April 23, 2023. Texts: Acts 2:14a, 36-41; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35.
Last Sunday vandals scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on the façade of the old Temple de Hirsch Sinai on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The timing was intentional. Monday was Holocaust Remembrance day. A similar incident happened seven years ago to the same Temple façade.
Usually good-hearted people of all faiths, and of no faith, show up ready to wash away the evidence of such hatred within hours. This time the decision was made to leave the message there for a few days. To let people see the writing on the wall. Literally.
You know that’s a biblical reference, right? It comes from the book of Daniel. A mysterious hand wrote on the wall of the royal palace in Babylon. The king asked for an interpreter. The Jewish captive Daniel was brought to the king and revealed the writer to be God. God’s message was that the king had been judged unjust, and the kingdom of Babylon would fall.
In Acts 2 Peter says, “Let the entire house of Israel know…God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you have crucified.” Sadly, Scripture texts like this one are used for anti-Semitic purposes wrongly blaming Jews for the death of Jesus. We should know better.
Peter was speaking as a Jew to fellow Jews gathered for the festival of Pentecost a few weeks after the events of Easter. The tone and content of his words were about mutual accountability. How could you let this happen? He was one of our own. You didn’t stand for up him when he was unjustly treated and ultimately in his death you are implicated.
This message speaks to all people about life and death, about justice and injustice. About love and hatred not as matters of emotion, but as calculated decisions we make. The message is that what we think, say, and do matters not just to us but to everyone – that we’re all in this together.
The painful and awkward reality is that Peter hadn’t been there for Jesus in his moment of need either. It reminds us that there was plenty of blame to go around. But Peter had had his moment with the risen Christ. Perhaps it was in making peace with his own failure that Peter got fired up to proclaim the message of repentance and God’s response of grace.
Peter understood the continuity between God’s ancient covenant with the Jews and the new covenant in Jesus Christ. In other words, God’s saving love for the Jewish people was not superseded or abandoned in the establishment of the Christian faith through Jesus’s ministry.
Peter said that having seen the extraordinary power of God’s love through the life and death of Jesus, it’s not too much to ask people to respond in a personal and visible way. The people there with Peter that day clearly heard the positive aspect of Peter’s charge.
Acts 2:37 says, “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’” The word “cut” actually is “pierced” which suggests that in their hearts they experienced the wounding of Jesus themselves. What had been something that happened out there to someone else, became personal.
But this is how the gospel works. The promise of God’s love is good news that does not hate or discriminate. Peter said, “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” The Jewish people have always been close to God, always possessed the promise of God’s saving love. Through Jesus, God’s love was extended to all people. And we are responsible for one another to that redeeming love.
Coming from a slightly different angle, the first letter of Peter, written just a few years after the resurrection to committed, baptized Christians, discusses accountability as holiness. Far from being a rare condition, holiness should be considered the common way of life for a follower of Christ. Holiness is the practice of loving one’s fellow human beings and fearing God.
We speak often in the church of what it means to love our fellow humans. Without dwelling on this, let me simply remind you of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is not his tragic death years ago that made a difference, it was his absolute commitment to the way of Christian love that accomplished so much to change our country for the better.
Fearing God is respecting that we are not the final judge of things and letting God be God. This is both a burden and a relief. The burden is that we do not get to be the ultimate judge of all things and we must accept that we are all subject to God’s judgment.
This in turn means paying attention to how our lives affect others, both positively and negatively and knowing that what we do matters in cosmic and ultimate terms. The relief is that it is not up to us to render final judgment on all things. Instead, we can acknowledge God’s rightful place as judge of all and entrust that responsibility to God.
Finally, in the Gospel of Luke we have the poignant story of two travelers on the road to Emmaus. This story tells us how closed hearts were reopened to the knowledge of God’s enduring love. How God reconstitutes broken communities. And how our worship was formed by what happened on that road as a consistent reminder to draw our life and strength from the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
As the travelers walked away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus they had no clear purpose to their journey except apparently to get away from the scene of Jesus’s death. Although they had heard of Jesus’s resurrection they simply could not take it in. They were on their way out of the community of faith before ever having fully grasped what it meant to be in it. That could have been the end of the story except that wherever we go, God goes, even if unseen.
What happened on the road to Emmaus became the framework of Christian life and worship. We take the story of Jesus to heart. We open our minds to its meaning and share that insight with others. We acknowledge that we are accountable to one another and to God and we break bread together.
We do this wherever we are, whatever state of mind we are in. Jesus is present not suddenly but consistently and whenever anyone is ready to see him, he is there. Though Christ is one with God in heaven, he is still in close, transformative relationship with us.