Sequels

Sermon

Part One: Scripture Review

I want to offer a context for our scripture today. A book club bonus, if you will. We’ll focus on the Book of Acts in the coming weeks, called the Acts of the Apostles or Acts of the Holy Spirit. Acts and how its stories are often used in the church feels to me sometimes like trying to follow Star Wars or any of the superhero movies that have become bigger and bigger universes. There are so many sequels, and different timelines… It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or like you need to know several other stories to enjoy a single story.

Acts is a sequel of sorts to the Gospel of Luke, which we’ve often read this year. Acts can feel out of sorts and off a timeline, but I hope by starting at the start, we’ll enjoy its images and narratives.

In Chapter 1, Luke writes: In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach… ³ After his suffering, Jesus presented himself to the disciples and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.

That’s where we are now… This time is called Eastertide or the Easter season. Today is the third Sunday of Easter or Easter 3. It’s good for us to remember that Easter is a full season. During this time, we reflect on what Easter means: Jesus is alive, so what? And we reflect on that so what with those who were the first to reflect on it, the disciples, the earliest followers of Jesus, the earliest churches.

Some of these folks are historically called “apostles” to differentiate between those who had been with Jesus in ministry while he was living, in the first film, I mean, book. So in this Easter season, the Book of Acts replaces the suggested Hebrew Bible or Old Testament scriptures we might usually use in worship, so we can reflect on: Easter happened, what now?

Where this can get even more confusing, at least in our timeline, is that the Holy Spirit, and specifically the day we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, happens toward the beginning of the text in the Book of Acts, but we don’t celebrate that day yet—because it’s at the end of the Easter season. This is where it feels to me like the timelines don’t match, and that’s okay, the themes work, it’s just chronologically confusing.

We don’t need to know or remember it all to draw from it.

We know Pentecost is coming, but we don’t celebrate that yet, so I’ve skipped ahead to some verses that are a good example of Acts. This is Peter talking; if you’ve come to this sequel hoping to hear more of Jesus talking, there is some but not a ton of that. But Peter talking is good; he recaps the resurrection. He shows the conflict of his faith in context, he mentions other characters that we can learn about, and he shows the story growing in a Greco-Roman world:

²² “Fellow Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— ²³ this man… you crucified and killed… ²⁴ But God raised him up.

²⁹ “Fellow Israelites, I say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried… ³⁰ Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had promised to put one of his descendants on his throne… David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah (a Jewish term), saying, ‘He was not abandoned to Hades (Greek term), nor did his flesh experience corruption.’

³² “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.

³⁷ Now when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, siblings, what should we do?”

This next part gets especially prickly for me, and if you’re recovering from some Christian traditions that use words like this to manipulate, I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I’m hopeful that you can hear this anew today, from a restored view.

³⁸ Peter said to them, “Repent (simply means: turn to God) and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ …so your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls.”

⁴⁰ And Peter testified…. with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” ⁴¹ So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

This chapter ends with an idyllic image.

⁴² They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers. ⁴³ Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs being done. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and had all things in common; They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them.

⁴⁶ Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me? God of abundance, as we try to figure out where we are in the universe, help us rest in your grasp, rather than to grasp for what we don’t need to know. Amen.

Part Two: Sermon

I have sequels in my mind these days. My wife and I have enjoyed getting our kid to watch movies this year, and half the movies in the top-ten-rated sequels of all time are movies made for children. Believe the reviews: Paddington 2 is better than The Godfather, Part 2.

I’ve always been a sequel person though. I love returning to a story to learn more. Recently I fell in love with Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Both books follow a tea monk named Dex and their friendship with a robot in a post-utopian world. I’m still waiting for the third book. The first two were perfect for me because they were short and narrated beautiful cultures and traditions, and they were great at helping me be better at using non-binary pronouns. I love a story that forms me for the better, without me knowing it. Thus, I’m sure you won’t find it shocking that I’m a Chronicles of Narnia fan. And I recently geeked out when I heard that Greta Gerwig might direct a version where the lion is played by Meryl Streep! But before I fell in love with Aslan, I fell for something with more scale(s)… the dinosaurs in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park books.

You wouldn’t be wrong to think first of Jurassic Park as a series of films from the ’90s; the first two were directed by Steven Spielberg shortly after the books were released. I fell for those, too, despite not having been a big dinosaur kid or a bored adult wanting to escape from a business trip pre-smartphones—the target market, I imagined, for those books. There are now six Jurassic Park or Jurassic World movies and a seventh expected this summer.

I have a feeling I will be seeing that film by myself; even if my wife is there, I imagine she’ll fall asleep. All the themes of each movie are similar, and I find that as comforting as I find dinosaur recreation to be scary. There’s an awe at creation, “We made a dinosaur!” Then there’s a time of reflection: “Should we haaave made this dinosaur?” An important reflection, but it conflicts with an immediate need—the tyrant king, or tyrannosaurus rex, is attempting to eat your nephews—you should prioritize that first.

There are recurring themes in Luke’s writing that I also find at times idyllic, and awe inspiring, and at other times frustrating to the point of abandoning reading scripture, and watching, instead, people acting shocked that the return of pterodactyls, dinosaurs that fly, didn’t go well.

We repeat themes and ideals in sequels, good and bad.

You can hopefully remember, if you were with us during the previous season, Lent, that we were focused on themes of healing and restoration. Healing and restoration come up a lot in Christian scripture, especially in Luke’s Gospel. That theme continues in the Acts of the Apostles, and it makes sense, because we have evidence to believe that the author, Luke, may have been a physician; in biblical Greek meaning literally, “one who heals.”

I have had physicians and other clinicians ask me what I think about those healings or miracles, especially while I was working in hospitals, and it’s an awe-inspiring thing to talk about. The amazing science of vaccines and data-driven medicine are miracles to me, and in these conversations I tend to land on how amazing medical intervention can be, and also how amazing it is that we can keep living—even in the face of diagnoses and how poorly American culture can treat those who are living with an illness or disability. How poorly we treat those who are just different from what some people say is “normal” or “typical.” How often we neglect whole majorities of the population.

So, we focused on healing and restoration last season, during Lent; hopefully you remember some of that, and it’s okay if you don’t. You do get extra points, though, if you noticed that though we focused on healing, none of us explained any physical healings. There were no medical miracles.

There are many healings like this in Luke’s Gospel and in Acts, several stories of people experiencing healings from leprosy, paralysis, chronic illness—but where the text was in Lent, last season, the healings all happened to be less medical and more communal. Healings in the Gospels and in Acts are always communal, even if not physical. Healing always restores people to belonging, a wider community; they experience restoration.

These healings are what we referred to during Lent, and now, when we, disciples and apostles are referring to deeds of power and wonder—it’s a recurring theme of bewildering amazement.

There is a healing feature that recurs in Acts that I have mixed feelings about, but when explained, I believe it’s healing, and that’s the concept of conversion or being saved. In some traditions healing and being saved are synonymous, but they aren’t terms that are used restoratively.

If you were told you needed to be saved or healed, you’d be smart in asking, from what? It can be a very manipulative idea, conversion, but it’s intended to be healing and restorative. If we asked Peter in this text, from what do we need to be healed or saved, it sounds like he’d say, “I told you, you need to be saved from this corrupt generation.” Calling a whole generation corrupt is not very healing, but I don’t feel like I need to explain our needing to be saved from corruption, at least not on our timeline.

There is a particular save, a conversion that is particularly healing in the Book of Acts. It’s in chapter 9 (which is technically the text for today, but I chose not to focus there because I like to start at the beginning). But in chapter 9 of Acts, the Apostle Paul is healed from blindness, returns to God, and changes the story of the church forever. The story eventually turns more to him; the Book of Acts and the Apostle Paul are theme bridges from the Gospels into the rest of the New Testament. Sometimes I like Paul, and I find him interesting, other times I find him self-righteous and annoying.

But in Acts Paul reads more self-aware to me, maybe because he’s not the one writing, as he is credited with a lot of the Church’s New Testament, or maybe it’s because in Acts chapter 20, when he preaches for too long, someone falls asleep and then out a window to their death. This is why I’m very careful not to speak for too long and why I’m also not offended if you fall asleep; why we encourage doodling! Maybe that’s the rest you need. I digress, but Paul raises that person from the dead: restored. I love that. Paul doesn’t want to be that guy. He wants to bring life to people, not death, abundant life.

And Paul along with the rest of Acts similarly lifts up women. There are named women in leadership in the Book of Acts; disciples, benefactors, preachers, like how we read on Easter that the women were the first to tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection. There are plenty of frustrating bits, too. These verses I read from Peter are regularly translated as “brothers, men, brothers, men.” This story is still happening in a culture that often didn’t even see women as fully human, let alone equal to men, but there is certainly proof of women revising their roles, restoring themselves to community, healing.

Easter is when we celebrate healing and restoration; more so, Easter is when we celebrate having been restored. What does that mean? I don’t know yet. My Acts reading and my other archaeological academic pursuits tell me that we’re going to keep making dinosaurs, we’re going to see sequels of tyrant kings; our role is to reflect. Stop and reflect on what themes we should keep repeating, while saving younger generations from being eaten.

Acts may be lacking in these more obvious beasts but is full of simple feasts, according to Luke, feasts that cover for the frustration and fractures. There is language that can be used to manipulate, as there was never a time in biblical history that was perfect, but there are also idyllic moments when nourishment is well shared, when people are restored and live that way. I’m hopeful we will find moments like that this Easter season and repeat. Amen.