Revelation:  6th Sunday of Eastertide

Part 5 of Eastertide 2008

Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:8-20; 1st Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

Eastertide should mark the beginning of the year for Christianity instead of Advent/Christmastide.  The fact that worldly time prevailed is evidence of the extent to which the Way followed by the early Christians eventually accommodated political realities.  The series of readings for the Sundays marking the Easter Season in Year A (beginning with Easter Sunday) suggests a progression for Christian spiritual development:  Doubt, Recognition, Community, Faith (Not Belief), Revelation, and Salvation.  The theme for this 6th Sunday is the revelation of the true God.

All of the New Testament readings for this series reflect the vital organizational work of the early Christian movement.  Especially after the destruction of the Temple, defining a new religion separate from Judaism became increasingly important as Jewish tradition shifted from Temple to synagogue, and began to include Pagan (gentile) converts.  All of the New Testament writings are part of that process.  The synoptic gospels are targeted to specific communities, and are focused on midrashic reconstructions of the life and teachings of the pre-Easter Jesus.  The gospel of John and the book of Acts were also written for specific communities, and are concerned with post-Easter themes.  John especially presents a mystical, theological interpretation of who Jesus was.  Some scholars argue that the Luke/Acts reports on the activities of the followers after Jesus’s death – most specifically, the Apostles Peter and Paul – are fiction.  Whether made up from whole cloth or not, nothing in the Book of Acts can be considered history remembered.

Claiming one “true God” among the Pagan pantheon was a political necessity if the movement was going to survive on its own.  The story about the altar to the unknown God has traditionally been understood as an indication of the universality of the Christian religion.  Sunday school children are taught that the “Pagans” Paul was preaching to believed in a pantheon of idols made of stone and wood, and in order to be sure they covered all the religious bases, they had this altar to any god they might have missed.  Paul is credited with being especially astute in creatively seizing the opportunity to claim the “unknown god” as the Judeo-Christian God, whose son Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead to save sinners from hell.  Paul then launches into standard lecture number 1 about how “God” does not live in a house made with hands (See Stephen’s outrageous [to the Jews] speech of last week), and is not made of gold, silver, or stone, “. . . the art and imagination of mortals.”  Finally, Paul gets around to talking about Jesus as the one who will judge the entire world on a day that God has already determined.  The people are urged to “repent” from believing in false gods before it is too late.

The writer of Luke/Acts does not give us any numbers, but does say by the end of Chapter 17 (not included in the readings) that while some scoffed at the idea of the resurrection, “some” joined with Paul – including a couple of named persons: Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris (Acts 17:34).  Unfortunately we don’t hear anything more about them in the Bible, but legend has provided an interesting story:  Dionysius the Areopagite was a prominent Athenian who converted to Christianity through the preaching of Paul on Mars Hill, the open-air supreme court of Athens (Areopagus in Greek).  In a stunning conflation of several centuries of time, the legend says he later was appointed the first Christian Bishop of Athens, and then at the request of Paul, was sent to Gaul, where he suffered martyrdom by fire in Paris.  His feast day is October 9th in the west and October 3rd in the east.  Damaris, who also accepted Paul's teaching, apparently was an educated woman.  Any woman who is named has to have been an important person.  Inquiring minds might wonder what her relationship was to Dionysius, but given that the name is the Greek form of the name of the God of Wine (Bacchus) the entire point is easily muddled.  

Meanwhile, John’s gospel continues with Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples on the eve of his death.  The portion chosen for the 6th Sunday in Eastertide is the promise of the Holy Spirit, who will come if the followers of Jesus remain faithful to him.  The Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, will be in anyone who loves Jesus and keeps his commandments, and Jesus will reveal himself to them.  These words – like many others attributed to Jesus by the writer of this Gospel – have been used for 2,000 years to discredit, disinherit, and destroy political opponents, inconvenient alternative ideas, entire civilizations.  

Yet these words have also been the foundation for speaking truth to power whenever that power has legitimized injustice in whatever form it appears.  “I will not leave you orphaned,” John’s Jesus promises, “ . . . because I live, you also will live. . . . I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you."  This is incarnational language, and it means that the spirit of distributive justice comes through covenant with the realm/kingdom of God.  This language empowers the work of justice-compassion, which has little if anything to do with the kind of docile piety dished out by the writer of 1st Peter – who is absolutely not to be confused with the original apostle.  1st Peter 3:13-22 could be construed as a call for non-violent resistance to injustice, but only if taken out of the context of the rest of the letter, which is concerned more with obeying the authorities and rejecting “licentiousness, passions, drunkenness, revels, carousing, and lawless idolatry” (1st Peter 4:3).

Nevertheless, the theme remains: Revelation of the true God and/or the Christ to all.  But 21st Century post-modern minds cannot accept Jesus’s Way as the only legitimate one.

If there is any reclaiming that makes sense, it is the words that the writer of Luke/Acts puts in Paul’s mouth: “The God who made the world and everything in it . . . does not live in shrines made by human hands . . . so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”  We are tactile beings.  We prefer the certainties of what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.  A non-theistic, non-corporeal, thought-form is hardly comforting in the middle of the night when the medics are on their way.  But isn’t that precisely what John’s Jesus is pointing to?  In the portion left out by the Elves, Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27).  

Those who live their lives as Jesus did (“they who have my commandments and keep them”) are those who will experience revelation.  But for post-modern Christians it is a continuing revelation, not one set in stone for all time.  21st Century Christians are confronted with choices about the nature of God – violent or non-violent – and whether Jesus’s message is inclusive or exclusive.  21st Century Christians must choose whether faith means literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion; and whether deliverance means salvation from hell in the afterlife or liberation from injustice in this life.

Indeed, it is not only Christians who are confronted with these choices in these current times.  The choices that people make regarding these questions, whether political leaders or common folk, are reflected in the results that are produced.  Whether a Christian candidate for President of the United States, or a member of a religious sect that wishes to restore a lost legacy, for anyone who is unable or unwilling to separate ego from the role life has assigned, violent exclusiveness and literal belief  threaten the economic and political security of the entire Planet.

But those who live in covenant with the kenotic God of distributive justice-compassion are already keeping those commandments John’s Jesus is talking about.  The Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, which John’s Jesus promises, lives in anyone who chooses to participate in that great work.  The Psalmist may yet have the last word: “For you, O God, have tested us; . . . we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.”

We shall see.