Sermon for the
Fifth
Sunday of Easter
April 20, 2008
Acts 7:55–60
Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16
1 Peter 2:2–10
John 14:1–14
Year A
I.N.I. (In the name of Jesus)
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Pilgrimage is on the rise. Six thousand shrines and sites in Western Europe draw as many as 100 million pilgrims annually. Pastors’sabbaticals abound with scheduled stops at Iona in Scotland, Taizé in France, or in my case during the summer of 2006, with following trips in 2007 and in just over one week in 2008, the Holy Land.
We all love stories and have stories about how long journeys have transformed us. I think of the movie with Billy Crystal called City Slickers, where two urbanites rough-it on a dude ranch and through their out of the ordinary experience (in one scene, Billy Crystal’s character helped deliver a calf), they came to appreciate their families more. Or there is the growing memory bank of youth and adults at Christ the King who attend confirmation camp, where the pilgrimage is to Camp Calumet on the shores of Lake Ossipee in the shadow of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, revered by generations of New England Lutherans. Youth and select adults can regale you with tales of the canoe trip on the Saco River where we filled trash bag after trash bag with beer cans, how enthralling a lighted Frisbee throw in the dark was, or what it felt like to be a community of youth who practiced faith and friendship for five days together sharing highs and lows and praying together at the end of each day. I cannot tell you how close I feel to our youth because of these experiences.
Perhaps you’ve had your share of family road trips, excursions to America’s shrines like Disney World or Graceland, and can share the benefit of such journeys. I myself have visited the place of Mickey Mouse, and remember frequent car trips to Florida to visit my grandparents when I was growing up. But more often than not these feed the wanderlust of consumerism and entertainment more than being truly transformative.
I’d like to consider with you today how pilgrimage is something that is part and parcel of our Christian identity. Whether you are a globetrotter or a homebody, we all share the idea of our faith life as a journey. We are on a path together toward God. We walk together to discover Christ in our midst. As those who consider ourselves disciples, we are also following where Jesus led the way.
So join together in the Camino de Jesus, the way of Jesus. Be invited to walk with Jesus, in the place where he walked. You do not need to come with me to Jerusalem or Galilee, and drink in the sights and sounds, even though I would surely welcome it sometime.
In the geography of the gospels, the location of Jesus’ own journey is always before God. Wherever Jesus goes, whether it is to eat with friends or to a place set apart, to attend to a need that presents itself or to teach his disciples, it is against the backdrop of the God who creates and saves. In John, the gospel that we have been immersed in the past weeks, the sense of God in the room is so heightened that we might have a hard time telling Jesus apart from God. While Jesus calls God Father, in today’s gospel he goes to great lengths to say something like “if you hold a mirror to me, you will see the Father.” This is what he says in today’s reading to a confused Philip:
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…. The words that I say to you do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me….
With these and other words surrounding this passage, Jesus is preparing his followers for their journey ahead without his earthly presence. To stupefied and confounded followers and friends, Jesus assures them of the continuity of his mission. In his words to disciples from John, with the cross looming on the horizon, Jesus is able to see beyond the finality of his own death to a future where God and the world are more connected than anyone could ever imagine.
How does he describe the ongoing journey disciples will take after the cross and resurrection? It goes something like this: While the followers of Jesus go on, Jesus himself is preparing for them. And even while those who follow Jesus continue the journey, Jesus is a part of them. Within this communion of Jesus with God, and Jesus with his disciples, the road trip is packed with possibilities, and stuffed with promise. While the final destination is spacious and inviting, the adventure of getting there is likewise fantastic, and explodes all categories and descriptions.
I’ll never forget how this way of being in Christ became magnified during an experience in seminary. Students were meant to be exposed to the ways of the Latino and African-American culture and communities in a required course called Multicultural Theology. While many of the readings in liberation theology were provocative, and the experience of oppression and poverty in many ways was the context for understanding in a small way where these cultures were coming from, it was the weekends that we spent exploring neighborhoods and churches that really caught our attention.
The restaurant in one community was unlike any I had been to before or since, with fried chicken, black-eyes peas, collard greens, and biscuits that to this day when I remember them make my mouth water. But it was the minister at one of the churches that opened me up to the ways of God that were larger than my small suburban upbringing ever led me to see. The short Baptist preacher had riveting eyes and was challenging the students sitting in a circle to get out of their mousy and intellectual stupor to discover the greatness of God’s call to freedom and new life. He demanded to know just how our study and preparedness could actually be known and felt. and focused on one particularly shrinking violet in the room, who looked as if she might melt if he spoke any more to her. Finally, during the course of the interrogation, I found myself standing on a chair and shouting that “I have been called to preach good news to all God’s children, and declare the hope that is in me!” or something to that effect. It was a rather out of body experience!
And then the minister began interpret how being in Christ gives us power and potential. He actually quoted from John Jesus’ words that if we believe in him and the works that he has done that we will do even greater things than Jesus. For example, the minister said that he had preached to more people than Jesus ever did. He said that the Jesus movement turned out to be an even bigger venture than Christ in his life ever saw. And I had to agree with him, which blew my mind, to think that my own participation in faith as both one of the baptized and a called leader of the church was so huge. Imagine, acting in Jesus’ name to do as he did, forgive sins, release the imprisoned, heal the sick, and raise the dead.
But that is what we are all about, isn’t it, dear compatriots in ministry, where we commune with one another, with Jesus, and with God all at once?
Here today we will welcome Nicholas Armand Cambray, who was born prematurely and is now a healthy baby boy, loved and cherished by his family. While we welcome him, we are in truth introducing him to a whole new family, that includes us and all who have been born anew into the living hope through the washing waters from times past to the present into the future. Through baptism in God’s name, we will think of this little bundle with blue eyes as royalty, of the priesthood, sparked with the Spirit to become something even greater than what we now see, and that is precisely the community, kingdom, nation, and universe that we all are part of. Brother King Nicholas he is, with us Kings and Queens. Missionary Agent of God he is with us. Think of it, Nicholas and his family, our community, followers of Jesus from every culture and language all on the journey toward God’s promises, revealed as we walk with Jesus within and around us. If we are not changed and inspired by the experience of the sacraments, if we are not moved to act as agents of blessing and justice and peace and love through Jesus’ invitation and promises, than we might as well melt away.
Our pilgrimage in the Camino de Jesus is exactly where we need to be. Jesus has said that for us who have been immersed in the water of new life, who claim that new life in what we say and do, when we step out in faith we are on the path that is laid out by Jesus himself! Won’t you rejoice in the journey, and invite others on the road trip, the adventure of faith, to communion with Christ, in whose great name we pray and sing live?
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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