Bad Citizens (Acts 5:27-32; 2nd Sunday of Easter, Year C; Confirmation Sunday, April 7, 2013)

Bad Citizens

Acts 5:27-32
2^nd Sunday of Easter, Year C
Confirmation Sunday
April 7, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Well here it is: Confirmation Sunday.  I have been annoying our confirmands since last October and have run out of fresh ways to do it.  There are any number of sermons I wish I could preach this morning, many things that I wish I could tell them about the life of Christian discipleship.  Early versions of this sermon contained at least two or three of those sermons each. 

I’ve learned over the years that a sermon should have one focus.  “Think rifle, rather than shotgun,” my first preaching professor said.  That has been good advice, so I’ll stick with it.  And, when deciding which sermon to preach, I have a bias toward the text.  And what a text!

Just to refresh our memory and put this story into context, we note that the disciples, now called apostles, had been caring for the sick and deranged and people were finding their health and wholeness again.  (This is one of the ways that the reign of God appears.  It’s one of the ways that the risen Jesus makes himself known.) 

Anyway, the religious officials didn’t like it.  It undercut their authority; these ministries were not approved by the proper committees and the people doing them had not even heard of the Board of Ordained Ministry let alone been ordained.  The priests had warned the apostles not to talk and act in such status quo-disturbing ways, but the apostles ignored the warnings.  The priests then had the apostles arrested.  That very night an angel busted them out of the joint and sent them back to the Temple.  There was some Keystone cops kind of confusion as the priests sent to have the prisoners brought to them, only to discover they had escaped, only to discover that they were in the Temple courtyards again, carrying on as if nothing had happened.  So the apostles were arrested once more and brought before the priests.

The priests reminded the prisoners of the earlier warning.  The apostles, however, did not seem particularly respectful of the priests’ authority, nor particularly inclined to obey.  It was clear that they were disciples of Jesus.  “We must obey God rather than any human authority,” they said, “We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey God.”  

It is in the nature of witnesses to testify; they are not allowed to keep silent.  They are empowered by the Holy Spirit that refuses to stay within approved channels or be subjected to regulation by the Temple bureaucracy.  The apostles are going to keep on doing what they have been doing, what Jesus has been doing.

The Temple puts out a message of stability.  Its message is that the way things are—the Romans in charge, the wealth of the wealthy, the poverty of the poor, the oppression of the weak by the strong, the illnesses of the sick, the competitive striving for mastery in an economy of scarcity, and the violence used to enforce the will of the rulers—all of this is the way that God wants it.  It is the will of God.  Any complaint is rebellion.  Revolution is unthinkable.

Jesus rejected this message.  He offered, and acted out, a different vision of human life in the world, one founded on peaceful non-violence, other-embracing love, and debt-forgiveness.  Jesus called it the Reign of God.  God, the God of Moses and the prophets, sides with the oppressed against oppressors, with the weak against the strong, with the poor against the rich, with the outcast against the privileged.  The God that the Temple offers is no God at all, only the projection of the wishes of the ruling class.  The powers that be didn’t like this message, so they killed the messenger.

But in this struggle between Jesus and the Temple, God had chosen sides.  God had raised Jesus from the dead.  Killing Jesus didn’t stop his message; quite the contrary.  Now there were dozens, even hundreds of copies of Jesus with the same Spirit and the same disturbing message.  Just as putting out an oil fire with water spreads the fire, so killing Jesus had spread his message and vision. 

The apostles were not about to stop what they were doing.  They were followers of Jesus.  They were doing what Jesus had been doing, was still doing through them.  They saw through the lies and the mystifications of the ruling class.  They invite us to do the same.  That’s our text for the morning.

Now, isn’t this a dangerous message to be preaching to young people?  They don’t normally listen to sermons, so maybe they won’t hear this message.  Still it’s risky, don’t you think, even to put this stuff out there?  I have the excuse that it’s just the Biblical text, and what am I going to do?  Still, we mainline Protestant denominations have done a pretty good job of keeping people from reading the Bible to see what it actually says, so what am I thinking in bringing an unsuitable text like this to the light of day?

Unfortunately, like the priests of the Temple, we are thinking more this morning of stability and continuity than we are of resurrection and revolution.  We are looking at these confirmands and thinking, “The Church is carrying on.  I was confirmed.  These are being confirmed.  Their children will be confirmed.  The Church is carrying on.”  The Finance Committee is looking at them and thinking, “One day one or two of these will be strong givers.”  The Nominations Committee is thinking, “I wonder which of these would be willing to serve on a committee?”

Parents are looking at their confirmands with pride.  They’re thinking, “It’s taking so long for them to grow up!  When are they going to move out?”  Well, maybe not.  But it does take a long time to raise a child.  Today parents are offered a hopeful sign that the task of raising them will not last forever. 

We’re looking at confirmation as if it were a milestone, a marker beside a road that shows how far they have come.  We’re looking at confirmation under the sign of stability and continuity.  Our kids are doing what we expect them to do.  We expect them to continue doing what we expect them to do.  They will graduate from high school.  They will chose—at least in a preliminary sort of way—a career for themselves in which they will make enough money to move out of the house.  They will go to work or to college or technical school and then to work.  They will go into debt—probably deeply—and they will work to pay off their debts.  They will fall in love.  They will fall out of love.  They will fall in love again.  They will find someone to marry.  They will have children.  They will have their children baptized, or as I have heard it expressed, “done.”  They will take their turn as the parents of confirmands.  And so on.

It does not further that plan to say to them that they might imitate the apostles who said, “We must obey God rather than people.”  Too much like the Temple priests, we are rooting for the status quo.  Neither parents, nor teachers, nor pastors are particularly eager to hear any of these young people say to us, “We must obey God rather than you.” 

This text reveals a hidden possibility in the rite of passage that we call confirmation.  It is possible that instead of confirmation being a milestone along the way to becoming pretty much like us so that things can go on pretty much as they have, that these confirmands will hear in confirmation a call to enter in a new way into the life of discipleship to Jesus.  It is possible that they will take these vows and mean them, not just as pretty words that mean a special dinner and presents, but as a summons to a life lived for God and for God’s vision of human life in the world. 

They might, for example, hear me ask them if they “accept the freedom and power God gives [them] to resist evil, injustice and oppression, in whatever forms they present themselves?” and assume that because they answer, “I do,” that they may and ought to start resisting evil, injustice and oppression.  And who knows just where they will find it?

Friends, this whole thing could be serious trouble for us and for anyone who is comfortable in the status quo, anyone who would rather avoid trouble, anyone who would rather not be reminded too often that we eat well as others starve, that we are safe while others are at risk from violence that we have paid for, that we drive our cars and trucks while others live with leaked crude oil in their back yard and poisons in the air.  This whole thing could be serious trouble. 

Friends, confirmation is not just a rite of passage for a few young people and their families.  It is not just a series of questions asked of our youth to see whether they believe the right things and are willing to commit to supporting the church.  Confirmation is also a challenge to all of us: are we willing to take these questions seriously?  And beyond that, are we willing to answer as we ask the confirmands to answer?

If we are then we and they can learn together how to strip away the various guises and disguises in which “evil, injustice and oppression” hide.  If we are then we and they can learn together what it means to be witnesses along with the Spirit of Christ of the resurrection of Jesus.  If we are then we and they can learn together how to make a space for God’s new way of being human in the world, and together we will see an answer to our ancient prayer for God’s name to be hallowed and God’s kingdom to come.

We know that God loves us.  We know that God wants truly human life for us.  But God will not be mocked.  If we are not willing to answer as we ask the confirmands to answer, if we wed ourselves too closely to the comforts of the status quo, if we close our eyes to “evil, injustice and oppression,” then the day will come when they will say, “We must obey God rather than people.”  And by “people” they will mean us.

But that day does not have to come.  On this happy day let us commit ourselves to God’s new life as we confirm these young people in the ancient faith.  Let us strive with them to make real these words in the actions of our lives.  Let us work and rejoice and weep and laugh and worship and struggle alongside each other as God’s people who are disciples of Jesus. 

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