesus’s own words in Matthew 25, that what we do (or don’t do) for or to “the least of these,” we do to Jesus himself.

Our call, at its most elemental and most basic (and one that a lot of Christians today reject), is to make welcome for the stranger, for the guest; for the disaster victim, for the refugee, for the migrant, for the sojourners among us, whoever they may be. This, even more than our prayers and offerings and worship, is how we welcome Christ among us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #246, Christ Is Alive!; #254, That Easter Day with Joy Was Bright; #249, Because You Live, O Christ

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on the Services for Holy Week

A few notes on the services for Holy Week at First Presbyterian Church of East Moline:

 

Thursday, April 2, 6:00 p.m.: Agape meal with communion, FPC East Moline library/meeting room

The early Christians gathered for services of worship and instruction which also included a community meal. While Christian converts from Judaism might have remembered the observance of Passover, Gentile converts were more likely to be familiar with the symposium, or banquet, and as the church spread out and became more far-flung and less focused on Jerusalem and Judea, this model was quickly adapted and fitted to Christian practice and tradition.

In addition to the meal itself, one or more teachers or evangelists would speak at such events. The remembrance of Jesus's last supper with his disciples was quickly adapted to all such gatherings, not only those for commemoration of an event like Maundy Thursday.

This meal will seek to capture the spirit, if not the actual form of such meals, with the message reminding us of Jesus's time with his disciples and how we best put into practice Jesus's instruction to "do this in remembrance of me."

 

Friday, April 3, 12:00 noon, Good Friday service, First Presbyterian Church, Milan

We are invited to join our siblings in the faith for observance of this holy day of the church year.

 

Saturday, April 4, 12:00 noon, Holy Saturday observance, the labyrinth at FPC East Moline

Weather permitting, we will commemorate the day Christ was in the tomb. Scripture, song, and a brief spoken meditation will be includedm as well as time for silent meditation and prayer. Those who are present will be invited to walk the labyrinth as part of your time here. (If weather does not permit we will gather in the sanctuary.

This is not an Easter Vigil. On this occasion we mark the fact that was indeed dead and buried, something that can often feel glossed over or rushed through to get to Easter Sunday. Participants are invited to take the time to consider the depths to which our Savior descended to reach us.

 

Sunday, April 5, 10:00 a.m., Easter Sunday service 

Traditional Sunday service for Easter Sunday, including communion. Also this year, the church's confirmation class will be presented as they begin their confirmation studies. 

 

We hope to see you at one or more or even all of these services.

 

Rev. Freeman

 

 

 

Sermon: Can These Bones Live?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

March 22, 2026, Lent 5A

Ezekiel37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11:1-45

 

Can These Bones Live?

 

 

You might be caught off guard by the tone of that psalm we read earlier.

It's a psalm, at least until those last two verses, that is about as frankly bleak and despair-laden as anything you might see in scripture. That opening phrase - "Out of the depths" - has proven awfully alluring for many kinds of artists seeking to portray a state of despair or darkness. It shows up on four different Sundays in the Revised Common Lectionary, has been set to music many times (sometimes under its Latin heading "De profundis"), and has inspired writers such as Elizabeth Barret Browning, Oscar Wilde, Federico Garcia Lorca, and C.S. Lewis.

It's probably not an accident that this psalm is paired with these two scriptures offered up for the church on this fifth Sunday of Lent, readings that come a little bit like a slap in the face (or maybe a slap in the faith) at this time of the liturgical year. Both of them have the temerity to offer up, two solid weeks before the observance of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, stories of new life being brought to that which was dead. "Out of the depths," indeed.

The obvious move, the one most pastors I know are likely making, would probably be to go to John’s account of Jesus’s raising of Lazarus. After all, that’s a whopper of a reading, both in terms of its sheer length (forty-five verses!) and the impact it has on the story of Jesus’s earthly ministry. Honestly, one of these years I might be tempted to take this story and break it up over the first five weeks of Lent; I honestly think there might be about five sermons in there.

You get Jesus dawdling about going to see Lazarus, and he gets a bit of what-for over that - "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." You get what was in the KJV the shortest verse in the Bible – “Jesus wept” (every kid I knew was quick to claim that as one of their "memory verses" in Sunday school). You get the warning that if Jesus really goes through with having the tomb opened after four days, it would, well, smell, as un-embalmed bodies do after a while, even today. You get, above all, Lazarus coming out of the tomb. If you push later into John's gospel, you find that his raising of Lazarus is part of why the religious authorities are so intent on getting rid of Jesus. There's so much possibility in this account, and I have no doubt that a lot of those sermons getting preached today are going to be about the best sermons that those preacher friends of mine are going to preach this season.

But I still can’t look away from Ezekiel’s story, the one that prompted James Weldon Johnson to create the song "Dry Bones" and get his brother to set it to music.

Ezekiel is, to put it in modern vernacular, one messed-up dude. He was a priest in Jerusalem who got carried away in the first wave of exile to Babylon, when the occupying forces chose only to “cut off the head” of Jerusalem – that is, take away its leaders, including its religious leaders. The puppet king installed after this turned out not to be quite such a puppet after all, and when he stopped paying tribute the Babylonians returned and destroyed the city.

This experience seems to have taken a particular toll on Ezekiel. Ezekiel was most likely, in modern terms, a victim of psychological trauma, most likely resulting in what we would call clinical depression. The outlandish nature of some of his visions (including this one), some of his prophetic behaviors that make even Jeremiah look tame by comparison, and his sometimes-extreme tone in calling out his people and their kings for their sinfulness and rebellion suggest a man who would at minimum be deep into therapy in modern times, if not something more intense.

And it is to this broken, traumatized old priest that God brings this deeply creepy, and yet deeply hopeful, vision of death being raised up into new life. Actually, that’s not quite right. This isn’t Lazarus still more or less in one piece just waiting for the call. This is not mere death; this is a destroyed, desiccated, disassembled, dehydrated kind of death, way beyond any kind of haunted house or Hollywood horror movie. And before this scene of absolute lifelessness, God asks old messed-up Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

There’s a lot of wisdom in Ezekiel’s answer: “O Lord God, you know.” God was clearly up to something, and Ezekiel (perhaps all the more because of his trauma) had the wit not to get in the way. God gives Ezekiel the command to “prophesy to these bones,” and maybe only someone who had seen too much, someone as broken and hurting as Ezekiel, could take such a command seriously enough to carry it out. He does, and behold, the bones find their way back to each other, they take on all the tissue and flesh that had long ago dried up and rotted away, and there are…bodies.

Not people, not yet: just bodies, bodies that were reconstructed and whole, but “there was no breath in them” – no wind, no spirit. It’s not quite like in the account from John, in which after Jesus called to Lazarus he was indeed alive, but still all bound up in the burial cloths in which he had been wrapped. Lazarus needed release; he still needed to be cut loose from the old trappings of death that still clung to him. These bodies in front of Ezekiel still needed breath, spirit, life itself. They aren't just dried-out old bones anymore, but there is still no life in them.

So, of course, God tells Ezekiel to “prophesy to the breath.” Ezekiel obeyed (what else was he going to do at this point?), and from “the four winds” came the breath that breathed life into these lifeless bodies. As Ezekiel recounts it, they stood up, a “vast multitude,” waiting.

Waiting. Is that where we are?

Verses 11-14 bring Ezekiel's bizarre experience home. In this vision, for that is what all this has been, those dried-up bones are nothing less than God's people, the ones conquered and exiled and occupied and crushed and living without any kind of hope whatsoever. All that Ezekiel has been commanded to do before the valley of the dry bones, God will do for God's people, says God to Ezekiel. It's not just about the bones taking on flesh; it's about the breath, the spirit, being placed within them. It's about being brought back to life again.

That message of hope has come through across the centuries, not least as that previously mentioned song that connected to the still-developing civil rights movement in the United States in the early twentieth century. In the early 1920s the great poet and dramatist and author James Weldon Johnson seized upon this story to evoke a movement that was itself still coming together, complete with lyrics about the foot bone connecting to the heel bone and the heel bone connecting to the ankle bone and you know how the rest of it goes. His brother Rosamond Johnson created the tune, and the rest is history (it certainly got altered in later years).

So, where are we in this trio of readings? Are we the psalmist, reduced to crying "out of the depths" but still waiting on the Lord despite it all, still not quite letting go of hope? Are we Lazarus, newly alive again but waiting to be freed from the bonds that keep us from moving and doing? Are we Martha and Mary complaining that Jesus didn't come quickly enough? Are we the dried old bones, without hope? Are we the reassembled bodies made physically whole but without breath, without spirit? Are we the newly breathing and living, standing ready, waiting for whatever God calls us to do?

Or, maybe, are we Ezekiel? Seen too much, been broken too much in too many places by too many things? Are we too broken to hope even a little bit, and yet so broken that we have nothing left to do but hope? Are we so broken that the moment we see or hear any little thing, any sign or word from God, we're going to cling to as if our lives depend on it, because maybe they do? Can we respond, along with the old prophet, with that kind of obedience to the most ridiculous or insane-sounding commands (I mean, really, "prophesy to these bones"?)? Are we desperate enough for that?

Or are we still too sure of ourselves, too much in control, too "sane" to think that any such outlandish (and kind of gruesome) command of God could be real? Are we too much "good church folk" to find a thing to hold on to in such horrific scenes, to hear God, to hear any word from God in such bizarre circumstances?

“Mortal, can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #424, Out of the Depths; #---, Rise Up; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God

 

Sermon: That's Not How This Works

First Presbyterian Church

November 9, 2025, Pentecost 22C

Luke 20:27-40

 

 

That’s Not How This Works

 

A few years ago, an insurance company ran a commercial set among a group of women who, we might say, would fit comfortably into the general age demographic of this congregation. One of the women was boasting about how, instead of mailing pictures of her vacation photos to all her friends, had saved herself time by posting them on her wall. Of course, a first thought to the social media-savvy might suggest she had posted them on social media of some sort, possibly Facebook or Instagram. Instead, the camera pans slightly and you see that the pictures are, literally, taped to the wall of her living room. One of the other women pipes up that she likes one in particular, but the third, one presumably more knowledgeable about such things, looks back and forth between the two incredulously. When the first woman boasts about having an insurance-related achievement in fifteen minutes, this third one retorts that she only needed half that time, to which the first responds, with a dramatic gesture, “I unfriend you.” Finally the third can’t take it anymore and, gesturing around the room, exclaims, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!”

It would not at all have been out of line for Jesus to respond in exactly that same way to the question put to him by the Sadducees in today’s reading from the gospel of Luke. 

The setting here is in Jerusalem, as we approach the climax of Jesus’s earthly life and ministry. It’s the type of scriptural text that the framers of the Revised Common Lectionary like to slip in toward the end of the liturgical year, a text that at least in some way looks forward to the life not of this earth but of eternity, or heaven or however one frames it.

In this case that particular framing comes from a faction in the religious society in which Jesus lived that didn’t even believe in such a thing. The Sadducees, a competing group to the Pharisees about whom we hear so much, are lingering on the edge of a conversation in which Jesus has just smacked down a group of scribes, or their lackeys as verse 20 suggests, with the response famous in its old King James rendering as “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That group has beaten its hasty retreat, to the hooting and derision of the crowd, and this group of Sadducees steps up for its at-bat. 

As verse 27 informs us straightaway, the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection.” This puts them at odds with the Pharisees and is a product of their particular interpretation of what constituted “scripture.” While the Pharisees, for example, took the prophets and the Psalms as authoritative, the Sadducees only read the books of the Torah that way. The prophets and Psalms speak in at least some degree of resurrection, the Torah does not; therefore the Sadducees and Pharisees disagree. While Jesus butted heads with Pharisees often, on this point they were in agreement. 

The Sadducees’ question is admittedly an absurd one, which relies on a particular allowance of Mosaic or Torah law. If a man died childless, his wife was expected to be married off to the next available younger brother, in theory as a means to provide for the widow, but frankly mostly so that the brother might produce a son to ensure the first brother’s legacy. In this trap question, the poor woman was put through seven brothers, each of whom failed to produce a son; when the hypothetical woman died, the Sadducees ostensibly wanted to know, whose wife would she be in the resurrection?

One could point out a lot of things about the beliefs inherent in such a question. One thing that cannot be overlooked is that it’s pretty clear that to these questioners a woman in such a situation is little more than a piece of property, more a subjected and captive character from The Handmaid’s Tale than a living, breathing human being and child of God and daughter of Abraham. The only thing that matters about her is whose possession is she for all eternity.

This all has to be qualified with words like “hypothetical” and “ostensibly” because in fact this batch of Sadducees weren’t really all that concerned with the answer. At the risk of including a second social media reference in the same sermon, they are trolling Jesus. The very asking of the question was its own end, namely mocking not even Jesus necessarily, but their Pharisee rivals and their oh-so-ridiculous beliefs about life after death. 

The trouble is that these Sadducees, unlike modern social media trolls who can disappear in an instant and not be held accountable for the evil that they do, could not get away fast enough. In the end, they were just as humiliated as the scribes who got tripped up on the tax question. In the world of social media, one of the most common and usually best pieces of advice is “don’t feed the trolls,” or in other words don’t give anyone who is clearly engaging in bad faith attacks a forum for their lies. Jesus isn’t most people, of course, and he is quite well-equipped to drive these trolls back under the bridge.

Jesus opens with a lesson that we modern Christians might well have trouble with. This is where the potential “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works” response comes in.

To sum up as best as possible, marriage is a mortal concern. People marry because for most folks, going through life with a partner is easier and more pleasant than going through life alone. That’s a pretty succinct nutshell argument for why marriage is a thing at all in the eyes of God, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden and God’s remark that it wasn’t a good thing for Adam to be alone. This matters because, to put it in as stark a term as possible, we’re going to die, all of us at some point, and such times as we have to endure on this earth go better if we can endure it with someone we love. 

Those who share in the resurrection, on the other hand, are never going to die. Life is eternal in the presence of the Eternal One. The concerns of that old past mortality, worries about property and legacy and all that implied in the question, simply don’t matter. In that life the hypothetical woman is in fact a child of God and a daughter of Abraham, subject to no one else.

As much as we might not want to admit this, we don’t like the sound of this, not one bit.

Think about it. What kind of songs, for example, do we sing about Heaven? One example I can’t get out of my head is an old gospel number called “Mansion Over the Hilltop.” Perhaps you remember this one, maybe from Elvis Presley’s version?

I’m satisfied with just a cottage below

A little silver, and a little gold

But in that city where the ransomed will shine

I want a gold one that’s silver lined

 

(Refrain)

I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop

In that bright land where we’ll never grow old

And someday yonder we will never more wander

But walk on streets that are purest gold

 

The second verse goes on to talk about wanting “a mansion, a harp, and a crown”. The question of what to do with a harp for all eternity aside, cue the lady from the commercial: That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

The song does get one thing right; in that bright land we really will never grow old. Otherwise, the metaphor Jesus uses in John 14 (another King James concoction, the one about “In my father’s house are many mansions”), the one meant to communicate how the disciples do not have to worry about life after resurrection because all is provided and there’s room for everyone, gets hardened and fixed into a dogma that we can all pre-order our gold mansions for all eternity. I wish I were exaggerating more than I am, but I’ve seen it up close too many times.. 

All such things miss the point. Whether the Sadducees intended it or not, this encounter really is about the resurrection, and the resurrection is about God, and being in communion with God and with all who are in communion with God. The resurrection is not merely an extension of this life with better building materials; it is about being in resurrection with the God who has loved us and redeemed us in Christ. 

This is illustrated by the second part of Jesus’s response to the Sadducees, the one in which he uses their beloved Torah against them by citing the words of Exodus 3:6, right out of the Torah that the Sadducees cited as the only true scripture. When God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, God doesn’t say “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob back when they were alive”; God puts it all in present tense. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Am. Present tense. Jesus elaborates that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” If God is their God, then they aren’t dead. Their lives are held in God, thus they live and shall live, and somehow that will hold true for us too.

How does that work? Beats me. Paul expended a lot of time and energy in his epistles trying to reassure the Thessalonians and the Corinthians about what resurrection meant and how it related to earthly life, which was to say not much. We get phrases like these from 1 Corinthians 15: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable”; “we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed”; or “for this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” How? Paul doesn’t even go there, nor does Luke, and I’m not going to either. But this is the work of God in us, redeeming us in Christ and preparing us through the Holy Spirit that when our time comes, when death comes upon us, it will not be the final word. What is mortal puts on immortality, and lives in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, really forever and for all time. 

We human beings are wildly insecure. We have a terrible habit of substituting rigid belief for life-giving faith. We demand to know how it all works – witness all those preachers and pseudo-Bible scholars who insist on trying to calculate the date of the Rapture when even Jesus says he doesn’t know the day nor the hour. We don’t trust at all, when you get down to the heart of us. Are we ready to take Jesus seriously, and be the living body that Jesus calls us to be now – to do Christ’s work in God’s world – and trust that our resurrection life is secured in God? Can we do that?

We are mortal creatures, subject to all the finitude and brokenness and decline that is the lot of all mortal creatures. But that is not our final fate, no matter whether we know how it works or not. 

For the God of the living, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #645, Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above; #238, Thine Is the Glory; #546, Lord, Dismiss Us with Your Blessing 

 

 

 

Sermon: Don't Hold On

First Presbyterian Church

April 20, 2025, Easter Sunday C

John 20:1-18

Don't Hold On

 

 

If the Revised Common Lectionary had its way, we would hear this version of the Resurrection story every year on Easter Sunday. As much as I am typically a lectionary preacher, this seems foolish to me. There are four different narratives that describe that first Easter Sunday, and each one brings us something different. Mark leaves us with the cliffhanger; do the disciples go to Galilee to find Jesus? Matthew throws in some conspiracy to cover up the Resurrection and finishes off with the Great Commission. Luke's account, more expansive than either of those two, includes that first appearance as well as the Emmaus Road story (which we will hear next week) and Jesus's appearance to the disciples gathered behind locked doors. 

This story, too, has its distinctive features. At first the only one we see is Mary Magdalene, alone at the tomb before sunrise. She sees the stone out of place and runs to tell the disciples. (Why didn't she go look in the tomb? If you're a woman by yourself and you think there might be grave robbers about, would you go look in?) Two disciples get into a footrace to get to the tomb; one looks in but stops short of entering; Peter (no shock) rambles right in and looks around and then the other disciple enters as well. They take stock and they believe. What they believe is hard to know, since their only reaction is that "they returned to their homes." They believed Mary Magdalene's report that Jesus's body was missing, I guess. At any rate, they left, and Mary was again alone at the tomb with her sorrow. 

When she finally looked into the tomb, she saw something that the disciples had evidently not seen - do you think they would have "returned to their homes" if there had been angels inside the tomb when they looked? Apparently, they waited for Mary Magdalene to be alone to ask their question of her, the question "why are you weeping?" that would seem to have a blazingly obvious answer. Even here Mary's answer makes clear that the whole idea of resurrection hasn't entered her head any more than it had entered the heads of the disciples; she asks where Jesus's body has been taken. 

Her distress is severe enough that when she turns and sees Jesus, she doesn't recognize that it's Jesus; she thinks he's a gardener. Honestly, he piles on a little bit by asking her why she's weeping and adds the more practical question of who she's seeking. By now, it seems that Mary is getting a little hysterical, and not without reason; she pleads to know where the body is and offers to take it off their hands.

If you see this scene in some movie or other, Jesus is most likely depicted as saying Mary's name in the most tender and sweetest tone of voice possible for the actor playing Jesus to achieve. Personal opinion here: I don't buy that. At this point Mary Magdalene's distress is likely enough that Jesus has to speak her name just a little bit sharply - "Mary!" with an exclamation point - in order to break through her distress and get her to see him. At last she does see him for who he is and calls out "Teacher" at that recognition. 

Based on what comes next, we kind of have to guess that she grabbed hold of him in some way, probably some kind of embrace - a risky thing to do in a culture that was quite rigid about keeping unmarried men and women separate from each other. What is striking, though, and what is perhaps the most discordant note in this passage is what Jesus says in response:

"Do not hold on to me."

Jesus hasn't been the type to be bound by strictly human mores and rules, so this seems an odd time for him to get all uncomfortable about this. No, what in fact he says is that she can't hold on to him "because I have not yet ascended to the Father." To be blunt, this probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to Mary Magdalene at this point, having lurched from the fear and confusion at the disappearance of Jesus's body to the amazement and shock of seeing and touching not only Jesus's body but Jesus himself very much alive in that body. 

Sometimes a good way to help a distraught person get focused is to give them a task or a job to do - not always, but sometimes it does help. He gives her a message to take to the disciples and she does so, announcing that "I have seen the Lord" and repeating to the disciples what she has heard from Jesus. She becomes, in effect, the first Christian evangelist - bearer of good news.

When later in this chapter Thomas is invited to touch Jesus's scars to get over his unbelief, it's hard not to flip back a few verses to Mary Magdalene's being told not to hold on to Jesus. It might sound a little bit unfair at first blush. Why does that unbelieving Thomas get the special treatment when Mary Magdalene had been so faithful to be at the tomb when nobody else was? 

Well, for one thing, there's a difference between touching and holding on.

There are times when a great big embrace is really the best response to someone, perhaps seeing them after a long time apart, or in congratulations for good news or getting out of the hospital or any number of other things. 

Holding on, though, can be a way of limiting or constricting. Here Jesus says that he has "not yet ascended to the Father." His task is not finished, and to the degree that holding on to Jesus constricts him from completing his work, it has to be forbidden. 

It isn't just Mary Magdalene who has to be kept from "holding on to Jesus" in this restrictive or preventative sense. We may not be able to hold on to Jesus physically, but be honest; have you ever found yourself "holding on to Jesus" in the sense of resisting or pulling back from what Jesus is calling you to do or to be? 

Churches can certainly be guilty of "holding on to Jesus" too. Trying to cling to the way things have always been? That's every bit as much "holding on to Jesus" as anything Mary Magdalene was guilty of, let's face it. We aren't called to "hold on" to Jesus; we are called to follow Jesus, even if the way Jesus is leading isn't The Way Things Have Always Been. It goes without saying that a church looking to welcome a new installed pastor sometime soon should especially beware of such holding on.

A little confession time (that probably shouldn't be part of a sermon, but oh well): I've had to learn this lesson in my own vocation. It would be easy to stay put in one church and enjoy what is comfortable and familiar for however long it lasted. I had to learn that it wouldn't be faithful to what God is calling me to do, not faithful to however what's left of my vocation needs to go. And so, sometime soon when this church has a new installed pastor coming in, I'll be moving on (once we can get a whole house packed up). I believe it's what I'm called to do, but that doesn't make it any less scary of a leap into something different and a little bit challenging, in a place as yet unknown. And yet, to try to deny this call would make me guilty of "holding on to Jesus," of being every bit as restrictive and obstructive as Mary Magdalene threatened to be. 

Individuals, churches, just about any kind of human anything can fall into this trap. When Mary Magdalene let go and followed the command Jesus gave her, she became that first evangelist - the first one to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ (a bit of scripture that somehow gets ignored by a whole lot of so-called followers of Christ who insist that women can't do that). The longer she clutched on to Jesus as she knew him, the longer she kept not only Jesus but also herself from fulfilling what God had called them to be and do. 

Way to put a bummer on Easter Sunday, right? But it has to be said: Jesus doesn't call us to cling; Jesus calls us to obey, Jesus calls us to follow. And you know what? When we do that, Jesus will be there as well.

For teaching us not to hold on, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #245, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!; #247, Now the Green Blade Rises; #233, The Day of Resurrection; #232, Jesus Christ Is Risen Today