Latah Valley

I don’t know if you will believe me if I tell you.   I don’t know if I believe it myself.   What we are about to accomplish is enormous.   What the Spirit of Christ Jesus has charged us to say and to do and to embody over the next few years, over the next few generations, is nothing more and nothing less than a cosmic enterprise.  

 

William Willimon, the one-time chaplain at Duke University, found himself at a dinner party.   Over ######### he met high-stakes corporate executive.   The man asked Willimon what he did for a living, and the ordained Methodist minister told him about training young people in the art and the skill of following Jesus.   Then, after another sip of his martini, came the predictable reply:  “Isn’t that nice?”

 

“What’s so nice about it,” answered the feisty Pastor Willimon.

“It’s just nice that the church is there for those who need that sort of thing…”

 

Clearly, you see, the vast majority of people don’t get it.   Clearly, the popular consensus on Christianity in North America is that it’s nice.   It’s nice to believe in God, if you need that sort of thing.   And even if you don’t need much of anything, the idea of God always makes a lovely wedding ceremony or for a comforting funeral service.   Church buildings often serve the public good.   In Ohio, the public health department used our facility to give out flu shots to the community.    Someone called me on the phone:  “Is this the church that has the flu shots?”  

Hmmm, yes it is.   Church may be the place that has the flu shots, but the true living virus which we share goes more like so:

“Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations… Beginning from Jerusalem… You are witnesses of these things…”

 

Now, I don’t know what you just heard in Luke 24:46, but that sounds to me like an extraordinary and enormous mission.   Where would people like us even make a dent in the colossal task of preaching “in his name to all nations,” or to all ethnic groups?   I’m telling you that I cannot believe that this responsibility is ours.   And, given the prevailing context of our ever-present niceness, how do we communicate to our friends and to our neighbors that they actually need to repent, that they actually need to receive forgiveness?

 

“Thirty years ago,” writes Annie Dillard

“my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written that he’d had three months to write.  It was due the next day.  We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surround by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.  Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.’”

 

 

Now, this is going to sound strange.   But the advice given to Annie Dillard’s father also seems to be the advice given by the resurrected Christ in today’s passage.   No, Jesus isn’t encouraging us to write our own ornithological report for a grade at school.   But, “beginning from Jerusalem… you are witnesses…”   And what does it mean to be witnesses?  

Isn’t it simply to describe what we have seen and heard and touched and felt?    Aren’t witnesses those who have been called or summoned to testify?

 

A few weeks ago, on the Sunday after Easter, we explored passages in the New Testament which suggest that the first followers of Jesus had been sent home.  They were sent back to Galilee, back to the familiar mountains, molehills, vineyards and villages which Jesus himself knew and loved.   And this, this sending back to the ordinary, this re-entry, is as it should be.  Christ is present in the ordinary.   Even when he’s seems absent and missing from the place we last observed him, Christ is present.   Even when he disappears out of our sight, Christ is present.  Even when all we feel like doing is indulging our appetites and eating broiled fish, Christ is present.   And yet, if Christ is present, he is also past and he is also future.   If he is there when we are desperate and dry, what would it mean if we experienced a fully-loaded blast of his power?

 

Well, my friends in Christ, this could be Jerusalem for you.   This could be the place where “the promise from on high” hits you right between the eyes…