Text: Acts 11:15-18; John 13: 34, 35
 
Easter lets loose God’s intention to restore all creation to its beginning; Easter is the sign, Easter is the proof;
in Christ, God is making all things new.
Today our eyes are opened to see that newness and where it is to be found.
One is in John’s Gospel which has no report of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, no outdoor classroom for readers like us to hear Jesus restoring the Ten Commandments to their intended purpose, to teach human how to walk in the way of the Lord.
In John’s Gospel, as we hear in today’s reading, Jesus pulls the ten laws together into one:
            “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.
  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
              By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,
                        if you have love for one another.”
The Easter sign of God’s creation restored to the original state when what God saw was good will be restored to that goodness with the mark for humans being:
            that you love one another…
                        love, defined and modeled in Jesus’ charge:
  Just as I have loved you.
The Easter mark that restores humans to bearing a likeness to God
made visible, lived out in all its fullness, in Jesus,
            is now seen in His followers who are known as His Easter
            people:
                        if you have love for one another.
The Easter mark of an Easter people who accept Jesus’ Easter invitation to see self and others as Jesus sees each of us:
through His lens of love.
Peter was the first to confess that new way, going back to creation’s
beginning days, life in the light of Easter’s newly born creation morning,
but it wasn’t easy for Peter.
He had trouble adjusting to seeing others through Christ’s lens of love. He had trouble seeing Gentiles as being fully human,
            until he remembered Jesus’ charge to His followers:  
to love as Christ loved them…all the way to the cross.
He remembered Jesus’ commandment and he made that his defense when he was called up to appear before the purebred Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, and he testified how when he began to speak of Christ to the Gentiles:
            the Holy Spirit fell upon them
just as it had upon us at the beginning. 
and he said:
“If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us
when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,
who was I that I could hinder God?” 
When they heard this, they were silenced.
And they praised God, saying,
“Then God has given even to the Gentiles
the repentance that leads to life.”
Easter come alive to see others through Christ’s lens of love.
For John Newton Easter it happened the day he looked down into the hold of a ship and saw natives snatched from their villages in Africa to be sold as slaves in America,
            packed like sardines in a can, the heavier the cargo the higher
the profit, and more money coming to him as the ship’s
captain.
That moment his eyes were opened to see through Christ’s lens of love; suddenly he say they were as human as he was, and he felt  convicted and condemned in the eyes of God, until he also saw himself through the lens of Christ’s love, and he exclaimed:
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me;
  I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see.”
He began to see with the vision of an Easter person who, being color-blind to race
sees how large God’s human family really is.
My own confession is that it took time on the Conference staff to see
beyond the prejudices that are still with us.
My vision of race changed the day I was the only white person in a totally Black church and they brought my sermon to life with their “Amen!” “Preach it to us, sister!” “Praise the Lord!”
I felt God’s Spirit that filled them fall on me, and like Peter, I saw each of us as a new race, one people, in Jesus Christ.
My gender phobia was convicted the morning I sat in a meeting listening to members of a congregation present their case for taking the church and all its assets out of the United Church of Christ –
an illegal move which they maneuvered through a by-laws change.
As the discussions became a verbal assault on all same sex people, with no hope for saving the church from a costly legal battle that eventually led to division,
I happened to look up at the cross on the wall and heard the
words of Christ preserved in John’s Gospel: (12:32)
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all people to myself.”
When Paul let himself be pulled into the Christ’s love, he not only gave up his Gentile phobia but exclaimed:
                        “If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation!”
To this day my heart is broken by the inability of Christ’s followers to let Him pull us out of our prejudices and phobias so that we confess:
“We are all children of our heavenly Father!” and celebrate with the exclamation: “What a large family!”
It took a dog, an invisible fence, and a snowstorm to enable a Christian to see though the Gospel lens Jesus holds up in today’s reading.
An invisible fence planted beneath the sod and the monitor on his dog’s collar kept her within the bounds of their yard,
until a heavy snow buried the invisible fences’ charge.
The dog was free to have a wonderful time romping with the neighbors’ pets and children and when tired,
she came back home. (Day1,the Rev. P. Richard Game, April 28, 2013)
How, thought the Christian, Jesus buries the fences we raise to isolate ourselves from others and miss the fun of exclaiming,
“What a large family!” the family God sees,
and so do we when we let ourselves be pulled up by Christ’s cross and from that height see one another
through the lens of Christ’s love.
The Easter sign of the Easter life of an Easter people!  
                        AMEN!
 
 

Text: Revelation 5: 14-17; John 10: 27-28
 
 “The Lord is my shepherd!” named in a song, guaranteed in the Gospel words of Jesus, and envisioned by John who was privileged to preview the ultimate celebration; each in their own way announces there is a shepherding God who could be called: “our security system” that’s free and easily activated, but requires staying connected.

Almost weekly an unsolicited email ad appears citing all that threatens us in our homes: a break in, a fire, a gas leak, and promises to send an alert to the police and firefighters who will respond almost immediately, if we buy their system that will then protect our home and our possessions.

But what about our lives? What about our minds and bodies and souls?
            Last week’s news broadcast the decision of some companies
            to end the practice of a seven-day work week and a 24/7 on call
            contact with employees, because research has found the quality of work and the health of the worker                     increases when the schedule changes to a six-day or less work week.
When we humans are robbed of sleep and quietness,
            are poisoned with the demands to work until we drop,
            and consumed by the fire of a frantic pace we set for ourselves at work or a play,
then a built-in security system goes off, triggered by health problems, exhaustion that shows as depression or anger, broken relationships and maybe even the loss of a job.

“Our security system” alerting us to God’s rules called the “Ten Commandments,” with one being: “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,” which the ancient Hebrews understood to be a health rule more than a religious edict,
meant to give humans time to renew body, mind, and soul. 

God’s built-in security system sounds the alert to our sheep-like need to “lie down in green pastures” and be refreshed “by still waters,” or as Jesus, the Good Shepherd, modeled – to take a break from busyness and be renewed in the quietness of a prayer-conversation with God. What we sheep-like people require and a shepherding God provides; call it “our security system” and it’s free! and easily installed.

Recently we had a security system installed in our home with the signal sent to the company’s headquarters in the mid-West. We learned how sensitive the system is when browning a roast on the top of the stove; a little smoke set off the signal that had the company calling us and the fire siren sounding the alarm.

We pleaded with them to cancel the call which they wouldn’t do until we gave our pin number. In a panic, we answered, “We don’t know what it is!”

After a short blast the siren stopped, the fire chief and policeman who appeared at our door chuckled,
 and we wrote down our pin number.

I thought of that nerve-racking and embarrassing experience, as I read today’s Gospel word of Jesus:
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Jesus is the “pin number;” to follow Him is to activate His presence, especially in times when we desperately need His promised response:
        “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.
         No one will snatch them out of my hand.”
How and where do we pick up that pin number today? The Rev. Elizabeth Mitchell Clement who has worked to recruit young people to the ministry, says they and the rest of us pick it up “in the church,…in the very midst of the people, in symbols and sacraments of the faith and in the practiced patterns and rituals of their church family.”
She calls the church “the Good Shepherd's flock” where each person picks up the pin number that connects us to Jesus, Who is God’s easily activated in-the-flesh “security system.”  

But it is a system that requires staying connected. For years we simply posted a security system’s sticker on our back door to give the impression that we had one, but we didn’t; we weren’t connected!

Now I realize we how we may give the appearance of being connected to the shepherding God we meet in Jesus when we are seen wearing a cross on a pendant or a lapel pin or a tattoo, but we really aren’t if we keep on living a life that’s turned in on self and away from God and others. A life described in the words of the Canadian singer and songwriter, Shania Twain: (adapted)
      “We live in a greedy little world – that teaches every boy and girl to earn as much as they can –
       then turn around and spend it foolishly…Our religion is to go and blow it all –
       So it’s shoppin’ every Sunday at the mall. We spend money we don’t possess;
       (yet) All we ever want is more A lot more than we had before. So take me to the nearest store.”

But when we let Jesus pull us into His embrace, and dare to believe there is no better life than being a sheep of His fold, we discover our choice is not the mark of dumbness but the wisdom of sheep who “follow their shepherd wherever he leads them”…and learn “to know him and trust him.”  (Adapted from Rev. Dr. John Pavelko’s “The Voice That Calls Us to Follow”)

After committing to that trust, Elizabeth Mitchell Clement said her mind has been filled with the lines from Isaac Watt’s hymn,
     The sure provisions of my God  Attend me all my days; 
     O may Thy house be my abode, And all my work be praise. 
     There would I find a settled rest, While others go and come; 
     No more a stranger, nor a guest, But like a child at home.

The sheep-like faith that connects us to Christ and to one another has us picking up the strains of a distant hymn echoing through the vision seen by John of a day when a human flock beyond counting, people of every nation, who will be gathered:
     before the throne of God,
         and worship him day and night within his temple,
         and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. 
     They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
         the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; 
      for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
      and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
      and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
            Our incentive to stay connected, because it is for an eternity.

The earliest pictures of Christ showed a shepherd carrying a young lamb on his shoulders;
some were mosaics above the Baptismal pool in the church, others drawings in burial sites in the catacombs under Rome. They, though faded, are the seal of guarantee on God’s security system: in life and in death, now and in the future “The shepherding God seen in the good Shepherd, Jesus, is “our security system.”
      The only one that works, forever! Amen. 

Text:  Revelation 5: 13; John 21: 5-6, 11-12
 
Just in time for throwing the line into streams freshly stocked for Trout season, followed by “fish stories” of the one that got away, we hear an after-Easter morning “fish story,” of an amazing catch that didn’t get away.
It followed a night of empty nets and a voice from the shore calling out, “Children, you have no fish, have you?”
They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.”
So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. 

Immediately, they realized it was Jesus, Who invited them to have breakfast with Him, and bring some of their huge catch – no “fish story” but a real catch which Peter hauled ashore: … large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn.

153 fish! Ever since that report people have been trying to figure the significance of that number.
            This is a sampling:
Cyril of Alexandria who was seated as patriarch from 412 until his death in 444, broke down the numbers and said:
            100 represented the Gentiles,
              50 represented the Jews,
            and 3 represented the Trinity and thus God.
Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 and died in 430, known as bishop, theologian, philosopher, saint, and, to this day, through his two writings, “The City of God” and “Confessions,”  
            proposed a far more elaborate explanation which works out
            as an intriguing mathematical exercise.
He said there are Ten Commandments and seven is the perfect number representing God the gracious Creator. 10+7= 17. 
            So, write a line of numbers, from 1 through 17 – (1, 2, 3, and on to 17)
Then below that line of numbers, indent by one space and write out1 through 16.
Below that line, indent one space and write out 1 through 15.
Continue adding line after line of numbers, diminishing
            by one each time – 1 through 14, one through 13, etc.
until the last number is 1,
            and see that the descending lines of numbers have formed a perfect triangle – the Trinity, the Triune God.
Jerome,  born in 347 and died in 420, and therefore, a contemporary of Cyril and Augustine, was a devoted priest, scholar of the Scriptures, especially the Gospels, translated the Bible into Latin, called “The Vulgate,”  and, as the dominant Christian historian, was given the title Doctor of the Church. Although a probing, thorough researcher, he came up with the simplest explanation:
          153 was the count of all the different types of fish in the seas at that time and symbolized the intended                   count of all the people in the world.

Jerome’s symbolism is worth considering, especially when noticing -both the people and the place of this after Easter Sunday morning story, which the Gospel writer noted as (John 21: 14): “This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.” :
          the disciples Jesus had called from their nets and their boats to follow Him and “fish for people,”
          the disciples the risen Christ met in the upper room and heard others report sporadic appearances that left             them confused…
          and unemployed,
so back to fishing, with not much success until that Voice called out, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat,
and you will find some.”

It was that breakfast on the beach that called them to remember what Jesus commissioned them to do:
            fish for people, save a humanity drowning in the storm-tossed waters of life, pull them on-board the ship of             the church, and bring them to sit at the Table of the Lord, the bread Life.

The ongoing Easter charge: Keep fishing until all peoples – the full count of races and nations, genders and ages are on-board – the symbolic count of the 153 fish in the net.

Fish by telling your own “fish story” –how you got “hooked” on coming here to Trinity, how you “got hooked” on Bible reading and prayer, teaching a Church School class, singing and ringing in a choir, going on ASP, volunteering in a soup kitchen, sending cards to and visiting the ill and shut-ins, giving your time to Scouting or serving in some way in the  community.

Fish with the gentle “hook” of an invitation to bring someone with you to a Sunday service and a special event at Trinity, someone who has given up after a bad religious experience, someone who needs to trust that
there is a gracious, loving God waiting to embrace that person through the accepting welcome of a caring congregation.

Fish, fish, fish…in the unending season that will go on until that Day promised in the complicated poetic imagery that completes the books of the Bible, “The Revelation to John.”

Like the first book of Genesis with its opening line: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” it picks up on God’s creation fully restored, when the dawn of that Easter morning will sweep over the heavens and the earth, and there will be an elaborate celebration.

Today we are privileged to read John’s report on his glimpse of the rehearsal for the performance of “The Angel’s Easter Cantata”:
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing,
            “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might
             forever and ever!”

A sampling of the celebration awaiting the 153 “fish” who, for Jerome, symbolized all people caught in the unbreakable net of God’s grace made real in Jesus Christ, with John’s vision serving to encourage us when there are empty net days in the life of the church.

Keep fishing, keep fishing.  Amen.
 

Text:  Acts 5:31-32; John 20:24-25, 27-28
 
Thomas the disciple missed Easter; he wasn’t  there with the others on that first night. Perhaps Thomas was not with the other grieving disciples  because he knew Jesus was dead and with His death there wasn’t anything to live for; it was time to get on with living without Him.
Jack Wellman raises the question:
“Wouldn’t we too have given up when all of our hopes were apparently dashed to pieces when Jesus was humiliatingly crucified?  I believe I would have.  Thomas must have been heartbroken, having all his hopes crushed when Jesus died on the cross.” (http://www.whatchristianswanttoknow.com/the-apostle-thomas-biography-doubting-life-and-death/#ixzz44bAwtAMW)

Thomas not only disappeared from the after-Good-Friday count of the twelve, he never made it into the first three Gospels; Matthew, Mark, and Luke say nothing other than to name him among the twelve.
Only John’s Gospel mentions Thomas and lets us meet him three times:

Scene One: (11:7b,8) When Jesus hears about Lazarus’ death and decides to go to his gravesite in Judea,
“The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’”
The disciples, minus Thomas, for he says, (11:16) “Let us also go, that we may die with him”
Unlike the others, he’s ready to follow Jesus, even to death.
            Thomas: the bravest one of the twelve.

Scene Two: (14: 2-4) When Jesus invites His disciples to join Him in observing the Passover Meal in the upper room on Thursday night, and as was and still it the custom, conversations are interspersed between the set order,
Jesus talks about arranging private accommodations for each of them and then confirms their reservations
            with the assurance that they will be where He is going.
But Thomas reacts with, (11:5) “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”
Thomas dares to question and in questioning shows he hasn’t listened or didn’t understand all that Jesus was trying to teach the twelve; like us when we miss what we should be hearing and remembering in Confirmation Class and worship.

Thomas doesn’t hesitate to show he doesn’t know what Jesus is talking about, he speaks, but the others, as in Scene One, keep their mouths shut; they let Thomas be the one disciple who isn’t too shy to raise the question for them.
           Thomas, the inquiring one of the twelve.

Scene Three: (20: 24-25) Today’s reading that pictures Thomas hearing from the others, “We have seen the Lord.” and saying to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He wants to see what they saw and he missed by being absent on Easter night.

How many are like Thomas, having missed the glorious, festive Easter Sunday worship, maybe because of having to work, or being ill, or caring for someone else, or being tied into others’ plans that left no room for church and the Easter Gospel? How many, like Thomas, come to this week after the announcement, “The Lord is risen!” with the same need, the same longing, “to see the Lord?”  Maybe you?

(20:27-28) Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands.
  Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

Artists tend to paint this moment in most graphic details,  showing Thomas, like a surgeon using his finger to probe the gaping gash on Jesus’ side, but there is no proof that Thomas needed to do that. Seeing Jesus standing before him bearing the wounds of Good Friday is enough; he is having the moment the others had,
and he missed by not being with them a week before. And he exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

He alone dismisses all doubt with his confession which he is the first to make, while, as in scene one and two, the others keep silent!
           Thomas, the first of the twelve to be a witness.

Later Peter will pick up on Thomas’ confession and make it the text for the first, very long Easter sermon that includes the words: God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior …And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

“We are witnesses to these things;” yes, with Thomas being a very special kind of witness, just the kind you and I may need today, you and I who have glued the label “Doubting” to Thomas’ name; yet nowhere in the Gospels is he called by that title. Instead, Thomas defines the kind of doubt it’s OK to have:

Doubt that is dismissed when we admit Jesus’ disciples weren’t duped into saying, “We have seen the Lord!”
They who needed undisputable proof were convinced that the Jesus they had known before He was laid in a tomb, is the after-Good-Friday Jesus, showing His nail-pierced hands and spear-cut side; no doubt about it.
              Their witness becomes our proof.

Or doubt that in Frederick Buechner’s words is like “ants in the pants of faith,” a nagging, unrelenting quest to know God is real and the risen Christ is alive. The quest of Augustine who finally admitted to God, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Or C.S. Lewis, who set out to prove God does not exist, only to find profound meaning in God revealed in Christ which he expressed in books and radio broadcasts that speak to this day to doubters who become believers.

Or testimonies given by people who have had a “God moment” that ends a life of addiction in one of its many forms –drugs, alcohol, gambling, abusive behavior. They become today’s “witnesses” who inspire us to believe what we can only experience through them, and on this Second Sunday of Easter worship.

The preacher and professor, Thomas G. Long tells of being invited to preach at a special service in  church basement where all ages sat around tables and made bread which was to bake while they talked about personal experiences of faith, and then everyone –like the first Christians – would savor the loaves and experience how Christ was made know in the breaking of bread. It was a good plan on paper, but children began to play with the flour and send it in clouds through the room to settle on everyone. The ovens were slow; people ran out of things to say, and tired children began to fuss and fume.

Dr. Long says, “Finally the service ended and I was able to pronounce the Benediction: ‘The peace of Christ be with you all,’ and just as I did, a child's voice from somewhere in the room called out strong and true, ‘It already is.’"

As he mused on that “It already is,” he thought the small boy had caught what John’s Easter Gospel has to say to us today: “In the midst of a church …of noise, confusion, weariness, and even fear, the risen Christ comes to give peace and inhabit our empty places,” (Thomas G. Long, Whispering The Lyrics, CSS Publishing)

...And through Thomas, introduces us to the Easter doubt it’s OK to have:
           doubt that is dismissed by the witnesses to the risen Christ,
           doubt that becomes our unrelenting quest to know that same Jesus,
           doubt that is diminished by others’ testimonies that inspire us to believe what we have not experienced.
When that’s who we are, then the blessing of the risen Christ is for us:
          “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.”   AMEN.