4th Sunday of Easter – Year C
Acts 13:14, 43-52; Psalm 100,1-2, 3, 5; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30.
What do we do when the unexpected happens?
The actions of two young men these past six days
have posed this question to the City of Boston,
to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
and to women and men of goodwill everywhere.
What do we do when a day off from school or work
sees most of us writing text messages and Facebook postings saying,
“I’m okay”; or for some, “I’m not okay”;
or worst of all, for three young people, no response whatsoever?
What do we do when the Easter movement of death-to-life gets reversed
and the anti-Easter movement of life-to-death tries to extinguish the Paschal flame?
What do we do when the events of a warm Friday teach us a new term –
at least a new one for me –
and “shelter-in-place” immediately sounds very, very dangerous.
What do we do when the unexpected happens,
when life confronts us with a situation for which we have no plan?
Believe it or not, this very question is percolating under the surface
of today’s first reading, the one from the Acts of the Apostles,
a book that Luke wrote as something of a follow-up to or
even a continuation of his gospel.
Our mothers and fathers in faith, at least according to Luke,
had a three-part answer to our question.
What do we do when the unexpected happens,
when life confronts us with a situation for which we have no plan?
We pray, we talk to one another, and we carry out a decision.
To set the context of today’s first reading and this tripartite response,
consider the end of Luke’s gospel,
the very last chapter he wrote before he turned the page and began Acts.
The unexpected had happened.
There was no plan for handling Jesus’ death,
a violent death at that, an execution.
Two of Jesus’ friends were walking on the road to Emmaus,
perhaps to pick up the pieces of their lives and to start over again.
“We were hoping” (Lk. 24:21), the disciples told the stranger walking with them,
“We were hoping”…well, what?
That Jesus would always be walking with us;
that, if he had to go, he would leave a clear set of instructions;
that our worlds would not be thrown into upheaval, as they are now.
But that is not what happened.
A betrayal happened;
an arrest in a garden happened;
Calvary happened.
And there were no directions sitting on the table in
the Upper Room when the disciples
huddled there afraid.
Before Cleopas and his unnamed companion departed for Emmaus, however,
they must have prayed.
As they walked with Jesus, we know that they talked with one another and with him
so intensely that they would later ask,
“Were not our hearts burning in us while he spoke to us on the way” (Lk. 24:32)?
And, of course, as the Risen One
“was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk. 24:35),
the two disciples carried out the decision that welled up in them:
get up, go, and be with the community in Jerusalem.
Be with the church.
There were other times when the unexpected happened,
when life confronted the followers of Christ with
a situation for which they had no plan,
and the Resurrection was a bit harder to see.
Take the death of Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus.
Not long after he died, the disciples wondered who would take his place (cf., Acts 1:15-26).
Jesus did not appoint any understudies to his band of followers,
nor did he command that there always be a stable group of twelve in place.
Luke tells us in Acts that the Eleven did what we are doing right now.
They turned to Scripture for guidance and found it written in the psalms,
“‘May another take his office’” (Acts 1:20; cf., Psalm 109:8).
They talked about who that person might be,
and they carried out a decision by casting lots.
A dramatic moment in the early church?
Maybe, maybe not.
But it does give us a paradigm for negotiating the unexpected,
for moving ahead when no plan is in place:
pray, talk to one another, and carry out a decision.
All of this brings us back to the reading we heard from Acts today,
and what could seem like an innocuous comment it contained:
after some Jewish people contradicted the good news Paul preaches,
Paul says, “We now turn to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:46).
This decision had enormous repercussions for the early church,
and it prompted an unexpected question,
a situation for which the church had no plan:
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would Gentiles who wanted to follow Jesus have to become Jews?
In other words, would men need to be circumcised,
and would all be bound to follow the Mosaic law?
Jesus, as you might have guessed, did not leave behind any answers.
So the disciples prayed, they met in Jerusalem to discuss the whole matter,
and they carried out a decision:
Gentiles who wished to follow Jesus did not have to be circumcised,
This is what the church has always tried to do when the unexpected happens:
pray, talk, and decide.
I wish I could stand here and do my best impression of Luke and tell everyone
how to pray about this week,
how to talk with one another about it, and
how to carry out a decision from it.
I can’t do that.
But I can remind us of one of the petitions from last week’s Prayer of the Faithful:
“For the participants, organizers, and fans of the Boston marathon:
we pray for good weather and fair competition
as they run the good race and finish the course.”
The prayer takes literally what Paul first meant metaphorically:
life is like a race, and we, the runners in it, ought to run with abandon until the end.
We all know that, literally, Monday’s race did not end for most people.
In fact, many sought shelter in this very building after being told to stop running.
I also suspect, though, that, metaphorically,
the race of this past week has not ended yet either.
Women and men, boys and girls, need to heal.
Questions of why, how, and will this happen again, will swirl for weeks, if not months.
Well-intentioned Christians will likely disagree over whether
capture, trial, and, perhaps, sentencing, are causes for celebration or sorrow.
The race, to be sure, is far from over.
And thus, now, more than ever, we need to remember who we are:
We pray, we talk to one another, and we carry out a decision.
As we do these three things, may we, like Paul, be able to say three other things:
“I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7).
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