The title of the movie – “Witness” – gets played out on two levels. On one level, the hardened cop, John Book, uses his street smarts to save himself and the boy. On another level, as Book tries to blend in with the Amish community, he begins to learn about another kind of witnessing – the witness that comes from the faith of the Amish community. In contrast to the cop’s independent, self-reliant and violent ways, the Amish witness to their belief in non-violence and reliance on the support of community members.

In the end, despite the heroism of the street-wise cop, it is the Amish community’s simple Christian faith, their reliance on each other and their rejection of violence that saves the day.

Throughout this season of Easter, we have seen how the early disciples witnessed to the resurrection of Jesus Christ in different ways. For some, it was the evidence of the empty tomb. For others, it was their first hand experience of the risen Jesus, walking with them or eating with them.  And for others, like Paul, it was hearing the voice of the risen Jesus.

Eventually, however, these eyewitnesses to the resurrection died. Witnessing to the risen Christ, therefore, became the privilege and the responsibility of the community of believers. Today’s readings all describe this shift from first-hand witness to the witness of the community.  In the reading from the Book of Acts, Paul and Silas are imprisoned for casting out a spirit of divination from a young girl. While in prison, they are miraculously freed from their chains by a violent earthquake. But rather than see this miracle of nature as a ticket to freedom, they reach out to the terrified jailor who is about to kill himself because he thinks his prisoners have escaped. The jailor is so overwhelmed by Paul and Silas’ concern for him that he asks them what he needs to do to be saved. The jailor then takes Paul and Silas back to his house and bandages up their wounds. Later, he and his entire family become believers and are baptized. What brings the jailor and his family to faith is the unity of mind and heart that they experience in Paul and Silas.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus comes to the end of his long conversation with the disciples in the Upper Room on the night before he is crucified. Now he reaches the point where he spells out for the disciples what they can expect when he is gone from them.  As a final comment, he tells them that he is praying that they will be one….that they will be united in their love for each other. He says that the love they are to have for each other, will be just like the love that the Father God has for Jesus and that Jesus has for the Father. He tells them that, once he is gone, their love for each other and for others will be a witness to his presence among them.

One question that always come up is, “what does Jesus mean when he talks about a unity of love?” Does he mean a kind of love where, in order to be part of this witnessing community, everyone needs to act or look or talk alike? No, in fact, it’s just the opposite. The love that Jesus is describing is not a bland uniformity. It’s a love that is expressed in many different ways.  What unites the disciples is not that they love each other in the same way, but that they are all united in their belief about who Jesus is and united in their love for him.

This is one of the biggest challenges for every Christian community.  Paul talks about the church as the body of Christ, with many different parts, each having its own unique role within the body. What makes the Christian community the body of Christ is not its uniformity. It’s the fact that each different member of the body is united in belief about Jesus and love for Jesus. And, yet, each member of the body will express this faith and love in very different ways. The challenge for us is that it’s so easy to begin to make assumptions about other people. It’s easy to expect that for me to love the other members of the body, they need to think and act like me.

When we do this, of course, we are buying into one of our culture’s most powerful features – the way that we tend to seek out people like ourselves and the way that we allow people and groups to go their own way, rather than to strive for a greater sense of diversity within our overall unity. Our culture encourages us to ask “what’s in it for me,” and “why should I have to work so hard to accommodate myself to others?”

If we stay connected to the love of Jesus Christ, and realize that he is present with us, then we begin to find strength in our diversity as a community. If we stay united in his love for us and our love for each other, then we will realize that unity doesn’t stifle growth, it fosters growth.

The challenge for us is to stay connected to this love and to believe in the power of our witness as a community that is united in Christ. And, in order to do this, we have to want to be in some kind of intimate relationship with the source of that love – Jesus, himself.  When we are connected to Jesus, then we know that it is not we, who witness to him, but it is his presence among us that enables us to witness to others.

Many of you may know the story of Le Chambon, the French village that, during World War II, sheltered over 2,000 French Jews from the Nazis. Many people in France followed the realistic course….the way of the world…and turned the French Jews over to the Germans and their French collaborators. But the Christians of Le Chambon refused to buckle under to the Nazis.

Led by the town’s pastor, Andre Trocme, their understanding of their commitment to Christ was that, when any child of God who is in need knocks on your door, you do not see a stranger and say, “Go away!” You see a brother or sister in need and say, “Welcome, come in.”

For four or five years, at great risk, the townspeople of Le Chambon hid the Jews of their area from the Nazis. They fed them, cared for them and became one with them in their pain and poverty and danger.

The people of Le Chambon lived out this gospel about unity in love. They also lived out what Paul and Silas did that night when they didn’t take the earthquake as an opportunity to flee for their lives, but instead, used it as an opportunity to witness to the love of Christ and invite their jailor to join their community.

Next month, you will all be invited to participate in a one day workshop to create a new mission and vision statement for Good Shepherd.  Every time church members gather to do this it presents a challenge.  The tendency is for people to focus only on what it is that is meaningful and valuable for them, rather to think how God might be calling them to be witnesses of God’s love to others.

It’s different isn’t it? It’s a different thing to think that the reason we exist as a community is to encourage and support each other to do the things we like to do together, rather than to think that the reason we exist is to be united in our witness to the love of Jesus Christ in our lives?

So, as we prepare for this workshop next month, take some time to ask yourself this question: What would it mean for you, and for us as a community to be a witness to the love of Jesus Christ?  What would that look like? How could our unity in love be expressed in a powerful way to others who have never experienced this way of living?

The Church of Christ is united…we are one in truth and love…only when the world is able to look at us who call Jesus Lord and say, “They don’t live for themselves. They live for and share the Lord’s life with us. They know no strangers, but say, ‘Come in. Come in and share the Lord’s life with us.’  They say, ‘Whoever is thirsty, let them come and drink this free gift we call the water of life.’”  Amen.

Although I’ve mostly been talking about the Gospel readings this Easter, you may have noticed an interesting contrast going on between the first readings – from the Book of Acts – and the Book of Revelation.  The stories from Acts, which, during Easter, replace readings from the Old Testament, are real-life, down-to-earth stories about the beginnings of the church as it grew from a handful of loyal disciples living in fear in Jerusalem, to an evangelistic movement spreading through the cities of Asia Minor. In contrast, the readings from Revelation are visions – visions of heaven…visions of a time when, as today’s reading says, “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” This is a vision of the celebration of the glory that takes place in heaven among generations and generations of the faithful who have been redeemed by God.

One of the things that we notice in Easter is how life in the church is a mixture of heaven and earth, and how we live in both worlds.  As one writer puts it, “we live between two shores. We dwell on earth, but our home is in heaven.” We find this paradox of living in both of these worlds at the same time in a lot of the clergy jokes that we love to tell. Here’s one I heard recently that caught my attention because just this past week we have begun to have some discussions about a capital campaign in 2011:

            A man called the church office one day and said, “Can I please speak to the head hog at the trough?” The secretary, highly offended, said, “If you mean the minister, then you may refer to him as ‘Father’ or ‘The Reverend Mr. So and So.’ But you may NOT refer to him as ‘the head hog at the trough’!”

            The man said, “Well, I was planning on giving $10,000 to the church’s capital campaign, but…..”

            “Hold on,” the secretary quickly replied, “the big fat pig just walked in.”

The community of early Christians thought of themselves as citizens of another country: heaven.  In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says, “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” As I have been saying the past few weeks, the early Christians lived their lives having experienced the power of the resurrection.  They knew that the risen Jesus was with them and would not abandon them. This awareness of the power of the risen Christ among them enabled early Christians to live a totally different life from the culture around them and they didn’t feel that they had to give in or fit in to their wider world. And it was this different kind of life…this quality of life….that was their most effective tool for evangelism.

So what was this mysterious “X” factor that made early Christians so different? It was, of course, the way that they witnessed to the resurrection of Jesus by living out in their lives the same kind of self-giving, sacrificial love that they saw in Jesus when he was with them.  We’ve all heard this so many times, haven’t we? “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” which is a paraphrase of the last sentence in our gospel for today.

We’ve heard it so many times that we tend to forget how powerful and influential this “Jesus love” can be.  Bruce Larson, the well known author and former assistant pastor at the Crystal Cathedral, tells a story of a young woman who joined his congregation in America, having moved from Angola in West Africa. Her name was Maria, and, Larsen says, “she was always laughing.” Her faith sparkled. Love leapt from her to others.

One day she went to a meeting on evangelism that the presbytery was sponsoring. All kinds of pamphlets, mission strategies, campaigns, and statistics were distributed to the participants. Lots of furrowed brows put lots of brain power into figuring out the best way to get the uncharted churched.

At one point, towards the end of the day, someone turned to Maria and asked her what they did in her church in Angola to evangelize the unchurched. Knowing how rapidly Christianity had grown in her country, they were curious to know more of the African “methodology.” Maria, slightly intimidated by the spotlight, stood up and after a moment’s thought, said, “We don’t give pamphlets to people or have missions. We just send one or two Christian families to live in a village. And when people see what Christians are like, then they want to be Christians themselves.”

Last Sunday, our “Good Shepherd Sunday,” I spoke about how important it is for us, not only to feel that we are known and loved by God and by others, but, also, how important it is for us to hear and know the voice of the shepherd, Jesus Christ. Today, all of our readings take us a step further and invite us to consider what it means not only to hear and know the voice of the Shepherd, but to follow  the Shepherd’s voice….follow, in the sense that, when we say we believe in Jesus this means we intend to try and live out in our lives the love that Jesus left us as a gift. 

The challenge for each of us is that trying to intentionally follow Jesus in this way is difficult. Christian love is not just about cozy feelings, or being nice to people, or even respecting the rights and needs of other people. It’s about responding to an invitation to follow Jesus by loving others in a sacrificial way…..in a way that goes far beyond feelings, duties or obligations.  This love, which we have come to refer to as “agape” love, is not motivated by feelings or the desire to be liked. It’s a gift -love that comes from outside ourselves. It’s not earned or deserved.

When we love as Jesus loved, then our love becomes a sign to others. When people look at us then they can tell that something special, something unique is going on. We can tell all the clergy and church jokes we want, but, at the end of the day, when we love like this, people will see in us the face of God and they won’t forget it.

Charles Colson tells a story that speaks about the challenge of living out this kind of love.  He was once being interviewed on Public TV and the interviewer, somewhat skeptically, was pressing him about his faith. “How can you be so sure about your faith?” she challenged him. Colson answered by telling a story of his time behind bars after Watergate, when several Christian men stunned him with a quality of love he had never known before.

One day one of these men – Al Quie – called him and said, “Chuck, because of your family problems, I’m going to ask the President if you can go home, while I serve the rest of your prison term.” Colson gasped in disbelief. At the time, Al Quie was the sixth ranking Republican in the House, one of the most respected public figures in Washington.  Yet he was willing to give this up out of his love for Colson.  For Colson, this  was a powerful witness that Jesus was real….that a believer would lay down his life for another.

Colson says, that, as he retold this story for the cameras, the interviewer broke down and waved her hand saying, “Stop, stop.” Tears mixed with mascara were streaming down her face, and she excused herself. Returning to continue the filming, the same things happened again. Later, the interviewer confessed that Al Quie’s willingness to sacrifice had touched her deeply, and she vowed to return to the church that she had left years earlier.

The reason for the existence of the Christian Church is very simple.  The Church is a new community of love. It’s a community where you and I are given the opportunity to receive this new commandment of love that Jesus gave us and try to put it onto practice. None of us are experts or naturals at this kind of love. That’s why we have to keep coming back to church. We may come here thinking we can learn how to love ourselves and others by ourselves. Jesus reminds us that we can’t. We may come here each week mindful of how good and law abiding we’ve been. Jesus reminds us that God’s love has nothing to do with rules and regulations.  We may come here each week thinking that what binds us to the other members of this community is our lifestyle, our education, our income, our shared interests. Jesus reminds us that God seeks out those who seem unworthy of our love.

A recent article in USA Today claims that young people are leaving the church in record numbers.  How should we respond? Without great influence from the Church the world would never have had universities, schools or colleges. It would never have had hospitals, or better prisons, or the end of slavery, dueling, segregation, apartheid, and kinder laws.  Maybe, one day, this love will also put an end to war, disease, famine and all forms of oppression. Maybe, one day, if Christians can embrace this new commandment of love in their lives, our dreams of heaven won’t just be the butt of jokes. We’ll see it, touch it and taste it because it will be real, and those young people who seem so indifferent to the church will be beating the doors down to get in. Amen.

Today is often called “Good Shepherd” Sunday.  Since our congregation is named “Good Shepherd” and not named after some historical saint, it’s as close to a patronal feast day as we get. This passage from John’s gospel about the Shepherd and his sheep, and our psalm for today – Psalm 23 – are probably two of the most popular passages in the Bible. They’re popular because they give us an image of our relationship with God and with Jesus, and they point to what most of us value about belonging to a church community. In the gospel, Jesus says, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” This passage speaks of a close personal relationship between Jesus, the Shepherd, and us, his flock.  It’s the same kind of relationship that the psalmist is talking about when he says, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Isn’t this one main reason that many of us are here? Because of our relationships with people here we can glimpse something of what the gospel and the psalm are talking about. Because of our relationships here we sense what it means to be known…to be loved…to be cared for – just at the Shepherd knows and cares for the sheep.

But let’s pause for a moment. Although many of us have experienced the joy of being known and cared for by other people….experienced, through our relationships here something like the relationship of the Shepherd to the sheep…we know that there are many people who have not experienced this. For many people, Psalm 23 or this gospel passage provide comforting images of God and of Jesus, but they don’t speak to us with any real power….they don’t really touch us where it matters most – in the heart. Why else do we see the slow decline in attendance at many churches like ours? If people’s hearts were really touched by the love of the Shepherd… if they knew with some depth the power of God’s love and forgiveness, wouldn’t they naturally want to be part of a Christian community where the voice of the Shepherd could be heard on a regular basis?

So what are some of the obstacles that people face in continuing to experience the presence of the risen Jesus in communities like Good Shepherd?

As people who have grown up on a sheep farm know, sheep are not like cattle. Cows are herded from the rear by hooting cowboys with cracking whips.  But this doesn’t work with sheep. Sheep need to be lead from the front. They won’t go anywhere that someone else doesn’t go first – namely their shepherd – who goes ahead of them to show them that everything is all right.  Sheep tend to grow fond of their shepherds.  A shepherd could walk right through the middle of a sleeping flock without causing a stir, whereas, if a stranger did this, it would cause pandemonium.

Sheep tend to consider their shepherds part of the family and the relationship that grows up between the two is very intimate and exclusive. The shepherd and the sheep even develop a language that outsiders aren’t privy to.  A good shepherd learns to distinguish a bleat of pain from one of pleasure. And the sheep learn that a cluck of the tongue means food or a two note song means that it’s time to home. Even when different flocks of sheep are all mixed up in a pasture, all the shepherd has to do is make a special call and the sheep withdraw from the crowd and follow the shepherd home. The sheep know who they belong to.

I know a lot of us resent being compared to sheep, but there’s something we can learn from this picture.  Many of us would be the first to admit that, in our relationship with Jesus, we feel that we are know, loved and forgiven by the one who gave his life for us. But how many of us would honestly admit that we know the voice of Jesus in the way that sheep recognize the call of their shepherd?

It’s interesting that, in English translations, the word “voice” appears 325 times in the NRSV Bible. To hear someone’s voice is to encounter what may be most distinctive about that person, to be in relationship with that person.  But how much time do we spend intentionally listening to the voice of God or the voice of the risen Jesus. Do we listen to the voice of the shepherd in our personal or family reading of scripture or in personal or family prayer? Do we intentionally cultivate an intimate relationship with the shepherd ….a relationship that is ours and no one else’s….what we would call an “owned” faith?

To use the language of John’s gospel, what keeps us from being part of Jesus’ sheepfold? Most of us would probably agree that it’s not about belief. We believe. The questions is, “are we connected to God in the midst of our harried, hurried lifestyles? Do any of us make the time, carve out the time to give priority to hearing the shepherd’s voice?

Another way that we exile ourselves from the community where the risen Jesus lives is through our expectations about what it means to be a member of the flock. I think that one of the reasons why the words of the 23^rd psalm are so comforting to people in the face of anxiety or worry is that they don’t focus on what we need to do to be in relationship with the shepherd. Instead, they describe what God had done for us: “He revives my soul; he guides me along right pathways; he comforts me; he welcomes me to a banquet; he anoints my head with oil.”

One of the obstacles that we face is that, so often, we put way too much emphasis on what we have to think, do or believe rather than on what God in Christ does. Psalm 23 clearly says that the sheep are in relationship with the shepherd because of what the shepherd does, rather than on what the sheep do.  

My former assistant in San Antonio once gave me a drawing that illustrates what we often expect we need to do in contrast to what the shepherd does for us. The drawing consisted of three related images. In the first image a pair of hands encircles the top of an elegantly shaped ceramic pot. The hands look as though they are just touching the vessel lovingly after the work of shaping and firing the clay – just enjoying the perfection of the completed vessel. Beneath this first image are the words, “Expect a miracle.”

The second image shows the pot again, this time without the hands. Two jagged cracks have broken open the mid-section of the vessel. Shards of pottery have fallen to its base. The interior of the pot is dark. But in the center of the vessel is not visible a bright, round light, and an equal brightness flows from the light, and spills out the front of the pot, beyond the broken shards.  “Expect a miracle.” The miracle we’d like to see is the one in which the vessel stays perfect and whole, not matter what happens to it….safe in its creator’s hands. We would like a life like that, and some people spend considerable time and energy in pretending that it is like that. Failing that kind of perfection, we might wish that, at the first sign of cracking, and after an appropriate prayer from us, Jesus would whisk right in and restore the pot to wholeness.  A miracle, yes, but then, we were expecting miracles, weren’t we? After all, isn’t the Jesus to whom we pray, God’s Messiah?

This is what is going on in our gospel for today. Jesus says to the people walking in the Temple, “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, but you do not believe.”  What are the works that Jesus did? Were Jesus’ works more like the first image or the second? In the second image, the hands that were on the outside have become the light on the inside, a light that shines in the darkness at the center of the pot…a light illumines the broken shards and even the space beyond the shards.

What were the people expecting? What are we expecting? That we have to be perfect, like the pot in the first image, in order to be part of the shepherd’s sheepfold? Or do we see the miracle…the real miracle….in the light that shines in and through the broken places of our lives….in the hospital room of a dying friend…..in the painfulness of a divorce or separation…in the anger that comes from hurt feelings and dashed hopes?

Isn’t the miracle we should expect that the love of Christ for this broken world will heal despair; that Christ’s love overcome brokenness? And that this love…the love of the shepherd….will lead us forward through the brokenness towards God’s bright and constant presence within us…..and that this love will spill over from out lives into the lives of others?

What keeps you from hearing the shepherd’s voice? Your busy, hectic life? What keeps you from belonging to Jesus’ flock?  Your expectations about who you need to be rather than what the Good Shepherd has done for you? Whatever the obstacles are, remember that the risen Jesus is here among us. The question is do we want to live without him being at the center of our lives? Amen.

There is an ancient tradition of the Easter joke…a tradition of telling a joke on Easter day that will bring a smile to people’s faces. So at the risk of being politically incorrect, here goes:

 A man walking along the Dover beach was deep in prayer. All of a sudden, he said out loud, Lord, grant me one wish.” Suddenly the sky clouded above his head and in a booming voice the Lord said, “Because you have TRIED to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish.” The man said, “Build a bridge to France so I can drive over anytime I want.” The Lord said, “Your request is very materialistic. Think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking. The supports required to reach the bottom of The Channel, the concrete and steel it would take! I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of another wish, a wish you think would honor and glorify me.” The man thought about it for a long time. Finally he said, “Lord, I wish that I could understand women. I want to know how they feel inside, what they are thinking when they give me the silent treatment, why they cry, what they mean when they say ‘nothing’, and how I can make a woman truly happy.” The Lord replied, “You want two lanes or four lanes on that bridge?”

I tell this joke because it’s a good introduction to the gospel story we just heard.  The gospel from Luke features two things: women figure prominently in the story of the resurrection of Jesus, and, just as the humor of a good joke is based on the unexpected, our story from Luke centers on the fact that the women come to the tomb expecting to find a body and are surprised to find the tomb empty.

But in our readings this morning there is another person who comes to realize something that probably came to him in the same way that the humor of a joke comes to us. It’s often said that, if you have to explain a joke you might as well save your breath.

And this is the way that Peter must have felt in our first reading from Acts. When Peter says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” he is, in essence, saying, “I have finally come to realize that the joke is on me!” By that, I mean that, like any good Jew, Peter had heard all the stories about the grace and power of God. He had heard all about how God is a God of grace and about the graciousness of God’s power…and about why everyone who got the point was laughing. But it just hadn’t sunk in yet.

He knew well the story about the Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, and how, after responding to God’s call they had taken that huge leap of faith and left their homeland. And he knew well the story about how Sarah and Abraham were sitting around in their tent one day, years later, when they had given up any hope of having children or grandchildren, when an angel appeared and announced that Sarah would have a baby even though she was 90 years old.

And Peter remembered well how Sarah laughed at the news because it was such ridiculous news, and how the angel told Sarah since she thought this was so funny, God would name her son Isaac, which means “laughter.”

But, you see, Peter never understood until now how all this applied to him. He didn’t understand, even after Jesus told the story about the son who had run away from home and wasted his inheritance….and how his father welcomed him back with open arms. He didn’t realize that the father’s joy at the son’s return was supposed to be like God’s joy and laughter – like the laughter after a good joke - over the fact that the son who was dead was now alive.

You would have thought that Peter would finally have gotten the joke, would finally have seen the truth, when Jesus told the story about the owner of the vineyard who hired some workers early in the morning and promised then a day’s pay’s for a day’s work and then hired some workers at noon and at the end of the day and gave all the workers the same pay. Peter would have realized how the early workers didn’t get the joke…how they didn’t appreciate the grace of the owner when he decided to pay everyone equally.

You’d have thought that, with all these explanations, Peter would have gotten the joke – the joke about God’s abundant, unearned grace so that, when the women came to tell him they couldn’t find Jesus’ body, he would have suspected that God was up to his old tricks and had something new and mysterious up his sleeve.

And you’d have thought that, by this point, Peter would have realized the truth – the truth that the grace of God is such that we’d better not count on our own limited expectations about life, because God is the one who goes beyond our expectations. You’d have thought Peter would know by now that when we limit our expectations about the grace of God, well, then, the joke is on us!

The joke is on us, isn’t it? The joke is on us human beings who are prepared for a God who strikes a hard bargain, but not for a God who gives as much for one hour’s work as he does for a full day’s work. The joke is on us who have lived so long in a world that fails to keep its promises that we cease to expect that God will keep his.

The joke is on us who, like the older brother, are so blinded and trapped by our own dead seriousness, by our determination to have what’s coming to us and to see that others don’t get something that isn’t coming to them that we can’t hear the laughter of a grace that loves nothing more than the embrace of one who was lost and who has returned.

The joke is on us who are so stuck in the “same old…same old” routines of our lives that we can’t believe that we could experience the power of God’s love working in and through us to bring about change.

And when the women went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, they found that the body was gone….and they were terrified. But the two men who appeared to them at the tomb asked them two questions: “Why do you look in a tomb for someone who is alive?” and “Don’t you remember all the things he told you when he was still in Galilee…that the son of man would be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again?”

The women who went to Jesus’ tomb on Easter Day failed to see that the joke was on them. They went expecting to find a dead body, just like Peter, who knew all about Sarah and Abraham, and all about the prodigal son’s father…and all about the promises of God’s grace….but he failed to see that the joke was on him.  Even when the women ran to him with the news that Jesus was gone, Peter still didn’t get it.

And that’s the point about Easter. If you have to explain the joke… if you have to explain about grace…maybe it’s just as well to save your breath! Grace, like jokes, can’t be explained. Grace, like jokes, just has to be enjoyed.

You and I….we, who are, for the most part, still stuck in our old lives with our old expectations about God, have come here today with Mary Magdalene and the other women to find Jesus. But one doesn’t “find” Jesus the way you’d find a lost button or a bicycle. The Living Christ calls our name…and we remember all the things he said and did about the grace and power of God…and he intrudes into our lives and shatters our expectations. Jesus finds you as he found Peter on the seashore that morning and cooked breakfast for him and told him he loved him…and then, after breakfast, sent him out to do all the works of grace that he’d heard about all his life.

What are we expecting here this morning? Here at the empty tomb? The difference for Peter came when the risen Jesus finally appeared to him…when the living Christ found Peter and the light dawned, and Peter remembered all the things Jesus had said and done about the grace of God.

And Peter was then able to say, “I have finally come to realize the truth. And the truth is that the joke is on me….because I’ve expected to little of God. I’ve expected a dead body, but the grace and power of God has raised Jesus Christ to new life.”

We don’t go looking for Jesus. The risen Jesus comes to us. And he’s looking for you right now. Remember all the things he has told us about the grace and power of God. You can have that power in your life.  That’s the promise of this day. The one who was dead has been raised and he is out searching for us…to bring us the power and grace of God. Take my word. It’s no joke!  Amen.

Tonight, the night we call Easter Eve, is the one night of the year when Christians experience what it means to be the church. In the early church, this was the most important time of the year…the time when Christians came to the great cathedral churches in the middle of the night…to celebrate baptisms and to renew their covenant with God.

Unlike Easter morning with its bright lights and joyful music, tonight we begin in the darkness. This darkness is the darkness of Good Friday. On Friday, Jesus died and, with his death, everything ended. Jesus and his cause – his message, his purpose, his reason for being – were all completely refuted.

Everything Jesus accomplished ….everything he stood for appeared to be defeated. In his humiliating and godless death, Jesus had been exposed as a lawbreaker and a blasphemer – a dangerous seducer of the people. The law had won. The establishment had triumphed. So, before it became a sign of victory, the Cross represented the complete refutation of everything the disciples had given their lives to.

So tonight we begin in darkness to experience what Jesus’ disciples experienced – the world as they knew it had ended. We begin in darkness…the darkness of a tomb, the darkness of a place of death and decay and destruction.

Then, in the middle of this darkness, we do what our Jewish brothers and sisters did this past week on the night of the Passover. We tell stories from the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, while we wait in the darkness…the story of creation, the story of our deliverance at the Red Sea, the story about a field of dry bones being breathed back into life.

This kind of story telling - telling stories that remind us of all the things that God had done in history to save God’s people  - is one of the things that we have largely forgotten how to do in the church today. Did any of you go to summer camp or were any of you involved in cub scouts or girl scouts? Do you remember how excited you were to sit around the campfire at night and tell ghost stories? I had a camp counselor who could scare us half-to-death.

Of course, because he was a wise person, he knew that the purpose of telling these stories wasn’t really to scare us, but to remind us that, now matter how scary life gets, we will always find support and strength in our parents, friends and adult mentors. This is why we tell these stories. They are stories of faith that lift us out of despair. They are stories of hope that enable us to walk into the darkness and not be overwhelmed by it.

Then, after we have heard these stories of salvation, we celebrate baptism. Why do we do this…and why did the early Christians celebrate baptism in the dark instead of in the light? We do it because we know that Christian faith begins not when the lights come on, but here in the middle of the darkness. Our faith begins in a tomb where nothing is alive…except the grace and love of our God who can bring life out of death and hope out of fear.

And this is the great mystery that we celebrate tonight…and that Christians have witnessed to for centuries. It is the mystery of the resurrection – the mysterious fact that God’s love works in and through the empty, fearful and painful places of our lives. One of the reasons that this night is so powerful is that we often try to forget that God can enter into the darkness of our lives and save us when our world comes to an end.

But celebrating baptism in the darkness is a powerful reminder that we can let go and surrender all of our painful memories, all of our guilt and shame for things we have done in the past…tonight, in the dark, we can offer it all up to a God who, in Jesus Christ, has entered into our pain and suffering and redeemed it. 

But what happens to us when we leave tonight? What happens when this service is over and when we go back to our homes….back to our jobs….back into the world…a world that has such a hard time believing that darkness can be a powerful sign of God’s love and forgiveness?

For one thing, our service doesn’t end in baptism. It concludes with Holy Communion. Our celebration of baptism concludes with a feast of bread and wine in which we receive the promise of being in fellowship with Jesus Christ…the promise of being bound together with him in his life …the promise of being active members of Christ’s body in the world.

The promise of Easter is the promise of continuing to live out our faith in the world… our faith in the resurrection…the faith that we have experienced in the dark of the night is a faith that continues to guide and strengthen us during the day.

Many of us have been blessed to know – either first hand or at a distance – people who live out their faith in the resurrection, sometimes in the face of tremendous obstacles. One such person is Paul Rusesabagina. He is the man portrayed in the film, Hotel Ruwanda. During the 100 days of the Ruwandan genocide, from April 6, 1994 through mid-July, Paul sheltered 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees in the Hotel des Mille Collines in the city of Kigali, where he was the general manager. Like many people who practice resurrection, Paul lived through some very dark times and experienced some terrible things.

On April 6, when the genocide began, he was at the hotel with his wife’s brother, Thomas, and his sister-in-law, Phyllis, celebrating a new job. Paul’s wife had not been able to join them and was at home. Suddenly she heard missiles overhead, a sound she’d never heard before. She rushed to call Paul and urge him to come home.  Like many others, Paul believed in the United Nations and felt safe going back home. So he told his relatives that he would see them the next day. But they never saw Thomas or Phyllis again because they were both killed.

Since that terrible time, Paul has created a foundation, the Hotel Rwanda Foundation, which is working to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the Great Lakes region of Africa, as well as trying to heal the long-term effects of the Rwandan genocide.

Tonight, we bring Sky, Evan and Andrew to this baptismal font to immerse them in the mysterious compassion of God, to join them forever to the life of the One who died and rose again. And then we will invite them to begin the lifelong journey of being nourished in the sacrificial love and life of Jesus Christ by receiving the bread and wine of this Eucharistic meal.

I can’t tell you exactly what the resurrection means. Resurrection is a mystery that has to be experienced. We have to enter into the darkness of this night….we have to learn to tell our stories of faith in the dark in order to truly understand the miracle of this new resurrection life.

But I can describe this life because I have seen it in the lives of other people….I have seen it in the lives of people like Paul Rusesabagina. I have seen it in church communities, like Good Shepherd, that have faced dark and difficult times in the past.

Tonight we invite Sky, Evan and Andrew to join this compassionate community that strives to practice resurrection. And our hope is that as they continue to grow into the full stature of Christ, they will become witnesses to others of the mystery of this new kind of life that we call resurrection life. Amen.

Today, the day we call Good Friday, we come face to face with Jesus’ willingness to suffer death on a cross. Today, we have to come to grips with a God who is willing to submit to the powers of this world, to the brutality of hardened criminals, to the violence of tyrants and dictators like King Herod, and to the senseless, mindless suffering we see on the streets of American cities and in the streets of Baghdad and Kabul.

But we need to consider the fact that, when Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn’t just cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that, for most people, is usually more feared than physical pain.

As brutal as it was, crucifixion was designed with more than one thing in mind. The other purpose of crucifixion was to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen.

As one writer puts it, “we have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated.”

This was why the crucifixion was such a blow to Jesus’ disciples and why many of them abandoned him and scattered after the crucifixion. They just couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity and triumph.

Today, Good Friday, we have to ask the question, “What is the connection between this type of suffering and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it that the gospels says, “it is necessary to suffer in this way in order to enter into glory?”

 In August of 2008, a family I know experienced a horrendous tragedy.  The family, members, who live in Denver, were vacationing on the Oregon Coast with some of their Oregon relatives. One Sunday morning, as the parents of this family were walking on the beach with their oldest daughter, a small plane that had just taken off from a nearby airfield, developed engine trouble and crashed into the house they were renting. The couple from Denver’s two younger children and one of the children’s cousins were killed in the ensuing fireball.

It is difficult…almost impossible for any of us to understand what it must be like to go through a tragedy like this. Even though I have experienced my fair share of family tragedies in 30 years of ministry, it was very challenging for me to preach at the memorial service held for these children. I had lost touch with the family until recently when I received an email from the mother announcing that she and her husband were expecting a baby girl this month. In the email, she mentioned that her daughter, the older daughter who was not in the home when the plane hit, was having very mixed emotions about the arrival of a new sister. In my response, I said something that, subsequently, I worried might have been misunderstood. I said that her daughter would be “happier and stronger” for having gone through this tragedy.

What I was trying to say, of course, is what many of us have experienced in our own lives, but is difficult to rationally explain. The times in our lives when we have experienced a tragic accident, when we have witnessed the death of a loved one, when we have been on the receiving end of emotional abuse, or felt completely powerless, or gone through a humiliating incident that once happened to us, or made some mistake that left us publicly exposed – it is often these experiences that have created in us what could be called “a depth of soul.”

Looking back in these experiences, we realize that, as a result of them, we look at life very differently. We become more empathetic, more compassionate towards others. We become more tolerant and patient with family members and others who are hard to live with. In the dark and difficult times of our lives we know that we are not alone. We know that God is in the midst of our pain and suffering. Many of us, like Jesus, have, in one way or another, experienced the pain, and, perhaps, the shame and guilt that comes from losing people we love. Many of us have been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And because we have been through this we have developed a depth of soul.

This is what I wanted to say to the mother about her daughter. By “happier” I meant that she would have a “depth of soul.” She would have a more compassionate heart and deeper awareness of others, and that this would, in the long run, make her a happier person.

But, as many psychologists and theologians have noted, depth of soul comes in very different forms. Some experiences of humiliation and suffering are not always healthy.  For example, if we compare Judas and Peter in our Passion Gospel we see two different ways of dealing with failure, sorrow and suffering. Both of these men were heartbroken over Jesus’ crucifixion and what they had done to contribute to it, but they responded in very different ways. In Matthew’s Gospel, when Judas realizes what he has done in betraying Jesus, he tries to return the money he was paid by the chief priests and the elders. But when they refuse his offer, in despair, Judas went and committed suicide. There was nothing hopeful about the sorrow that Judas experienced. His humiliation did nothing to open his heart to the forgiveness and mercy of God. There was no depth of soul for Judas.  There was only despair – the kind of despair we see in many people who seek escape in addiction or other self-destructive lifestyles… or, respond to their humiliation by living lives of violent crime and murder.

In contrast, Peter let his remorse and grief lead him to a new level of faith and trust in life and in God. Peter’s humiliation led him to experience a depth of soul. His pain led him to realize that God was working graciously and redemptively within this tragedy.

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. But that pain stretched his heart to a great depth. And that new space did not fill in with bitterness, anger, rage, or self-destruction. It filled, instead, with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we are still struggling to understand today.

The former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, says, “In the mystery of suffering, we have arrived at the heart of faith.” You notice, he said “at the heart,” not at the understanding. Good Friday is a day for us to stare in wonder and amazement at this great mystery – how such suffering and humiliation can stretch our hearts and fill them with compassion. Good Friday is a day to experience, not necessarily to understand, the strange, absurd, even crazy way that God has revealed his love for us. May our hearts be stretched and our souls deepened by this day. Amen.

We call today Maundy Thursday. The word Maundy comes from the Latin, mandatum, from which we get the word “mandate.” A mandate is a command or an order that has some authority. Maundy Thursday is the day when we celebrate Jesus’ giving to the disciples a new command or a new set of orders regarding what they must do in order to enter the kingdom of God.

Another word for “mandate” is “covenant.” Tonight we celebrate how Jesus established a new covenant relationship between God and his people. It’s the new covenant brought about by the love that is revealed in Jesus Christ. Jesus had talked about this new covenant, but now he was doing something to give the disciples a permanent reminder and an enduring symbol of Jesus’ love for them and for the world.

Tonight, we celebrate how Jesus gave his disciples and gives us two different actions that symbolize this new covenant.  He gave us bread and wine as a symbol of his life. In doing this, he gave the disciples what had been a Jewish Passover meal a new meaning. Whenever they ate this meal together and used these words, which Jesus used, he would be present with them. Whenever they shared bread and wine in his name, this new covenant would be activated in them and through them…forever.

On Maundy Thursday, we also remember how Jesus gave the disciples an additional sign of this mandate of love – the washing of feet.  When Jesus wrapped the towel around him and washed the disciples’ feet, he wanted to drive home the point that Paul makes in his letter to the Corinthians. When we eat the bread and drink wine that represent Jesus’ new commandment, this isn’t just an occasion when individuals receive forgiveness of sins or when we receive grace to grow spiritually as individuals. Paul says that when we do this in remembrance of what Jesus did for us, we become members of his Body…. we are united with everyone else, the whole body of the faithful, who are also joined to Christ. Jesus commanded the disciples to wash each other’s feet as a sign of the kind of community they were to be. They were to do to others as Christ had done to them…they were to do acts of servant love for others.

So, tonight, we celebrate the fact that Jesus gave us two things to remind us of God’s covenant of love – he gave us a meal and he gave us himself as a role model of how we are to live our lives. When you think about it, meals and role models are two of the most important ways that we remember who we are and what is our purpose in life.

When I think of my grandmother, I can’t help but remember the three months I spent with her in the late 70’s. And I will never forget the fresh Cape Cod strawberries that we ate almost every day of the summer. It is these familiar meals that keep us connected to the people we love and who love us, whether it’s a Thanksgiving turkey dinner with friend our relatives,  a home-baked apple pie when we returned from college, or a bowl of fresh strawberries and cream eaten with our grandmother.

I can also never forget the people who modeled servant love for me: a 4^th grade teacher who taught me about respecting the dignity of every person; my 8^th grade history teacher who taught me the importance of team work; my Bishop in Chicago, who never forgot the names of the people whose parishes he visited. We have all known these people in our lives – the people who reflected something of Jesus’ servant ministry… the people who showed us how to love and care for others.

But, when Jesus gave his disciples these two signs of his covenant love, he did it in a way that was completely unexpected. He did it in a way that got people’s attention …got their attention in a dramatic, even radical way.  For the disciples, who, at the Last Supper, were expecting either that night or the following night, to eat the flesh of the sacrificial lamb - which united them to God and to each other – it would have been a total shock to their Jewish ears for them to hear Jesus say, “This is my blood of the New Covenant; drink this”. It would have been shocking because Jews were forbidden to drink blood or to eat meat containing blood because the blood of an animal or a person was believed to contain the life of that animal or person.

In the same way, in Jewish society, although it was the custom for a host to provide water for a guest to wash his feet, foot washing was something one did oneself. The Jewish household codes were very clear in saying that washing of a master’s feet could not be required of a Jewish servant. Even a slave would be spared such humiliation. So, for Jesus to command that his disciples do this, as he does in John’s gospel, would have been received as a radical suggestion… radical because it would have been so degrading and humiliating.

What both these symbolic actions have in common is that they would have caused an emotional  reaction from people and I believe Jesus knew this when he suggested it. It’s as if Jesus is acknowledging that fact that creating a new covenant of love between God and God’s people, these actions may provoke anger, resistance, betrayal and even death.

Tonight is the night when we remember and celebrate what Jesus did, what actions he took that make it possible for us to live our lives in the world…the be members of  Christ’s body….to be members of the community of the church. Each time we come together as a Christian community to celebrate the Eucharist or to live out our faith by serving others, this is a remembering of Christ. But it’s also a time for us to remember that when we take Jesus’ life into ours and when we go forward demonstrating the kind of free, liberating love that Jesus embodies, we will probably run into resistance. We can never get away from fact that loving like Jesus loved had a cost and has a cost for us today.

In his historical novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, the great South African writer and prophet, Alan Paton tells a story about a South African judge by the name of Jan Christian Oliver. A black pastor invited him to attend his church service on Maundy Thursday. Given the fact of apartheid, the judge knew he would be risking his career if he went; but meaning to be a good man, he accepted the invitation.

Judge Oliver learned on his arrival that it was a service of foot washing, and was urged to participate. He was called forward to wash the feet of a woman named Martha Fortuin, who, as it happened, had been a servant in his own house for thirty years. Kneeling by her feet, he was struck by how weary they looked from so many years of serving him. Gently moved, he held her feet with gentle hands and kissed them. Martha fell to weeping, as did many others. The newspapers got word of it, and Oliver lost his political career. No doubt, however, he found his soul.

We are here tonight to remember the new covenant of love that God has made with us in Jesus …. the covenant given to us in a sacred meal and in a model of servant love.  But more than that, we are here to try to comprehend the great mystery of God’s love for us….a love that lasts and never runs out, but a love that is also costly. As we move into Good Friday and Easter, let us pray that God will lead us to discover the joy and the power of following Jesus and his servant love.  Amen.