Sunday, April 14, 2024, Third Sunday of Easter
“Life After Easter: Power from On High”
Psalm 4; Acts 3:11-21; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36-49
Divine Service III without Communion
Hymns: #469 “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”; #477 “Alleluia, Alleluia! Hearts to Heaven”; #720 “We Walk by Faith and Not By Sight”; #506 “Glory Be to God the Father”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Let’s talk about the power grid this morning. If you plug in a lamp, an appliance, or a machine, where does the power come from? Somewhere there’s a power source; a power plant, a massive generator, powered by gas, or coal, or nuclear energy, a hydroelectric dam, or the sun or wind as the case may be. I saw a wonderful cartoon where someone was plugging in their electric car, and the wires from the charging station ran up to a magic unicorn in the sky. That’s now how it works! The power has to come from somewhere. Electricity has to be generated (generally by burning things), and sent out to the towers, transformers, and substations, through the power lines and miles and miles of wires. One of those wires is connected to this building, and that’s why we have lights. If we should lose our connection to the power source; if the grid should go down, if the power source should go off-line or fail for some reason - if a storm or some other disaster, wind or ice or falling tree limbs, should bring down the lines between us and our power source, we’ll all be left sitting here in the dark.
Jesus promised His disciples in our Gospel this morning that they’d be “clothed with power from on high.” The Greek word for power is dunamis – the root of our English words “dynamo” and “dynamic” and “dynamite.” The power Jesus promises isn’t a human power, or an earthly power, or a power that originates in this place. It’s from-on-high power, heavenly power, supernatural power, a power that comes to us from above. Jesus isn’t talking about some magic unicorn; He’s talking about the power of a real universe-creating God, the God who created heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. This “power from on high” comes from God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the One by whom all things were made – the Creator and Author and giver of life. God is our power plant, our power source, and we would be powerless without Him.
This power Jesus promises is the power of God’s divine love, because it comes from a God who is love, and a God who loves us. It’s the power of Light to obliterate darkness. It’s the power of truth to win out over lies. It’s the power of Life to overcome death. It’s the same power that raised Jesus up from the dead, and will one day bring us up from our graves and raise us all. St. Paul says it’s “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” “We have divine power to demolish the devil’s strongholds,” Paul says. “This all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
So how do we gain access to this holy power of God? How does all that divine power reach us down here from wherever it comes from? How do we come to be connected to this holy power grid our Lord has set up, so we can live in love, and grow in faith, and live forever? Jesus promised His disciples they’d soon be clothed with God’s power. How do we get hold of God’s holy power and wrap it all around us? Father in Heaven, I don’t want to be powerless. I don’t want to sit in the dark. I want to live!
As our Gospel reading begins, Jesus’ disciples had spent a long weekend unplugged. The power lines that connected them to God seemed to have been cut. Jesus was dead, or so they thought. They’d lost their hope. They were living in fear. The future to them looked bleak. Jesus had made it very clear to them, before He was crucified, “After three days I will rise again.” The women had gone to the tomb in the early Easter morning, and came back with their wild tale about angels. Peter and John had run to the tomb and found it empty, the grave clothes lying there with no body left inside them. The two disciples who’d left town for Emmaus had coming running back, telling the good news that they’d seen Jesus alive, and even broken bread with Him. But no one in that room really believed it yet. They were powerless with fear. So how did Jesus reconnect them to the power of God?
Like all of us, they were dead in their sins and without hope in the world. The power they’d need to live, to be revived, to be brought back to life, would have to come from somewhere outside themselves. We who are deaf and blind and dead in our sins have no power on our own to see, or to hear, or to live. If, God forbid, my heart should stop beating on this beautiful morning, one of you is going to have to run for the paddles; I won’t be able to do that for myself. And likewise we have no power to revive our sin-dead souls on our own. We need a holy physician, a heavenly EMT, Jesus as our divine Wichita lineman, to repair the damage sin has done and turn the lights back on. The disciples didn’t ask for Jesus. They didn’t expect Him. They thought He was dead and gone forever. He in His grace and mercy came to them, because God is love, and God is good.
The first gift Jesus gave to them was words of forgiveness, grace, and peace. While they were still talking about what had happened that day, about what they’d been told and what they’d heard and seen - and still without the power to understand it or believe it - “Jesus Himself came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” I forgive you, I still love you, we can still be friends.
Then, blessed among all the people on earth that day, Jesus gave them proof that He was alive. He reached through to bless their troubled minds and doubting hearts by letting them touch the places where the nails and spear had been, and letting them see and feel for themselves that He was no ghost, but living flesh and bone. (That was the second time they’d mistaken Him for a ghost, the first being when He’d walked to them on the water). He even asked for a piece of fish and ate it in front of them, and left no room for doubt.
So He gave them forgiving grace; and then He blessed them with living proof; and next He reconnects them to God’s living and powerful Word. He points them back to the old things, the ancient promises they should have already known, to what had been written about God’s Christ a long time ago in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. He takes them back to Sunday school (Saturday school for them, I guess), and to all those good old stories they’d been hearing since they were children. And He opens their minds to begin to understand that all those good old Bible stories were all about Him. So they could understand why the Savior had to suffer, and why the cross had to be, and the depth of the love of God for them.
Father, in Your mercy, turn the lights back on for us as well! You and I didn’t have the blessing of being in that room with Jesus on the evening of Easter Day. We weren’t blessed to hear and see Jesus and touch His precious scars for ourselves. That room was too small for all of us to fit! And that was many years ago. Two thousand years divide us now from that blessed event. We do have the Word, though – God’s powerful, faith-giving, life-changing Word. That was Jesus’ next step on that Easter Day; not to give only those eleven disciples forgiveness, grace, mercy, and hope, but to make sure you and I and everyone else would be able to make that holy and blessed connection as well. He gave His disciples the calling to be not just disciples, but apostles – “sent ones.” To be preachers, light-carriers, newsboys, with their beautiful feet beginning the work of taking the Good News from Jerusalem and out into the world.
Jesus gave to them, and to the Church they began in His name, the joyful mission of calling people to repentance, and offering forgiveness for sins, and calling people out of the darkness and into the light of God’s marvelous grace (or is it the grace of God’s marvelous light?) To some of those apostles He gave the ability, with the help and power of the Holy Spirit, to write down what they’d heard and seen, so people in all ages would have the ability to read and hear the Good News, and have access by it to the love and saving power of God. The Bible is a holy Book, God’s Word from on high, a Word given to us from above. It’s our connection to the holy power source, to all the power of God’s heaven. If you choose not to read it, hear it, or pay attention to it, you’ll be powerless as powerless can be, and you’ll find yourself sitting in the dark. God’s Word is the Word we live by, and the Word that will help us to live. You have to plug in and read it, though, for it to do you any good.
Jesus told His disciples, “I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." That happy day was on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, and after Jesus had left His disciples to go back into heaven. Before leaving them, Jesus gave them the Great Commission, to go into all the world to Baptize and teach and make new disciples. And He promised to send them the Holy Spirit, to be “with them always to the very end of the age.” And He told them again to wait in the city for the Spirit to come. And on Pentecost, the Spirit came just as he promised, in a rushing wind and tongues of fire, and filled them all with the power to preach the Gospel in words everyone could understand.
So the question for us today, folks, is this: Is the power Jesus is talking about still available to us? And if it is, what do we do with it? How do we make use of such holy power? We’re here on earth as God’s after-people, the after-the-Resurrection people, living in a world full of people who are in desperate need of forgiveness and grace and Good news, but are afraid and out of hope and not knowing where to find it. How do we use the power we’ve been given to do what we’ve been put here to do, which is to save the people in need of saving? Do we really have the power to do that?
In the lead-up to our reading from Acts 3, Peter and John, those after-Easter apostles, are on their way to the Jerusalem temple to pray. And they come across a man who’d been crippled from birth, begging by one of the temple gates. The poor man asks them for alms, for a hand-out. Peter tells him, “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk.” And the man immediately jumps to his feet and walks into the temple with them, dancing and jumping for joy and praising God.
To whom do these newly hatched apostles give the credit for the miracle that’s happened? Peter tells the crowd that gathers, “it isn’t by own power or holiness that this crippled man is up on his feet. It’s the power of God who made earth and heaven, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who’d done this thing for him. It’s the power of love, the power of a God who loved you so much that He put His own Son a cross for the sake of your sin. It’s Jesus, the One who was crucified and raised from the dead, who’d brought healing to this man, as you can see.”
Did Peter or John have any power of their own? No, and they freely admitted as much. Do you and I? No. Left on our own, we’re blind, deaf, and dead, and sitting in the dark. Apart from Jesus and His holy power, we can’t do a thing. But “all things are possible with God.” If it’s true we have access to God’s forgiving grace, and the power of God’s love is working in us by faith, is there anything we’re not capable of? The question, of course, is if we have such power, why aren’t we making more use of it?
Do you know anyone whose body is hurting, or who’s doing poorly health-wise? Have you prayed every day for them? Have you gone to pray with them? Have you laid your hands on them and offered their healing up to God? Do you know anyone who’s broken in spirit, anyone heartbroken, hopeless, or sad? Have you done what we Christians are called to do, and prayed for them, encouraged them, and lifted them up? Have you called them on the phone, or written them a letter, or gone to see them? Do you know anyone close to you who’s walking apart from the power of Christ today, and having a world of trouble because of it? Have you had that difficult Jesus talk with them, or have you been putting it off for fear of how they’ll respond? Have you asked God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to help you say the words that will help bring them home again? Power isn’t much good if we don’t trust our Lord enough to put it to use. It’s like leaving a lamp unplugged…
How great is the love the Father has poured out on us, that we should be called the children of God! And that is what we are! What dynamic, dynamite, heart-changing power is ours, right at our fingertips, and ours to use, if only we’ll ask in faith. Peter, by the power of the Holy Spirit, called the people to repent and come home to God. May God bless all of us, after-Easter people that we are, with the strength, power, and courage to do the same. And we’ll praise God and give Him all the glory when the miracles start to happen. Do this for us, heavenly Father. In Jesus’ name; Amen.