Don't Fear the Man: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, and St Luke's, Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on May 18, 2025, the Sixth Sunday of Easter.  

Readings for this Sunday (Easter 6C): Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home^[of God is among mortals.  He will dwell^[b] with them; they will be his peoples,  and God himself will be with them and be their God; (Rev 21.3)

Will you listen to the words, long written down?

These words could be used in church before every scripture lesson, but they actually come from a well known song.  Bonus marks if you recognize them?   

If you said they are from Johnny Cash’s song, When the Man Comes Around, then congratulations, you’re a winner, but you still have to listen to the rest of this sermon!

Johnny Cash said that this song took him longer to write than any other of his songs, and thelyrics borrow heavily from the Book of Revelation, the source of today’s second lesson.  And like the Book of Revelation, Cash’s lyrics are ominous, even scary.  There are phrases like “The whirlwind in is in the thron tree” and “Some are born and some are dying”,  and if that’s not spooky enough, the song ends with this words:

"And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him"

I would guess that Cash’s lyrics are how many people understand this strange last book of the Bible, as a book of fear and doom, prophecies that trigger our deepest fears and anxieties.   Many of our cultural and movie tropes and images come from Revelation:  the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Armageddon, death as a pale rider.  

I wonder though how many listeners to Cash’s song understand that man in the title who is going to come around is Jesus!   Johnny Cash runs with imagery that Revelation uses to describe Jesus, who will lead the armies of heaven like a conquering king and who will judge all souls at the end of time (Rev 19:11,13-16).   For the first Christians who would have read or heard Revelation at the end of the first century, the scary and doomy parts of the letter would have described their world, where the Roman emperors were beginning to persecute the Christian church and hunt its leaders and members.    These early Christians saw Roman culture as being deeply sinful and corrupt, and so they imagined a day when Jesus would come to rescue them and punish the wicked.  A long sequence in the middle of the book describes Rome as the Whore of Babylon, and imagines its destruction as God finally returns to bring justice and punishment for the wicked.

Whoever wrote Revelation (according to tradition it was a man named John, not the disciple but sometimes called John of Patmos) was drawing on many biblical sources, particularly books of prophecy like the Book of Daniel, which contain strange beasts, coming events, and numbers (such as seven and twelve) that recur frequently in scripture, leading some to want to interpret them as clues and codes.    Many books have been written trying to explain Revelation as a warning about things that will come in the near future, such as Hal Lindsey’s 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, or the Left Behind series that started in the 1990s. 

All of these and similar books and films depend on what we might call the “scare factor” of Revelation, but what if I told you that there is nothing to be scared of?  I could summarize it in five words:  “Good guys win.  The end”.   In fact, if you look at today’s second lesson (Rev 21.1-6), the only possibly scary part is that “the sea was no more”, which is disturbing for those who like to go on cruises and eat seafood, but everything else speaks of a world that is renewed, refreshed, and made infinitely better.

Today’s passage begins and ends with things being made new, which is a central idea of our faith, that salvation involves being remade and reborn, as in Paul’s statement in Second Corinthians, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor 5:7).  There is a wedding, which is also an image of something new being created (a family) and we remember that Jesus’ first miracle was at the Wedding in Cana.   Then there is a threefold statement of intimate relationship as God literally comes to be with and stay with us:

“See, the home^[a] of God is among mortals.
He will dwell^[b] with them;
they will be his peoples,^[c]
and God himself will be with them and be their God;^[

Then there is an image of comfort and consolation (tears being wiped away) which makes the scary God that we associate with Revelation suddenly becoming as tender as a mother, and then there is the startling and wonderful news that we won’t have to cry and mourn any more because pain and death have been abolished from this new world that God is creating.   These images of comfort and an end to death and mourning explain why this passage is so often read at funerals.  And this passage is not alone in providing a kinder, gentler Book of Revelation. 

Last Sunday our second reading in church featured a vision of Christians who have been killed for their faith being sheltered by the Lamb, a description of Jesus as a victim and a nurturer as well as a conqueror:  Revelation says that these martyrs will “hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev 9.17). 

The image of “springs of water of life” reminds us of how today’s reading ends: “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life” (Rev 21.6) and together these images remind us Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s gospel and how he promises her water of eternal life.   So once again there is an affirmation of care, rescue, a promise of an end to death and pain and suffering and a promise of eternal life.

So all I’ve done in this short homily today is to try and make a case for why Revelation isn’t a scary book.  Is it mysterious?  Yes, in the sense that a dream can be mysterious, and not every image has a deep meaning.    However, the book as a whole is a celebration of God’s love and commitment to us, despite everything that we fear might keep us from God.  So let me finish with some thoughts about who needs to hear this message.

If you wonder if your church is doing a good job, look at the first chapter of Revelation, which says pretty clearly that a church’s job is always and only to be a witness to Jesus Christ.

If you feel that God is far away, and doubt that you will ever find God, then remember that Revelation promises that God and heaven will come to us, down from heaven and making God’s home with us, on earth.

If you fear for the earth itself amidst news of climate change, droughts, and natural disasters,  then Revelation promises us that God is deeply committed to the future of the world that God created, and that God will remake and renew all things, including the earth God loves.

If you fear the future and you watch the news anxiously and obsessively, then don’t be afraid.  Revelation promises that there will be a day when wars will cease and justice will come to the warlords and persecutors.   Yes, there may be suffering to come, but God and the good guys win.  The Lamb of God will also be the holy and righteous judge of God.  So maybe switch the news off and spend more time outside!

If you are filled with deep mourning and doubt that you’ll ever feel alive again, hold on to that image of God (or Jesus) gently wiping away your tears and washing your face.

Finally, if you love poetry and language, then Revelation is a book of poetry to enjoy, and not a code to be cracked, so if you haven’t read it already, then now’s a good time to start, and maybe start by listening to Johnny Cash read Revelation (youcan find it on YouTube).

 

 

Sheep And Shepherd Both: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

 

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.

 

Today is called Good Shepherd Sunday in the life of the church.  The readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter traditionally focus on the “good shepherd” sayings of Jesus, which of course come with a side order of Psalm 23 and passages from the New Testament which emphasis Jesus’ role as saviour and protector of the faithful.

It’s a pleasing work of the Spirit (I prefer that phrase to the word coincidence) that this particular Sunday comes just after word that the Roman Catholic Church has selected a new Pope, Leo XIV, and that this event should come less than a week after we heard in church, on the Third Sunday of Easter, Jesus tell Peter three times to feed and look after his sheep.

We are thus reminded that just as God in Christ protects and cares for the faithful, so God’s church is called to protect and care for those who have no one else to speak for them.  Good Shepherd Sunday ties together the sheep and shepherd imagery in scripture to reassure us that God is not detached but is engaged with us, that God is not absent but is present, invested, and attentive, deeply invested in our loves, and that God knows us intimately, understanding our weakness and committed to our welfare.  If you watched the crowds in St Peter’s Square in Rome rejoicing as the new pope was announced and then seen, I think you were seeing that deep human need to be cared for that is at the heart of faith and indeed of our human identity.

All of the ideas that are central to our faith – nourishment, protection, nurturing, companionship and love– are basic human needs, and if you’ve ever studied Mazlow’s theory of the hierarchy of human needs, they are fundamental to our wellbeing.   Just as sheep need a shepherd to lead them to pasture, water, and to protect them from predators, so do humans need food, shelter from the elements, and perhaps even more importantly, others who will help see to our emotional wellbeing and give us purpose.

We want our basic needs looked after, but as humans, if we are fortunate, we can find our greatest satisfaction in caring for others – ailing partners, children and grandchildren, strangers in distress to who we can be good Samaritans, even and (maybe especially!) our pets.   Collingwood, being a wealthy town, has no shortage of pet stores where you can buy all manner of high end things for your pets.  As you know, Joy and I have two little terriers that rule our lives, and we’re fortunate that we can spend an inordinate amount of money on looking after them.   Their current dogfood has the words “Life Protection Formula” in large letters on the bag.   How satisfying for us that we can buy “Life Protection” to our beloved dogs.

Protection from harm is way up there in the hierarchy of human needs.   We want to protect our pets, our families, our pets, and we spend a lot of money in search of protection.  If you’ve driven by All Saints at night, you’ll see the new lighting that we’ve installed to make the church safer, and the new intercom cameras so Nancy can see who wants into the building.   But of course, the word “protection”, so beloved of advertisers, has its limits.    Your insurance policy that should have protected you against disaster has its loopholes.   Your internet antivirus software may protect you from hackers and identity theft, but who really knows?  And your virtuous lifestyle and diet may not protect you against cancer.   Protection is an attractive idea, but we all know that life is inherently risky, and no one gets out of it alive.   The last time I checked, the mortality rate was hovering at 100%. 

So who protects us?  If you’re a sheep, your best source of protection is your shepherd, someone who will provide for those needs we spoke about – pasture, good water – and who will protect you from predators, both two legged and four legged.   If you’re a sheep, a shepherd will also protect you from yourself.   There’s a saying that the difference between sheep and goats is that goats only think about escaping, and sheep only think about ways to put themselves in fatal situations.

Today, on Good Shepherd Sunday, we are reminded that  Jesus can be our our shepherd if we wish to follow him.   We can follow him for many reasons, to meet our many needs:  to be intimately known and loved in an age where so many feel lonely and anonymous, to know what the good life looks like because of his teaching, and ultimately, I think, because Jesus is life.  The ancient church had a phrase it used in worship, “In the midst of death, we are in life”, and I think the idea there is why Good Shepherd Sunday falls during the Easter season, as we try to figure out how the resurrection of Jesus touches our own lives.

To understand what I mean in saying that we follow Jesus because he is life, let’s conclude these reflections with a brief look at today’s first reading, from Acts.   The apostle Peter has been summoned to a town where one of the leading lights of the local church has passed away.  Tabitha, or Dorcas to use her Greek name (both names mean Gazelle) is the sort of faithful woman that any church would love to have,  someone “devoted to good works and acts of charity”.   But she has died, leaving a huge hole and much grief in the community; the description of widows holding the cloths that Tabitha made for them is a very real detail that tugs at our hearts. 

I don’t think there’s a pastor alive who wouldn’t love to be able to do what Peter does, to heal the sick and bring the dead back to life.    We would certainly be asked to do more hospital visits if that were the case.   But I think we need to resist the temptation to think of this as a fantastic story.   The Book of Acts has its place in scripture because it describes the impact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the way that a seismograph captures aftershocks following an earthquake, or in the way that our eye registers the ripples moving out from a stone thrown into a pond.

Peter was in that room with the disciples when the risen Christ appeared to them and breathed on them, giving them the Holy Spirit.   Acts makes it plain that Peter is drawing on this power, because he puts the widows out of the room and prays before he brings Tabitha back from the dead.    Likewise, in an episode just before this one, he tells a sick man to be healed “in the name of Jesus Christ”.   Acts thus describes a vital power that flows out of Jesus in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection that empowers the apostles and brings enough people to faith to create the church.   Indeed, one could fairly say that the biggest miracle that Acts describes is not healings or resurrections, but the creation of a church that has survived for all these centuries.

Even in the first generations of the church, it became evident that believers would die, either from sickness and age or from persecution.  Our second reading from Revelation describes martyrs. those who “have come out of the great ordeal”, who are now sheltered under the throne of the Lamb who has himself been slaughtered, so that Jesus, himself crucified, becomes the most powerful force in the universe, a force of life and love who is both sacrificed sheep and protecting shepherd.     The message of Revelation is that whatever our fate, our faithful shepherd will never let go of us, never let us be snatched away, either in this life or the next.

When a church is real, and not just a social club or a cultural experience, the living Christ is at the centre of its life.   That living Christ, the voice of Jesus speaking to us in our scriptures and in our hearts, calls us into an eternal life that begins now.  I think Jesus’ promise of “eternal life so that we may never perish” is not just the afterlife, but is also experienced in the present.   We find eternal life in the knowledge that Jesus knows us completely and loves us, but that Jesus also calls us to see others as he sees us, as individuals worthy of respect and dignity.  Jesus calls us to a life of service, in which we realize our satisfaction from recognizing that the needs of others are as great as our own, that we too can be shepherds to those around us.

I started this homily with a mention of the new pontiff, Pope Leo, and I’ll finish with another reference to him.  I read yesterday that the reason Cardinal Prevost chose the name of Leo was in honour of Leo XIII, who was alive when the industrial revolution of 1800s was impacting the lives of millions.   As the new pope said on May 10, the church’s social teaching, which comes from the gospel of Jesus, speaks to “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour”.    That word “defence” is important because it speaks to the role of the shepherd as a protector, and reminds us that the church’s role is to speak for and protect those who have no voice.

Good Shepherd Sunday reminds us that we, as followers of Jesus, can be sheep when we need to be, but can also be shepherds when we are called to be.

 

Follow Christ and Die?: A Homily for the Third Sunday After Easter

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 4 May, 2025, the Third Sunday of Easter.  Texts for Easter 3C, Acts 9:1-6 (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

9 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ² and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem

Before Paul, there was Saul.  Before the proclaimer, there was the persecutor – a man convinced of his own righteousness,  an enforcer willing to use his power cruelly and violently  against those he deemed subversives and criminals.    If Saul existed today, I suspect he’d wear a ski mask, heavy boots, and military style uniform, armed and empowered to kick down doors and make arrests and haul people away in shackles to grim prisons from which they might never return.

We’ve seen people like Saul on the news, he might be the immigration enforcement agent in the US or the riot police in countries like Russia or Georgia, wading into protesters with baton swinging and throwing them into vans.   He’s the kind of thug whose bosses are self-satisfied, smug men and women in high office who boast and smirk at news conferences and say that the undesirables are finally getting what they deserve.

So while there are aspects of this first lesson from Acts that we can relate to, let’s first put it into context text. The Book of Acts moves us forward a decade or so beyond the events of the Jesus’ death and resurrection.    The message of the gospels has spread out of Jerusalem to neighbouring regions, where some Jews in places like Damascus are coming to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  In Acts, such people are not called Christians (that word hasn’t yet taken shape) but they are called followers of The Way.   

The Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem are worried that things are spinning out of control.   They begin to arrest and imprison the apostles (Acts 5), and one, Stephen, is executed, which is the first time that we meet Saul (Acts 7.58).  Stephen’s death doesn’t slow down the spread of the gospel, and soon Saul is fully employed as a religious policeman “ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 7.8).  At the beginning of our first lesson today, Saul has been sent to Damascus wit orders to inspect the Jewish population there and round up any Jews who are now Jesus followers.

The story of how Saul becomes Paul is one of the most well known stories in the New Testament, so that when someone makes a lifechanging decision, we still sometimes call it a Damascus Moment.  In the church we refer to it as the Conversion of St Paul, an event which is commemorated on 25 January, and while it’s a very important and dramatic story, it’s strange that we only hear it in church as part of our Sunday lectionary cycle once every three years.

When Jesus speaks in this story, he asks a question:  “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9.4).  The pronoun “me” speaks volumes.  The “me” is Jesus identifying with the persecuted church, with the men and women that Saul wanted to arrest and bind and haul away.    Jesus may speak here as a disembodied voice, but he is very much embodied and enfleshed in those powerless ones who suffer because of people like Saul and the authoritarian systems that he works for.    The “me” of Jesus represents God’s compassion for and solidarity with those who have no voice of their own to speak for them. 

Jesus can speak with and for the persecuted and the hunted because he became one with them on the cross.   Since Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem not as a conqueror but on a donkey, we’ve seen this strange and consistent way of how God in Christ turns worldly power on its head and invests ultimate meaning and ultimate hope in an innocent man condemned to death after a show trial.    This same man, exhibited, broken  and shamed on a Roman cross, comes out of the tomb to show that human power is empty and that the imperial apparatus of death is a hollow sham.

Saul’s encounter with Christ takes two forms, the first with the disembodied voice on the Damascus road, and the second with the very real and very embodied Annanias, the first person he sees when he regains his sight.   I say Annanias is Christ because is the “me” that Saul is persecuting, he is a member of the persecuted church that is the body of Christ.    Saul, who would have hauled this man off to prison, is now tended by him, is called “brother” by him, and I think this is the moment when Saul becomes Paul, when he finds his earthly power broken by the love of Christ which has claimed him and remade him.

There are two ways that this story is helpful to us, I think, one being political and one being personal.  Let’s take the political first.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “When Christ calls a person, he bids that person come and die”.    This statement sounds like terrible advertising for the church, but it’s actually good news.  When Jesus calls Paul, Saul has to die.     Whereas Saul would have despised and cruelly treated Annaias,  Paul sees him as a brother and an equal, as a vehicle of Christ’s love, and Paul will spend the rest of his life working out how those who follow Christ are one body and one family.  And likewise, something of Ananias had to die.    When Jesus called him to go to Paul and tend him, Ananias didn’t want to go, he was afraid of the man Paul was and probably even hated him, in the way that we fear and hate mortal enemies.   But Jesus wouldn’t let him off the hook, Ananias had to go and minister to this man, and in the process he too had to change, even let his old self die so he could truly become Christ’s disciple.

I think this story from Acts is incredibly relevant at this dark and fearful time that we find ourselves in.   Authoritarian regimes seem to be on the march in many cases.   There’s a famous line from George Orwell’s 1984, where the chief of the secret police says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.   Our Christian faith tells us that this is a lie.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ shows that the power of despots is hollow and fleeting.   The secret police and soldiers who oppressed Poland before the fall of communism couldn’t defeat a man called Karol Wojtyla, who we knew as Pope John Paul II.   Dictatorships inevitably collapse because they can't control the place where God lives, the human heart and the human soul.

Dictatorships do end, but often they end in violence and revenge that create new cycles of violence and fear.  Last night I heard a rousing chorus from Les Miz, the one that goes "do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men", but the problem with all revolutions is how do you stop people from being angry?   Reconciliation seems like the only way, as we've seen in Northern Ireland and South Africa, but it's a slow process.   Our best hopes for reconciliation, I think, is to let God into our hearts, so that old selves can die and new selves can be born.  I started this homily by imagining Saul as some kind of secret policemen in fatigues and boots.   What if we ended by imaging his fatigues and boots and truncheon abandoned in a trash can, and Paul and Ananias together walking into a new future?

Finally, let’s look at the personal.  You may have had a conversion experience in your life. It might have been a religious transformation or maybe something less spiritual but important, like from smoker to non smoker.  

When we think of conversions I think we tend to think of them as conscious decisions, though in our lesson today  Saul doesn’t really get to make any decisions.   Instead, he is directly affected by the intervention of Jesus, who, despite seeming to be only a disembodied voice and a blinding light, can still change a life, and even change world history.  Not all Christians have a dramatic story to tell like Paul’s, but I’ve known many whose life’s direction changed significantly because they had an experience of Jesus that was very real to them.   

On Friday night we witnessed an ordination service, which can be an extravagant display of conversion, but not everyone needs to become a minister to follow Jesus.  Sometimes Jesus just forces us to recognize we have to see, stand with, and even love those we didn’t previously recognize as people.  If you’ve come to one of our Friendship Dinners, and served and sat with people whom our affluent Collingwood community generally ignores, then you’ve had your eyes opened by Jesus.

Genuinely wanting to know Jesus can be risky.  Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, he understands what holds us back from being our best selves, the people God always wanted us to be.   He may ask us searching questions, like he asks Peter in the Gospel today, but those questions come from a deep love and can lead us forward.   But be warned that Jesus does want to transform you.  You may be on that road already.  But if you want to be on that road then I encourage you to consider our course starting this spring, which we call a confirmation course but is actually a course about following Jesus so that we can truly live.