FIRST READING Acts 3:11–21
11 While he clung to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the portico called Solomon’s Portico, utterly astonished. 12 When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, “You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? 13 The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. 14 But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, 15 and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. 16 And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you. 17 And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18 In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. 19 Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, 20 so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, 21 who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.
PSALM Psalm 4
1 Answer me when I call, O God, defender of my cause; you set me free when I was in distress; have mercy on me and hear my prayer. 2 “You mortals, how long will you dishonor my glory; how long will you love illusions and seek after lies?” 3 Know that the LORD does wonders for the faithful; the LORD will hear me when I call. 4 Tremble, then, and do not sin; speak to your heart in silence upon your bed. 5 Offer the appointed sacrifices, and put your trust in the LORD. 6 Many are saying, “Who will show us any good?” Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD. 7 You have put gladness in my heart, more than when grain and wine abound. 8 In peace, I will lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me rest secure.
SECOND READING 1 John 3:1–7
1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. 4 Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. 5 You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. 6 No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. 7 Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.
GOSPEL Luke 24:36–48
36 While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 37 They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38 He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41 While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43and he took it and ate in their presence. 44 Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.
RELIABLE WITNESS
I don’t have to tell you, that when it comes to our young ones, they can ask some pretty interesting questions. This was the case when a little girl asked her mother, “Mom, how did the human race appear?” The mother answered, “Well, God first made Adam and Eve and then they had children, and so on and so on . . .” Two days later the girl asked her father the same question. The father answered, “Many years ago there were monkeys from which the human race evolved.” This of course confused the little girl so she returned to her mother and said, “Mom, you told me the human race was created by God, and Dad said we developed from monkeys, how’s that possible?” The mother answered, “Well, dear, it’s very simple. I told you about my side of the family and your father told you about his.” How we got here is a question that humans have been wrestling with for centuries.
For the Christian community we look to the Bible which we believe is clear on the subject. In the beginning God… However, for the scientific community and the non-believers, this doesn’t seem like a satisfactory answer. For the scientific community, faith is not a measurable criteria, so they expend countless hours developing theories, doing research and writing papers in order to try and justify their ideas. There’s a quote from the movie Men in Black that I love. While trying to recruit Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones says, “1500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” It’s a good summary of how science has changed over the years.
There are many things we believe in this world that we haven’t seen. As children we learned that the earth is round. It was the ancient Greeks who first theorized that the earth is round. This discovery is attributed to Pythagoras who first proposed it sometime around 500 B.C. “Earth is a sphere floating in space,” he declared to a packed lecture hall.
It’s said that a grave silence fell upon the hall when he said this. His listeners were amazed. They wondered how they could live on a sphere! Common sense suggested that earlier philosophers were right when they said the earth was a flat disc floating on the air. Pythagoras had deduced the idea of a round earth based on his observation that earth casts a circular shadow on the moon during eclipses.
His revolutionary idea was accepted by Aristotle and other Greek philosophers and became common knowledge as early as 300 B.C. Most of the rest of humanity, though, had to accept it on faith. It’s only been within our own lifetime that human beings have escaped the earth’s gravitational field and ventured out into space and affirmed that Pythagoras was right. The world is indeed round.
Scientists tell us that life began to emerge on earth as early as 3.5 billion years ago. They also tell us that our earth is rotating on its axis at 1100 miles per hour; that the earth is rotating around the sun at 481,000 mph; and that our sun and solar system are whirling into space at 57,000,000 mph. It takes quite a leap of faith to believe all that, but people I know and trust tell me it’s true, and thus I believe that, yes, a lot of what science tells us is indeed true. Furthermore, they tell us this universe is enormous.
Now this isn’t mere conjecture. For four decades two Voyager space crafts have been hurtling beyond the edge of our solar system at a rate of 100,000 miles per hour. These space craft have been speeding away from earth and are now approximately 12 billion miles from this small planet. When these craft were still responding to signals, at about 9 billion miles away, engineers would beam commands to them at the speed of light. It took these commands thirteen hours to arrive, even at the speed of light! It’s estimated that to send a message to the edge of our enormous universe, at the speed of light, it would take 15 billion years. And within this enormous universe there are billions and billions of galaxies. It’s more than I can get my mind around, but isn’t it a magnificent thought, that we live in such an amazing universe? Just think what we’ll know tomorrow!
Just like today’s theories, science knew, only to have those earlier theories disproved, so they develop new ones. As far as I’m concerned, all science does is prove how right the Bible has been all along. In the beginning God… Is there anyone here today that believes that such a magnificent universe could just have just happened with no guiding hand at work? To me the thought is preposterous.
British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle compares the likelihood of life appearing on earth, by accident, as equivalent to the possibility that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials found there. I’m sorry, I just can’t accept the theory that we’re here by sheer chance or accident.
There’s a story about a caveman who was out hunting one day and found a modern-day watch. He noticed this strange looking object on the ground making a ticking sound. Looking at the face of the watch, he saw the hands go around. Opening the inside, he saw a system with order. At that time, he didn’t know what it was but he said, “If this is a watch, there must be a watchmaker.” And that’s the way most Christians respond to this amazing universe. Without a watchmaker, there could be no watch. And without Supreme Intelligence, there could be no universe. There’s no way this world with all its immensity and intricacy and beauty could simply have happened. Even a caveman could see that.
Do you remember Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town? There’s a scene in it where Jane Crofut gets a letter from her minister when she’s sick. The envelope is addressed like this: “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.” That’s right, the mind of God. That’s where it all began. Science struggles to tell us how it happened, but only faith can tell us why it happened.
A father told of taking his family to the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. He said the sky seemed more brilliant than they’d ever seen it, and the stars were so close you felt as if you could touch them. Their three boys decided that they would put their sleeping bags out on the ground so they could go to sleep watching the stars. The man and his wife had just settled down for the night when their youngest boy came into the tent, dragging his sleeping bag with him. “What is the matter?” his parents asked. “Is it getting too cold?” “No,” he answered. Then he added, “I just never knew I was so small.” Looking into the vastness of God’s creations does make us feel small. But it also reminds us of how great and wonderful God really is.
Even if you were determined to be an agnostic, you would still be left with mysteries that science can never answer: The first of these is the creation of the universe itself: that there should be something rather than nothing is miraculous. The second is that, once upon a time, some of the inanimate matter on this earth planet suddenly came to life. And the third is that some of that matter that came to life gained the ability to think, to be motivated, to seek, and to imagine, even to hope.
Even if you weren’t impressed by the immensity and the intricacy of it all, the wondrous beauty of creation alone should show the sheer lunacy of believing it all happened by pure chance. “Nature,” wrote Jonathan Edwards, “is God’s greatest evangelist.” And he was right. That’s one of the reasons you and I are in this room today. I can’t imagine a universe such as ours coming into being without some intelligent Being saying, “Let there be light.” Whether it happened in seven days or whether it happened over billions of years is irrelevant. It happened because God caused it to happen. But there’s another reason we’re here. It’s because two thousand years ago in Jerusalem a man named Jesus rose from the grave.
Of course, you and I weren’t there. We didn’t see it with our own eyes. But there were a host of people, reliable people, who did see it. Our gospel lesson for today records their testimony and is candid about their reaction. In today’s lesson from Luke, we discover that when Jesus was seen, after He was resurrected from the dead, some of His closest friends reacted with shock and disbelief. They thought He was a ghost. They wanted to touch Him and hold Him. It’s hard to blame them. How could He be resurrected from the dead?
A Methodist pastor tells about a parishioner in a church she once served who had not seen his family in over 20 years. There had been conflict. He had been hurt and decided to leave home and never return. More than 20 years later he had a change of heart knowing that he needed reconciliation with his family. He gathered up all his emotional strength and returned home. His mother and sisters, who had not had any word from him during the long period of separation and had on occasion even wondered whether he was dead, responded like the early followers of Jesus who first saw Him after His resurrection. When the man arrived at his family home, the family was startled and fearful.
They never expected to see him again and they remembered the conflict that had separated them. Was it really him? Was he back for revenge? They wondered. But finally, their pain became joy, the joy of disbelief this son and brother was alive and had returned to them. Throughout their visit the mother and sisters would say to him, “We can’t believe it’s you,” and would touch him and hug him for a sense of verification that it was indeed him. That’s the way the disciples reacted to the risen Christ.
They wanted to touch Jesus and feel where the nails pierced His flesh. These disciples needed proof He was alive. If He were merely a bodiless apparition, it would be too easy to dismiss His appearance as a mass psychosis brought on by their grief. But they touched His hands and His sword-pierced side. He even ate a meal with them. He was no ghost. He was the risen Christ. Of this they had no doubt. You can see that from what happened next.
Christ gives them their mission. He says to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then He opens their minds so they can understand the Scriptures. He tells them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” That’s what’s important; they are to be His witnesses. And what witnesses they became!
They were fearless. We see that in our Acts reading for today. No matter how hard the religious and the political authorities tried to squelch their fast growing movement, they wouldn’t recant their faith. We’re told that the word Luke uses here translated as “witness” is a unique word in Greek. It has two or three meanings. Initially, it simply meant someone who was an eyewitness, who saw something happen with their own eyes. In that sense, the disciples were definitely witnesses. However, it can also mean someone who might not have seen something happen with their own eyes, but who nonetheless believes strongly enough, that the event happened, that they’re willing to tell others about it. Paul is called a witness even though he wasn’t present for Jesus’ actual ministry. You and I also fit into this category. But there’s a third meaning for witness as well in the New Testament, and it’s the one that applies the most.
We get the word “martyr” from the Greek word for witness. It even sounds like it “martus.” As you know, a martyr is someone who was killed for their convictions, for their witness. The Greeks understood the connection between martyrdom and being a witness. So did the disciples. We don’t know exactly how the disciples died. Most of the stories come from tradition, not from scripture. But we do know that, of all the disciples, only one of them died a natural death and that was John and he live on Patmos in exile. That’s why we know that their witness is reliable.
Nobody dies for something that they know isn’t true. People with a second-hand faith might be reluctant to give their lives. After all, they might have a degree of uncertainty. They weren’t there. They simply heard a report from people they trusted. But the disciples were there. They spoke with absolute certainty. They saw nail scarred hands. They spoke with Jesus and ate with Him. And, eventually, they died for Him. There can be no doubt of their reliability.
Chuck Colson says it better than anyone else. For those who may not recognize the name, Chuck Colson went to prison as part of the infamous Watergate burglary and subsequent cover-up during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Colson was part of a determined conspiracy to cover up a crime committed by high government officials. Colson says: “The Watergate cover-up reveals the true nature of humanity. Even political zealots at the pinnacle of power will, in the crunch, save their own necks, even at the expense of the ones they profess to serve so loyally. But the apostles couldn’t deny Jesus because they had seen Him face to face, and they knew He had risen from the dead. No, you can take it from an expert in cover-ups. I’ve lived through Watergate and nothing less than a resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain, to their dying whispers, that Jesus is alive and He is Lord. Two thousand years later, nothing less than the power of the risen Christ could inspire Christians around the world to remain faithful despite prison, torture, and death.” It’s a matter of faith.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve turned our minds off and accepted as truth something that is appealing but without substance. Just as we accept many of the findings of science, no matter how incredible, we also accept the witness of authorities we trust. In faith and through the reports of eye witnesses, we accept the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ because we accept the testimony of reliable witnesses. And now we’re being called and sent to be reliable witnesses as well. “He lives,” says the old Gospel hymn. “He lives! Christ Jesus lives today . . . You ask me how I know He lives, He lives within my heart.” That’s the best evidence there is of the resurrection. We too are witnesses to the events of history because we get our information from reliable eye witnesses. And now we’re called and sent to share these same facts with others.
Amen