A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 10, 2020
The Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle
Dallas, Texas
Stephen V. Sprinkle, Theologian-in-Residence
For Jesus’ Sake
I thank Fr. Christopher and the community of St. Thomas the Apostle for the courtesy of the pulpit, and for the opportunity to preach. It is an honor to serve as a Theologian-in-Residence for this church.
What is it that motivates Christians today, or more precisely for an embodied religion such as ours, Who is it who motivates Christians? I concede that some, perhaps many, who call themselves “Christians” do so at the risk of false advertising, but join me this morning in granting all of us the benefit of the doubt. After all, one of the central tenets of this faith is called, “grace.” Who is this One around whom the earliest believers gathered? After whose death on the cross and resurrection from the dead has a worldwide movement been launched from First Century CE to this very day? What is it about this Resurrected One that moves people to act, regardless of the effort, the struggle, and oftentimes the suffering that comes with their activity? How do the events of Jesus, lived in the evermore distant past, reach across the centuries to you and to me and to our world?
Worldatlas.com estimates that there are 2.22 billion Christians in our present time, fully 31.5 % of the world’s population—the largest human organism in the history of the planet. Talk about a ‘mustard seed’ that exploded into growth! The story of Jesus is not an ever-recurring myth. Jesus is not reborn every Christmas; Jesus is not nailed up on Golgotha again and again. He does not die every Good Friday and rise again every Easter. The history of his story is too stubborn, the past-ness of his passion is too undeniable. 2.2 billion (that’s billion with a B) human beings are not a memorial to his past-ness. It is instead as New Testament scholar Leander Keck put it, a present motive rooted in Jesus’ is-ness. In other words, in Jesus, God is with us, Emmanu-el, here and now.
But what is the bridge to get us from then-to-now? My Latin is pretty modest, but I did pick up one little jewel: a device or a vehicle to get something from one side of the river to the other is called a pons asinorum, “an ass’s bridge”. If a jackass needs a bridge, give it one! Remember the ABC song? “ABCDEFG, HIJKLMNOP….” That’s a pons asinorum. I learned my ABCs from that catchy jingle, lyrics and music that made all those letters memorable for me, and maybe it did for you, too.
Just so, Lee Keck gave a way to understand how action accomplished in the past, even the distant past, can continue effectively into the present and beyond. Dr. Keck was a scholar of ancient, or koiné, Greek. Language creates worlds. It presents the present moment with the past, to dynamic effect. And he found his pons asinorum in the perfect tense of the language of the New Testament. As he writes in his book, Who is Jesus? History in Perfect Tense:
The ancient Greeks used the perfect tense of a verb to distinguish the ongoing import of the completed action from its sheer occurrence in the past. (1)
Kindly follow Dr. Keck with me for a moment more. His example in English is the difference between the sheer occurrence of an action in the past, “The door was opened”, and the ongoing effects of a past action that remain in effect in the present, “The door is opened.” The door remains open as the result of past action. We no longer have a simple past tense. Voila! We have the perfect tense, and the world of our understanding changes and is made new. Dr. Keck then writes,
“Similarly, then, to speak of history in perfect tense is to consider the ongoingness of something from the past, namely Jesus. In short” [Dr. Keck concludes], the question before us concerns the ‘isness’ of the Jesus who was.” (1)
This Jesus who lived and walked the dusty roads of Palestine during the Roman imperial occupation, who ate and drank wine with his disciples in an upper room, this same Jesus who healed and cast out demons, who lived with the outcasts and the poor, and died a criminal’s death before rising on a Third Day morning is like that once-opened and nevermore shut Door.
That is the metaphor Dr. Keck presents us with. The presence of the Resurrected Jesus cannot be shut up once-upon-a-time in a timeless symbol or a re-occurring set of meanings. This is God-with-us, now and then.
If this is difficult to wrap your head around, much less your life around, then welcome to the club, as they say. In John 14, the disciples have such a hard time comprehending the truth that God-with-us is in Jesus, that our Savior in exasperation said, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.” And you know what? They did! It took a crucifixion, an uprising from the grave, and the gift of the Holy Spirit to do it, but the early Christians became convinced that they had to go public with the news that God is in Jesus reconciling the world to godself. They found God accessible in Jesus, in fact undeniable. For through the mystery of the resurrection the Jesus who was became transformed into the Jesus Who Is.
Ed Farley, the theologian from Vanderbilt University, said that it was incumbent on us as Christians to practice gospel. That’s a provocative way to put it: to practice gospel — in other words, to do the works of the One who sent the early Christians, and who now sends us. To act for Jesus’ sake. To take up the often painful work of doing gospel in a world that will not likely thank us for it. Jesus anticipated that very thing in our scripture portion today: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”
I mentioned pain. The work we do for Jesus’ sake is costly. The German Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about that in The Cost of Discipleship, and then he lived it out in opposition to Adolf Hitler. That cost is often paid out even though it hurts to do it. Am I saying that it is holier and better to suffer pain than not to? Of course not. It is not better to hurt than not to hurt, Beloved! But to take up our part of the great work for Jesus’ sake will cause conscientious Christians to suffer at least to some degree because the kin*dom of God Jesus announced has never yet been realized in this world that God so loves. We see the odds thrown up against the vision of the kin*dom of God by the seemingly insurmountable resistance of “the way things are” in our world, and we experience wrenching dislocation, just like an arm popped from its socket. Every time I pray Jesus’ prayer, “Thy kin*dom come/Thy will be done/On earth as it is in heaven,” I feel the dislocation of that built-in contradiction.
But that has not stopped generation after generation of faithful people from offering their service in the name of Jesus, regardless of the friction. People who believed in the marrow of their bones that Jesus’ vision of a realized kin*dom of God was worth the expense and expenditure of their lives. I am not sentimental about human beings, past or present. I suppose that is partly because I am so aware of how prone I myself am to understand things so partially, and to stumble so often. But I cannot succumb to negativity about the Church because I am plainly amazed at how deeply my forebears cared about the work Jesus gave them to do. None of us invented faith, you know. It found us, passed along by the faithful people who went before us. We have each been surrounded by what the book of Hebrews called a “great cloud of witnesses,” some we know and can call by name. Think for just a moment, and the memory of their faces and their example will visit you to remind you that you have never really been alone. Others remain anonymous, known only to God, by whose ceaseless prayers and courtesy we have found this Christian meaning and purpose for our lives.
Mtr. Virginia Holleman and Fr. Christopher Thomas have shown us that the call to love and serve the children of God is as near as the awning-community of the homeless at the Dallas Public Library, and as immediate as our part of the Greater Dallas Coalition’s outreach to the impoverished and hungry in South Dallas. There is so much work that Jesus gives us to do! Wherever the need is found, followers of Jesus step up to face the challenge—and the motivation to do that so willingly has captured my heart and my mind. I stand amazed at the isness of the Risen Jesus among the involuntary sufferings of so many in our city, and also among those who voluntarily accept the cost of their discipleship in the effort to set things right “On earth/As it is in heaven.”
No one speaks about this more clearly than Lee Keck. And so I quote him for a bit more. He writes:
“Thy kin*dom come/Thy will be done/On earth as it is in heaven,” I feel the dislocation of that built-in contradiction. But that has not stopped generation after it, or to advance it. Somehow they have been persuaded that the [kin*dom] is worth the pain, and so they endure hardships, hostilities from siblings and peers, persecution by police and executioners—in this century no less than those that preceded it. That all too often they have inflicted suffering as well is a clearly tragic betrayal of the [kin*dom], but that should not eclipse the many instances when they were made to suffer for the sake of the [kin*dom]. Nor should those whose personalities and identities and feelings of self-worth are distorted by the need to be rejected (the persecution complex) be confused with those who accept suffering as the inevitable consequence of responding faithfully, though fallibly, to the ways in which the [kin*dom’s] coming rectifies life.
Then Dr. Keck moves to make final things crystal clear:
Such persons [he writes] do not talk of their own suffering, but talk of others for whose sake they are ready to accept what may befall them. Such voluntarily accepted suffering has two names: one is love, the other is Jesus—in perfect tense. (182)
For Jesus’ sake, Amen.
