Acts
10: 34–43; Psalm 118: 1–2, 14–24; I Corinthians 15: 19–26; John 20: 1–18
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on Sunday, April 21, 2019.
“CONSIDER
THE ROCK”
(Homily text: John 20: 1–18)
Last
Saturday, my wife and I took a bicycle ride on the rail-trail west of town. It
was our first outing of the year, and the first time we’ve had the chance to
ride together. As often happens, she stopped at one point on the ride and
picked up a rock to bring back to our garden, putting the rock on the rack on
the back of her bike.(I teased her a little, saying she should pick a rock that
wasn’t so heavy that it’d collapse her back wheel.) By now, there’s a sizable
collection of such rocks, picked up on earlier rides, that line the flower bed
behind the house.
My
wife’s father was a geologist, and some of her dad’s knowledge of and interest
in rocks has rubbed off on his daughter. My wife can tell you a good bit about
rocks. For example, she might say, “Well, that’s a sedimentary rock, or, that’s
an igneous rock.”
Imagine,
then, in your mind a rock, about big enough to hold with one hand, although two
hands would probably be better. I am thinking of the rock that she brought home
last Saturday: It is gray in color, and it’s obviously a sedimentary rock. (So
says me, who knows next-to-nothing about rocks.)
There’s
a lot we can observe and learn from examining this rock. For example, the first
question we might ask would be, “how old is it?” The answer to that might vary
quite a bit, but the general answer would be, “it’s very old.” We might even
say it’s billions of years old. Then, we can observe the strata in the rock,
and we might think about the forces that shaped it, perhaps as the ingredients
of it were submerged under water, forming the various layers that later
solidified into rock. Then, we might think about the fact that this rock is now
hundreds of feet above sea level, and as we ride along the rail-trail, we see
that some of the sedimentary rocks are tipped, now sitting at an angle. So we
might wonder about the forces that lifted it up out of water, and then later
on, forced it upward so that it sits at a significant angle to the ground.
The
next step in our consideration of the history of this rock would have to do
with its origins. “Just what – or who – created it in the first place?”, we
might ask. Since, at some point, this rock had to have come into being out of
nothing, the answer we Christians would supply to the question of what – or who
– made it, is that God made it. The Nicene and the Apostles’ Creeds both affirm
our belief that God is the maker, the creator, of all things, or as the Nicene
Creed put it, God is the creator of all that is, “seen and unseen”.
In
our belief and conviction that God is the maker of all things, we affirm that
one of the powers that God has is the ability to create things out of nothing.
God’s
creative power applies not only to solid objects, like rocks, but also to
living creatures, great and small. The marvelous nature of the created order,
and especially with regard to the intricate ways in which God’s creation is
intertwined and related to its various parts, testifies to God’s wisdom and
power.
God’s
power is the power to give life, to bring into being out of nothing, new life.
If
God can create life in the first place, God can re-create it, too.
This
last statement brings us to the Easter event, the raising of Jesus from the
dead on Easter Sunday morning.
If
we affirm that God has the power to grant life, then God can also bring life
back into something that was dead. In this case, God re-creates life in Jesus.
How
do we know this is so? I think the proof lies in two places: For one thing, we’ve just affirmed that God
has the power to create life, and to re-create life. For another, and with
respect to Jesus’ resurrection, we have proof in the enormous change that came
over Jesus’ disciples, once they had encountered the risen Lord….these original
disciples, the first twelve (minus Judas), plus those who had been with Jesus
during His earthly ministry (people like Mary, Martha and Lazarus, Justus and
Matthias, to name a few), and then plus Paul, go out into the world proclaiming
that they had encountered Jesus, come to life again. They tell the world that
the risen Lord showed them His hands and His feet, that He said that they could
touch Him to be sure that He wasn’t a spirit, that He ate in front of them.
(See Luke 24: 36 – 43.)
Then,
after that, they went out into the world, carrying the message that God has the
power over all things, even death, and that this power had been proven through
the resurrection of Jesus, to whom all power had been given. The message they
carried led – in many cases – to martyrdom for the messengers. But so sure were
they that God’s power had been seen in Jesus’ resurrection, that God had given
this power to Jesus, so that they would have new life in God’s eternal presence.
The prospect of an ugly and painful death was no deterrent to their belief in
the Lord’s resurrection.
We
said a moment ago that God has the power to create – and to re-create – life.
God
can rekindle that life in us, if our relationship with God has grown cold. God
can create new life in relationships with others that have lost their liveliness. God can bring healing where no hope is present. These are
the blessings that God’s desire for us, and our response in faith to that
desire, bring.
Easter
blessings, everyone.
AMEN.
