The Hope Within Us
Acts 4:5-12
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The New Testament does not narrate the resurrection of Jesus per se. The majesty of that Easter moment is shrouded in mystery. However, the Gospels do narrate the aftermath of the resurrection of Jesus. We have tales of grave clothes in an otherwise empty tomb. We have tales of sightings, women like Mary Magdalene and her friends seeing the risen Jesus. There are other sightings as well-Peter, James, the apostles and even a large crowd of some 500 people. In other words, the early church reported that they had seen the risen Jesus, talked with him, held him, and even ate with him.
But let’s be candid. These are all eyewitness accounts. And as every good lawyer knows, nothing is so flimsy in one sense as an eyewitness account. Just go to traffic court any day of the week. Listen to how an accident is described by multiple witnesses. Oh my! How the accounts differ. As a judge I suppose you need the wisdom of Solomon just to figure out who is at fault in a fender bender. Whose testimony do you believe?
Simply because someone claims to be an eyewitness does not make the story so. Just drive down Main Street in Roswell and ask yourself, “Is this for real?” In fact, the apostles first responded to Mary Magdalene’s eyewitness account as just “an idle tale.” Throughout the Gospels, the initial response to the eyewitnesses is usually doubt. Thomas did not even believe his fellow disciples’ account of their rendezvous with the risen Jesus. “I have seen the Lord” is not all that convincing, really, even to this day. Doubt is not always a bad thing. Do you believe everything you hear? Lord, I hope not.
So what is convincing testimony? What would convince you that something really happened, something even transformative? I do not labor under the illusion that anything I say this morning will necessarily convince you. In truth, I assume that I am largely preaching to the choir, that is, brothers and sisters who already believe that Jesus is risen. But what about those lingering doubts in many of your hearts? What would constitute convincing testimony for you?
It has been my experience that something more than mere verbal testimony is needed. What convinces me is this: when someone’s words match up with their life. What they say and what they do somehow converges. So when someone says, “Trust me”, I am willing to do that if….and this is a big if….I have reason to trust them, beyond mere words. If I have seen their life somehow embody their verbal testimony, then maybe. If a friend says to me, “Try this diet. It has done me wonders”, I suppose one could easily ascertain the truth or falsity of that assertion. Have their words taken form in their life? Is my friend really changed? If so, then I begin to take their words more seriously. Hey, this could be for real. A transformed life makes me sit up and take notice.
Take the apostle Peter. I need not narrate his almost comical life story from a simple fisherman to impulsive leader to violent defender of Jesus. He is at times beloved and ridiculous, scolded by Jesus too many times. And to top off his roller coaster career, he promises to die with Jesus, that is, right before he denies his master three times. That Peter, that blustering, stumbling, bumbling Peter-the one disciple we can all identify with. The one who is so like us, the one who needs to be recommissioned by Jesus along the seashore. Three times Jesus asks him, “Do you really love me, Peter?” That Peter, the best and the worst of us all wrapped up in one lovable and frustrating package. He is us.
And yet in our text from Acts 4 we encounter a profoundly different Peter. Assertive, bold, convincing. The text says that Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit as he bore witness to the risen Christ-the same one whom the authorities crucified Peter now insists “God raised from the dead.” The “stone that was rejected has become the cornerstone.” Peter stands like a man possessed and proclaims to all who will hear, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” This Peter has healed a crippled beggar in the temple. He has turned preacher, prophet, proclaimer, herald of the risen Christ.
What in the world got hold of Peter? I think the risen Christ got inside of him and turned this uncertain and unsteady bumbler into a rock. Peter is transformed. Peter is now an apostle, one sent to proclaim good news. Oh my! Should we take notice that his words and his deeds merge together? The fear is now gone. The vacillation. What we have now is a convincing eyewitness. The leader that really leads with his life as well as his words.
Or take Jurgen Moltmann. In the late 60’s he wrote a classic theological text entitled The Theology of Hope. It transformed my life when I read it in 1972, my first year in seminary. During that time I was struggling with my own vocation and with my own feelings of despair. It turns out I was the same age as Moltmann when he faced the most difficult period in his life- his early twenties.
In his short work Experiences of God Moltmann tells his story, how he moved from dark despondency to hope in the living Christ. Moltmann had grown up in a secular home in Hamburg, Germany, planning to study mathematics and physics. He found the theory of relativity and quantum physics absolutely fascinating. But all that changed when at the age of 19 he was drafted into Hitler’s army. He took with him to the front lines what he called his “iron rations”, books by Goethe and Nietzsche. In Holland when he was captured and taken prisoner by the British, his world collapsed around him.
The British sent him to a Scottish POW camp where he remained for three years until his release in 1948. He described his POW experience like this: “We had escaped death but we had lost all hope. Some of us became cynical, some fell ill. The thought of there being no way out was like an iron hand constricting our hearts. Yet each of us tried to conceal his stricken heart behind an armor of untouchability.”
“And then came what was for me the worst of all. In September 1945 in Camp 22 in Scotland, we were confronted with pictures of Belsen and Auschwitz. They were pinned up in one of the huts, without comment. Some thought it was just propaganda. Others set the piles of bodies which they saw over against the piles of bodies in Dresden. But slowly and inexorably the truth filtered into our awareness and we saw ourselves mirrored in the eyes of the Nazi victims. Was this what we had fought for? For me, every feeling for Germany, the so-called sacred “Fatherland” collapsed.
“For me, the turn from humiliation to new hope came about through two things-first through the Bible, and then through the encounter with other people. In the Scottish POW camp I was for the first time given a Bible by a well-meaning Army chaplain. I began to read the psalms of lament and found words to express my anguish and heartache. Over time I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope. I would walk around the barbed wire perimeter, circling the chapel on a small hill in the middle of the camp. I began to sense in those walks the same mysterious companion that had accompanied Cleopas and his friend on their way to Emmaus. This early fellowship with Jesus, my brother in suffering and redeemer from my guilt, has never left me since.”
The other experience that changed Moltmann’s life was the first international Student Christian Movement conference in the summer of 1947, to which a group of POW’s was invited. Listen to his description of that transformative experience: “We were welcomed as brothers in Christ and invited to eat and drink, pray and sing along with young Christians from all over the world.”
The young POW was frightened when a group of Dutch students came to speak. This is what he wrote: “I had fought in Holland, in the battle for the Arnheim Bridge. The Dutch students told us that Christ was on the bridge on which they could come over to us, and that without Christ they would not be talking to us at all.” In a flood of emotions young German and young Dutch Christians shared in one loaf and one cup in the spirit of the Risen Christ, truly, the bridge over troubled waters.
After three years in that POW camp Moltmann wrote that he experienced “a marvelous, richly blessed time. We were given what we did not deserve and received of the fullness of Christ grace upon grace. We came there with wounded souls and when we left my soul was healed.” A great hope within transformed Moltmann. A great hope within transforms us into the image of Christ. Moltmann’s life since his release has focused on changing hearts that are despairing into hearts that are filled with good cheer and good hopes.
Changed lives, changed hearts-that is the witness that convinces us of this astonishing truth: Christ is risen? Christ is risen indeed! Thanks be to God. Amen.