Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter
Just eleven days ago, we were at Good Friday. And, of course, that means that today, we are only nine days into Easter. From the perspective of the church year, we are all very new to the idea of the risen Christ. So, we have to ask, what does Easter mean for us followers of Jesus Christ who remain here on Earth?
This is a huge question. Thankfully, to help us answer it we have before us today a reading from the Book of Acts. In it, the community of believers is working out what it means to be the body of Christ after the resurrection of Christ. That is, they are figuring out how to be the church. And their story tells us at least two important things.
The first one is that to be the church, we must give our testimony to the risen Lord. We must talk about it. Proclaim it. We live in a world that rejected our Lord’s message of forgiveness, compassion, and grace. So determined were the people of Jesus’ day to stamp out his message, that they hung him on a tree. And they thought they had succeeded in bringing an end to his word. But they were wrong. Our Lord triumphed over all of the fear that his message aroused. He even triumphed over death itself. As the body of Christ in the world today, we need to give our testimony whenever and wherever we can to the truth that love and hope have won over hatred and violence. Our world so desperately needs that message today.
The second one is that we must live Jesus’s message within the church. As we think about how to do that, we can draw upon the model that we encounter in our text from Acts today. In that church, the people brought their possessions together and shared them in common. One man, so taken by the power of God’s grace, sold his land and put the proceeds at the feet of the apostles. For him and for that very early church, it was essential to make sure that no one was in need. In these early days of the church year, we must look within our church and ask who is in need among us? How are we addressing that need? How might we be much more generous in response to that need?
Of course, the second point has everything to do with the first. Our ability to testify to the love and hope of our risen Lord to the world beyond our church has everything to do with our dedication to responding generously to the needs within our church—whether “our church” is our local church, a church in Puerto Rico still struggling after hurricane Maria, some other church elsewhere in the world, or, in fact, the global church. What we do in compassionate and generous response to the needs we see within will surely bear strong witness to the truth of what we proclaim without.
- Sue Trollinger