The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee
We are half way through the Easter season, and as time passes for us, we see time moving in the creation narrative of Christianity in our lectionary. We have lived through the shock and the awe of the Resurrection, of the empty tomb and all that it represents.
Last Sunday we watched as Christ appeared to his disciples, initially all but Thomas, who expressed an inability or perhaps an unwillingness to believe that freed all of us, two thousand years later, to ask our own questions, express our own doubts, always with the reassurance of Christ’s presence in our lives even when our faith or our imagination is wanting.
Today we have two stories, running parallel, creation narratives in their own right-genesis stories of two apostles, and of the church.
In the reading from Acts, we meet Saul, who we know as Paul, on his way to Damascus. We are all familiar with this story, Saul setting off bloodthirsty to persecute followers of Jesus, struck blind on his way. He hears the voice of Jesus asking him why he was so set on persecution and destruction, and once he reaches Damascus he meets Ananias, a follower of the Lord who lays hands upon Saul’s eyes, and something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Saul is both literally restored to sight, and metaphorically so-he sees the error of his ways and ceases his persecutions, is baptized, takes a meal, and spends several days learning the story of Jesus from the disciples, and then sets out into the world, the most Christian of Christians, and in that moment the Church has her first evangelist. Paul travels far and wide, spreading the word of Christ, and we read his letters, or letters written in his name, still, encouraging and mediating between the distant churches founded in Christ’s name.
In the Gospel reading from John we encounter Simon Peter, setting out in a boat to fish with his fellow disciples. They don’t have any luck until the morning, when the Lord appears on the beach and tells them where to cast their nets. Over breakfast (notice the meals in both of these stories- always with the eating!) Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him, and each time when he replies “Yes, Lord,” he tells Peter to tend his lambs, feed his sheep, tend his sheep.
And in that moment, the church receives her first pastor.
And so in three short weeks we have moved from the foundation of the Christian faith, in the resurrection, to the foundation moments of the Christian Church in these two stories. It is important that we are familiar with our history, so that we understand who we are as a Christian people, and as Episcopalians.
Today between services I will talk with a group of newcomers about the history of our Episcopal Church in our Foundations Class. We will discuss how we first differentiated ourselves from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation in a dance of the theological and the political, the development a few years later of the first Book of Common Prayer-which transformed us from a breakaway group of rebels into a proper church-to a similar act of rebellion a couple of hundred years later, when a group of colonies chose self-rule-all the way to this day of a global communion that struggles but has managed, so far, to find room in the wideness of God’s love for all who call themselves Anglicans. It is a complex and beautiful history, and I think there is some proof of God’s love for us in the fact of our existence, as Episcopalians, as Anglicans, as Christians, for two thousand years.
During my brief career as a lawyer, I was often forwarded emails from well meaning family members, usually some sort of lawyer joke or inspiring quotation about justice-though many more of the former! One that has stuck with me to this day was a picture of two people standing in a vast law library, staring at the endless shelves of books, with one saying to the other: “And to think it all started with ten commandments!”
I didn’t appreciate it for more than the sight gag at the time, but today, as we pray together for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Communion in Japan, our companion cathedral in the Sudan, I find that I have a greater appreciation for the awe in that statement, because our vast global communion, our two thousand year Christian history, warts and all, started with the two stories we heard today in the lectionary, with two apostles, as human and as flawed as each one of us sitting in this cathedral today.
It is a little frightening, isn’t it, to know that any one of us could be the Peter or the Paul of the next two thousand years? Don’t think too much about it, it will keep you up nights!
It is said that the one Bible verse that is almost universally know is John 3:16. Even in this day when church educators and seminary professors decry mainstream biblical illiteracy, you see this verse sited on bumper stickers, billboards, posters at baseball games. I bet each of us could recite it- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
It is a pity that John 3:17 is not as universally known. Can any of you recite it? Don’t worry, I had to look it up—“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
It is a very human instinct to judge, to condemn, to put our own judgment in the place of God’s. But in these foundational verses of scripture, and in the foundational stories we heard today of Peter and Paul, we are warned against persecution, not told to judge, but to nurture, to love, to care for our fellow sheep.
And so, on this third Sunday of Eastertide, and every day, let us yearn to follow those two commandments of Christ-to love our God, and love our neighbor as ourselves, to spread the word of God’s love far and wide, and to make sure that each and every sheep is tended, and is fed.
Once we have managed all of that, perhaps then we can begin on the business of condemning those we disagree with. But somehow I doubt we will have much of an appetite for it, after all.
AMEN.
