SERMON FOR THE SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER

TEXTS: Acts 5:27-32

When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

 Revelation 1:4-8

John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

 John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

TITLE: "Copyright"

PREACHED BY: the Rev. Stuart R. Tucker at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, Needham, MA on April 15, 2007.

In honor of Carter Memorial’s 140^th anniversary which will be two Sundays from today I’m giving you a surprise history quiz. Don’t thank me all at once.

Here’s the first question:

The Methodist congregation which eventually became Carter Memorial was founded by English immigrant knitters. Why? Why immigrants? Weren’t there any red-blooded American Methodists around? I went to the library and did a little research on Needham history. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I came up with a few snippets, some statistical snapshots, as it were, from the annual report of that year. From those yellow, crumbly pages I learned there were 80 babies born in Needham in 1867. Of these only 20 had parents who were both American citizens. 49 had foreign parents. The remaining 11 were of mixed parentage. So apparently the Needham of 1867 was an immigrant ghetto.

This leads to a second puzzle:

Why such a low birthrate for American couples? Well, you do need both a mom and a dad to produce a baby. This was just two years after the American Civil War which took the lives of 600,000. To give some perspective, in order to match that in Iraq at our current casualty rate we would have to sent troops there for the next thousand years. In the Needham 1867 budget, one of the largest line items was aid to families of volunteers: two thousand, one hundred sixty-seven dollars and seventy-two cents. In other words, this was money paid out by the town to widows and orphans of the war. Many of the would-be American-born dads of Needham may have been populating cemeteries in places like Gettysburg and Antietam; Hence, the founding of our congregation by immigrants.

Here’s a third puzzle for you:

If our congregation surviving for one hundred and forty years impresses you, what about the Christian faith? How in the world did the Christian faith survive for the last two thousand years? In A Short History of Christianity author Stephen Tomkins tells the story of a man appeared two thousand years ago in the Roman province of Judea claiming to be a teacher from God. Many Jews left their homes and jobs and followed him, believing that he was the Messiah. But he was executed by the Roman occupation, and his followers dispersed.

The name of this failed prophet was Theudas. He was not the only would-be messiah of the period. In fact there were quite a few of them. They all created quite a local stir, and almost all met a grisly end. Jesus of Nazareth was by no means the most famous of the time. Although his is now the most famous name in the world, no record of him written during his lifetime survives today. Judea was an obscure backwater of the Roman Empire and neither the comings nor goings of its rabbis caught the attention of the non-Jewish world.

So again, why did the Christian faith endure when so many would be messiahs and their followers of the period disappeared completely? Like the mystery of our congregation’s founding by immigrants, we have only snippets to give us clues. No newspaper recorded the events of Jesus’ ministry and what followed. But we do have what was written by Christians in the period between twenty to sixty years later. The three passages that make up today’s scripture readings present the early church’s vision of itself and its situation which is still applicable today. Ever since that first Easter Christians have been a people living in between. Behind us we have the triumph of Easter, in which Christ won for us the decisive victory over sin and death. Ahead of us we look for the ultimate culmination of that victory when Christ returns to this earth and the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of our God. In between these times, the church struggles with being faithful in proclaiming its witness to the resurrection of Christ sometimes in spite of heavy persecution.

Christians have always debated what actually happened the third day after the crucifixion and what meaning did it all have. What is clear is what the early church believed and taught. In John’s gospel, written some sixty years after Jesus’ ministry, the author addressed third generation Christians who may have had doubts about whether such an incredible event could have really happened. Doubting Thomas must have spoken for many of that generation as he does for many Christians today. "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side I will not believe."

John’s answer to those very understandable doubts was not to define down the resurrection. He did not make it easier to swallow by spiritualizing the event. Instead, John went the opposite direction and could not have made it more concrete. Jesus reaches out to Thomas and says "Put your finger here… Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." In the original Greek it is much more graphic: "Poke you finger through here. Jab your hand in here." Thomas falls to his knees and says, "My Lord and my God." At that point Jesus seems to look up from Thomas to speak directly to those generations of Christians who would follow. "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

Some early Christians dealt with these same doubts in a variety of ways. Some felt it would be crude to take this story literally. Better to understand the story on a strictly spiritual level or reduce it to a vague, abstract principle. Some, like the Gnostics, claimed that Jesus as not truly human, but was a spirit who only appeared in human form, and so was not truly raised from the dead. This sort of mythological approach would have been very marketable in the ancient Mediterranean world.

But those stray branches of the early church did not survive. It is ironic that the ones who accommodated their preaching to make it more acceptable to a wider audience were the ones who died off. The resurrection faith which was so out of step with the world that it led people to be persecuted and even put to death, that faith endured and is still with us to this day. Why in the end did this counter-cultural faith prevail while other, more marketable versions of Christianity, ultimately failed?

I’m not sure my attempt at an answer will satisfy anyone else. I can only invite you to seek your own answers if you are not satisfied with mine. Like Thomas, Jesus invites each of us to reach out to him in our own way.

My theory is that when Christian proclamation merely echoes current popular opinion it loses its reason for being. It becomes the same old product in different wrapping. It is true that many things Christianity offers can be gotten elsewhere. The Resurrection carries a message of hope. But we do not have a copyright on it. All religions offer hope whether you are Muslim or Methodist. In fact, hope is something that is basic to our humanity, whether we believe in God or not. Our hopes fulfill us, betray us, and reveal us for who truly we are. Spend a dollar on a lottery ticket and hope it pays against one in nineteen million odds. Spend a hundred million on a Dice-K and hope it pays in October. Kill a human embryo now and hope it cures certain diseases in fifteen years. We look for hope in a lot of places other than church.

Bible study is essential to our continued existence. But again, we do not have an exclusive copyright on studying the Bible. Every major university has a department of religion. If the church blinked out of existence there would still be tenured professors like Marcus Borg devoted to unlocking the Bible’s mysteries, not as a matter of faith, but as an example of great literature and as a historical resource.

We are called to care for the poor. But people of other faiths reach out to those in need. Habitat for Humanity is not church-related at all but it performs a vital ministry. Governments and international organizations like UNICEF do likewise.

There are a lot of essential things that the church does on which we do not have a copyright. Our denomination’s advertising slogan is "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors." But these qualities are not exclusive to Methodists or to Christians. In fact Cornell University uses the same words in the title of its inclusivity statement. (I hope they don’t sue us for copyright infringement.)

But there is one thing on which you might say the church has a copyright. Not in a legal sense but in the sense that if we were to stop doing it, it would not get done at all. I recall during the last election there was a political ad which ended with the candidate saying, "I’m so-and-so I paid for this ad. Who else would?" It is the same with proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. If we Christians didn’t do it, who else would? The answer is no one. Why would anyone else want to associate themselves with such a crazy, improbable tale? Many have tried to define it down or explain it away. Yet this congregation has endured for one hundred and forty years. The Christian faith has endured for two thousand years. It has done so by proclaiming the same message that propelled the apostles out of Jerusalem into the world; the same faith into which you and I were baptized. That proclamation is as simple as this: Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.