Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter-2023

 Being an Easter People?

John 20:19-31

As you know, our Sunday morning Lectionary is designed to take us through the Bible in three years, but on certain Sundays, because of the significance of the readings, we will read the same gospel passage in all three years.  This is one of those Sundays.   See if we can grab ahold of what the church considers so significant about this Sunday that we would halt our scripture rotations to emphasize this Gospel passage.

The setting for today’s Gospel story is in the Upper Room on the evening of the Lord’s Resurrection, Easter Sunday.  Jesus had been crucified that previous Friday and placed in a tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea.   In his Gospel account, St. John writes about Jesus having risen from the dead on that morning and appearing to Peter, Mary Magdeline and to himself, John.  Nonetheless, we find the disciples confused and afraid, huddled in the Upper Room “for fear of the Jews,” as John puts it.  They are afraid they too will be arrested and crucified.   

But then… everything changes.  Jesus comes and stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.”  All fear, confusion and doubt melt away.  He’s alive, just as Mary Magdalene, Peter and John said. 

Jesus then breathes on them the “Ruach of God,” the Breath of God.  Rauch is an ancient Hebrew word that can be translated breath, spirit, or wind.  We know the Rauch of God as the Blessed Holy Spirit.  With the Holy Spirit, Jesus empowers his disciples to live a new life in the reality of what they had just witnessed, which was the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead, and Christ commissions them to share this “Good News” with the world.  In this moment they become an Easter People.  As the hymn we just sung says, “Breathe on me, Breath of God, fill me with life anew, that I may love what thou dost love, and do what thou wouldst do.”  Being and Easter People, therefore, is not lived by our might or power, but by the Spirit, the Ruach of God.

Another key component to our becoming an Easter People is our Faith and Trust in the promises that God presents us at Easter.  It is no accident that St. John goes on to tell us the story of one of Jesus’ disciples, St. Thomas, on that evening, as well as Thomas’ experience the evening a week later.  This story highlights faith in what God has done at Easter as what opens the way for us all to become Easter People.  In other words, the great promises of God are actualized in our lives when we surrender in faith in what God has done for us on the Cross and at the Resurrection.   This is what allows us to live in this life as God’s Easter People.

Although we read from John 20 every year on this 2^nd Sunday of Easter, our Old and New Testament readings that support the Good News that John 20 proclaims do change.  There are many such readings for the lectionary writers to have chosen from.  One such reading is the passage today from 1 Peter 1.  Take up your bulletin, if you will, and follow along with me:

·    In verse 3 Peter writes, “… [Jesus] has caused us to be born again to a living hope.”  

·  Not only that, but in verse 4, Peter writes that this promise from God is imperishable, pure, and everlasting.

·  verse 5 tells us that, even though we are an Easter People with a great inheritance, we are still grieved by various trials in this life, which, Peter says, are a test of the genuineness of our faith.  We see once again the importance that our faith and trust in God plays in our salvation. 

·    Because, as Peter writes in verses 9, in it all, “we obtain the outcome of our faith, which is the salvation of our souls.”

So then, what does it look like for you and me to be an Easter People?  Let me conclude with these observations to this question:

1. First, to be an Easter People is to live a life that is as radical as the Resurrection itself, radical at least when compared to the standards and norms of this world.  To be an Easter People is a spiritual adventure in which we dare to live into something much bigger than ourselves with a faith that opens new vistas, new ways of seeing things, new ways of living, and a new understanding of who we are and whose we are. That is Resurrection Living. That is being an Easter People. 

2. Being an Easter People means offering up and shedding the debilitating effects of sin and guilt in our lives, laying them at the foot of the Cross.  

3. It is allowing the Holy Spirit to equip us supernaturally to transcend life’s burdens, challenges, and disappointments, and to do so with peace and joy.  

4. Being and Easter People is to have a greatly expanded worldview in which God is at the center, seeing everything as God sees it, and seeing others as God sees them.  This worldview makes our materialistic worldview seem very small and our secular concepts of living life to the fullest very limited.  

5.   Being an Easter People is a pilgrimage from self-absorption to self-giving.  It is to take on a sacrificial love akin to God’s own kind of love, Agape Love, to use the word that the Greek-writing authors of the New Testament uses to describe it.

6.   
And finally, being an Easter People is life that is open-ended for us just as God originally intended… not limited by time and space, not limited by death, but eternal with death no longer leaving our stories incomplete.  Jesus has conquered that barrier.  We are free to become the people that God intended us to be… healthy and whole in body, mind and spirit, perfected, completed, and everlasting.

Last week, Father Ross mentioned that Jesus’ Resurrection is so central to the Christian life that we Christians have taken Sundays as our Sabbath; in other words, every Sunday for us is a “Little Easter.”  Just as creation began on the first day of the week, we became a new creation on the first day of the week, the Day of the Lord’s Resurrection.  We became an Easter People.