May 10, 2020 - Fifth Sunday of Easter

Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 10, 2020

Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

Adapted for print from transcription.

Well, good morning, Shepherd Family, or good afternoon, depending on when you're watching this. Just a few announcements that I forgot about for our welcome and greeting, one is that today we will be doing a special collection for our friends at ICM to support them financially during this time, as they kind of wade the waters like so many of us in terms of this financial crisis, so that they can continue to serve the vulnerable among us and those marginalized communities, and the working poor during this time. If you'd like to support that special collection, you can always send a check to the Shepherd of the Hills office, or you can go to our website and we have a special collection button available on our online giving.

Most importantly, Happy Mother's Day to all of our Shepherd of the Hills moms out there. Wishing you a wonderful mother's day and hope that you are able to celebrate, or be together, safely, with family in a special way today.

If not to be physically together, maybe to be together virtually. And so then that brings me into our other reminder announcement is that today for the first time, we will have a virtual coffee time. And so what that means is, if you look at this last Friday’s epistle, take a look in there, look for, there's a picture of a computer with a coffee mug on it, and our coffee mug on a table.

And the idea is, is that you will click the link associated with that picture and bring your coffee, and we'll just have some fellowship time following the service today. So at the 11 o'clock hour on Sunday mornings, we will have a virtual Zoom fellowship time that you're invited to.

I've had a lot of people ask how that might work, and surprisingly enough, Zoom works perfectly for something like this! Let's say we have 20 people logged in, that would be wonderful, by the way. But to facilitate a good conversation, since it's hard to have anybody but one person speak on Zoom at a time, there are breakout rooms, so I press a button on Zoom and it allows me to break the group apart.

So if we have four people, I could just simply break the group into two rooms so you can have a conversation with one other. And so we'd probably do that for about five or 10 minutes, allow you to get to connect, and then I can hit a button, bring everybody back, and then hit it again. And it will simply throw everybody into a room with somebody that you weren't in with before. So technology is amazing and we continue to learn and to utilize technology during this time so we can continue to connect.

Now, off to today's readings! Last week we had a difficult reading for many of us to hear, because that reading from 1 Peter has, as I mentioned, so often been used to wound people.

And so today we're hearing a reading from the gospel of John. That too is difficult to hear for many of us, depending on the church that we might come from or the preacher that we've heard preach over the years. And so specifically, the piece of that reading, I probably don't even have to say it, is “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

That is a difficult for many of us to hear. It's difficult for many non-Christians to hear, and it's still used by many people today to hold Christianity up as the only way. So we want to break that open a bit today, but for now, what we can say about this gospel of John and this community is that this Jewish community.

Most scholars agree that this gospel comes to us from about the year 100. So let's be generous and say 95 to 100 of the Common Era is where most scholars look at this in terms of authorship. So it's important to ask what was going on during that time.

And so what was going on during that time? The Christian community was really a new community. Jesus is now gone. And what they're doing is they're looking around and they're asking the question, “Who is Jesus and who are we as followers of Jesus?” And so there were many voices going around at that time, emerging, if you will, in that early Christian community, and many of these voices were saying a variety of different things. So the question emerged, “What does it mean to know Jesus?” So as we journey through the gospels in these upcoming Sundays, up until Pentecost, I think the question that we need to ask ourselves each Sunday is, “What does it mean to know Jesus?”

And more importantly, what does it mean to know Jesus for us today? So what we're doing is we're kind of, again, going back to that idea of having the newspaper in one hand and having our sacred story and the other hand. We always want to engage scripture, engage our sacred story and the context of what's happening in our world today.

And you know, what's really fascinating for me as I read these stories anew, in light of what we're experiencing today is that we're maybe able in this generation to hear these stories, more than ever, the way this early Christian community experienced them. So we continue to hear from Acts, as I've mentioned before, throughout the Lenten season, in our first reading, unlike throughout the rest of the year.

In other seasons of the church here, we normally hear from a Hebrew Bible lesson or from the old Testament, but throughout the Easter season, we hear from the book of Acts, and the book of Acts is really giving us a sense of what it was like in the early centuries of the church; how the church was developing and what it was going through.

So today, from the book of Acts, we're hearing about the martyrdom of Stephen. And so when I hear about the martyrdom of Stephen and the death and the dying, the way I'm engaging that scripture this week is the death and the dying that we as a people are experiencing right now and are surrounded by.

And as we hear those numbers, again, both literal, literal deaths and figurative deaths. And so as we hear those numbers of 78,805 U.S. deaths now from the Coronavirus. And about 33 million people out of work. So again, we're hearing these readings, both literal deaths, and figurative. You know, I don't want to minimize this, but you know, I connect with people throughout the week. I hear many things that people are grieving right now. It could be loss of employment. It could be loss of a vacation. It could the physical loss of a loved one, or someone that we knew, a friend, a family member.

But it could also be the grief of maybe what could have been, what could have been. So, again, literal and figurative losses. So that's really the way I'm engaging our Stephen story today. But we're reminded in the first letter of Peter, this is important for us to hear today. We're reminded that now, we are God's people.

There's some comfort in that. We need to be reminded that we are God's people. And again, as I've mentioned before, it's important that when we engage our sacred story, Richard Rohr talks about this, of not looking at it any time we look at sacred story in a narrow way. If we look at the sacred story narrowly, we’re doing it wrong.

So we always need to go bigger instead of going narrower. So what does it mean to be a people of God; of one human family? This is the sense that's beginning to emerge with 1 Peter and a reminder from last week as I mentioned, that, for the people, the community of 1 Peter, they were being persecuted.

And so these are words of comfort. And now back to Mother's Day. Mother's Day has an interesting history, and, unlike past years, I really wanted to connect Mother's Day to our readings today. And I think it works well.

Anna Jarvis was the founder of the modern day idea of Mother's Day. She was a peace activist, and she originally founded Mother's Day after and kind of after the civil war as an opportunity to highlight, or to unite mothers, and bring them into the fold to create communities of peace. And not only creating communities of peace, but highlighting things that affect communities. And so some of those things that she highlighted were poverty, abuse, and domestic violence, and so I would say that these are all of the things that we, as Christians, and all people of faith share.

This is what it means to be connected with this risen Christ in Christian community together. It’s this idea of making the world more just. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. This is what it means to be a “Jesus People,” as the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal church, USA, enjoys calling his flock.

He says that we are Jesus People, and I think that that's important for us to remind ourselves. On this Mother's Day, and on this Fifth Sunday of our Easter Season where we hear Jesus speak those words to Thomas, that “I am the way I am the truth, and I am the life.” And so the question for us is, “How are we incarnating the way? How are we incarnating truth and life and our world today?” These are the questions that Jesus leaves us with today, not only as individuals, but as followers of the risen Christ– as “Jesus People.”

And so today John is leaving with leaving us with one message. This Jesus movement, this community of faith in its infancy. As John writes, it's about we, not me. It's about we, not me.

How do we highlight “we”? How do we be the body of Christ bringing about truth, bringing about life?

Amen.