How do we know?

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C

The Collect

O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Acts 9:36-43

Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, "Please come to us without delay." So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, "Tabitha, get up." Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.

Psalm 23

1 The Lord is my shepherd; *
I shall not be in want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures *
and leads me beside still waters.

3 He revives my soul *
and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

4 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; *
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

5 You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; *
you have anointed my head with oil,
and my cup is running over.

6 Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, *
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Revelation 7:9-17

I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom

and thanksgiving and honor

and power and might

be to our God forever and ever!
Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

For this reason they are before the throne of God,
and worship him day and night within his temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center 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."

John 10:22-30

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly." Jesus answered, "I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one."

Reflection

How do we know what it means to follow Jesus?

I mentioned last week that we just kicked off an month-long focus with our youth around the old question, “what would Jesus do?” The idea is to get our kids to think about this question in their own lives, and the particular challenges young people face in America in 2025.

But this isn’t easy work, not by a long shot. How do we, those teaching these kids, even know what it means to do as Jesus would do? Reading the Bible is all well and good, even reading the Gospels, but we know from a life time of experience, this stuff is hard. Like, really hard. Discipleship is hard. Trusting in this vision of a new world is hard.

Living in the old world, on the other hand, is pretty easy. Going with the flow requires almost no effort at all. All the more so in a world that is constantly reaffirming all our worst impulses, about other people and possessions and sex and everything else.

Even worse, for a long, long time, the church has basically rubber stamped the old world, doing its best to intertwine being Christian with being an American, or a capitalist, or a responsible citizen. Being Christian required no effort, it asked nothing of you; you became a Christian by birthright, not by discipleship. As Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon write in Resident Aliens, “People grew up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville, South Carolina, or Pleasant Grove, Texas.”

And so, passages like Psalm 23 so often resonate strongly in American churches; on this Sunday, many will center Psalm 23 in the Message, and relegate Revelation, or Acts, or the Gospel of John. I don’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t read or center Psalm 23; it is certainly one of the most beautiful and well-known passages in all of Scripture. But, when it becomes disconnected from, say, the Prophets, or the Epistle of James, or the Exodus story, it slips into soft focus, all needlepoint and stained glass and major chords, a balm that asks nothing of us, that simply tells us a story we want to hear: God is my shepherd! God hears our prayers, and lays a banquet of feast for us in the warm grass! Hallelujah! We forget the work it takes to get to that place.

As Christians, we want a Psalm 23 world. Instead, we have been handed a Revelation 7 world.

Here’s what I mean: the vision John relates here is also a beautiful and joyous one: the Lamb on the throne, a host singing, living water and no more hunger. It is perfectly in concert with Psalm 23. But, as John’s angelic guide tells him, for those clad in pure white to appear before the throne, they must first have been martyrs. In other words, they had to suffer and die for their beliefs. They had to do the hard work first. Yeah, their garments have been washed clean, but they were bloodied before.

Martyrdom, rejection, betrayal: this is our lot as Christians, first and foremost. At least, it is if we live as Jesus did, discordant with the expectations of the world and those in power over it. Yeah, Jesus promised eternal life, but not before we suffer first.

I know this all sounds gloomy, and even overtly fire-and-brimstone, especially for a progressive Christian space. And, I can hear you asking, weren’t we talking about youth groups and wwjd and how do we know what it means to follow Jesus? You’re right, let’s pull back that way. Look at the story from Acts today. A veritable miracle, at the hands of Peter! More joy, more celebration! That’s a Psalm 23 kind of story right?

St. Tabitha the widow, raised from the dead by the Apostle Peter

I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think it is.

The story of Acts, remember, is the story of Jesus’ earliest followers - this new thing called the church - figuring out what to do now that Jesus is gone, how they are going to live like Jesus in this new world. And here, in chapter 9, we see that one of the ways to do that is (checks notes) literally raising the dead. This on the heels of another of Jesus’ followers, Stephen, being stoned to death because of his preaching.

In other words, following Jesus, being a disciple, it’s hard. It’s not an easy thing, and the truth is, we’re all probably going to fail at it, over and over and over again. Encouraging children and teenagers to embrace this way of life, like I do in my job, is probably actually pretty cruel in some ways. Honestly, in all of the passages in today’s Lectionary, the part I identify with most is the crowd of Jews talking to Jesus in the Gospel story: are you sure, Jesus, that you are the Messiah? Are you sure that this is the Way? Are you sure that it isn’t, maybe, I don’t know, like chariots and credit cards and cozy suburbia? When You say, “you do not belong to my sheep,” I think maybe, yeah, You’re right, because that way You are preaching, it’s rough.

But: we do this, all of this hard stuff,

like being willing to be betrayed,

and trying to make dead things alive again,

and asking more of one another than is reasonable,

because we read that whole story in Acts today. And we know, the promise of Jesus isn’t success and power and wealth and prestige; no, the promise of all this - the loving, and the healing, and the provoking, and the forgiving - is life itself. Not a half-life, a shadow life where we surrender some of our humanity to the Powers and Principalities on the promise of safety and security. No, a real life, a full life, a human life, in the sense that to be human means to be like Jesus was. That’s how we know. That’s how we know what Jesus would do: because when we do it, we are so alive, we understand in that moment- even if it is fleeting! - that no other way of being could ever be right.

In some ways, that is the Psalm 23 world; we hear God saying, “get up! I’ll lead you beside still waters, wipe away your tears, you will dwell here forever.” And we’ll ask, what did we do to deserve this? And God will answer, you lived.

Amen.