Easter 3B
Notes
Transcript
3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B
3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B
In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed - hallelujah!
If you’ve followed global news at all in the last 10 years, then you’ve heard that Christians in Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries in that part of the world are being persecuted for nothing more than *being* Christian. They have been arrested for attending worship, for carrying a Bible in public, for sharing the message - the Good News - of Jesus Christ. Once arrested, they have been left in prison for lengthy periods, tortured, and some have even been killed simply because they would not renounce their faith.
More recently we’ve learned that the same things are happening in China. The Chinese Communist Party has no interest in competing with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For communists, there is only one god, and that’s the government. Refugees tell us that the CCP will go so far as to torture a family’s children to get the parents to renounce their faith.
As hard as that is to hear, you might be inclined to think “thank the Lord that’s all the way in Africa and Asia.” I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. But I have more bad news for you: it’s now on our back door. Our Christian neighbors in Canada are now fighting their government for the right to gather for worship. Canada. Let me share some details of this story, if you haven’t heard about it yet.
GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta is a congregation currently at odds with their own government. The Canadian government has been notably more strict with their guidelines on public gatherings, including gathering for worship. The leaders of GraceLife decided, after a couple of months of online-only worship, to open back up for in-person worship on Sunday, June 21, just 2 days after the relaxing of government restrictions.
They didn’t just open back up like everything was “normal” - they took many of the same precautions we have taken and still take. But as they were one of the few churches that *did* open back up, they soon found themselves exceeding the government’s restrictions on how many people could gather in their church building, and it quickly gained the attention of the authorities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Alberta Health inspectors began showing up and issuing warnings, but Pastor James Coates would not turn people away. He felt that in times of crisis - such as a pandemic - and fear (such as we are exposed to daily by national media), people need faith more than ever. So the government put Pastor Coates in jail for 35 days. And not just county lock-up. This was maximum security prison, and he spent some parts of this sentence in solitary confinement. The church continued to gather during his confinement with other pastors filling in.
Pastor Coates was released earlier this month, ready to go back to the pulpit and continue to preach the Gospel. But last week, the government decided to take more drastic action, since Pastor Coates didn’t appear to be scared into submission: they built a barricade around the entire church complex - 2 layers of chain-link fence with barbed wire and law enforcement patrols to keep anyone from entering the church at all. They closed off the church entirely. For the record, not one person who has attended GraceLife church has been reported as having COVID-19. Not a single case.
So what have the people of this church done? First, they did not respond with violence, thanks be to God. Instead, they have taken their church gatherings underground. UNDERGROUND church. In Canada. Think about that for a moment. This is not Communist China. This is not Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. This is CANADA.
“The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him”…the world does not know the Heavenly Father. Can we compare these things happening in our world today with what the early Christians faced in 1st Century Judea? Maybe, maybe not. The Muslims and the Chinese aren’t exactly throwing Christians to the Lions for sport. But I think torturing children to make parents renounce their faith is about as evil as you can get.
There are things happening in our world right now, even in Western society, that simply do not fit with the Christian faith. For most of our lives, it wasn’t that big of a deal…those things didn’t really affect us. They didn’t impact the church. We were a society of “live and let live” and everyone’s happy. You do you, and I’ll do me, and we’ll leave each other alone. And we thought that was ok.
But something changed. I don’t know what that was, but something changed. First it was “if you don’t accept my ____, then you must hate me.” (Insert something that Christianity doesn’t permit into that blank.) Then it became, “if you don’t accept [this], then you’re a _____-ist.” The latest iteration of this change has become: “If you don’t accept this, you will be silenced, you will be cancelled.”
I would like to think that I have the courage that Pastor Coates has. Frankly, I don’t think we’re going to have to face that, because of the lawsuit we had in our state last year. I hope we don’t have to. It would be incredibly hard.
So when I read these lessons about the Apostles gathering in secret places, with locked doors, these are the things I think about. Sure, they were afraid…but they were still gathering. And, just like Thomas last week, Jesus gave them what they needed, so that they would not be afraid. So that they would believe that He is who He says He is. He gave them evidence (“see my hands and my feet…touch me, and see...” and then he ate with them - spirits cannot eat food), and He reminded them that everything that was written about him in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then He “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures”. What we didn’t read this week is the final gift He gives them, which follows soon after the passages we read today - and that is the gift of the Holy Spirit. With the Holy Spirit’s help, they were able to build Christ’s Church and change the world forever. We are children of that change. We are members of that same church, made so in our Baptism, when we received the same Holy Spirit.
The story of the church in Canada does not involve the death of any Christians…only their ability to worship as they want. I don’t want to overstate their dilemma. But as history tells us, this is often how such horrible atrocities begin. The world doesn’t understand our faith. Others in our world want people to put their trust only in worldly things: in powers, in governments, in corporations. For ideologies like communism and socialism, there is no room for any god except government. That is why they go to such lengths to make people give up their Christian faith. If the people have hope in something other than the government, then there is a chance they could rise up and rebel. Totalitarians cannot have that.
But Christ *does* give everyone hope. Christ’s death and resurrection gives hope to the whole world…as well it should. “Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things’.” [The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Lk 24:45–48.]
While we may not have seen it with our own eyes, we *are* witnesses to His death and resurrection, because we have heard it proclaimed to us in His Word, and therefore we have also been entrusted to carry this message to those who have not heard it.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention another Christian who was persecuted for his faith. It’s appropriate that one of the most significant events in the story of Dr. Martin Luther happened exactly 500 years ago yesterday:
The Diet of Worms has gone down in history as the event at which Luther refused to recant by appealing to his conscience, but the “Luther Affair” was not on the original agenda of the 1521 diet. Representatives of the papacy were pressuring Emperor Charles V to reinforce Luther’s recent excommunication by enacting an imperial ban, so Luther’s prince, Frederick the Wise, insisted that Luther be given a hearing to determine whether or not he was in error. When Luther appeared before the diet on April 17, 1521, he was asked simply whether he had authored the books published under his name and whether he stood by their contents. Luther replied that he had written them, and while he was certainly capable of error, he would recant only if an error were proven by Scripture. When asked more directly whether he would recant, Luther replied that he could not recant if it went against Scripture or his conscience. “As long as my conscience is captive to the words of God,” he stated, “I neither can nor will recant, since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience.” On May 8, 1521, the emperor issued the Edict of Worms, which banned Luther and his followers from the empire. On the way home from the Diet of Worms, Frederick the Wise arranged to have Luther taken to the Wartburg Castle, where Luther would remain in hiding for almost a year. [Brecht, Martin Luther: His Road to the Reformation, 1483–1521, 1985, 433–76; Jensen, Confrontation at Worms, 1973.]
Luther, like so many others we’ve mentioned this morning, was willing to give up everything for his faith. That lonely German monk stood against the most powerful people in the world. And because he did, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has grown even more in the 5 centuries since his stand.
What is it that God is calling us to do about all of this? We are not facing persecution, and I pray that we never will. But we have sisters and brothers in the faith who are facing it, and at the very least we can hold them in prayer. I think a healthy awareness of what’s happening in our world is also something we can hold ourselves responsible for. I will do my part to help us stay informed of that. And, I think most importantly, we need to be stewards of God’s truth…all of us. As Luther said to the Emperor, “As long as my conscience is captive to the words of God...” and that’s the most important point. God’s Word is true. And that is why it is so important that we study and know it, so that we can discern truth from lies.
“Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead...” Even this one statement has its detractors - those who claim it isn’t true…that it didn’t happen. You *could* argue that this is the central statement of our faith, that everything we believe hinges on this. Could you stand up for the truth of that statement if you were confronted by someone claiming it didn’t happen? Could you defend the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?
I pray it never comes to that. But we don’t have to worry about whether or not it did, because we have the witness of the apostles and the testimony of the entire Christian Church throughout history. And shortly, we will enjoy the bodily presence of Christ Himself as He comes to us in His Holy Supper. And as we partake in that, let us all be reminded of all that He has promised us, and all that He has already done for us. Because that is what we believe when we see His empty tomb. We know it is true.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed - hallelujah!
In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.