April 23, 2023

Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24:13-35

Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Peter is speaking to a crowd soon after the great moment of Pentecost, when fire descended from the heavens and the disciples were able to converse in many languages. Peter is taking the opportunity to convince the crowd that this is the moment to repent and seek salvation through baptism. According to the Book of Acts, three thousand people were baptized that day.

One thing that Peter said struck me as interesting. He assured the crowd of people that Jesus was the Messiah. He said, “[L]et the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah…”

With certainty. That is a surprising declaration for Peter to make. Not because we should doubt the significance of Jesus’ life and ministry. But because Peter of all people is not a great example of certainty when it comes to Jesus. Peter was one of the first disciples and has been a faithful follower of Jesus. But his faith has wavered at times.

When Jesus was walking on the rough waters, Peter tried to walk out with him, but at one moment stumbles and begins to sink beneath the waves. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter attacks one of the high priest’s servants and cuts off his ear. This runs counter to Jesus’ repeated statements about accepting his fate. And then Peter famously denies Jesus three times after the arrest. Peter now, however, speaks of certainty after fire has fallen from the heavens and the miracle of Pentecost has unfolded. He may talk about certainty, but Peter required more than a few moments of assurance along the way.

And that is Peter. An eyewitness to the events of Jesus’ life. A man who has seen, and would perform, miracles in the name of God. And yet he declares to the crowd that this is all a certainty. How should those people have understood the events of that time? And how should we understand those events so many centuries later?

The word used in our translation is “certainty.” That is a good and solid word. But in other translations like King James, the word used is “assuredly.” That is a bit more abstract, more high-end vocabulary. I looked at the Greek word used and it was interesting—honestly, why else would I bother mentioning it. The Greek term is “asphalos” and its primary translation is “safely.” Safely or perhaps securely. It suggests that we have pinned down all the possibilities with no chance for anything to escape. Chance for escape is actually an aspect of this term.

So, what exactly are we concerned about getting away from us? A sense that we can trust what is going on and what is going to happen. And trust is central to the definition of faith. Without trust, faith is not possible. Trust in something or someone. Trust rather than fear. Trust rather than hesitancy. Trust rather than doubt.

Faith is sometimes a challenging concept. It requires us to hold something to be true without much or any evidence to support our conviction. And that may be difficult for some of us—some of us who are more about reason and proof than we are about faith and trust. Guilty as charged, by the way.

Think back to Peter. Peter who was there for all these dramatic Biblical events. Peter who knew Jesus personally. And Peter who on various occasions somehow still lacked faith. That Peter.

When Peter is conveying his sense of certainty to the crowds, it has been after a series of moments of doubt. Reading through the whole story, we might understand why Peter has now turned to talking about certainty, about safely placing his trust in Jesus. But this took some effort.

And it required Peter to reimagine what it meant for Jesus to be Lord and Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to come and save the people. Not metaphorically but literally. To deliver them from captivity. To free them from oppression. The first messiah was Cyrus the Great, the Persian emperor who defeated the Babylonians and released the people of Judea from bondage. Jesus was supposed to do that again. That is why Judas betrayed him, because Jesus was not what Judas was expecting.

When we think about questions of faith, about questions of trust, there is something like this process going on. We have to reach a point where we consider something or someone worthy of our trust. That is a mental declaration of sorts, a level of comfort finally being achieved. But one pivotal step in that process of acceptance is figuring out what we are placing our trust in.

Judas trusted Jesus for a time, but that changed when he thought Jesus was not what Judas was expecting. He had trusted that Jesus was going to free the people from the Romans. But Jesus showed no intention of doing that. Instead, Jesus was trying to free the people from religious oppression.

The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt after it was destroyed for the first time by the Babylonians. The Second Temple period as it would be called was marked by complicated religious practices overseen by Temple priests. These were difficult to follow for common people, in large part because they were expensive but also because they extended to many aspects of daily life. Jesus sought to place aside most of those requirements. That did not endear him to the Temple authorities, who eventually arranged for Jesus’ execution by the Romans.

After Jesus’ death, Peter stood before the crowds declaring Jesus to be Lord and Messiah. Lord meant a person in power. Messiah meant someone who has come to free others from oppression. Jesus was neither of those in the literal sense, but he was so in the broader, theological sense. Lord, meaning having the power to save us. Messiah, meaning the person who could save us if we are willing to follow. Save in the sense of salvation from sin rather than salvation from all we are suffering.

Now if you are a person who happens to be suffering, that sense of assurance might seem limited. Your sense of trust might be shakier. The extent of your faith might be curtailed. But again, we need to understand what exactly we are trusting in, what our faith is holding up for us.

This is a question of theology. The word theology suggests that we are somehow studying God. But in practice, I have found that theology is more often a study of the faith we have in God. Theology describes God in terms that someone has thought through and has accepted as trustworthy. There are many different versions of theology, of course. But at some point, a person crafted their theology as a way of characterizing God in a way that they found to be persuasive. And persuasive does not necessarily mean comforting.

The Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards once declared that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, one who holds us over the burning pits of hell like a loathsome spider and that it was only through God’s forbearance that we were not dropped into the flames. Weirdly enough, some people found that imagery to be both persuasive and comforting. Comforting because God has not dropped us. God has not forsaken us even though we are sinners.

Theology reflects something about the person who wrote it. For example, the theology of Augustine displays a great deal of self-doubt and even self-loathing. And yet he figured out a way for someone as terrible as himself to be saved.

In seminary, I read the theology of Henry Nelson Weiman, a college professor who came up with the notion that God is that which has the power to transform human beings in this life. This power to change was known as creativity. Weiman was also a serial philanderer who married and divorced repeatedly when he was caught having affairs with colleagues and students. He imagined God in a way that even Weiman, for all his faults, could find his way into heaven.

Weiman’s sense of the possibility for change was persuasive for many people. This theology was examined in the doctoral dissertation of none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. And even as King struggled with the injustices in the world, he placed at the center of his sense of the divine a power to change it, a power to change ourselves. And there must be an aspect of trust behind such an understanding of the world. Trust that it is possible. Trust that people can change. Trust that people can change and that they will change. Maybe.

As I said, theology has a lot to do with the person writing it down. It is an attempt to construct a way of understanding God, even though our ability to comprehend God is constricted by our quite limited and very human frame of reference. And so, I will inflict upon you this morning my version of theology. My personal way of understanding God and how I might, or we might, in turn engage with God and one another.

I am fond of the idea of virtue. Virtues are good habits that we acquire and maintain in our lives. Virtues like courage and justice, temperance and prudence. I’ve written multiple sermons on each of those words. And then there are three fundamental virtues that serve as the foundation for those other four and that serve as the foundation for my sense of theology. These three virtues are hope, faith, and love.

And I generally think about those three ideas as being linked to a sense of time. Love is a condition of the past that reaches into the present. Faith is a condition of the present that reaches into the future. And hope is a condition of the future that relies upon the past and the present to exist. What do I mean?

Love is the most important virtue of all. For as the Bible offers, God is love. And so love makes every other virtue possible. Love is the basis of our relationships with the people in our lives and the world around us. That sense of love might be firm or it might be shaky. It might be strong or weak, tight or loose, ever so simple or incredibly complicated.

And that sense of love is the foundation upon which we build everything else. Love is the beginning of trust. Trust that someone is there for us in a literal way. And our loving relationships stand as the seed from which our sense of trust grows and our sense of faith comes to be.

Faith is the projection of such love into the present. We trust or we do not trust, we have faith or we do not have faith, because of the light or the shadows cast by those past moments of love.

That does not mean that we cannot have faith if the love we have known in life was complicated. But our faith might be complicated.

That does not mean that we cannot have faith if we have known little love early on in our lives. But our faith might take greater effort to grow or to foster.

Faith is about trust and trust is about love. Love makes trust and faith easier to have and to hold. But love is not only what we are given, but also how we ourselves reach out to love.

And then there is hope. Hope is faith looking toward the horizon. Hope is a sense of trust, a sense of optimism, a sense of wellbeing that spans across our years. The love we have known in the past sets up a pattern in our thinking. That pattern takes root as faith and it blossoms into hope. Love is the beginning of it all, in my own version of theology, the first step we take.

And that may seem a bit simplistic, I realize. It may even seem entirely unfair. Not everyone had the luxury of a loving home life, a loving childhood. But I would caution you not to assume that someone who treasures the concept of love has always been a recipient of love. In fact, love is all the more precious because it may be very scarce in some of our life experiences.

To be blessed with love throughout our lives is wonderful. But to build a life aimed at love even after having gone without it, that is quite different. To have faith that love is possible in such circumstances may be the greatest leap of faith imaginable.

Think about Peter. He had repeatedly doubted what was happening right in front of him. We can shake our heads, as if we would have reacted in some other way. But remember that Peter was living in a difficult time. The Romans were occupiers, they were overlords with the power of life and death. The Temple authorities were also repressive in their way, demanding strict adherence to a complicated behavioral code and expensive ritual practices. It was a time of conflict, a time of wars.

And Peter and the other disciples were almost to a person very poor. Many lived in caves in the mountainside. If you visit the home of Mary the mother of Jesus, it is a limestone cave in the side of a hill, now surrounded by a massive cathedral. So is it any wonder that it would take time for Peter and the others to place trust in Jesus and his teachings, because trust was not an easy thing to have in their rather untrustworthy world.

And I would make the same observation for us in our time. Trust is not a quick or easy proposition. Maybe some of us have had stable, loving, and rock-solid relationships throughout our lives. And maybe some of us have experienced challenges and complications along the way. It is not so easy to trust when love is hard to find.

But remember that love is also a virtue. A virtue meaning a good habit that we have cultivated in ourselves. Love is what we build, what we offer to the world. Love can be what we receive, but it is also what we give.

The habit of loving starts with someone. And it can start with each of us. Even if love has been complicated. Even if love has been hard to find. Love is a creative power that we can initiate, that we can bring forth into the world. It can begin with anyone of us in any moment we choose.

That does not mean it will be easy, but it is nonetheless possible. And the possibility of love is another definition for hope. We all stand on the other side of someone else’s sense of hope with them waiting for someone like us step up and offer love to a weary world.

And that is the greatest gift we can offer another person. The gift of making someone feel the possibility of hope, the certainty of faith, and the warmth of love. It is the one true way that I know for us to allow the presence of God to flow through us into this world. That is the beginning of everything. And it can begin, this day and every day, through us. Amen.