"What Does God Want?" - Easter 6C

 Acts 16:9–15

Saint John 5:1–9

Even though you didn’t know it this was probably the first question you were ever asked in your life as a member of your family hovered over your crib when you were being fussy. “What do you want?” they might have said wondering whether you were hungry, or wet, or in some sort of discomfort.

The same question was probably asked as your linguistic skills lagged behind your ability to identify objects. You would point and someone would ask: “What do you want? Milk? Cereal? A Cookie? What?”

As you grew older you heard the inevitable question. “What do you want... to be when you grow up?” It was at if, at five, you had already picked a profession. So, you would dutifully say: A doctor. A nurse. Abus driver. A firefighter. Or, if you lived in Chicago, a ghost pay-roller. “What do you want ... to major in?” 

Was the question asked in High School even before you picked your college and were probably still wrestling with the question you were wrestling with since you were six: “What do you want ... to be when you grow up.”

When you finally got to be what you wanted to be the questions still came. Only they were more troublesome or a personal and a global scale.

I want the promotion and eventually the corner office. I want my children to be happy. I want more money. I want more time to spend the money I have. I want to retire.

Then, as time passed there were personal wants. I want the pain in my shoulder to go away. I want the report from my doctor to be good. I want a positive prognosis from my loved one. 

And wants for life in general. I want gun violence to end. I want an end to famine and war. I want to feel safe when I go out. I want reconciliation between the races. I want an end to “hate speech.” I want the time to come when I can stop worrying about whether I should wear a mask or not. I want people to have a better understanding of mathematics.

It seems we go through most of life with the “What do you want?” question rolling around somewhere in the back of our minds.

Jesus asked that very question to the guy sitting by the pool of Bethzaida.

We know this guy. He’s the guy we see every day, rain or shine, with his beat-up cup standing at the foot of the expressway ramp. Perhaps, if there is a dollar lying on the passenger seat from the change we got at Starbuck’s we’ll give it to him. Perhaps, if we have a voucher for food that we received from church that will help the poor soul at least get one meal. Or perhaps, because we pay everything with our credit cards and carry no cash with us, we’ll just stare straight ahead wanting the light to change as swiftly as possible.

The “Good Book” tells us that guy at the gate has been coming to the same spot for thirty-eight years. It was a gathering place for the blind, the halt, and the lame, who had, because of their disabilities have been dislodged from their community of family, friends, and neighbors.

He is probably used to not being seen by those who pass by. In fact, I have to think that the neighborhood around the sheep gate, porticos and pools, was one of those to be avoided by the regular rank- and-file. Like the freeway underpasses and homeless encampments of our day this must have been one of those places where only the bravest of souls go.

Which is why it is no surprise that Jesus is there. He sees the here-to-for unseen by everybody else man and asks him the age-old question. “What do you want?” “Do you want to be made well?”1

Now if Jesus would have asked me the question I would have said “Yes” in my big outside voice. I would have pumped my fist, gave Jesus my best “cow eyed” expression and said, “Please. Oh, please, oh please, oh please, make me well.”

Instead, this man offers a litany of excuses. “I can’t,” the sick man said [in The Living Bible paraphrase], “for I have no one to help me into the pool at the movement of the water. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me.”2

We know this guy! He’s the friend with a million excuses. “I want to but...” “I’d like to but...” “I wish I could but...” For every simple solution put forth that is in their best interest, forty-four obstacles are placed in the way.

While we may throw up our hands and just give up on the person Jesús will have none of it. He simply says: “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”3

With Jesus there is no horsing around. With him there is no hemming and hawing. With Jesus it’s “Stand up! Walk! Get going! On your way! Be of use!”

Contrast the man at the pool’s reaction to St. Paul and his companion’s reaction to what is reported as “a vision.” I’m not so sure that if I was in Paul’s traveling party and he reported this kind of “vision thing” to me I wouldn’t have chalked it up to a severe case of dyspepsia, told him to watch what he ate today, and advised him to  back to bed.

All Jesus asked of the man was to “take up his mat and walk” and he launched into an excuse as to why Jesus’ solution wouldn’t work. The unknown night visitor asked Paul and his gang to travel over 250 miles and they went. No questions. No conditions. No excuses. Just a “let’s go.”

And this trip wasn’t even on Paul’s list of “wants.” Two days earlier

if someone would have asked him if he wanted to go to Macedonia he might have replied: “Not on my agenda. Haven’t even thought about it.”

What both men received was not just a vision or a healing but a community. 

In Jesus day, when one was healed one was restored to one’s former social network.

Whether he admitted it to himself or not what the man got was what he wanted – restoration to his family, his friends, his community.

Jesus restored him so he could go home and, in the words of the King James’ Version of this story that I still like the best, “be made whole.”

Saint Paul and his friends may have never wanted to go anywhere near Macedonia but when they got there, they received more than they might have ever wanted – a whole new community of friends who became sisters and brothers in Christ.

When God sneaks God’s way into the picture the question gets turned on its head. It is no longer what I want but what God wants.

God may not be asking us if we want to drive halfway across the country for the cause. God may not be asking us to leave our place of comfort for the last forty years.

All God may be asking us to do is turn what we want into what God wants.

For a Sabbath day, or any day, that’s more than enough.

Thanks for listening.

________________Se

1. St. John 5:6b. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

2. St. John 5:7. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible Carol Stream, IL: Tyndall House Foundation, 1971]

3. St. John 5:8. (NRSV)

Sermon preached at Trinity Lutheran Church - Foster Avenue

22 May 2022

"Resurrection Restoration" - Easter 3C

 

Acts 9:1–20

Saint John 21:1–19

Amare is a teenager who had a problem. 

To the rest of the world he looks like he has it made.  He was living a “bachelor pad with three other teenage males.”  Meals and snacks were served up daily by a devoted staff who took care of his every need.  But, with all this time on his hands and everything taken care of Amare developed an addition to cell phones.

They weren’t his cell phones because he is a 400-pound gorilla who lives at the Lincoln Park Zoo.  The cell phones belong to the visitors.  

“Guests at the zoo’s Regenstein Center for African Apes have delighted in Amare’s keen interest in seeing their photos and videos.”  an article in The Chicago Tribune reported. So they shared them with him by holding up their phones so that he could have a look.  Gradually he was spending his days “sitting in one corner of the habitat glued to guests’ phones ... increasingly distracted to the point that he disengaged from his frat mates.”  This withdrawal along with his “increasingly sedentary behavior”1 became a cause for concern.  

Amare was becoming increasingly more isolated and wisely the humans who were charged with his well-being took action.  They knew the dangers social isolation can bring and so do we.

I’m thinking of that person who used to call, or text, or stop over regularly who hasn’t been heard from for days, or even weeks.  When we reach out there is only their voicemail to leave a message on and when we work up the nerve to text and ask, “Is everything alright?” their response is only a “sure, fine, why?”  Short of camping out in front of their house or banging on their front door, if you’re like me, you don’t know what else there is to do.

More dangerous still is the isolation of some leaders.  Not just the ones who keep their own council but those who have surrounded themselves with Sycophants, “toadies”, who tell them only what they want to hear.  Evidence to the contrary they may become more and more entrenched in their beliefs that the war they started is going well or that they won the election because there is no one around them who is willing, or courageous, enough to tell them the truth.  So, they sink deeper and deeper into their isolationist delusions.

Small scale or large-scale isolation is dangerous and can cause us to do awful things like walking down a road “threatening with every breath and eager to destroy every Christian.”2

This has been Saul modus operandi since we first caught a glimpse of him, standing off to the side, holding the coats of those who were in the process of stoning the first martyr for Jesus’ cause, Stephen.  “He not only approved of Stephen’s death but also led a violent persecution of the community.  ‘But Saul was ravaging the church, entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”3

  In his wonderful new commentary on the book of Acts, Willie James Jennings said of Saul: “He killed in the name of righteousness.  No one is more dangerous than one with the power to take life... Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their logic.”4

Saul was listening to his own inner voice and that voice was leading him astray causing him to become more and more isolated as a man on a mission.  This Jesus guy and his followers are a threat to the old order, he kept telling himself.  In his isolation he comes to believe that he, and he alone, can fix this.  

Fortunately, he doesn’t get very far before he gets knocked off his high horse. 

I love the way the 17th century painter Caravaggio depicted this.  Saul is flat on his back with his arms reaching for the sky.  His horse is almost stepping on him and his companions, who only shared the road and not his convictions, are staring down as if to say, “What in the world just happened to you?”

Saul’s world is being turned upside down but that does not happen in isolation.  He may have to spend a few more days alone, thinking about what he has done and doing some real soul searching, but then Saul must become a part of a community.

While Saul is being confronted by Jesus’ voice   another man is really being challenged.  

Ananias is already living in that community.  He too gets a word from the Lord, but this word is not given in isolation.  There are other followers around and, even the job was his and his alone to do, there can be little doubt that their presence gave him courage.  

That is why communities like the church exist.  The temptations we face to become isolated may be even stronger than those faced in Jesus’ time.  We can become isolated from each other, like poor Amare, by our phones.  We can become isolated from each other, like Saul, blinded to the other person’s position or by the party to which we belong to or the news sources we listen to. 

Saul might have had theological differences with members of the Way, but it was his inability to see past those differences and relate to their humanity that engendered his hatred for them. In confronting Saul, the voice from heaven challenges him to see them through new eyes as people worthy of respect.5

It is hard to be isolated from someone who wants the best for you.  

Ananias’ comes and addresses Saul as “brother.”  He is inviting him to break out of his isolation and become part of the new family that God is creating. 

It is important for us to see that today’s Gospel reminds us that this family almost never got off the ground.  The disciples by the sea were isolated by their own thinking.

As Dr.  William H.  Willimon reminds us.  For them it was back “to business as usual, doing what they were doing before they met Jesus.  ‘Well, it was a good trip while it lasted,’ perhaps they said.  ‘But we didn’t get him elected Messiah.  It’s over.  Back to fishing as usual.  At least they will have better luck mending their fishing nets than they had changing the world with Jesus.”6

Their mission looks like it's over until a figure appears to them on the beach.  

Way back in the recesses of their memory they might have been thinking. Something like this happened with Jesus, didn’t it?  When they first met him, after a long night of fishing with nothing to show for it, didn’t Jesus climb into their boat, uninvited and unannounced, and tell them to do the very same thing?  Didn’t Jesus once tell them that a better catch could be had on the other side of the boat and there was?  Now this shadowy figure was telling them about the very same thing with the exact same results!

Their conclusion: “It is the Lord.”  

Suddenly pandemonium is breaking out and community is being restored.  There is splashing of bodies wading through the waves.  There is hauling of boats and bewilderment over an enormous catch where once there was none.  No longer were they isolated from each other by sadness and despair, but a post-Easter brunch is being served with Jesus as the host!

Jesus came to them just as he came to Saul and gave them exactly what they needed – a resurrection restoration – where they broke out of their isolation and reentered the world seeing it in a vastly different way than they did before Jesus came to them.

Amare’s caregivers at the Lincoln Park Zoo installed a temporary barrier creating a buffer zone between him and his human visitors where he could no longer see their phones and they noticed positive changes in him almost immediately.  

Stephen Ross, director of the Fisher Centre for the Study and Conservation of Apes, noticed the change in his teenage charge right away.

“Amare is realizing that it’s not really worth it for him to sit there in that corner, waiting for someone to come up and show him their phone,” Ross said, noting Amare’s increased enthusiasm for “being a gorilla” by going outside more and interacting with his group mates.  

What’s the difference between a 400-pound gorilla and the first followers of Jesus? Amare went back to his tribe, to his fellow gorillas whom he had been with for a long time.  Saul and the disciples’ barriers were broken down they were sent out, into the world, to people outside of the tribe.  

The followers of Jesus were to do what he did and reach across religious boundaries and cultural barriers.  They were to talk to people, and eat with people, who they might never have thought of socializing with before.  They were to proclaim the message of a Resurrection Restoration to all people knowing that no matter where they went – fishing, to the beach, or down the road – Jesus would be with them and, if they strayed, he would bring them back.

No matter where we are, no matter where we go, Jesus is always restoring us.  From the isolated life of cell phones, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and tweets he is restoring us.  

From the factions that divide he is restoring us.  

From the anger and hate that separates class, color, identity, orientation, or faction he is restoring us. 

From all the keeps us from following God’s will and way and he is restoring us.

But first he is inviting us: “Come and have breakfast.”

So come, have breakfast with Jesus so that, refreshed by him you, can go and participate in his Resurrection Restoration that is taking place even as we speak.

___________

1. Lauren Warnecke, “Screen Time? Gorilla Fixated,” The Chicago Tribune March 14, 2022, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-gorilla-screen-time-lincoln-park-zoo-20220414-upsef6scabhztevvwtdgwf6yrq-story.html.

2. Acts 9:1.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. {Carol Stream, IL,: Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 1977}]

3. William H. Willimon, Acts:  Interpretation Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching. (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1988), 74.

4. Willie James Jennings, in Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).

5. Raj Nadella, “Commentary on Acts 9:1-6 [7-20],” Working Preacher from Luther Seminary (Luther Theological Seminary, April 13, 2022), https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-acts-91-6-7-20-5.

6. William H. Willimon, “Resurrection Vocation,” Ministry Matters™ | Christian Resources for Church Leaders, accessed April 29, 2022, https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/11186/may-1-2022-resurrection-vocation.

Sermon preached at Irving Park Lutheran Church

May 1, 2022

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRu0gQKlX7Q&t=3604s 

 

"Plotting the Resurrection" - Easter 2022

 

Saint Luke 24:1-12

Growing up, one of my favorite writers was E.B. White who you probably know best for his two most famous children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.  He also wrote numerous short stories for The New Yorker where White’s wife, Katharine, was the fiction editor.  She was also an avid gardener writing about the subject at length for the magazine.  Her love of language and gardening was such a perfect marriage that, after her death, her husband E.B. collected her most memorable essays into a book called: Onward and Upward in the Garden.

In the forward to that book White wrote about his wife’s final days in a poignant, loving, and memorable way as every fall she would get into a “shabby old raincoat much too long for her, put on put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes and proceed to [a] director’s chair [where] she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while [her assistant] produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment.”

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion – the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.1

Some of us have been plotting this Resurrection celebration for over two years as congregations waited to gather together maskless to sing “Christ is Risen, Alleluia!” or “Thine is the Glory '' once again at the top of our lungs. 

 
In 2020 when we were forced by the pandemic to close our doors, I read White’s essay to the wonderful people at Our Savior in Aurora where I was the interim pastor and promised that we would “plot the Resurrection” together and celebrate it the first chance we had.  In the year that followed things got better, then worse, then better, but we never had the opportunity to hatch our plot and hire trumpets, decorate with lilies, have brunch, and raise our voices together in the jubilation that Easter brings even if we had to move the feast to August’s hottest day.  Our resurrection plot never materialized and our attempts at replacement were thin gruel indeed.

I watched the video of Easter in the midst Covid that we produced and if a celebration of Easter could be deadly this one was.  

We prerecorded all of our online worship offerings with all of the music for Holy Week and Easter being taped in one session while I returned later in the week for the sermon and prayers.   This meant that I was absolutely alone in the sanctuary when I boomed out “Christ is risen!” and could only hear my own voice fading out as it echoed through the rafters.  Instead of being surrounded by the faithful when the paschal candle was lit, and the Easter proclamation was read it was just me in an empty church.  I preached not to a room filled with people who “got dolled up and dropped by” but to two video cameras.

I would invite you to find it on our YouTube channel but don’t even bother because, as I said, it was deadly dull.  The plot of the resurrection requires people present who not only follow along in the story but react like they were hearing it for the very first time.

Saint Luke’s account begins at dawn.  Or, as Saint John would later add as if for emphasis, “while it was still dark.”  

We know what they are talking about.  When a struggle we are going through wakes us up in the predawn darkness and we have to decide whether it is too late to try to go back to sleep or too early to make coffee.  We may just lay awake and ruminate over anything and everything that we are struggling with in our lives.  In those predawn dark moments, all we can do is toss, turn, and maybe pray but plotting a resurrection is the furthest thing from our minds.

For the woman this struggle was titanic in nature and resurrection was not in the plot line of their story.
 The one they had pinned all of their hopes on was not just dead of natural causes in the fullness of time but had been killed for threatening those who would cling to power at any cost with, of all things, a message of love, peace and acceptance.  The threats to this message in our day may still awaken us in the middle of the night and cause us to worry that if Christ’s message isn’t dead, it may be on life support.

We can tell the direction the plot is moving by simply looking at what the women are carrying in their hands.  They were expecting only to find Jesus' body and so they brought spices to do what was good, and right, and proper for a corpse.  It was a part of their devotion to Jesus.  

The women were dutifully serving Jesus in the best way they knew. They had prepared spices to anoint his body and had gone to the tomb early to finish the burial, only to be met with the challenge, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"2

That’s a very good question that contains the sudden plot twist.

The women were expecting to find their friend as dead as he was Friday night when, as Saint Matthew remembered it, Joseph of Arimathea, “took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.”3

That’s the way it is supposed to end, isn’t it?  That is the way it ends for us.  The body is lowered; the vault lid comes down with a soft thud that indicates it is sealed; some flowers are thrown; we go off to brunch and then we go home to stare at the ceiling and wonder what life will be like without the one we loved.

Even in our day some go back to the cemetery to see that everything is in order.  If we go back at all it might be only to plant some flowers, but we don’t expect anything out of the ordinary.  Our loved one is always (Not usually but always!)  right where we left them.

I spent my high school and college years working in a funeral home and, while this should come as no surprise to you, all of our bodies stayed right where we left them. We didn’t come in one morning and find that the one we placed in chapel A was in chapel B.  They didn’t change places in the middle of the night just to play with our minds.  No, if there was one thing we could count on it was the plot was always the same and no one who had breathed their last moved unless another member of the staff moved them.

That is what Mary thought in John’s gospel when she encounters but does not recognize the risen Lord.  She thinks somebody moved Jesus and mistakes Him for the gardener, confronting  him:  “Sir, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him.”4

The resurrection plot is twisting in ways that have never been seen before and have never been seen since.  It’s not the Chemlawn man, it’s Jesus!  Jesus isn’t in the tomb but two men in dazzling white clothes, light cascading over them, are with that question and this reminder:   “He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee:  ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ”  Then they remembered his words.”5

But sometimes resurrection plot twists are hard to believe.  

At first the male disciples didn't get it probably because the messengers were women!  What they saw, the men who up until now had been cowering under the covers, or discussing matters over coffee, was determined by this do-nothing, know-it-alls, as in various translations: nonsense; a fairy-tale,  a product of the women’s sheer imagination.  

Even when Peter decided to go and have a look for himself all he did was bend down; looked in and “saw only the cloth that Jesus’ body had been wrapped in. Peter went away to his home, wondering about what had happened.”6  There is no sense of amazement as the translation we read today would have us believe but only as Dr.  Eugene Peterson, paraphrased it in The Message.  “He walked away puzzled, shaking his head.”7

This resurrection cannot be plotted on a clipboard or understood easily.  It is a puzzling turn of events that has turned the world upside down.

Recently I heard a podcast that featured Dr. Amy-Jill Levine who holds the very unique position of being both the Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School.  She was asked by a United Methodist Pastor, Dr.  James Howell, what she believed about the resurrection, and she said: “It isn’t about whether you can catch it on a camera, but can you see what the payoff is?  I think the followers of Jesus generally experienced him as being alive and it changed their lives.

Look,” she went on, “I’ve seen Elvis twice on West End Avenue pumping gas, but it didn’t change my life.  The people who saw Jesus [the resurrected Christ] it changed their lives.”6

That’s where the Resurrection plot comes home for us.  Does what we do on this day or what we proclaim to be true on this day change our lives?  Will it make any difference for us tomorrow, or the next day, or the next?  Will it inform and inspire our lives to somehow make them better or more in tune with God’s will and ways.

Believing in the resurrection will sometimes make us look as foolish as the woman whose life is ebbing away but is still picking out bulbs and charting their perfect placement in her garden knowing that her winter is coming, and she might never see them bloom.  But still, she plots the resurrection and so must we.

The plot turns on our ability to hope again, to believe again, to rely again on the goodness and power of God.

A belief in this kind of power is hard to hold onto at a time when, on an unbelievable scale, we see the horrors of war played out our television screens.  The power of God may be hard to see in a nation as politically divided as ours – red against blue and blue against red – in battles sometimes as deadly as those of the Civil War when it was blue against grey.  Liberals and conservatives, black and white, gay and straight, all taking sides.  It is hard to see the Resurrection’s plot in all this but still it is there.

We could have seen it in the Pope’s decision (though not without some blow-back) of having a Ukrainian woman and a Russian woman, “who work together at a Rome hospital and are friends, to carry the cross during part of the [Good Friday] procession, which recalls Jesus’ suffering as he was being brought to his crucifixion and death.”9

While those entrenched in the ways of war were outraged, an onlooker caught the symbolism perfectly when she called it “very moving and meaningful symbol.” She added, “I think that real people in the real world are concerned about peace. We want peace, we don’t want war.”  She understood the plot of the resurrection and saw it in two friends carrying the cross together.

In more concrete terms columnist, David French, saw the plot of the Resurrection being advanced in the church.

When great evil arises, great good answers. Yes, it’s represented by individual Christian Ukrainian soldiers laying down their lives in defense of their nation and their homes, but it’s also represented by a very different kind of institutional Christian response.
I’m thinking, for example, of the report that the average Baptist World Alliance Church in Ukraine is “feeding and sheltering 100 people.” I’m thinking of Samaritan’s Purse setting up an emergency field hospital outside of Lviv, Ukraine.10

Perhaps you caught a glimpse of Resurrections’ plot in a young man named Mark who, amidst the rubble of a bombed out building, decided to play his guitar.  It reminded me of what President Zalinsky said to the audience at the Grammys

“Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos, they sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them, but the music will break through anyway,” he continued. “We defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound. On our land, we are fighting Russia, which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence.” 

He concluded: “Fill the silence with your music! Fill it today, to tell our story. Tell the truth about this war ... Support us in any way you can. Any way — but not silence. And then peace will come.”11

Until peace comes, we can fill the silence in some small way today with our music as we play our tiny part in plotting the Resurrection by proclaiming that Christ’s message of love, peace and acceptance has not died out – it isn’t even on life support.  It is alive!

So, let’s fill the silence with our music as we sing of Christ who rose and conquered the powers of death for us and all humankind.  

Thine is the glory, risen and conquering son.

________________

1. White Katharine Sergeant Angell and E. B. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, Giroux , 1997).  p.  iii. 

2. R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter's Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2015), 272.

3. St.  Matthew 27:59-60.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

4. St.  John 20:15.  (MSG) [Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament Psalms and Proverbs (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1998).

5. St.  Luke 24:6-7.  (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

6. St.  Luke 24:12.  (NCV) [NCV=The New Century Version]

7. St.  Luke 24:12.  (MSG) 

8. Drs. Amy-Jill Levine and James D.  Howell, “Jesus And...Holy Week,” Myers Park United Methodist Church Weekly Bible Study webcast (Charlotte, North Carolina, April 6, 2022).

9. Francis De'Milio, “Ukraine War Weighs Heavy on Pope’s Good Friday Ritual,” The Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2022, sec. 2, p. 2.

10. David French, “The Best of Christian Compassion, the Worst of Religious Power,” The French Press (The Dispatch, March 13, 2022), https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-best-of-christian-compassion?s=r

11. Emily Yahr, “Zelensky Makes Surprise Grammys Appearance to Urge Support for Ukraine,” The Washington Post (WP Company, April 4, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/04/03/zelensky-grammy-awards-appearance/.

Sermon preached at Trinity Lutheran Church 

Foster Avenue 

17 April 2022