Yes, Lord? Sermon

Yes, Lord?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 10, 2016

Scripture: Acts 9:1-6; John 21:1-19

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! In the church it’s still Easter. Out in the world Easter has come and gone. The plastic baskets full of plastic grass and chocolate bunnies are mostly gone from the stores. That’s fine. Those things aren’t what Easter is about in any event. Here it’s still Easter, and today we heard two scripture accounts of encounters some of the early giants of the faith had with the risen Christ. One of those, the one about Peter and other disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, which John for inexplicable reasons calls by it Roman name the Sea of Tiberius, occurs not long after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other, the one about Paul’s road to Damascus experience, occurs later; but it’s still about an encounter someone had with Jesus after Jesus’ death. The Revised Common Lectionary that I use put these two readings together for today, and as I read them last week I wondered if these two seemingly very different stories have anything in common, if there is some common theme in them that might be worth talking to you about. Somewhat to my surprise I found one, and that’s what I do want to talk to you about this morning.

What do these stories have in common other than that the risen Christ appears in both of them? One thing they have in common, I think, is that in both of them the risen Christ asks someone a question. He asks Paul, called by his Aramaic name Saul in this story, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asks Peter three times, called here by his Aramaic name Simon, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” In both cases Jesus is, I think, actually asking the people he questions something rather deeper than the actual question he puts to them. He’s not just asking for information. He’s actually calling on these men to do something. On one level he’s asking Paul to stop persecuting Christ’s followers. He’s asking Peter to confess his love for Jesus.

Yet I think there’s more to these questions then even that. These questions imply a call from the risen Christ to Paul and to Peter. Jesus wants a lot more than information from them. What he wants, what he’s calling them to, is repentance. Now, to understand what I mean by saying that what the risen Christ wants from Paul and Peter is repentance we obviously need to know what repentance means, and that’s perhaps a more difficult question than you might expect. See, in popular usage repentance has come to mean essentially to regret something, to feel sorry about something we’ve done. We can even hear it meaning something like beat up on ourselves because we did something wrong.

That is not what repentance means in the language of faith. Rather, repentance is having a change of heart. It isn’t feeling sorry, although we may feel sorry about something of which we are repenting. It is turning your life around. When Jesus says repent and believe the good news, as he does at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark for example, he doesn’t mean feel bad. He doesn’t mean beat up on yourself. He means something a lot harder and a lot more fruitful than that. He means turn your life around. Turn from the ways you have been living to new, transformed ways. Turn from the ways of the world to the ways of God. Stop doing what is wrong not because you feel bad about doing what is wrong but just because it’s wrong. Start doing what is right, and for Jesus that means essentially start living the life of the Kingdom of God now, in this life, in this sinful world.

That’s what the risen Christ asked of both Peter and Paul. They responded in faith, which is a pretty good thing because if they hadn’t we probably would never have heard of Jesus. So Christ’s call to them and their response is important to us to be sure, but here’s something just as important, or maybe even more important to us. Christ questioned Peter and Paul, but Christ questions us too. He probably isn’t asking us why we’re persecuting him like he asked Paul, because I don’t think we’re doing that. He may be asking us if we love him, like he asked Peter. One thing I’m sure of. He’s asking us to repent. He’s asking us to turn our lives around. I know he’s asking that because he always asks that of everyone, since none of us lives the Kingdom life perfectly.

The question for us to discern is just what that question, that call to repentance, means to us more specifically. I suspect that there are several facets to Christ’s call to us. Are there things in our personal lives of which we need to repent? Perhaps addictive behavior. Perhaps unjust or unloving relationships with people in our families. Perhaps disregard of how our actions affect others. He’s also asking: Are there things in our life as a church of which we need to repent? Judgment where we should be extending grace perhaps. Or un-Christian narrowmindedness toward certain classes of people. Or maybe just inertia or inaction when we should be taking Christ’s Gospel of grace into our world.

I’m not going to try to answer those questions today. I don’t have time, and besides, those questions are not just or even not primarily for me to answer. They are for us to answer both individually and together as a community of faith. One thing I know for sure. Christ is asking. Christ is calling. Peter and Paul answered Yes Lord. Will we? Amen.