May 13, 2007

Sixth Sunday of Easter - A Resurrected Community

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

 

 

On November 20, 1999, Illinois farmers Duane and Mark Plock knew their neighbor was in serious trouble when they spotted the fireball rising 300 feet out of the field adjoining their farm.  All they knew in that moment was that their neighbor, Ted Fink, needed help.  Rushing over, they saw a fireball of propane gas hovering over a field of burning cornstalk stubble.  Mark Plock crawled under the burning vapor and found his neighbor.  Then Mark used his own body to extinguish the flames that had engulfed Ted’s clothes.  But the heat from the still-burning propane was so intense that even after Mark had smothered the fire and torn off Ted’s burning clothes, his body re-ignited.  Duane Plock then assisted his brother, Mark, by throwing dirt on Ted Fink’s burning form. 

 

Fink was hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns over 93% of his body, but he survived through heroic efforts and numerous grafts of a new synthetic skin.  Ted Fink left the hospital and went back to his farm 14 months later.  Mark Plock was treated for lesser burns, especially on one hand.  He also recovered and returned to farming, the nation’s second most dangerous profession.  For their efforts, and for risking their lives for their neighbor Mark and Duane Plock received a Carnegie Medal.  Established in 1904 by Andrew Carnegie following similar acts of neighborly love by Pennsylvania miners, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission annually awards medals to those whom Carnegie called “heroes of civilization” for lifesaving acts in which they put themselves in jeopardy for the benefit of others.

 

Today, the mission of the 21-member Carnegie Hero Fund Commission remains the same:  to honor civilization’s heroes, whose lifesaving actions put themselves at risk, and who therefore embody humanity’s highest ideals.  Their names and their heroic stories are released five times a year.  To date, 9,053 medals have been awarded, about 20% of those posthumously.  Nearly 200 people lost the lives they risked for the sake of others. (I first heard this story on WNYC radio on Monday, May 7, as Leonard Lopate interviewed Michael McCarthy about his new book, The Sun Farmer, which tells the story of Mr. Fink’s accident and the subsequent events.)

 

 Ted Fink was brought from the brink of death by the selfless actions of his farming neighbors, Duane and Mark Plock.  This is a resurrection story, of sorts, reminding us of the central story of our faith:  we, the church, have been given new life by the selfless generosity of Christ, our Lord, on a Roman cross 2000 years ago.  And we, the church, are called to love others with that same selfless love, putting ourselves on the line for those in dire straits all around us.

 

All too often, I suspect, we short-change the incredible story of Christ’s resurrection, therefore short-circuiting our understanding of all that the resurrection means for us.  The earliest disciples were transformed by their experience of the meeting the risen Christ on the far side of the cross.  It wasn’t just that they felt the hope of joining Christ in a similar resurrection experience.  They had that hope, of course, and the apostle Paul speaks of it often.

 

But there was more.  As the stories for this whole Easter season still remind us, including the stories chosen for us today, the resurrection changed the frightened little band of Jesus’ followers into a courageous witness for God’s goodness in their world.  Like Mark and Duane Plock, the early church dove into the world selflessly, and through them God changed that world.

 

Whenever I wonder just what signs we have of the truth of the resurrection, or at least the disciples’ experience of it, I remember that early band of disciples.  Without question, something happened to them.  Something happened that empowered the very people who ran away on Good Friday.  Something happened that gave them the courage to go out into the world after Pentecost.  What happened, I believe, is another kind of resurrection.  We are here today because the earliest disciples found the courage to put aside their logical concerns for their own safety and go into the world with the message that Jesus had given them:  “God’s realm is here.  It is at hand.”  The proof, for them, was Jesus’ resurrection:  though the powers of this world control the power of death, God alone gives life.

 

We are here today because those disciples, John, James, Andrew, and Peter (and the women disciples, too, Mary, Martha and others) saw God’s presence firsthand in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  And then they experienced that same living presence of the risen Jesus in their own life together and in the rebirth of both hope and mission.   During those awful days after the cross, with terrible images still etched in their brains, they had other images to give them hope.  In those days they knew, without question, that God’s realm was a reality.  They knew, because they saw it for themselves in their own little band of followers.  Jesus was alive in a new way.  And they were newly alive, too.  An Easter essay I read this week says it best:  “…the church was never meant to be a loosely knit collection of individuals who believe in the resurrection.  It is the community of the resurrection.”  (Scott I Paradise, “Easter,” in Social Themes of the Christian Year:  a commentary on the lectionary, ed. Deiter T. Hessel, Philadelphia, The Geneva Press, 1983, p. 201.) 

 

The truest sign of God’s new life, I believe, is the continuing imperfect community of the resurrection, the church.  We are here because God raised Jesus to life; but we are here also because God raised the community to life as well.  And, empowered by their trust in the God of life, the church boldly took the word to neighbors far and near, no matter the cost.

 

We heard in the lesson from Acts just one of the many chapters of the story of this new life.  Paul, accompanied, it seems, by the author of the account, has a vision, inviting him to Macedonia – part of what we now know as Greece.  “We immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia,” says the lesson, “being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.”

 

If you aren’t paying attention, you might miss the significance:  it is the first time the gospel is carried from Asia into any part of Europe.  The Easter community is a special community in many ways, not the least of which is its radically inclusive nature:  everyone is invited to participate in this new realm of God’s goodness.  Everyone.  Everywhere.  Acts itself is the account of the spread of the gospel toward the far reaches of the world.

 

And, on this Mother’s Day, let’s also notice that the first European convert is a woman, Lydia.  She and her household accept the news of God’s dawning realm.  Afterward she opens not only her heart but her home and her hands as well, becoming one of the first financial supporters of the earliest Christian mission, in the persons of Paul and his traveling companion.  Little wonder, then, that she is remembered.  It is evident that she, too, has been raised to a new life.

 

But such expanding forays as this one by Paul and his companion into their world and to people like Lydia came at a cost to the earliest Christians.  Today’s other lesson is from the Revelation to John, written, remember, by a follower of Christ who was exiled by the ruling political party of the day.  Roman imperial authority imprisoned John because he said, “Jesus is Lord.”  This was, and remains, a political statement as well as a theological affirmation.  Saying, “Jesus is Lord,” means never saying, “Caesar is Lord,” for Caesar and Christ are ultimately at odds.  The cross of Jesus had taught the earliest Christians the enmity between the powerful and the faithful, if nothing else.  And the resurrection had settled the truth of the locus of power:  with God, not with Caesar.  True power comes from heaven, not from Rome, and not from Rome’s modern spiritual equivalents, including Washington, DC.  And the message of the community of the Risen Christ is that God’s power is dawning here and now.  But that is not a message that will be spread by the worldly powerful.

 

Therefore, we are called.  We are to live as if it is true that others are our kin, not our enemies.  We are to love the stranger, not kill him.  We are to care for our neighbors, not allowing them to be raped, as in Darfur, nor passively allowing death by malaria for want of mosquito nets, as in much of tropical Africa.  We are to care for the powerless, the helpless, and the forgotten.

 

 My friends, we are to work for the blessings of God for all people, but especially for the least, the last, and the lost.  On this Mothers’ Day, too, we are to note with compassion, not merely curiosity, the continuing disparity between the claim of justice for all in God’s abiding realm and the injustice facing women of all ages in so many lands in our world, too often including our own.  And we, the people of Christ’s resurrection community, are called to bring this new vision of justice to all hearts, beginning first with our own.

 

To live as a people who trust in God’s authority over all of life and death means that if we are truly to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, then we must love our neighbors as ourselves.  And that will mean, occasionally, putting ourselves at risk, just as Mark Plock did when he crawled under the burning fireball hovering over that smoldering Illinois field to extinguish the fire that was burning his neighbor alive.

 

The resurrection community is just that, my friends:  a community.  We are called into existence by the God who claims us and names us – a motherly act in itself, as even the Bible notes.  Thus given birth into the life of faith, a resurrected life, we are called to share that life of faith with others.  Together, we know the power of the risen Christ, and together, we share that witness with our neighbors, whoever they are, whatever their needs, and wherever we may find them.

 

Amen.