Sermon: “What should we do?”

on June 3, 2014

The following sermon was delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on Sunday, April 27 at First UMC of Michigan City, Indiana

 

First Lesson: 1 Peter 3:13-22

Second Lesson:  Acts 2:1-41

 

Around this time of year, American high-school students are making those collective decisions known as “senior superlatives.”  The basic idea is that the graduating seniors take a vote of who among them excels the most in various categories, such as “who is the best dressed?,” or “who is most likely to become a Hollywood star?”

These can set the stage for some big surprises.  Someone voted “most likely to succeed” may end up in jail.  Someone voted “the biggest flirt” may become a celibate monk.

From most of what we saw of him in the four gospels, Simon Peter would have made a good candidate for “least likely to be the one who makes such a bold, fearless witness for Christ” as in our second lesson today.

Sure, he talked a good game.  But again and again, he showed that he did not have the courage, stamina, or reliability to follow through.

Most infamously, he told Jesus, “Not me! You may be right that these other 11 will fall away from you, but even if that happens, I will never leave you!  Even if it costs me my life, you can count on me, for one, to never disown you!”  And then when Jesus was arrested, Peter ultimately showed himself to be as cowardly a deserter as all the others.  In predicting that he would deny Him, Jesus gave Peter plenty of advance warning to prepare to do the right thing.  And then Peter still chose, three times, the cowardly route of denying Jesus to protect himself!

Peter was given the chance to stay with Jesus, to risk the anger of Christ’s crucifiers, and to perhaps even confront them on the wrongness of their actions, but he so spectacularly blew it!

But then something happened to him.

Please take out your Bibles and look again at who he was preaching to so boldly.  Acts 2:36, the last half of the verse, he mentions “this Jesus whom you crucified.”  Did you catch that?  Peter was preaching to some of the very same people who had been yelling “crucify him!” about Jesus.  The same people Peter had been scared to death of just a couple months earlier!  But this time, Peter not only admitted to being Jesus’ follower, but he directly confronted the mob for having blood on their hands from the most horrible crime that any human since Adam had committed.  And at the end of verse 23, he told them, “you crucified and killed [Jesus] by the hands of those outside the law.”  Adding insult to injury, he reminded them that when they so pridefully thought they had such power over the Lord, they were actually relying on the power of “those outside the law,” meaning their hated Roman oppressors who did not follow the moral laws of the Old Testament.

Amazingly, rather than rioting against Peter, verse 37, the crowd was so “cut to heart” by his preaching that they asked him that most fundamental of questions: “What should we do?”

What a remarkable change has happened in Peter!  How did this happen?

First, let’s get a bit more context.

The large crowds that had flocked to Jesus have melted away.  There are only about120 Christians left in the entire world.  They are all together in Jerusalem.

Last weekend, we celebrated Jesus’ crucifixion and physically rising back from the dead.

But by this point in history, Jesus has wrapped up his brief post-resurrection ministry on Earth, and as Peter notes at the start of verse 33, has gone to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.

Today’s passage highlights why we cannot really make sense of the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament.  We’ll be singing later about how God heard “His people” cry.  Well, “God’s people” had meant the specific ethno-religious community of the Jews, among whom Jesus did most of His initial ministry.  When New Testament people, including Jesus, talked about Scripture, they were mainly talking about what we now call the Old Testament.  Today’s passage describes the sort of grand public opening of the church after Christ’s ascension to Heaven.  At first, this was largely an effort of Jewish Christians leading fellow Jews, or “Fellow Israelites” as Peter calls them, into Christianity.

So why are all these “devout Jews from every nation under Heaven,” as they are called in verse 5, gathered in Jerusalem this day?  These are Jews who had been scattered across a wide range of different lands, but at least the ones visiting Jerusalem still sought to follow biblical religion.  There were also some converts to Judaism.  And so they came back to Jerusalem in time for the Festival of Weeks, or Pentecost, which was one of the major yearly religious celebrations required by the Old Testament.

By the way, the multi-lingual, multi-cultural nature of this gathering points to how the church of Jesus Christ would spread beyond one ethnic group to become a community that embraces people of EVERY race, tribe, language, culture, and social status.

The New Testament quotes the Old Testament hundreds of times.

In verses 16-21 of today’s passage, Peter explains that this strange miracle taking place that day fulfilled a prophecy from the Old Testament prophet, Joel.  He also explains, in verses 25-35, how Jesus fulfilled parts of the Psalms written by King David.  The New Testament is not a replacement for the Old Testament, but rather both a continuation and a fulfillment of it.

Peter reminds the crowd, verse 22, that this Jesus of Nazareth was clearly from God, as He demonstrated by performing many miracles that could not be scientifically explained.  Friends, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that miracles that break the ordinary laws of physics were just easy for superstitious people back then to believe.  Ancient people knew very well that dead men like Lazarus do not just get up and move around when a holy man tells them to.  But note how the fact that Jesus did such miracles does not seem to be disputed here.  Peter says, I’m just reminding you of what “you yourselves know.”  This is not logical – unless there actually were numerous, reliable eyewitnesses, within and beyond the crowd, of Jesus performing miracles.  But even then, Peter points his finger of accusation, you had Him not just killed, but crucified!

This is a rather interesting evangelistic approach.  Peter did not say, “Hey everybody, please become Christians so that you can have a better marriage, get rich, or live your best life now!”  Now there are definitely ways in which becoming a Christian can make your life on Earth more joyful and fulfilling.  But that’s not what Peter focused on.

Rather, verse 36, Peter told them that Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is eternally part of God, Who is Three-in-One.  And Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior figure prophesied repeatedly in our Old Testament, Who all you devout Jews had been waiting to rescue you.  And you subjected Him to the worst form of torture the great Roman Empire could invent, before you finally murdered him in merciless cold blood.

In verse 40, Luke, who wrote this book, does not record all of the “many other arguments” Peter used.  But he found the most important other argument Peter offered to be “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”

This was indeed a wicked generation who was guilty of sickening evil.  Peter’s audience needed to be saved, rescued out of the evil in which they were swimming, and the awful punishment they had earned for themselves from a just God.

But was this generation of first-century Jews really any more corrupt than we are today?  All of us are guilty of evil thoughts, words, and deeds, known in church-speak as sin.  We like to tell ourselves that our wrongdoing is not so bad.  We rather self-servingly think of other people’s sin as much worse than our own.  But if I cheated on my wife – which, for the record, I would never do – she would have every right to feel betrayed and rejected, even if I told her, “Don’t act like it’s such a big deal, Honey! I cheated on you only once or a few times, not 500 times!”  But that’s exactly how we often treat God.

Any sin makes us sinners.  By our sin we have all betrayed and rejected God, and made ourselves unworthy of having a loving relationship with Him.  So God would have had every right to just abandon and destroy all of us.

But because of His great love and mercy, he chose to reach out to us when we, like those yelling “crucify him!,” least deserved it.  Verse 23, this was all “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.”  Because we could not bear to pay the just penalty we earned for our sins, He came down to pay it for us.  It’s been said that Jesus lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died.  It was because of our sin that He died, which makes us just as guilty of killing Him as that first-century lynch mob.

But thanks be to God, verse 32, the disciples themselves had witnessed, verse 24, how Jesus was freed from death, not as a ghost but in a resurrected body, “because it was impossible for him to be held in death’s power”!

Verse 37, the crowd asked Peter THE most important question facing every person on Earth today: What should we do in response to the Gospel?

Verse 38, Peter tells them three things that are the most important tasks for anyone on Earth, then or today.  If you are here as someone who has not yet submitted to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, this is the part about which I would especially love to talk to you if you want catch me after the service:

First, we must repent.  We must genuinely, sorrowfully apologize to God for the evil we have done and turn away from it.  Without repentance, there is no true Christianity.

Because Jesus came to save us away from our sins, not to make our sins no big deal.  The brutality of the cross demonstrates how seriously God takes sin.  Christians must never become flippant or ungrateful about the incredible forgiveness God has given us.  Repentance is a continual part of the Christian life.

Secondly, we must receive Christian baptism, the sacrament in which we declare our Christian belief and are initiated into the church, for the forgiveness of our sins.

In the United Methodist Church, we baptize children of Christian parents into our community.  But John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, also taught that many of us who were baptized as infants would still need to be born again later in life.  Wesley even described those who trusted for their salvation in having been baptized long ago as leaning on the staff of a broken reed (Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Teaching, Pastoral Theology, vol. 3).  When people become Christians as adults, our denomination offers adult baptism if they were never properly baptized or a ritual for reaffirmation of faith if they were.

So trusting in Christ alone and living accordingly is also a continual part of the Christian life.

The third thing is something God does and we receive.  Once we become Christians, the Holy Spirit comes into us and causes a supernatural regeneration, so that as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:17, if anyone is in Christ, they becomes a completely new person.

Today’s passage challenges the ironically secular attitudes Christians, myself included, sometimes take towards our evangelism, our witnessing for Jesus.  We are afraid of any potential for conflict.  We are paralyzed by fear of offending people.  We want others to share the joy we know as Christians, but in trying to win people over we are so easily tempted to forever avoid the most fundamentally offensive teaching of Christianity: that people need a savior in the first place.  We may even be tempted to pander to people’s desire for a god who is more like Aladdin’s genie, our supernatural servant whose job it is to bless whatever we want him to bless for us, rather than the King of the universe to whom we owe our complete humility and obedience.  Sometimes we act like we think we can devise such clever schemes for marketing our faith and church that we don’t need any help from the Holy Spirit, thankyouverymuch.

What a contrast to Peter’s approach!  Look at how clear Peter was in saying that the main reason people should become Christians is not because it is a great means to the end of having a better life but rather because we have sinned terribly against the good God of the universe, and turning away from our evil and towards Him is simply the right thing to do.

And in response, 3,000 new believers joined that church of 120 people!  Can you imagine this congregation not doubling or quadrupling, but multiplying your membership by 26 times in a single day??

This was more than just a particularly skilled sales pitch for Jesus.

This revival was supernaturally orchestrated.

Peter was a new person because he had forgiveness through the cross of Christ and was made new by the Holy Spirit.

Now I realize that not all of us here will preach large revivals like Billy Graham.  Probably the majority of us will not become supernaturally empowered to speak in other languages like these early disciples.

But the same Peter who preached in our second lesson wrote our first lesson.  Remember, he taught, 1 Peter 3:15-16, that all Christians must always be ready to explain, with gentleness and reverence, the hope we have in Jesus.  The first audience for that instruction were folk who, for simply being Christian and especially for telling others about their faith, had suffered terribly and were still very vulnerable.  We’re talking about much worse, actual persecution then the “would my co-workers or neighbors think I’m weird if I try to talk to them about God?” sorts of things we fear.

Friends, evangelism is not optional for Christians.  It is not something you pay [your pastor] to do so that you don’t have to worry about it.  All of us have our own networks of people we can reach better than anyone else in this church.

All around us people are facing an unbearable burden of guilt.  Precious men and women created in God’s image are drowning in a sea of evil, much of it of their own creation.  They are in desperate need of someone who can help them be saved from this corrupt generation, so that they will not be lost forever.  To my brothers and sisters in Christ, I say they need someone like us, who is no better than they are, but who has been saved from the mess we created for ourselves, and so can go back and help our relatives and friends receive the salvation that is uniquely offered through the cross.

Because if we do not go out of our way to take risks, to make ourselves vulnerable, and to pray for the Holy Spirit’s help in addressing our non-Christian loved ones’ most important, eternal need, who will?

  1. Comment by Ann Pierce on June 7, 2014 at 5:14 am

    Thank you for this excellent exposition and for the challenge to “go and do likewise.”

  2. Comment by Byrom Wehner on June 7, 2014 at 8:30 pm

    Thank you, John. I am reminded of a couple of things. One of them is my title for an imaginary sermon for Pentecost: “Going Fishing.” After Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, Peter told his fellow disciples he was going fishing, and I believe that meant he was giving up. The resurrected Christ told Peter to go and “feed my sheep.” The infilling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost gave Peter and others great power to do just that. That infilling will do the same for the rest of us.
    I am reminded of another thing whenever I hear someone about seeking God’s will/purpose for his life. I do believe that God does have special tasks for each of us, but He has well laid out in the Bible what we are to do in general. Too often, I am guilty of ignoring what the Bible says. Indeed, evangelism is not optional!

  3. Comment by Betsy on June 8, 2014 at 10:48 pm

    John, what a needed sermon on our need as disciples..share the good news. Thank you for your insight into the Holy Spirit in us.

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