May 1, 2005 - Sixth Sunday of Easter - Father Andrew Green

FIRST READING: Acts 17: 22-31
PSALM: 66: 7-15
SECOND READING: 1 Peter 3: 13-22
GOSPEL: John 14: 15-21

(Audience participation will be noted in bold print and italics)

Before I launch into the sermon, I want to do a little teaching. How many of you know what the Apostle's Creed is? Worse than I thought! O.K. I think it's on page 96 in your prayer book. At Morning Prayer, baptisms, funerals, and weddings we use the Apostle's Creed, and, on Sunday mornings, we use the Nicene Creed. There are about 100 to 150 years between the two Creeds. There is a line in the Apostle's Creed that, in the old prayer book when talking about Jesus, it says "He descended into Hell". The new one, the one you have on page 96, says "He descended to the dead". Over the years, I have run into a lot of folks who were sure that we changed that to 'descended to the dead' because Hell seems so unpolitically-correct, and that for Episcopalians to even mention Hell was so inappropriate. Well, the fact is that the reason they changed it was because it was a poor translation. The word in Greek is Hades, which just means the place of the dead. The word for Hell is Gahena, and Hell is the place where Greek, non-Jewish bodies were burned outside of Jerusalem. So, for a Jew or a Jewish Christian, one of the worst things they could imagine happening was to have their body burned in a pagan burial ground. So, a lot of the thinking about Hell, fire, and brimstone is to do with burial practices.

The reason I am bringing this up is because the reading from First Peter connects with this. It says, "Put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit in which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison". When you hear about Jesus descending to the dead, this is between Good Friday and Easter Morning, and evidently He had a preaching mission to those who had died before He came along, so that they could also be included in the economy of God's salvation. Now, this doesn't come up very often, and, to my knowledge, this is the only reference in the Scriptures to it, but the Creed picked it up. So, in case you ever hear the Apostle's Creed again, you will know, and you can tell your friends about it.

Teaching is one of the jobs that I have, but I am very grateful that salvation is actually not my responsibility. Aren't you glad? Can you imagine, instead of missing an announcement or something, "Oh, dang! I forgot salvation today! We will have to add that in later!" But who is responsible for salvation?

(lots of low-keyed mumbling!)

You don't know?! O.K. Who is responsible for salvation?

God!

God! God! Salvation is on God's ticket, not ours. Do you understand that? We are saved by God's Grace. We are saved because God loves us and because God's good pleasure is to see us become a part of the Eternal Kingdom that will live with God in Heaven forever. Amen?

AMEN!

O. K.! That's salvation. Salvation is God's responsibility. It is not up to you or to me to save anybody. Do you ever hear about preachers saving souls? That's wrong! None of us preachers ever save anybody's souls - Thank God!

But we do have a responsibility . . .

AMEN!!

I love it! Thank you! Good! An AMEN for the AMEN, please!!

AMEN!!

All right! But we do have a responsibility. We do have a responsibility, and the First Epistle of Peter also tells us what our responsibility is in the economy of God's salvation. It says, "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you". Now, I have to tell you that, when I first memorized this, I memorized it in the King James version, or, "Always be ready to make a defense for the faith that is in you" - a little bit shorter, and it is odd that it is shorter in the King James version! Always be ready to make a defense, or to give an accounting, for the hope that is in you - that is our responsibility, and that is, as Christians, what God is asking each one of us to be ready to do. So, there are some questions about this, and there might be some head-scratching going on out there. Now that you are hearing that this is your job, that this is your responsibility, to be ready with an accounting for the hope that is in you, you might be thinking, "O.K. now. What's that hope?" What are we hoping for?"

What are we hoping for? Did God promise that we would all be rich?

Did God promise that we would all be rich?

NO!

O.K. Did God promise that we would all live to be 110?

NO!

O.K. What did God promise us?

SALVATION!

Salvation! God promised us life eternal with God in Heaven, provided by the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, His death on the cross, and His resurrection to God's right hand. That's what our salvation is.

But our hope is actually more than that - our hope is about not being left alone. In the Gospel today, Jesus is talking with His disciples, and, frankly, His good-bye message to His Disciples is longer than anything He has said to anybody else throughout the rest of His ministry. He spends about four chapters saying good-bye to His disciples in John's Gospel, and He talks to them about, if they follow His commandments, He will send another advocate, another counselor, another helper, to be with them. He promises He will not leave them desolate. Our hope is ultimately that we will be with God, and we will not be alone.

Now, I don't know about you, but I have had some bad times in my life when I thought I was all alone. The worst of them was when I was out with the Boy Scouts in the dark, and they thought it was good fun to see if they could all hide from me out in the woods. And here is, I think, about 14-year-old Andrew out there going, "Hey guys! Come on back!" - and then Andrew crying because they didn't come back. So, being alone and thinking that you might be left desolate is pretty nasty, but, in a sense, that is at the heart of our hope - that God promises us a relationship that never ends.

Now, what is it that we are responsible for in order to participate in that hope? Jesus says in the beginning of the Gospel today, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments". And now, I am going to give you a little heads-up here in case you are not quite ready when I ask you to say something back to me. In John's Gospel, how many commandments does Jesus give us?

One? Two?

Somebody is sneaking the answer in there! I heard two - Wrong!

ONE!

One! Jesus gives us one commandment in John's Gospel. Now you might get this confused with His telling us to go and make disciples of all nations and to baptize, and then to do Communion until He comes again, but that is not John's Gospel. In John's Gospel, He tells us one commandment, and there is only one thing in all the Gospels that He tells us is called a commandment, and it is that we would "love one another". Jesus tells us to love one another as He has loved us, and He tells us over and over again. He says that, not only is it how we are to interact with each other, but he says it is how people will know that we are really Christians. He didn't say, "They will know you are Christians because they see you parked in front of St. Paul in the Desert". He didn't say, "They will know you are Christians because you have a really gorgeous cross on this week". He said, "They will know you are My disciples because of how you love one another".

Now, on first thought, that may seem like a rather under-whelming kind of requirement to participate in the hope that God has for all of us, but think about it. If Jesus had asked us to love people in a distant land, whom we have never met, that might be pretty easy. But think about it, particularly those of you who have been with somebody for 20 years or more - Who might be the most difficult person in your life to love?

(a very small 'what?' can be heard from the choir area!)

It is easy to love somebody you never have anything to do with. It is easy to love somebody that you never have conflict with. It is easy to love somebody who has never hurt you or whom you have never hurt, but to love someone whom you are with, day-in and day-out, someone who knows you and knows all the buttons to push - loving . . . .

( laughter from the choir area)

. . . loving that person is often very difficult!! So, in fact, Jesus has given us a very high calling when He has asked us to love one another.

Now, I don't think he just meant within our families; I think he also meant within the Body of Christ. If we were just asked to go out and love the Methodists, I think it would be easy; but to love one another within the Church, within St. Paul in the Desert, within our Diocese, within the National Church - when we are supposed to share so many things together, but we see other folks, and we see them getting it wrong, as far as we are concerned, and we get it wrong as far as they are concerned - it is tough to love people when you don't actually see eye-to-eye, but you are supposed to. That is the challenge that Jesus has given us. That is what we are expected to do, and, to some extent, that informs our hope.

What I am doing here is that I am trying to kind of focus on this so that, as you leave here today, if you were to be out at brunch and somebody were to accost you and to demand an accounting for the hope that is in you, you might be able to do it! You might be able to let them know, "You know what? I am convinced that God loves me and that God has asked me to love my brothers and sisters in the faith and, indeed, all other people, and, in fact, God has promised me the Holy Spirit to help me do it. And that is what I believe. That is what I am willing to stake my life on. That is what I am willing to give myself to".

In First Peter, the author there tells everybody that, when they give that accounting, they are to do it with gentleness and reverence. So now, have you ever seen anybody do anything with gentleness and reverence that involved a finger of any sort pointing at you? When we are asked to give a defense for the faith that is in us, when we are asked to account for the hope that is in us with gentleness and respect, it does not happen from a position of superiority. It does not happen from a position of, "I know better about these things than you do". It comes from a deep position of knowing God's love in our hearts, having experienced forgiveness and new life, and having that be the source that we constantly turn to for the way that we live. And then, what we are doing is that we are saying, "I know, because I have lived it."

Now, I want to finish this with a quote from somebody. We had a funeral yesterday for Doug Carner, and Jay, who read the Epistle today, preached before I preached, and he did a wonderful sermon.

AMEN!

Amen! He talked about a conversation he had with Doug just a few days before Doug died. He was talking with Doug, and Doug said, "You know; I know all of the promises that God has for me, and I believe all of them". And then he took Jay's hand, and he said, "And I know they are true. I am not afraid of anything".

I can't imagine a more fantastic witness - to be facing death and to list and to acknowledge all of the promises that God has for us and say, "I know they are true, and I believe them, and I am not afraid of anything". I pray that, as we leave here today, each of us, if accosted, could come up with a witness that simple, and that elegant, and that full of the real hope that, by the power of God's Spirit, ought to be in every one of our hearts.

AMEN