We Are "Haves" (Reflections on Easter 5, Year A 2026)

 

The Stoning of St. Stephen (Mariotto Di Nardo 15th Cnet)

43 Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts 2: 44-47)

There’s a pretty nasty story in the First Lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary for Easter 5, Year A (Acts 7:55-60). It involves the first Christian to die for the faith, a deacon named Stephen. Stephen gets stoned, and not in a good way. It was something of a custom among the high religious muckety-mucks of the time to throw heavy rocks at anyone they thought was a blasphemer until said alleged blasphemer died from a cracked skull or other related injury. This was certainly an unpleasant business, but so was crucifixion. First century folks seem to have been remarkably inventive when it came to ways of killing people they didn’t like.

To understand Stephen’s death, you need to know a little back story. Above is a quote from the First Lesson from Easter 4 (last week’s First Lesson) in the RCL. It describes a nascent form of socialism practiced by the early Christians. Then as now, this economic arrangement was pretty radical. I guess all societies liked to divide their populations into “haves” and “have nots.” In the world of the Bible text, it was generally believed that you were a “have” because God liked you better than God liked the “have nots.” If you were righteous, God would bless you. If your life sucked, it was because you must’ve gotten on God’s naughty list somehow and you deserved the suckiness that was your lot.

But then came Jesus and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Suddenly there were folks who wanted to love others as Jesus had loved them—without distinction of person. No more “them” and “us.” Only “us.” The early church, on fire with God’s Spirit, offered more than just a compelling message. They offered the charitable and generous spirit to back it up. The “haves” shared with the “have nots,” and they all had fellowship together. They sat down at table with one another and ate with glad and “simple” or “humble” hearts.[i] It’s not hard to see how a community that was generous, humble, grateful, friendly, and non-judgmental could be attractive to others. This sort of makes you wish every church was full of folks like this, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, every family has problems. As egalitarian as our early Christian ancestors were, a little favoritism started to sneak in. The gentile widows and orphans felt they weren’t getting the same charitable treatment the Jewish widows and orphans were getting. The Apostles decided to handle this in a remarkably democratic way by having the whole congregation of believers elect a committee of seven men to oversee food distribution. The requirements for the Board of Deacons were the men chosen had to be in good standing with the community, they had to be wise, and full of the Holy Spirit. Stephen was among the seven chosen for this job, and, apparently, he was pretty good at it. The Bible suggests he might’ve even had the gift of healing. He was also a really good apologist for the faith and was able to debate eloquently with those outside the Christian community.[ii]

Now just imagine if you were a scribe or Pharisee or some other religious bigshot. You see the Christians growing in number and you might be getting your boxers bunched up. What if people stopped listening to you? What if they stopped donating to the temple and started giving to the poor instead? What if there stopped being a visible class distinction between the righteous and the sinners? It’s just no fun being a “have” if there aren’t “have nots” to look down on, is it? And this Stephen guy makes a really good argument for being a Christian. So, what do you do? You trump up some false charges of blasphemy against him and have him stoned to death.

What I see in this story is not what the religious authorities did, but what they were unable to do. Stephen went to his death praising God. The earthly authorities could take his life, but they could not take away his faith. Like Jesus[iii], Stephen chose to forgive those who persecuted him. They could make him die, but they could not make him hate.

In our Gospel Lesson for Easter 5, Thomas tells Jesus he doesn’t know the way Jesus is going. Jesus tells him, “I am the way.” Philip asks for a vison of the Father. Jesus tells him, “I am in the Father, and the father is in me.” No mystical experience is necessary. Anyone who knows the way of Jesus—the way of gentleness, generosity, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and love—is a “have” with something no amount of pain, disappointment, poverty, persecution, or illness can take away.

Saint Peter (or, more likely, a disciple writing to the church in Rome after Peter’s death) sums it all up in the Second lesson for easter 5:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

Have a good week, my friend.

---

[i] The Greek word our lectionary translates as “generous” is apheloteti. I don’t know why the NRSV translates it as “generous” as “simple” and “humble” are the definitions I find in my dictionary. The KJV used the term “singleness of heart.” Of course, if you take it in context, the early Christians were certainly generous in the way they shared what they had.

[ii] See Acts 6:8-10.

[iii] See Luke 23:34.

It's Sheep Sunday Again (Reflections on Easter 4, Year A 2026)

 

There’s a curious tradition in the Church during the fifty-day celebration of Our Lord’s resurrection. The Lectionary for the first three Sundays in Easter always focuses on the risen Christ. We see Jesus meeting the astonished women as they leave the empty tomb. We see him appearing to the disciples and “Doubting Thomas.” We see him being made known in the breaking of the bread to the travelers on the road to Emmaus. In the last three Sundays, the focus shifts to Jesus packing his bags and getting ready to return to the Father, making sure that his buddies are ready to receive the Holy Spirit, start the Christian Church, and generally carry on without his physical presence. But in that middle fourth Sunday—for reasons my seminary education and the miracle that is Google are inadequate to explain—we hear about sheep.

Why do we get this “Good Shepherd” Sunday? Beats me. At least we get a chance to recite that most popular Psalm of David’s which so many of us memorized in Sunday School (Psalm 23). God is the caregiver who wants only the best for us, leads us where we ought to go, and is the source of every blessing we’ll ever know. It’s unfortunate that this lovely Psalm is so often used for funerals. It’s really about life.

The gospel reading (John 10:1-10)—as the Bible commentaries remind me—may be a bit of Jesus’ commentary on the events which preceded it in chapter 9. Remember, back in the day there were no numbered chapters and verses in the Bible. When Jesus uses this sheepfold metaphor and talks about “thieves and bandits (v.8), he’s still talking smack about the Pharisees who kicked the man born blind out of the synagogue. They refused to recognize God’s work because it didn’t fit in with their preconceived notions.

In the Bible “shepherd” was often used as a metaphor for the leaders of the people whether such leaders be kings or religious figures. I’m naturally tempted—given the current circumstances here in the U.S.—to launch into a diatribe on false shepherds and excoriate Christian Nationalists, but I think it might be more interesting to drill down on what this passage says about Jesus and the sheep themselves.

In verse seen Jesus says, “I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.” The gate has two functions: it keeps the sheep in the sheepfold where they are safe, and it lets them out to the pasture where they can feed and have abundant life.

In his wonderful 2011 memoir Bred of Heaven[i], the Welsh journalist Jasper Rees writes about spending a week on a sheep farm in the Cywarch Valley. Wales has about three times more sheep than people, and the Welsh have been in the sheep business for over 3,000 years. Jasper lovingly points out that sheep enjoy a long and well-deserved reputation for being some of the dumbest animals our good Lord ever created. They’re not particularly adroit at decision-making, so they depend on the shepherd (and often the sheep dogs) to move them from one pasture to another and into and out of the sheepfold. Sheep need to keep moving, and much of a shepherd’s work is managing this locomotion.

Jasper recounts an event when he and the farmer’s son, Owain, attempted to repatriate an errant sheep belonging to a neighbor’s flock. This critter had somehow managed to fall in with Owain’s sheep. When he and Jasper attempted to capture it, it ran from them just as Jesus said a sheep would. It didn’t know their voices. Eventually, Jasper managed to grab the outlaw sheep by the fleece while Owain put a bag over its head. Blinded, the sheep forgot to keep running away and just laid down. Without vision, sheep don’t move.

Can you guess who we are in Jesus’ sheep metaphor? Yup. That’s right: we’re the sheep. We need vision, and we have to keep moving. Martin Luther told us the Church is always reforming. Jesus is always leading us to new pastures.

I’ve often written about a vision for the American Church. In the years ahead we’ll get away from giant, expensive buildings. Our clergy will be bi-vocational and not depend on the Church as a source of income. We’ll stop emphasizing individual salvation and we won’t worry about going to Heaven. Our job will be to love and serve our neighbors and bring the Kingdom of Heaven here to Earth.

I am sensing something of a renaissance within my own congregation. We are getting out of the sheepfold and reaching out to the community with our public events. We are inviting outsiders to participate. Currently, we’re working on developing a new model of worship with our Wednesday night fellowship. We’re also working on a new model of Christian Men’s Ministry. This won’t be the old way of having the men form a property committee or a supper club, but a real fellowship where truths are spoken and scripture is taught.

We already grow vegetables on the church lawn for our Lutheran food cupboard, but we have been approached by our Seventh Day Adventist friends about opening a food cupboard for our neighbors in need right here in our facility.

Our Good Shepherd is calling His sheep out of the comfort of the sheepfold and into newer pastures. Jesus is also calling each of us as individuals. We’re called to come to the Gate—either to enter the fold and be part of the flock, or to get out of our comfort zone and explore how our lives can better serve and give glory to God.

However the Shepherd is calling you, keep moving safely in the knowledge that He IS our shepherd, and we shall not be in want.

Peace be with you, my friend. Do come again.

  

---

[i] Rees, Jasper: Bred of Heaven: One Man’s Quest to Reclaim His Welsh Roots (London, Profile Books, Ltd. 2011). Really fun book. You don’t even need to be Welsh to enjoy it.

Do You See Him? (Reflections on Easter 3, Year A 2026)

 

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual affection, love one another deeply from the heart. (1 Peter 1:22)

Back in 1990 (I think it was) I took a long road trip from LA to Chicago to attend a buddy’s wedding. Since this is a pretty long drive, another LA friend offered that her mom in Tulsa would gladly put me up for a night (rent free) if I wanted to rest during the long journey. I was only too happy to accept the hospitality—and hospitable it certainly was.

My friend’s mom, like all nice Oklahomans, believed in introducing an out-of-town guest to all her family members and just about everyone she’s ever met. This nice lady happened to be the church secretary of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church. She invited me to her place of employment to meet her boss, the pastor. She also gave me a tour of the facilities at Prince of Peace, a congregation located in a predominantly African American neighborhood. In the church parish hall, I stood awestruck in front of a gorgeous painted mural depicting Our Lord’s ascension into Heaven. The painting covered an entire wall, and the figure of Jesus was life-sized.

And he was Black.

I, of course, being a white Lutheran boy, had always grown up with Sunday School pictures of a blond, blue-eyed, European-looking Savior. It was quite an eye-opener to me to realize Jesus could appear to others as someone relatable to their experience. I stood looking at the mural for a few minutes and went away thinking, “That’s pretty cool.”

Just how does Jesus appear to us? In the gospel reading for Easter 3, Year A in the RCL (Luke 24:13-35), Jesus is unrecognizable. He is stranger on the road. The two disciples walk with him but have no idea who he is. It’s only when they extend Christian charity and offer him a place to stay the night and something to eat that his identity becomes real to them. Jesus told us:

“…for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’… ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40)

Jesus can appear to us in the stranger or the one in need, but Jesus also appears to us through the Word. I think I had a vison of the Lord once during my seminary days during a chapel service led by our professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, a visiting academic from the Church of South India, the Rev. Dr. James Vejayakumar. Vejay, as we called him, was standing in the chancel after having just consecrated the Host. He held the loaf of bread in his hands. He was a small man, shorter than myself, with curly black hair, deep black eyes, and a coffee-and-cream complexion. He wore the vestments of his denomination which looked strange and Oriental. I thought this was what the historical Jesus might have looked like.

As I made my way up the aisle to receive the sacrament, I thought of the words of Luke’s gospel:

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)

Vejay had, indeed, opened the scriptures to me and my classmates, and we experienced the Bible as we had not experienced it before. Truly, this must’ve been the way people felt when Jesus taught them. Jesus came to us in this foreign gentleman and came alive in the Word.

But we needn’t do missionary work among the needy or take seminary classes to encounter Jesus. For Cleopas and his companion, Jesus is made known to them in the breaking of the bread. We share the meal weekly of Christ’s body and blood, made tangible to us in the bread and wine of the sacrament, but we are also experiencing Christ in the very act of eating together. Jesus told us

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20)

Every Sunday during the consecration of the elements, we pronounce the Memorial Acclamation: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. How does Christ come to you? Where have you found Jesus? Where do you expect to find Jesus? You may not recognize the Lord at first but keep looking all the same.

Christ be with you, my friend.  

 

Peter's Transformation (Reflections on Easter 2, 2026)

Although you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:8-9)

It’s something of a tradition that the gospel passage we get for Easter 2 in the Revised Common Lectionary is always this story of “Doubting Thomas (John 20:19-31).” Smart Bible scholar folks have a theory about this. Without getting too much into the historical/literary critical weeds, let’s just say that around the end of the first century of the Common Era there may have been a little rivalry between the disciples of John and the disciples of Thomas. Subsequently, when John’s disciple writes his resurrection narrative, he makes Thomas look like a doofus for not taking his buddies’ word that Jesus really is raised from the dead[i]. 

(Of course, if the Johannine account is correct, you can hardly blame Thomas for being a little skeptical. It’s not like people get raised from the dead every day! But I digress.)

Yes, poor Thomas looks like a doubting, faithless doofus in John’s gospel. He, therefore, stands in stark contrast to Peter, who looks like a doofus in all four gospels. I mean, how would you like it if the one thing everyone remembered about you was the fact you shot your big pie hole off about being faithful to Jesus even unto death, and then—the second things got a little uneasy—you denied you even knew the guy? And not once, but three times?

But the Peter we meet on Easter 2 isn’t the same guy we saw on Good Friday. Somehow a switch got flipped, and the old, cowardly, say-it-before-you-thought-about-it Peter has given way to the bold and eloquent messenger of the Gospel we meet in our first reading (Acts 2:14a, 22-32).

I’d hate to have been Good Friday Peter, wouldn’t you? The guy must’ve been feeling a boatload of emotions, and none of them were good. In a braggadocio moment the night before he swore he’d stand by Jesus even if he had to die for him. He was ready to draw his sword and do battle to protect his rabbi, but when the temple police slapped the cuffs on Jesus, Peter ran away like the others. Then he denied he was Jesus’ disciple. I don’t think this was calculated. I think fear just oozed out of him before he knew what he was saying.

The gospels tell us Peter wept bitterly that night. I imagine him slumped in some dark, dirty corner of  Jerusalem ally, his head between his knees, his body heaving with sobs. What were those tears about? Shame and self-loathing when a man sees himself as being weak and cowardly? Disgust at his own hypocrisy? Grief for the certain death of the friend, teacher, and leader whom he so dearly loved? Utter despair and disillusionment for the movement which promised to be about joy and liberation, but which has turned out to be about nothing at all?

But then came Easter. Peter encountered the risen Jesus and something in him was resurrected too. Peter became like an addict who has conquered addiction. Like a woman escaping an abusive partner. Like a bankrupt starting over. Like a hostage set free. In the power of Christ’s resurrection, he shed the demons of fear, shame, guilt, and self-doubt and became the rock Jesus had prophesied he’d become. He’d become a real adult—whatever his chronological age might’ve been at that moment.

It’s believed he eventually left Judea and Galilee to share the joy he found in Jesus around the Mediterranean world. His journey took him to Antioch in Syria, across the sea to Corinth in Greece, and finally to Rome.

By the time the epistle we call 1 Peter was written (probably sometime in the late 90’s of the Common Era), Peter would be dead. It’s doubtful the Galilean fisherman could write in such sophisticated Greek, so the letter was probably composed by a disciple who had known Peter in Rome.

The letter would’ve been written to that Roman church, and I’m sure that congregation could relate to Peter’s story. Some of them may have lived through the Great Fire of 64 CE and seen everything they owned destroyed. They may have known the terror of flaming death all around them with no place to run, escaping only by crawling through the sewer. They certainly knew the grief of losing beloved leaders as both Peter and Paul would be executed by the imperial authorities. They also knew disappointment as they waited for Jesus’ return and Jesus appeared to be taking his good, sweet time about coming back. Worst of all, they were living under persecution for their faith, marginalized and even criminalized for loving the Savior they’d never met in the flesh.

But through all of this, they received the outcome of their faith just as their leader Peter had done. Some may have been peasants, and some were even slaves, but they loved Jesus and knew Jesus loved them. In turn, they could love one another. They could rejoice even in their suffering because the earthly authorities which took Peter from them could not take away their baptism, their love, or their hope.

What is the outcome of our faith? I like to think it’s real maturity—a maturity which leads us to be like those early Christians who so resonated with Peter’s story. We are to be a community of love; forgiveness for ourselves and others; courage in the face of chaos, doubt, and uncertainty; selflessness; and, finally, peace.

May your faith bring you to that peace, my friend. Thanks for visiting my blog this week.

 

---

[i] If you’d like to learn more about this, I suggest you check out Elaine Pagel’s wonderful book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003)