Release to the Captives.

Luke 4:14-21

I.

            When Jesus goes back to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, he chooses to preach on a passage, or several passages, from the prophet Isaiah.  It becomes the inauguration of his whole ministry, in Luke.  Here he is announcing to the people the shape of what he was sent to the Earth to do.  It is Jesus’ mission statement.

            We see precisely these things then embodied in his on-going ministry.  The fact that he does these things is a validation of his being the promised Messiah.  These are the kinds of things the Messiah was supposed to do.

            I also think that, as his disciples, they are also supposed to characterize our own ministry.  We are called to do the same work that Jesus does.  He sends us out into the world with the same mission.  By his Word and Spirit he anoints us, he equips us, he empowers us, to continue his work.  This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

            The first thing in Isaiah’s list is bringing good news to the poor.  The good news that Jesus brings to the poor in his ministry is that they are no longer poor.  Not only does he favor a redistribution of wealth, as when he instructs people with wealth to sell it all and give the proceeds to those in need, but he inspires communities of sharing in which no one has any need that is not met by the resources of the whole group.

            Jesus does not say that the way to help the poor is to give money to the rich, who will supposedly create jobs and grow the economy.  Jesus knows this to be a self-serving mythology that wealthy people perpetuate in order to make themselves wealthier.  Neither does he have his disciples spend on social programs that help people only indirectly.  No.  With Jesus it is very simple.  If someone is in need you address the need to the best of your ability.  “Give to whomever asks of something from you,” is how he rather bluntly puts it elsewhere. 

            He doesn’t fret over whether he is instilling “personal responsibility” in people or not.  He is only concerned about instilling personal responsibility for other people.  He doesn’t seem to be at all concerned about rewarding laziness, or any of the other paternalistic rationalizations we like to weave around this issue.  For Jesus, if somebody needs food, you feed them.  If they need clothing or shelter, you provide those.  If they need health care, once again, you give people what they need.

            And I don’t think he’s talking just about economic poverty.  But we also find many who are impoverished educationally, emotionally, relationally, intellectually....  Wherever there is a lack of something we need to live happy, healthy, productive, and good lives, that’s what Jesus would have us do our best to provide for anyone who needs it.  Jesus is about wholeness. 

II.           

            The second thing characterizing Jesus’ mission is his proclamation of “release to captives.”  In his ministry, Jesus is not reported to have actually broken anybody out of jail.  The prisons from which Jesus sets people free from have to do with the captivities of disease, sinfulness, exclusion from the community, and hopelessness. 

            Captives are not necessarily the most popular people to minister or proclaim release to.  Whether you are held in bondage to a chemical addiction, or actually, physically languishing in jail or prison, people often tend to imagine that this is something you brought on yourself by your bad behavior or moral failings.  So we have ample excuses to ignore these folks.  And we do.  Raising money for agencies that provide services to prisoners or addicts is about the most difficult of all fund-raising tasks.

            It is interesting that Luke uses the same word here, “release,” that is elsewhere translated “forgive.”  Forgiveness is a setting free from a type of bondage, a liberation, a letting-go of someone from punishment.  To forgive is to release the anger, resentment, desire for retribution that you are holding onto about a person who has harmed you.  Forgiveness means releasing someone from punishment, even if deserved.

            Jesus calls on his disciples to be forgiving – that is, freeing, liberating, releasing – people.  We are to be a community that sets people free from whatever is binding them and enslaving them.  And often it is the community itself, in the way it welcomes, accepts, and includes people, that makes this liberation happen.  Most of the things that enslave us we cannot escape from on our own.

            I do feel led to add, at this point, that one of the greatest and most hidden scandals in our country is the absurdly and tragically high rate of incarceration.  A higher percentage of Americans is in jail or prison than any other country on earth.  It is higher here than in China, or Russia, or any brutal dictatorship.  It is higher here than in North Korea or Cuba.  And it has risen dramatically in the past 20 years.  This is probably our greatest civil rights problem today, and it is rarely talked about.  An overwhelming majority of prisoners in America are non-white.  And it is a corrupt and devilish system propped up by both a for-profit private prison industry and powerful corrections officer unions.  This is a major evil in our society which undermines our effectiveness in witnessing against human rights abuses in other countries.  Working on this would be a very good thing for followers of Jesus to do.

III.

            Jesus also knows himself to be empowered to bring “recovery of sight to the blind.”  Jesus in his ministry heals several cases of blindness, and we are called to engage in ministries that bring sight to people.

            At the same time, the church is also called to address the more pervasive moral and spiritual blindness we encounter around us.  People who refuse to see the truth because they are blinded by various ideological, political, or economic assumptions.  Fear and anger are great blinders of people, preventing us from seeing our neighbors as they are, and instead turning them into something we can more easily hate, reject, and even kill.

            Jesus repeatedly lamented the moral blindness of his opponents, who claimed to be able to see better than anyone, but who really failed to see what was most important.  People find it very difficult to see what they don’t want to see.  When our loyalties and commitments are challenged, we don’t want to know about it.  We are often blind to the evil in ourselves, and blind to the good in others.

            Or we can be blind to the truth about ourselves, like the anorexic young woman I used to know who would look in the mirror and see a fat person, even though at the time she weighed less than 90 pounds.

            Jesus comes to connect people with a vision of the truth, which is God’s love for the whole world.  When we see the world as a place of scarcity and violence, we are not seeing the truth… but we are at the same time creating a false world where scarcity and violence reign.

            The truth about each person is that they are a beautiful, miraculous, cherished, valuable, and blessed child of God.  That is the truth we need to communicate and help people to see about themselves and others.

            We are oppressed by our negative and false vision.  We think we see a world divided into enemy camps, a world of competition and jealousy, a world of fear and hatred and anger and violence.  The tragedy is that when that’s the world we see, that is the world we create.  When that is the lens through which we perceive reality, it determines our actions, and our actions project and maintain the world that we and others live in.  If we think we live in hell, we will act like we live in hell, and then we will actually live in the hell our actions have generated.

            So we who follow Jesus have to help people see the truth, and to do that we have to become the truth by enacting and embodying a community where this blessing and goodness and forgiveness and love is made real.  We see Jesus, who is God’s love for the world revealed in all its fullness. 

IV.

            When Jesus proclaims the next part of his mission, which is to “let the oppressed go free,” he seems to be repeating himself about the captives… and he is.  All these are basically restatements of the same chronic condition that affects humanity, as exemplified in those who suffer under them physically.  To be poor, to be captive, to be blind, to be oppressed… these are all symptoms and manifestations of the same disease, which is sin, the state of being cut off from God and from others.

            Cut-off from reality, we collapse and implode into our own little, false, but somehow comfortable, worlds, worlds of our own making, worlds that are really hermetically sealed little boxes allowing us to wallow in delusion.

            Finally, Jesus summarizes his mission as “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  This is something that also had an inward and an outward manifestation.  Preaching the Lord’s favor means proclaiming and living in the world as God made it, in love, justice, peace, sharing, healing, forgiveness, and blessing.  It means announcing through word and deed that God is love, and in him is no darkness at all.  It means creating together a community where this actually happens in the way people interact together.  It means addressing the poverty, blindness, bondage, and oppression of people both on the level of our spirits and our physical circumstances.

            At the same time, there is nearly universal agreement among scholars that what Jesus and Isaiah are referring to when they talk about “proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor” is the Jubilee Year from Leviticus 25.  The Jubilee Year was supposed to happen every 50 years or so… but it probably never actually happened, which is part of Jesus’ point.

            The main characteristics of the Jubilee Year were the cancellation of all debts, and the reversion of all real estate to its original Israelite families.  The Jubilee Year basically hits the “reset” button on the economy.  And the point of it was to prevent the unequal distribution of wealth that happens when you leave people to do as they please.  God’s intention was that every 50 years all debts, all mortgages, all loans… were simply nullified.  It was bad news for bankers and creditors; but it was very good news for debtors, and those who had lost wealth in the previous half-century.

            The idea that it is integral and essential to Jesus’ mission that he came to proclaim wall-to-wall debt relief, is not something we hear about very often.  And yet that is the case.  Jesus knows that debt is one of the most unjust and pervasive manifestations of bondage, oppression, poverty, and even blindness, that can corrode the heart of a whole society. 

V.

            Jesus’ message is about release.  He uses the word twice in this short passage.  It is about freedom.  It is about real freedom, not the counterfeit “freedom” that the wealthy and powerful preach to justify their oppression of others.  Neither does he advocate the kind of false “freedom” by which people supposedly choose to remain in bondage and captivity.  An addict isn’t free.  Neither is a debtor.

            But for Jesus, freedom and release had to do with being in resonance with the truth of God’s infinite love for the world.  We are only free when we are operating according to God’s Word and Spirit, which are the foundations of all creation and reality.

            On May 20, we are going to go out and spread some of the freedom.  We are going to bring some of that release to people in need.  We are going to defeat a little bit of people’s bondage, whether it be the bondage of loneliness or poverty or the bondage of simply having a body that doesn’t work as well as it used to.  We are going to be emissaries of God’s freedom, Gods release, God’s liberation in some small but important ways.

            I hope you will all find a way to join us.

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"Fallen Into the Hands of Robbers."

Luke 10:25-37.

I.

            The lawyer who approaches Jesus wants to know what he has to “do to inherit eternal life.”  He makes the assumption that eternal life is a reward for what he does.

            Jesus doesn’t argue with him on this.  In fact, he agrees with him.  But he doesn’t answer the question directly.  He says, in effect, “You’re a lawyer, you tell me.”  In other words, the answer is in the Scriptures.  “You are a professional biblical scholar” – which is what a “lawyer” was in that culture – “you can answer your own question.”

            The lawyer then quotes the most important and basic text in the whole Old Testament, the famous Shema in Deuteronomy 6: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.”  What we have to do, then, is to love God with our whole being.

            The lawyer is to be credited, I think, because on his own initiative he adds another verse, this one from Leviticus: “and your neighbor as yourself.”  In the other gospels it is Jesus who puts these two commandments together.  We call his pairing “the Great Commandment.”  We don’t know if the lawyer made this connection himself, or heard Jesus talk about it another time, or if it was a common teaching at the time, to put these two commandments together.

            Jesus does not seem surprised.  He affirms the man and his answer, and says, “There you go.  Do this and you will live.”  In other words, there is something we can do to inherit eternal life, it is about our actions and behavior, not just our opinions or thoughts.  What we have to do to inherit eternal life is to love God with our whole being, and love our neighbor as ourselves.  So go do it.

            But this does not satisfy the lawyer, who actually has a deeper agenda that he is now getting to.  He says, “Yeah, but who is my ‘neighbor’?” 

            Who is my neighbor?  It is kind of a trick question because, if you read Leviticus, it appears from the context that the text is referring only to other Israelites.  The lawyer wants Jesus to admit that this neighbor thing is just about helping your own kind.  Gentiles, including Samaritans, were not “neighbors” in a strict sense.

            The lawyer is looking for Jesus to either give the traditional answer, which says that only other Jews are your neighbors.  Or he wants Jesus to get himself in trouble with the Jewish authorities by claiming that neighbor is a category that includes everybody.  Such open universalism could not be tolerated.  Everybody knows, they would say, that the Torah and eternal life are just for us, not for them.

II.

            Jesus’ ministry, and that of the early church, was radical and dangerous because of its openness and inclusiveness.  Jesus would infamously heal, eat with, and befriend anybody: prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, women, Samaritans and other Gentiles, even Roman soldiers were not exempt from Jesus’ embrace. 

            He expresses this mainly through his actions and his parables.  Jesus here doesn’t come out and say, “Everybody, even Gentiles, are our neighbors whom we are instructed to love as ourselves.”  No.  He tells a story.  And by telling a story he makes a much more powerful point, while, as we will see, getting the lawyer to admit the answer himself.

            The story starts off with a man making a journey along the steeply descending, winding road through the wilderness from Jerusalem to the town of Jericho.  It was a notoriously dangerous road, noted for the activity of robbers.  We assume the man is a Jew, though Jesus doesn’t say so.

            On the way the man is mugged, and beaten rather severely.  His clothes are taken, because textiles themselves had a certain value, and he is left for dead on the side of the road.  The way Jesus talks about this is to say he has “fallen into the hands of robbers.”

            The people listening to this story would have identified with the man who was attacked.  Not just because he was a Jew like them, and they knew that road and how bad it was.  But the observation that he had “fallen into the hands of robbers” was actually a description of their whole lives.

            They knew themselves to have “fallen into the hands of robbers” as a whole society.  Their entire lives were spent responding to the powerful forces who were systematically robbing them of their livelihood through crushing taxes, high prices and fees, high interest rates, even high exchange rates when you went to the Temple to worship God.  There was no way to get ahead.  You entire life was spent working to basically make the people at the top wealthy, healthy, and happy.  There was an enormous gap between the few rich and everybody else, who actually did the work, but who had little to show for it, except debts and bills.

            When Jesus tells this story, his hearers would have understood: “We’re that guy.  We’re the man walking a dangerous road who has ‘fallen into the hands of robbers.’  He represents us.”

III.

            Two people pass by on the road.  They see the wounded and perhaps dead man, and they don’t stop to help.  Instead they hurry by.  The person who has “fallen into the hands of robbers” is of no concern to them.  And remember, if you identify with the mugged man, you realize that these people are not there to help you either.

            The first passer-by is a priest, and the second is a Levite, kind of an assistant or associate priest.  Jesus does not introduce these two characters by accident.  He is saying to the people that, basically, your own religious establishment and institutions do not care about you.  They are more concerned with the biblical regulations about purity, and the inconvenience and consequence of having touched a dead body.  They don’t even bother to get close enough to see if the man is actually dead or not.  Better not to take the chance.

            “Your religion is part of the problem,” says Jesus.  “These people have power, they have authority, they have status.  They have something to lose.  They are part of the upper-class that is living off of you.  They are not going to compromise any of that to help you.  They will find an excuse, no doubt an airtight biblical excuse, to walk by and let you die.”

            So by now Jesus’ hearers understand that they “have fallen into the hands of robbers” and their own religious officials are not going to lift a finger to help them.  Indeed, they don’t even believe it is their job.  Jesus says, “Do not depend on them.”

            Now the audience would have been wondering who, if anyone, is going to help the man bleeding in the gutter.  At which point Jesus says, “But a Samaritan, while traveling, came near him.”

            Samaritans were considered an impure race of semi-Gentiles.  They descended from foreigners who intermarried with Jews centuries before, and adopted a kind of un-official version of Judaism.  They were second-class citizens, and the two groups couldn’t stand each other.  Samaritans mostly lived in an area north of Jerusalem, so this one was a foreigner, traveling in Judea.

            At the mention of a Samaritan, I imagine some of Jesus’ hearers scoffing: “Right, a Samaritan, like he’s going to do anything.”

            But, of course, it is the Samaritan who is “moved with pity” and actually helps the man.  Indeed, the assistance he gives is so wildly over-the-top that the point is unmistakable.

            The man whom everyone would have despised, and who would have despised them, is the one who actually turns out to be the good guy.  The Good Samaritan, as we say.  I suspect people would have started turning Jesus off at this point, because his story just became unbelievable. 

                       

IV.

            You can plug all kinds of different categories of people into this story if you want to give it an impact today like it had then.  For the priest and Levite we could substitute religious and/or political authorities of our day.  People we’re supposed to depend on to help us, who, in the end, don’t.  They are more concerned with their own status, connections, position, their own purity and political viability, than with helping one poor slob who got mugged.  Which is to say, us, the ones who have “fallen into the hands of robbers.”

            And for the Samaritan we would have to substitute some class of people we do not like or trust.  The Samaritan is a Muslim, an undocumented alien, a Tea Party activist or Occupy Wall Streeter, a gay or lesbian person, someone HIV-positive, a registered sex offender, an ex-convict.  Whomever you fear and even hate the most, that’s your Samaritan.  That’s the only person you’re going to be able to depend on when all the official helpers have decided to ignore your plight.

            This is what Jesus is saying.  Your leaders have failed.  Help will come from God… through the most rejected kind of person in your life. 

            After the story, Jesus asks the lawyer a pointed question: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  Jesus thus turns the original question, “Who is my neighbor?” on its head.  He reverses it, and answers the question, “Whom am I supposed to be a neighbor to?” 

            I think Jesus thinks these are basically the same question.  If you ask, “Who is my neighbor?” that is like asking, “Whom am I supposed to love?”  We are neighbors to each other.  If one is in need, the other has to help… and vice-versa.  Being a neighbor is a mutual, reciprocal, shared relationship.  It takes two, at least.  If I have little, my neighbor is the one with more who is therefore able to share.  If I have much, my neighbor is the one with little with whom I am able to share. 

            Jesus’ point, as always, is that the outward characteristics of a person – their race, religion, ethnicity, family, political views, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, even what they have done in their past – none of that matters.  When it comes to a neighbor it is merely the raw and immediate question of suffering.  If a neighbor is suffering, you help them.  Period.  End of story.

            Everyone is our neighbor, and everyone is a neighbor to us, because we all share in this basic human, mortality.  We all have the same flesh and blood.

V.

            The neighbor is the one who takes a detour in the rat-race of daily existence because of the need and suffering of another.  The neighbor is the one who sets aside their own agenda and schedule, even some of their own values and morals and beliefs, because of the cry of someone else’s mortality to theirs.  The neighbor is the one who realizes that, one way or another, we have “fallen into the hands of robbers” and there are many who are left bleeding in their wake.

            Jesus would have us open our eyes to the need and suffering around us.  And he would have us go out of our way to rather extravagantly take care of others… especially those who are not particularly liked or cared for in general.

            I think the gathering of disciples is called to take special care for the people in a society whom nearly everybody rejects.  The unpopular and the universally reviled.  The people it is hard to raise money to help.  The people whom some would say deserved what they got, or who brought it on themselves, or who wouldn’t be in their predicament had they exercised some personal responsibility.  The people whom, we are told, we should not help because it would only encourage them to make the same bad decisions again.  After all, the Samaritan in the story went out of his way to help someone who was, in effect, an enemy.

            Following Jesus means, well, following Jesus.  It means doing what he did, in so far as that is possible for us.  It means being instructed by his example of love, service, healing, liberation, and blessing.

            Our church is going to experiment with following Jesus in a significant way on May 20.  That’s what we are calling “be-the-church Sunday.”  On that day, we will not be worshiping in the morning, but we will be sent out on three different missions o f service to people in need. 

            Now, it’s not like worshiping isn’t also a way of being the church.  God also calls us to worship, praise, prayer, and hearing the Word.  But on this day we’re going to concentrate on how an essential element of the church’s work is to be sent out.  I guess, the point is to avoid looking like the priest or the Levite, passing by human suffering while trying to serve God.  On that day we’re going to take a detour.  Instead of gathering we will be sent into the community.

            This is a very exciting project and one in which I hope you will all participate.  I am sure that after we have been sent, our times of gathering for worship will be that much more powerful and significant.

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One Heart and Soul: No Private Ownership.

Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1–2:2; John 20:19-31

I.

            One way of looking at the New Testament, and indeed the entire Bible, is as a manual for community organizing.  It is all about organizing, first the community of Israel, and then the community of the New Israel, the church.  First, it has to do with knitting together a disparate group of people – originally the band of slaves escaping from Egypt – into a coherent, integrated, interactive, functional whole.  It is about making one out of many.  It is about moving from being an ad hoc collection of individuals to being a united group.

            Jesus’ entire ministry is rescuing people from a corrupt, oppressive society, and delivering them into a new community of his followers, whose life together was characterized by love.  They were to love each other just as he loved them, which is to say, with generous, sacrificial, healing, accepting, and forgiving love.  Jesus is a healer and he gathers a healing community.  

            The diseases Jesus heals in his ministry are not accidental.  They are first of all maladies that the Old Testament predicted the Messiah would master, and secondly, they stand for wider and deeper conditions in people.  These are diseases people contract because they live in a sick society.  They are ailments rooted in depression, exclusion, powerlessness, and stress.

            When Jesus heals someone it is not like he then sends them back into the rat-race that made them sick in the first place, or at least ignored and profited from their illness.  Jesus is not patching people up so they can be thrown back into the battle, which was the perpetual frustration of the doctors on M*A*S*H.  Jesus forms small communities of disciples wherever he goes.  These communities exhibit and practice his healing values.  And it is these pre-existing communities that create the environment for the rapid spread of the good news after his resurrection.

            We get a vivid picture of the character of the kind of community that Jesus established in the early chapters of Acts.  Luke portrays the gathering in Jerusalem as demonstrating a remarkable unity.  “They were of one heart and soul.”  This oneness has a healing effect because one of the most crippling things about a crippled community is its divisions. 

            Just as a body can’t function when it is working against itself, neither can a community be healthy if its members are functioning in competition, at cross-purposes, and even conspiring against each other.  When there is mistrust and backstabbing in a group, when there are class divisions and unequal distributions of wealth and power… these things undermine a community and turn it against itself.

II.

            We see unity celebrated in today’s Psalm, Psalm 133.  This is kind of a wishful-thinking hope expressed in the Psalter.  It looks ahead to a reunion of the northern and southern Kingdoms, Israel and Judah, a reunion which never actually happened in history.  The northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians and was never heard from again (unless you’re a Mormon).

            But the Psalmist is celebrating in advance a unity that is true in God’s sight, but just hasn’t been manifested in human affairs quite yet.

            In 1986 I was asked to participate in the wedding of my brother in Buffalo.  He married an Irish Catholic woman and the service would be in a Catholic church, led by a priest friend of her family.  The priest asked me to celebrate the wedding with him.  At the time I was managing a couple of bookstores in Cambridge, Mass., one of which served the local Catholic seminary.  When my manager, a seminarian, heard what I was about to do he was scandalized.  He shook his head and said, “You are witnessing to a unity that doesn’t exist.”

            I replied that I was witnessing to a unity that truly existed in Christ, but was not yet realized by our sinful institutions.  I don’t think he appreciated that I was including his church among those sinful institutions.

            But this is something to think about very seriously, especially in these days when churches are considering leaving the Presbyterian Church (USA), as is a church in my presbytery.  Our unity is in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.  When these disciples gathered in Jerusalem after Pentecost, who knows what theologies they held?  There were as yet no creeds, catechisms, doctrines, or even a New Testament.  All of the earliest disciples were Jews, like Jesus.  Luke tells us they were of one heart and soul.  But does that mean they all had the exact same opinions about everything?  I doubt it.

            Their unity was in a common trust and obedience of Jesus, whose life and teachings and healings had been vindicated by his resurrection.  And if the followed Jesus with any integrity and authenticity, they continued his ministry of radical inclusion and healing.  They certainly continued to welcome both “prostitutes” and “tax-collectors,” that is the two categories of sinners representing both the moral and social transgressors who were excluded by a collaborationist establishment that was more interested in keeping order and stability than in manifesting God’s Kingdom of peace. 

            If anyone decided this was too much, that they didn’t want to have to associate with “those people,” they left the fellowship… and were never heard from again.

III.

            This is because the communion of those who follow Jesus realizes that we are all “those people.”  We are all in need of healing, even if we may not be literally lame, blind, deaf, a leper, or dead.  You don’t come to Jesus if you have it all together.  You only come because you realize your own brokenness.  Because your life has become unmanageable.

            When you joined the community of Jesus’ disciples, you came with your corrupt and smelly baggage and laid it at the apostles’ feet.  And if you had any, this baggage included your money.  Luke tells us that “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”

            “Everything they owned” would have included the obvious: property, assets, cash, real estate… and it also included the more figurative: addictions, diseases, memories, experiences, habits, relationships, thoughts, and emotions.  Everybody brings both.  Rich people like tax collectors brought more material resources; poor and sick people would have brought more of the kind of baggage we mean when we say people have “baggage.”

            Whatever they brought, they dumped it in the middle of the gathering.  Whatever it was, they considered it a burden, a ball-and-chain, a crippling debilitation that was killing them by its weight.  They even thought of money in this way.  As something they needed to be rid of for the sake of their own survival.  Because, then, as now, money comes mainly from some form of stealing, however rarefied, justified, complexified, and rationalized it may be.  Sin is always a burden that binds and kills a person.

            Instead of private ownership of their sins, instead of letting their sins continue to corrode their souls and poison their relationships, these early followers of Jesus were able to give them up to the whole community.  And when these are given up to a whole community, the community of followers of Jesus, who rely upon his Word and his Spirit, then these burdens start to evaporate, dissipate, dissolve, break apart, and fade away.  The power of death that had a lethal grip on people, is shattered.  People experience liberation in the acceptance and forgiveness of the gathering of disciples.

            This is what Luke identifies when he notes in the next verse that “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”  The resurrection is not a doctrine.  It is not merely words.  It is not a fact of history we have to maintain a certain opinion about.  The resurrection is a real experience in the life of people in this community of Jesus’ disciples.  People experienced themselves brought from death and despair and illness and powerlessness, to a miraculous new life.  And this was accomplished by the power of the good news of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus, enacted and practiced in the living community of disciples.

IV.

            The resurrection is something they know to be real because they experience it themselves.  This is what John is celebrating when he writes: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” 

            He writes about his direct experience as a disciple of the Lord, and the direct experience of the community in its life together.  They have heard, and seen, and touched the reality of Jesus’ resurrection in their own lives.  In the way they were brought from death to life.  They were brought from divisions to unity.  They were brought from poverty to abundance.  From fear to hope.  From illness to healing.  From loneliness to togetherness.  From no to yes!

            They know that Jesus is raised because they are raised.

            Then come perhaps the most economically radical handful of verses in the whole Bible.  These are the most threatening words to many in Christian history, so much so that they have been systematically and categorically ignored, except in certain specialized, monastic settings.  Luke relates: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.  They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

            They do not prattle on about who “deserves” what, or who was exercising “personal responsibility.”  They do not haughtily sniff about “job creation,” or trickling down.  They do not wring their hands about “punishing the successful” or “the politics of envy.”  No.  Those who have resources cash out, terminating their participation in, and benefit from, an economy based on inequality, greed, exploitation, and fear, the main purpose of which is to make rich people richer.

            These followers of Jesus want no part of that.  They know that that is a large part of what is killing them.  They know that inequality is part of the sickness of their society, and it is sin against God to perpetuate this injustice, let alone profit from it.

V.

            In today’s gospel reading, Jesus himself takes it to another level.  Just in case people think that that this divestment of wealth is somehow “payment” for the healing he gives, he blesses those who exhibit trust in him before they perceive and experience any evidence of it.

            It is like the blessing of Psalm 133.  “Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when kindred live together in unity!”  And we sing that Psalm even when the kindred are not yet living together in unity!  Which, at the time the Psalmist wrote them, they weren’t.  We proclaim the resurrection even before we experience this liberation in our own lives.  We practice the principles of love and justice, before we actually hear with our ears, see with our eyes, and touch with our hands the Word of Life.

            When we come to the Lord, we have to come before we experience who he is and what he has.  We have to come on the basis of hearsay, rumor, someone else’s testimony.  And in coming to him in this way we demonstrate an initial trust that Jesus blesses. 

            Inspiring this initial trust in people is a large part of what evangelism is about.  And there is nothing that inspires that initial trust than when someone can see something good happening in someone else’s life.  The person in recovery, the person whose notoriously bad relationships have been healed, the person who has been accepted and forgiven… when people see lives turned around, that is when they start to consider trusting in this Jesus and his healing themselves.

            We are never going to convince someone about the resurrection of Jesus by setting out cogent theological, philosophical, historical, archaeological, scriptural arguments.  People become convinced because of their experience. 

            We are the evidence, we are the argument, we are the truth of the resurrection.  When people want to come to Jesus they have to come to us.  They will examine the quality of our lives and our life together.  Do these people look healed?  Do these people have joy?  Do they accept and forgive each other?  Do they love each other?  Can I trust these people with my burdens, my sins, my shame, my fear?  Can I admit to them what I can’t even admit to myself?

            Can I trust them with my gifts, my talents, my wealth, my children, my story?

            With how much power do we give our testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus?  Not just in words, but in the character and quality of our relationships?  Our practices and lifestyle?

            May we in our own life together embody the words of John:

“This is the message we have heard from [Christ] and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we… walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

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