The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for April 19, 2009

Texts: Acts 4:32-35/John 20:19-31

Title: “On Condition”

              Virtually everything we do has conditions attached.  We act because we are motivated to act, the motivation supplied by the realization that our action will produce some desired or beneficial result. We go the health club and put ourselves through a regimen of exercise, but there is a condition attached.  We exercise because we expect a return on our time invested. I am willing to allocate time in the gym because I believe that I will feel better physically as a result.  We go to work each day not merely to pass our time, we work on the condition that we will receive a pay envelop at the end of the month.  We hire a contractor to do work around the house, and we will pay that contractor only on the condition that he completes the work.     

              Virtually everything we do has conditions attached. There are conditions attached to your getting up and coming to church on Sunday morning. You are motivated to come here because you expect those conditions to be met.  You come, and only will continue to come, on condition that the service fulfills your expectation for a peaceful break from the routines of life, for instance, or good music or an inspiring message.

              The gospels reveal that the disciples of our Lord followed the Lord under the assumption that certain conditions would be met.  Those conditions often centered on personal advancement.  They believed that their efforts would be repaid by special considerations when Jesus came into his glory. As the events of Holy Week disclose, however, when dreams of glory were disturbed by the whip’s lash and the Lord’s crucifixion they betrayed the Lord and scattered.

              The Lord knew full well the character of the men with whom he associated.  He knew that they maintained false assumptions about where their experience with him might lead. When they failed him, he may well have written them off. That did not happen.           

             The resurrected Jesus sought out his disciples after the resurrection, not to chide or admonish them for their cowardice, instead, as our lesson reveals the first words John’s Gospel has coming from Jesus’ mouth are, “Peace be with you.”  But not only did he confer the blessing of peace, John tells us he breathed on them and gave them this charge, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

              Jesus’ blessing effectively inaugurated the next chapter in the disciples’ ministry.  The Holy Spirit would do remarkable things in their lives, and through them accomplish incredible things in extending the peace of Christ into the world. Yet before they even began their work, in fact on the very day Jesus appeared to the disciples, John informs us that a least one of the disciples was unprepared to take up the work of discipleship.

              Enter “doubting Thomas.” Rivaling Peter alone, Thomas enjoys particular notoriety in John’s Gospel.  Thomas was not present when the Lord came calling, this despite the fact that the disciples were in lock down in fear that Jesus’ enemies might be looking for them.  We are not told why Thomas was not with the rest, but apparently fear didn’t keep him behind locked doors. In fact, when Jesus’ life was threatened earlier in the ministry it was Thomas who urged his fellow disciples to follow Jesus to the death.

              Bold in his commitments, Thomas was also bold in voicing his doubts when the disciples reported Jesus’ appearance. Do you not find it interesting the disciples who had seen the Lord faced to face and had received a spiritual blessing were unable to convince one of their own that the Lord was actually alive? 

              Those of us who follow the resurrected Jesus Christ today may take solace in the fact that the resurrection wasn’t an easy sell even for one who had actually participated in Jesus’ ministry.  No, the disciples were unable to convince their fellow disciple that Jesus had appeared to them alive.  Thomas set certain conditions that needed to be met before he believed, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” 

              You have to marvel at the candor of John to introduce the issue of a disciple’s doubt into a narrative written that his audience, us, “[might] come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.”  But neither John, nor the other gospel writers for that matter, pull any punches.  All four gospels are quick to report the fragility of the disciples’ faith, are frank to inform us that the disciples imposed conditions on their discipleship.

              It is a profound mark of God’s grace that the disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, somehow moved beyond their conditional faith to become the community the book of Acts describes in chapter three, a community responsible for “signs and wonders,” a community where everyone held everything they owned in common, selling all their personal stuff and adding the proceeds to the common treasury. 

               Yet Scripture will not allow us to forget that even as they prayed and worked together, winning the good will of the people in the process, the flaws of the disciples were still exposed.  They were all too ready to yield to temptation to place their own interests above those of the church, to place conditions on how far they were willing to stretch in obedience to God.

                The church even in the hands of the saints, people like Peter, Paul, James, was never a perfected creation.  Those saints loved the Lord, but being flawed and sinful like the rest of us they were incapable of loving or following the Lord unconditionally. 

               Yet God’s grace can do remarkable things. We gather to pray, study Scripture, meet for worship and fellowship that we might become less conditional in responding to God’s call. In worship we remind ourselves that we are in covenant with God, that God expects certain things from us as his covenant partners. Those expectations are framed in three questions that will be put to our new members at this public reception. (The session already voted to receive the Hesters and our confirmands into membership at its meeting last Tuesday night.)

                  You will discover at the outset that the questions asked allow little room for a conditional response. The questions are as follows: 1) Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world?  2) Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love? 3) Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?   

               The questions go to the very heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.  The same or similar questions were put to us when we joined the church.  If you have ever been elected to be an elder or deacon in the church, you know that further testimony of faith is required.

               Christ makes little room for conditions when he asks us to follow him, even though we are incapable of more than a conditional response. That he continues to reach out to us, flawed as we are, is one of the wonders of grace. 

              “Do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world?” It was that great, decisive, miracle of grace, the resurrection, that shapes what we think and how we live as children of grace. Even as reality forces us to acknowledge that our renunciation of evil and its power in the world is weak or occasional, even as we allow sin great leeway to move in our lives, we know that God’s love in Christ is unconditional. Christ never abandons us.

               The second question we pose to those entering the church completes the first. Having turned away from that which wars against God and his authority, “Do you TURN TO Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love?” Again the question offers little room for a conditional response. But what does that turning to Jesus mean?  It means faith to trust that Jesus’ grace and love have sufficient power to overcome all obstacles we might face in doing his will.

                In my sermon last week I characterized faith as “living beyond our means.” I described it as daring to live from the conviction that Jesus’ resurrection from the dead effectively accomplished what Jesus and the Church has said it would accomplish. I described it as venturing in faith into those places where our eyes and human analysis cannot take us, as trusting the Bible as the word of God, as trusting witnesses long dead who lived their lives in the conviction that Jesus’ resurrection was not only personally transformative, but decisively transformed human history itself.

                Thomas struggled to make the leap of faith. He needed evidence he could touch and physically examine as a condition for believing. Jesus ultimately provided the evidence Thomas was seeking, but in the end would even that prove sufficient to help Thomas over the obstacles he might face in his life of faith? How would Thomas carry on once Jesus was out of sight?

                  Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love?  The question allows little room for conditions, little room for “I do, but.”

                 Thomas may well have walked away still gripped by doubt concerning Jesus’ resurrection, yet despite the residual doubt that may well have plagued him, there is no indication in John’s gospel that the “doubter” was excluded from Jesus’ ministry. It is not our doubt, but our rejection of God’s grace that severs our relationship with the Lord of life.

                 Do we turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as Lord and Savior?  The proof of God’s amazing love in Christ is boldly displayed in the fact that our “I do, but,” is not met with an in kind response. Jesus never said “I will be with so long as you meet these expectations.”  Or “you can count on me until…”

Our level of trust may well be under-developed at present, but trust at whatever level gives God something to work with, and that is all God asks from us.

                  A third question is posed to the entering the church. “Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?” The suggested response is the phrase “I will, with God’s help.”

                 In fact the only reason you or I can, or will ever, give anything but a conditional response to the three membership questions is by virtue of God’s help. 

                 The resurrection of our Lord which we celebrated last week, friends, demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which God is willing to go to help us remove the conditional in our commitment and replace it with the unconditional. Imperfect people we make imperfect commitments.  We struggle to fulfill the just requirements of the Lord, but are not thereby condemned, for there are no conditions we may place on our believing that God is unable or unwilling to overcome through his unconditional love.

                  As Paul reminds us “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  And to what end did he die?  He died that we might enjoy all the good gifts of God without condition.

PRAYER

              Heavenly Father, to whom all thoughts are open, all desires known, we drawn near to thee in worship, knowing that you are ever near to us.  Whether waking or sleeping you maintain your vigil at our side.  You are a constant in our lives. On you we can rely in our ever changing circumstances.  Expand, we pray, our capacity to sense your presence in all seasons of life, particularly in those times when we our most vulnerable and our need is most great.       

                Distracted by many things, we hastily pass through rather than living through the many events that shape our lives. Teach us, O God, how to live with greater deliberation. Teach us how to slow down that we may nurture a deeper and more contemplative inner life.

                 O Christ, you have no expectation that we will become perfect specimens of faith, for you know the burden of sin under which we labor. Strengthen us, O Lord, to live into the resurrected life you have won for us by establishing habits that will make us less attractive targets for temptation and sin. Where we are most tested there be to brace and defend us, and in the event that we can help our neighbor who is passing through the shadows grant us the gifts of empathy and wisdom in reaching out to them.

                 Lord, open your church to a more vigorous discipleship. Inward focused, we have too often failed to take seriously your call to move beyond our walls. Help us to reprioritize our commitments that we might more faithfully follow where you would lead us. Enlarge our hearts that we might embrace more of the world’s pain and suffering, and then rouse us to action to address the conditions that breed that pain and suffering. 

                     Forgive us, O God, when we insist that our personal virtue and hard work are responsible for the many material blessing we enjoy. Grant us humility to accept thy good gifts with charity toward those who do not enjoy our good fortune.

                   Abide with those who live in poverty this day, those who live in the squalor of shanty towns or slums.  Even as people of means struggle to meet the challenges of a depressed economy, we know that many live without means even in the best of times economically.  We lift up all those who will live this day hungry, ill-clad, uneducated, and without hope to sustain them.  Forgive for ignoring the plight of our neighbor, even as we enjoy great material advantages and resources that might be used to alleviate his suffering.

                 We pray, O God for those whose lives are marred by tragedy this day.  Support all those who mourn that they may feel the light of your countenance.  May those whose grief is beyond their capacity to support be given the strength to prevail over their anguish.

                We give thee thanks, O God, for those who have united with us in ministry. We pray for Dan and Melanie who come to us on letter of transfer. May they find the encouragement and the support they need to live the life of faith to the fullest. We pray your blessing on Adrian, their son, that his faith may be nurtured into vigorous life as he participates in the life of our congregation. We pray for Rachel, Kaitlyn, Will and Christopher as they personally affirm the baptism vows that were made at their baptisms.  Grant, O God, that they may feel the power of your Spirit in this place, and may find our fellowship to be the nurturing environment for faith you would have it to be.

                 We praise you for Bill, Elaine, and Jennifer, the mentors and teachers who shared their many gifts with our youth through the confirmation process.

                  Lord, we give thee thanks for all your good gifts we enjoy in such abundance, even as we lift up petitions for those who have special needs….