The Torah Reading Exodus 6:1-7
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh: indeed, by a mighty hand he will let them go; by a mighty hand he will drive them out of his land.”
God also spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’ I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they resided as aliens. I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians have enslaved, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the Israelites: I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.
The New Testament Lesson Acts 5:27-32
When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”
Sermon Text
Following Christ’s resurrection and ascension, the Church was devoted to creating a community that did two things. Firstly, it cared for those in need through visitation with the sick and feeding of the hungry. Secondly, it proclaimed the truth of Christ’s resurrection through works of the Spirit and through proclamation of the Word. In general, we tend to separate out these missions as the modern church. We can no longer in good faith do this, however.
For centuries the church has allowed itself to be an institution rather than a movement; to be something that exists that stands the test of time but in so doing becomes static. For those of us who are called to be a part of Christ’s Church we should not see our continual existence as a call to be unchanged but instead to be a call to preach an unchanging testimony. The difference is small and yet it can make a profound difference to our ministries to acknowledge it. The gospel must be “all things to all people that by all means some may be saved,” but it must also somehow retain the essential truth that is at its root—that God took upon human form lived among us died a human death and rose in the perfection of glory.[1]
This story predates us. In some ways even before the church existed this was the story of God’s salvation. It was told in Abraham’s flight into Canaan and then into Egypt, in the patriarchs who survival against all odds in the time after Abraham lived, and it was shown most obviously in the salvific work which God worked on behalf of the Israelites as they fled from oppression in Egypt. No longer existing as Hebrew outsiders, but becoming the people of God who received God’s perfect instruction. At Sinai a foretaste of Christ’s glory was shown and it was shown in the incredible work which God did on behalf of God’s people.
This morning, we saw an excerpt out of Acts in which two of Christ’s disciples are called to trial because they continued to preach Christ’s gospel even though they have been warned against doing so. This reprimand from the powers that be was something of a controversial measure even among the leadership of Jerusalem in the day. There were those within the leadership who saw this Jesus movement as a new expression of God’s spirit. They believed that God had somehow found it was time to create a new sort of faith, one that was inaugurated through the work of Jesus Christ. Others more skeptical of the movement, either because they were directly involved in Jesus’s death or because they feared that their own power would be impacted by the work of the church, were less charitable and saw this new movement as a threat to national security as well as to religious sensibility.
In this climate the church had several options for what it could do: either it could capitulate to the demands and cease preaching the word and cease uniting Greek and Judean Jews, or they could continue to preach the word of Christ to unite the people who used to be separated by the language they spoke and the culture that they practiced. The choice was obvious for the Christians in the first century. You have to keep preahing! It’s interesting to me then that it became difficult for the church to define what it should do later on in its history.
Looking at the story out of Exodus, we see where God speaks to Moses and tells him that he shall go into the halls of power to challenge the pharaoh and free God’s people. It seems to me that God’s general goal for this world is obvious—the abolition of humanity, the freeing of all people to follow God and to live a life in concert with God’s ultimate truths.
For Moses this meant freeing the Israelites from Pharoah, for the prophets it meant liberating the people of God from their own idolatry, and in Christ we saw the ultimate expression of this abolition when Christ freed all flesh from sin. We were no longer required to die, but were finally given the chance to experience eternal life and more than that a blessed life of holiness and perfect love.
Yet, time and time again, we turn from the idea of standing against what is popular or powerful. We give in to the idea that the cruelty of the world must be the cruelty of the Church. What is popular defines what the Church feels it is capable of doing. The simple fact is that you will see this in any tradition, even our own. For as much as I adore the Methodist Church in all of its historical splendor and with them the Evangelical United Brethren who stood by their side, siblings in doctrine separated only by language, I cannot deny that we paid heavily for our participation in the cruelty of the world rather than the love and service to the truth of Jesus Christ.
When the early Methodist movement started getting popular, did they stick to being abolitionists? No, they endorsed slavery through inaction. Even when they split over the issue, Northern Congregations supported the creation of Liberia and not freedom for black folk on American soil. It was a matter of Church government that people of different races should be in different churches and have different leadership, not for only a few years – but until 1968, four years after the country had legalized integration through the Civil Rights Act. While the EUB has a slightly better track record than the Methodist Church, there are essentially no Church movements in the United States that have succeeded in championing justice ahead of the larger societal acceptance of a movement. The exception being women’s groups, like the UMW now called the UWF, who remain at the forefront of justice work in this world.
We have failed to charge ahead when it comes to proclaiming God’s goodness to the world. The Church is always behind in its proclamation because we are so unwilling to change. We were slow to integrate into the Internet and so only in COVID did most congregations truly begin to connect and by that time those who worship online already had their favorites: with much better equipment and with much better production budgets.
While people were beginning to realize that if you wanted to make a difference you had to go out on the street, the Church refused to leave its doors saying: “If anyone wants to be saved they can come to me, but I will not give an afternoon or an evening or any time to anything that would require me to leave this place.” So stingy with ourself, with our resources, with our schedules that we have forgotten there were those who were willing to be beat to be dragged out into the street, to be thrown out of cities simply to proclaim the good work of God and to feed those who needed food.
For what do I bring this doom and gloom on this Sunday after Easter. People of God, we have the chance each day to experience the resurrection. Having just celebrated the fact that Christ overcame even death itself I would hope that we can acknowledge that perhaps there is more than just the state of our soul in need of resurrection. Our systems, our commitment to justice, and to care for the people around us needs to be filled with the same fervor with which we approach the throne of grace through which we worship before the Lord. With which we kneel at the altar and call upon God’s name.
People of God when Moses was sent to pharaoh, he was afraid because he could not speak properly and yet what came of it was the liberation of the people. When the disciples saw, that Greeks were not getting fed in the same way that Hebrews were getting fed they could have panicked, they could have defended themselves, but they hired Greeks to do the work of feeding Greek and Hebrew alike. Eliminating the bias through embracing those affected.
The Church has two eternal witnesses that it must give: firstly, that Christ came and lived and died and rose again to bring us all out of sin and into the Kingdom of God. Secondly we are called to feed every hungry person, to give drink to the thirsty, to care for the sick, however we are able to, and to bring the stranger into our world, to let them know that they have a place with us: whether that is a homeless stranger, a migrant stranger, a foreign stranger – we are called to be the hands of feed in Jesus Christ in service to the people around us.
Are we willing to face even the mildest scrutiny in our continued commitment to this work? Remembering that there are those who die to do it in other countries? That our scripture records the tale of apostles who were killed and put on trial and beaten to do the work that we choose not to today? Are we willing to let God’s resurrection lead us to change something about the way that we do this thing called Church? Or are we content to keep the status quo as close as possible, to sit comfortably to not do too much that’s new, and just wait out the rest of our existence as a lesser form of what we could be…
People of God, the Spirit of the Lord, is upon us the people of God… We need to do our work, we need to help our community, we need to be a part of the people around us. Let us go and proclaim our risen savior! Let us go forward and lead the way in justice and mercy and service to all! And let the church no longer be a place where people can come and hear something the rest of the world figured out twenty years ago, but instead be a place where the Gospel is given once more, in a new way to tell the same ancient truth. Our Lord and Savior, is knocking at our door asking to be let in… To change us completely… Are we willing to be changed? Or are we content to fizzle out this is the charge before us today and forever? People of God, I hope we know there is really only one answer. – Amen.
[1] 1 Corinthians 9:19
Teach us to Number our Days 