Sunday, April 15, 2018

3^rd Sunday of Easter

The Revised Common Lectionary passages for the Lord’s Day are:

First Reading: Acts 3:12-19, Psalm 4
Second Reading: I John 1:1-2:2
Gospel Reading: Luke 24:36b-48

The liturgical color for the day is: White

In Luke’s Gospel this episode is the place where the Risen Christ appears among the disciples in Jerusalem.

Early in the Second Century, Ignatius, that bishop and martyr too, warned Christians to pay attention to the reality of the bodily resurrection.  He was clear that to ascend to a mere spiritual view of resurrection was not only incomplete but also incompatible with the reality of how God’s fullness is demonstrated in the incarnation of the person of Jesus Christ.

To the early Church and to us still today who stand in the midst of this great tradition, the event of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth stands as the centerpiece of who we are as a people and becomes the very lens through which we define ourselves and identify ourselves.

We are people of the resurrection.  That proclamation is made so clear in the Sacrament of Baptism.  It is there that we claim the action of God on our lives as a full movement of grace.  In the waters of baptism, we see with our eyes and experience in the element of water the powerful reality that God reaches all the way out and all the way down to claim us fully as the children of God.

Even before we can lay claim to that reality, God in sure sign and symbol proclaims it over our very lives.  We are the children of God.  We have been washed in resurrection.  We die to sin—it still exists and is a clear and present danger in our lives—but its power is stripped away and the power of life is upon us.  We become dead to sin and alive to all that is good in Christ Jesus.  We ARE the people of resurrection—resurrection people.

It is this power of resurrection that prepares us and sets us up to be ready, reliable, credible witnesses to what God has done in the world.  It forms us as disciples and apostles.  When we look into the baptismal font we are seeing the empty tomb—and it is that empty tombness—it is that being alive fully that we are witnesses to.  We witness a kind of life that nothing—including the power of death—oh, nothing can stop this life that is in and of us.

We are the witnesses to that kind of life.  That is what Jesus tells them in this passage—“You are my witnesses.”  Such is a role—a functional role that defines us God’s people.  We have been baptized into this role—witness!

General Presbyter
Daris Bultena