Emphasis Preaching Journal

Biblical scholars, conservative and liberal alike, date most of the New Testament letters before the gospels and Acts, as in Luke-Acts. So a sermon reconstructed in Acts -- few believe that we have stenographic records, either, in these compressed half-column sermons -- is not the first preached witness to the resurrection. But the story of Pentecost, the early gathering day with its account of the coming of the Spirit, qualifies as a symbolic "first sermon" tryout.

Quite naturally, scholars and people of ordinary faith probe the few lines here to get clues to the mentality of people who thought they had buried hopes with Jesus, only to find Jesus Christ and their hopes liberated and very much alive. This time, Peter speaks to the "men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem": "You that are Israelites, listen ...." The man Jesus, handed over in a plan and with the foreknowledge of God, "you crucified." O-w-w-w-w! Lawless, outside-the-law types crucified and killed Jesus.

Now comes the new proclamation: "But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power." God raised: the action is all from outside the world of resuscitating doctors and prophets or the fertile imaginations of newly bold disciples. It was "impossible for him to be held in death's power." That kind of declaration still stirs those identified with Christ.

Death tried. It had tradition on its side. Until then, all but one or two biblically storied people got out of the world only through death. But death can no longer "hold" one in its power. The believers are henceforth free.

1 Peter 1:3-9

Sometimes the New Testament letters seem to throw in unnecessary words. Here in this early Christian document we read that believers had been given "a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Living hope? Why not just "hope"? Hope is alive. It leans forward. It cannot wait for tomorrow to unfold, because tomorrow offers so much promise.

One might almost say that "living" makes "hope" redundant. Those who "get a life" look forward to more and other, ahead and tomorrow. They do not vegetate. Clearly, connecting "living" and "hope" is an act designed to communicate something we might otherwise miss.

The gospel narratives now and then have dead, or at least inert, hope. Thus in a story several weeks ago, Martha was seen expecting a resurrection of the dead at the last day, but that "hope" was doing her no good. Or on Easter evening, the disciples on the way to Emmaus told the stranger with whom they walked that they "had hoped that [Jesus] was the one to redeem Israel." "Had hoped" is past hope, buried hope, reminiscent and vestigial "among my souvenirs" kind of hope.

Suddenly it begins to make sense to talk of a "living hope." Living hope is high-priority hope; it is top of the agenda hope; it crowds out all the wan wishings and failing fantasies, the idle dreams and passing fancies that get billed as being "hope." Living hope is magnetic, kinetic, connected with what God is doing in the risen Jesus.

Next time you see a Christian achieving something Christianly in a broken world, note: We all claim to hope. Hers is a living hope.

John 20:19-31

This is a gospel text to like, really to like. Preachers tend to welcome chances to help something sink in, to reorient hearers, and the story of Thomas is a case in point.

Think, now, how often it has been told and is told as a story of less, of doing without, of making the best of circumstances. Thomas, "Doubting Thomas," we say as if Doubting were his first name, comes across then as nothing but a skeptic. He puts up the hardest kind of empirical test. Jesus passes it; so, then, does Thomas. But wouldn't it have been nice if he could have hung around the upper room a week before, so he would have the shared experience of a fresh encounter with the risen Jesus? And wouldn't it have been nice if we could have been around with the seeing and sight crowd, a week before Thomas showed up?

Whatever, here is Thomas. He is over his cold, or his cold feet, and can be present in the room with the door shut; no obstacle, there, for Jesus. And Jesus pursues an agenda instantaneously. He has Thomas on his mind: "Put your finger here .... Do not doubt but believe." Thomas: "My Lord and my God!" But now comes the point of it all:

This day is a turning point in Christian history, in history. Until this moment people saw and hence could believe. (Some did; most didn't.) Henceforth, a new chapter was to be written. After Thomas, no one who believed had seen. All believers were free of even the temptation to make a test of faith dependent on their eyes. Thomas is the last representative of the old. Not "doubting Thomas" but "Thomas, the Disciple Victim of Cultural Lag." The rest of us get to hear Jesus' word, "Blessed are they ...."


FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

As appealing as it might be in a liturgical agenda, this portion of Peter's sermon in Acts 2 is likely to be offensive to others on at least a couple of grounds.

The theme of prophecy-fulfillment, so important to the early Christian community as it established itself in relation to the Old Testament, strikes contemporary, historically-minded interpreters as Christian interpolation. But that is nothing compared to Peter's flat-out violation of the now commonly accepted standard concerning relations between Jews and Christians: "You Israelites, listen ...: Jesus of Nazareth ... you crucified and killed ..." (vv. 22, 23).

However justified, such offenses bear closer examination. The rejection of prophecy-fulfillment grows out of a linear, progressive view of time in which everything is sequential. People of the past can therefore have no more idea of the future than we do. Given this and other limits of human knowledge, according to present assumptions it isn't appropriate for people to make ultimate claims, either for their own position or against some else's.

But now what happens if, like Peter in this sermon, a preacher begins with another assumption, not really an assumption at all but a conviction of the event of Easter? Whatever else might or should be said about it, the resurrection does not fit into the normal presuppositions, conditioned as they are by death. Raising Jesus from the dead is God's declaration that the normal sequence of things is no longer a locked step, that death has lost its ultimacy.

Doesn't that change interpretation itself? Beginning with the fulfillment of hope, everything that precedes it appears in a different light: "deeds of power, wonders and signs" (v. 22) emerge out of Jesus' story as preliminaries to the wonder of wonders, an empty tomb; words long ago attributed to David if not actually spoken by him take on new significance when suffused by Easter light (vv. 25-28). In fact, even the crucifixion itself -- especially the crucifixion, with all of its offensiveness -- now appears in "... the definite plan of foreknowledge of God ..." (v. 23).

And then what happens to Peter's immannerly accusation? Such a question now requires another. To whom is he speaking? To "you Israelites ...." And what is he saying? "But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power" (v. 24). Just so, and here is the best news possible: because he is risen, death has lost its dominion over them and you. So there you are now, presuppositions, sequentially, manners and morals laying discarded like empty
grave clothes. " 'He is risen.' Let all the people say, 'He is risen indeed.' "