Threatened with Resurrection: Or the Power and the Glory

Threatened with Resurrection: Or the Power and the Glory

Acts 1:6-11

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

Cathedral of Hope – Oklahoma City

    4 May 2008    

 

 

    Slapstick comedy. That's how Canadian writer Laurel Dykstra describes this famous passage in Acts chapter 1. Here's how she tells it:

 

In a final, over-the-top demonstration of "not getting it," an unspecified group of followers demand of the resurrected Jesus, "Lord is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" My crude paraphrase is: "Great, you're not dead. Now are we going to kick some Roman butt and take our rightful place as kings?"

In response, Jesus promises an entirely different kind of power and then promptly disappears into a cloud, as though in exasperation. I imagine later there was a fair amount of forehead-slapping among his followers, with them saying, "I can't believe that was the last thing we said to him."

So the stooges are standing gawking up at the place where Jesus has disappeared when two men appear and ask why. . . The men's appearance is sudden but not necessarily supernatural – they may simply have walked up on the distracted cloud-gazers. "Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" they said. I expect the unrecorded response from the disciples was, "Agh! Where did you come from?"

 

    It can sometimes seem like every week we gather to gaze into heaven and ask, "Is it now?" like a bunch of children in the back seat of the station wagon, "Are we there yet?"

    My former colleague Harry Wooten has a number of Harry Wooten-isms for which he is famous. For example, when we were planning a worship service and we had providentially stumbled, despite our best efforts, upon a particularly powerful song, reading, or other worship experience, Harry would say, "This will make them clutch their pearls."

    But the most oft-repeated, and famous, Harry Wooten-ism is his weekly reminder of the "relentless return of the Sabbath." With wit and wisdom, Harry reminds us that sometimes our faithful discipleship is a joy, and sometimes it does feel like a burden.

      

 

    Graham Greene tells a story of a whisky priest in Mexico in the nineteen thirties. Mexico had entered into a period of intense religious persecution, particularly of the Roman Catholic Church. Priests were forced to renounce their vows and marry or face prison and execution. Some became underground priests.

    The whisky priest was one of these. Colleagues compromised in order to save their lives, but this priest did not. And it was all the more ironic because he was not a saint. In fact, he was a drunkard and a philanderer. He had an illegitimate son. Many people despised him because of his intemperance.

    Yet something compels this priest to keep at his duties. He is constantly on the run, evading the military authorities. He hides out with various peasants and performs the sacraments in secret.

    He might arrive in the village and spend the night getting drunk, sleeping it off in some shed or stable. The next day he would arise and perform baptisms, confirmations, and communion.

    Over time he looses everything -- his money, his belongings, his clothes, and finally the last bit of sacramental wine he possessed. He is arrested, brought to jail, convicted and sentenced to die.

    His last night on earth he spends getting drunk and making his own confession. He knows that the people really needed a saint, but all they had was him. And so he is killed.

    In the closing of the novel a young boy is listening to a woman tell stories about martyrs and heroes of the church.

    

    "And that one," the boy said, "they shot today. Was he a hero too?"

    "Yes."

    "The one who stayed with us that time?"

    "Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the church."

 

    The novel which tells this story is entitled The Power and the Glory. That phrase and this story have stuck with me. Two years ago I preached an entire sermon series with that title, and pretty much every Sunday I use that phrase during the Prayer of Thanksgiving:

 

Glorious God of love, thank you for these gifts. May they fill us with your power and glory that we might truly be your people of hope.

 

    Every week, for me at least, there is an irony in those words. I'm praying that we will receive the power and the glory of the creator of the universe. I imagine passages like Exodus 19 when God's presence descends up on Mt. Sinai in thunder and lightning, or Ezekiel 1 where the prophet has his vision of the great throne of God and its flaming wheel within a wheel, or Isaiah 6 where God is surrounded by the mighty cherubim and seraphim, or Revelation 21 and 22 and the image of the end of time and the new Jerusalem.

    But on the other hand, I think of the whiskey priest.    There is no dignity for this priest. He is a failed human being. Yet, he will not give up his identity in order to save his own life. Despite little hope, no consolation, and in constant danger, he fulfills at least this one vow – he worships God in the sacraments. And, thus, he is the vessel for God's power and glory.

    And if the whisky priest, then also us.

 

    For three years this week you have blessed me with the opportunity of realizing the great hope and joy of my life – to stand here each Sunday and proclaim the Word of God. All of our individual spiritual gifts must be lived in community, but maybe none more obviously so than this ministry of word and sacrament. And it is you, the community, which shapes the sermon. Your stories, your anxieties, your questions, the thought of one of you or all of you during the hours of sermon preparation.

    We have undergone a great deal of change in three years. It's overwhelming to think about really. We've done some great things together, had some magical moments. I think of the fifth anniversary celebration when we had 150 people in this room and a marvelous banquet that followed. Or the way we have ministered to Curtis during his time of need. There's the Sunday that we licensed Mary Frances, as joy beamed from her face. Or when Bruce Lowe received our very first Hero of Hope award and had the entire room in tears.

    Loss has accompanied the change as well. The transition to independence was not easy. We've grieved those who have chosen to leave us. We are anxious that things aren't exactly how we had dreamed they would be.

This realization is part of the lesson of the Easter season. Nothing was quite the way the disciples expected it to be. Jesus dies. Jesus reappears. Then Jesus disappears into heaven. Imagine how annoying that would be.

    Christian discipleship teaches us that we must die in order to be born again. That we are never closer to new life than when we have died. It is when we finally realize that we do not posses our lives or our church, that God can finally act. Our present, our future, is not ours to control – it is God's.

    So long as we are faithful, God will use us.

    Graham Green's novel concludes with the young boy who wondered if the whisky priest was a hero. The boy hears a knock at the door in the night and goes to answer it. A stranger is there asking for his mother. The boy says that she is asleep and tries to shut the door, but the stranger blocks the door with his foot and whispers, "I am a priest." And the boy rejoices.

 

    Let us pray:

    Risen One, may you find us faithful, so that we too might be the vessels of your power

and you glory. Amen.