Sermon on Easter 6A: What is Important to You?
All three readings today are about explaining the importance of Christianity. You obviously believe Christianity is important, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I think Christianity is important, otherwise I wouldn’t spend so much of my time with it, enough to be a priest. But what of everyone else? People have all sorts of agendas about what they think is most important.
We can see that in the debates and arguments of our age. For some people money is important. For others issues of life. For others work. For others power. For some beauty. For others destruction.
How are we to know what is important?
Paul is explaining to the Athenians what he thinks is important. He sees that they are religious, so he uses that to argue that there is an “unknown god” to whom they ought to pay more attentions. It is a god not of gold, silver, or stone, but a living god of who has risen from the dead and calls on all to repent.
Important for the author of First Peter is doing good, despite its dangers. He does warn about people suffering for doing good, but that is better than suffering. He also comments on the risen Christ, and points out the values of baptism.
Jesus himself in today’s gospel lays his importance on keeping his commandments. He doesn’t spell them out in this situation, but we all know the two-commandment summary of the Law: love God and love your neighbor. Jesus does emphasize the connection between keeping the commandments and a mutual love of God and Jesus and us. He tosses in what will become a theology of the Holy Spirit, completing the idea of the Trinity, with his gift of the “Advocate.”
All of this is important, because from the view of the three authors of scripture today, from the view of all of scripture and the teachings of the church, we are to build a community of love. It is a community that will not end with death. Both Paul and Jesus seem to mention an apocalyptic end of the world which has not happened yet. But as I always say about the apocalypse, why worry about the end of everything, when our own individual death faces us every day?
Other than their own death, some people fear the end of America, or the end of Civilization, if not the end of the world. That may happen—it did before, with the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire. But that did not lessen the message of Christ. His truth has endured until today. It is our task to keep it glowing and growing as best we can for tomorrow. And the message is the love we should all share.
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2020 May 17
URL: <http://therev.brianpavlac.org/srms/20200517.html