3 Easter A

April 6, 2008 

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116:1-4, 10-17

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

In my former career I often got a phone call from someone who wanted to have a sofa reupholstered and wanted an estimate. My response was generally that I could say with some accuracy what the labor would cost and if the person could answer a few questions, like how many seat cushions does it have, does it have a tight back or loose back cushions or does it have a skirt, then I could tell them how many yards of fabric it would take. I was always amazed how many people were talking to me about a sofa they had sat on for ten maybe even twenty years and when I asked those questions they said they didn’t know, they’d have to go look. They couldn’t remember how many cushions it had or if it had a skirt or not. They had gotten so used to living with that piece of furniture over the years they stopped paying attention to it. Stopped even looking at it really. I suppose they were tired of it. The sofa was outdated or ugly. Maybe they just wanted to change other things in the room and the old sofa didn’t fit anymore.

A sofa is one of the largest pieces of furniture you can put in a living room or family room. I used to counsel people to choose it carefully. I told them all the places to look so they could see how well it was crafted. Besides being a large piece of furniture, a sofa is expensive. Most people want to choose one they can live with for a while because through all the changes you might want to make to a room over time, the sofa will be right there, taking up as big a space as ever and you will have to deal with its presence. I advised people to buy a sofa with a strong hardwood frame. That way, if they ever wanted to reupholster it, they had a sofa with a good foundation that could endure the work of stripping away the old to build up the new.

In today’s lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, Jews from a vast region, Jews by birth and Jews by choice were all gathered together in the same house for the Feast of Pentecost. You know the story, how the Holy Spirit came like a mighty wind and forced its way inside them. After that, all the different dialects from that vast region suddenly found a common language. They all had ears to hear what Peter had to say and thanks to his speech three thousand Christians were born that day through baptism.

If you look closely at the structure of Peter’s speech (the whole speech, not just the snippet we heard this morning) it will be familiar to you because his words are the foundation of our baptismal covenant. The covenant has two parts. The Apostles Creed, which is the part where we acknowledge that God is God, that God was made known in the world in a flesh and blood man named Jesus. He lived and died, was raised from the dead, then joined God in heaven. And through him we are promised forgiveness of our sins and life everlasting now, and after we die.

That’s the first part. In the second part after we acknowledge who God is and the promises God has made to us we make our own promises. We say this is what we believe about God and what God has promised us. Because of that we make these promises to God. We know we are not equal to God but God’s promises together with our promises bind us to God in a covenant relationship. If you will forgive the simplicity of this comparison, the Baptismal covenant is like an ancient sofa that we inherited from our ancestors in the Church. It goes at least as far back as when Luke wrote the book of Acts a couple of generations after the resurrection of our Lord.

I haven’t run into anyone who said they had a problem making the promises in the baptismal covenant. I do run into people who have a problem with the Creed, with the acknowledgement of who God is, who Jesus is and the promises attributed to God in the Creed. Modern day disciples who question the ancient claims of the creed about God and Jesus and the promises God made through him to every generation, including our own, are like Cleopas and the other disciple. Those two were so disillusioned and confounded by the whole Jesus experience they turned and walked away from their community. They once believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the one God promised to send to redeem Israel but when they saw him die they did not believe that anymore. They didn’t know what to believe about the resurrection. They were unable to believe with the rest of their community that God could act in a way they could not understand until Jesus came to them on the way to Emmaus and walked with them a while. He peeled back the layers of scripture that referred to him as the promised Messiah so they would understand why he had to die. There was a stirring in their hearts but their ears were not yet primed to hear. It wasn’t until they entered another house and broke bread together that they recognized who Jesus was. Then they returned to their community back home in Jerusalem.

Some of those who would like to see the creed either made over in contemporary language or thrown out could answer basic questions about it. Others who have recited the creed week after week year after year (like those who couldn’t answer questions about their sofa) could not answer simple questions about it. If you stripped an old sofa to its frame, a sofa that was well-crafted to begin with you would see the legs are an integral part of the frame. They weren’t screwed or bolted into the four bottom corners. The leg went all the way up to the arm. As a matter of fact in an old well-made sofa, you probably wouldn’t find any screws or bolts anywhere. But you might not know that unless you cared enough about the old sofa and were willing to take the time to take it apart and look at it, maybe see it in a new way.

Likewise if we peeled back a corner of the fabric of our old creed to the place we say that Jesus is the ONLY son of God and then keep stripping away the layers until we get to the frame we might be surprised to find another way to see that statement of belief. The authors of the creed struggled for a common language to express the belief they shared about God and Jesus. They used words from scripture but they chose them carefully. Perhaps they did mean Jesus is the One and only Son of God as set out in John’s Gospel but there’s a story in the Old Testament that is very significant to the Jesus story, particularly the sacrifice of Jesus’ earthly life. That is the story of Abraham and Isaac. There "only son" does not mean one and only. God said to Abraham, "Take your son, Isaac, your ONLY son, whom you love, and go to a place I will show you to offer him as a sacrifice." Isaac was not Abraham’s only son. He had another son named Ishmael, the son of Hagar. God knew that. But Isaac was Abraham’s favored son, his beloved son, the son who had the spirit of his father Abraham. In light of that story, to speak of Jesus in the creed as the ONLY Son of God is to say he is God’s beloved son. Just as the scriptures testify God said to Jesus at his baptism and transfiguration.

Eastertide is a season full of surprise. We’re supposed to be surprised at every turn. We’re not supposed to be confident that we understand who God is and how God interacts with the world. We’re supposed to struggle together in our understanding with a willingness to be surprised. And before we throw away what we inherited from our ancestors or stow it away somewhere because it’s too old to be useful, let’s take the time to strip it down to the frame and look at it again with Easter eyes.

If we’re willing to be surprised we might see something old become new again. We might see our risen Lord in a stranger, we might feel his presence in our hearts and see his face in a little bit of bread and a sip of wine.