Outlasting Our Worst--April 16, 2024

 
Outlasting Our Worst--April 16, 2024

"[Peter said,] 'The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses." [Acts 3:12-15]

You could say that God's greatest power is the ability to outlast and to exhaust the worst of humanity (and the best—look how much evil is done with good intentions!). God's surprisingly determined faithfulness is what sends Jesus, risks Jesus' rejection and death, overcomes it in the resurrection, brings healing to those who are still broken and hurting, and then withstands the skeptical looks from this crowd. It is the goodness of God that keeps coming back, even though, at every turn, that goodness has been met with rejection.

That faithfulness is given shape in enemy-love; we hear that much in this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday. In this scene from early in Acts, Peter tells a story of a God who does not merely wait for us to come back to him like a faithful dog waiting at the back door of the house, but who actively goes out and seeks those who have participated in rejecting him. Peter tells this crowd that they are complicit in Jesus' death—they are accomplices, and they cannot merely pass the blame or pass the buck to the empire for getting rid of Jesus. They are—and we are—enemies of God, who stand in a long line of people who have rejected God's goodness and grace. And if God just did the "common sense" thing to do, God would have left us behind a long time ago. But to hear Peter tell it, this same God whose vision for a new world keeps being rejected, and this same God whose Chosen One, Jesus, was put to death, this God has not given up on blessing the world and mending the very lives that had conspired against him.

The resurrection, it would seem, is the sign of God's determination not to take our violent "No" to be the last word in the conversation, insisting instead on a loud and clear "Yes" after our outbursts. Or, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, in the Crucified and Risen Jesus, "God refuses our refusal of friendship."

Knowing that gives us the courage to face the worst in ourselves, much as Peter's speech here pulls no punches with revealing the ways we keep rejecting God. We can't look away--and we don't have to anymore--from all the times and all the ways we have slammed the door in God's face and said, "No, I think I'd prefer to do things my way, thank you very much." Peter's speech here doesn't let us forget that we are complicit in Jesus' death, and we cannot push the blame off onto any other lone group—we can't blame "the Jews" as had been done (wrongly, in case it needs to be said again) for so long in the church's history, and we can't blame "the Romans" as though we would have had the courage to liberate Jesus if we'd have been there, and we cannot blame the random cruelties of fate.

No, we are a part of this mess, and we have dirty hands. The resurrection of Jesus shows us God's refusal to let that be the end of the story, and so we are given the courage to name it when we would much prefer to brush all of our histories of rejection under the rug. Because ultimately these words of Peter are about the persistence of God—this God who keeps seeking us out even after our repeated rejections. The God whom Peter calls on as "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," is shown throughout the Scriptures to be "gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love." Perhaps we cannot help but see our failures, but we are also invited to see the God whose love simply outlasts and outlives and exhausts our failures and rejection and animosity, and who keeps coming back to find us. We are met with this love that will not let us go—ever. That is part of what the resurrection means, too.

Today, it may be that the task in front of us is two-fold: first, I am called to dare being honest about all the ways I reject God's goodness and all the blessed opportunities to live in God's new way of things that I pass by. And then second, seeing that God refuses to let that be the last word, I am dared to jump into God's love in a way that makes it possible for me to love others without waiting on them to love me first or deserve it. God's faithful love is a love for enemies as well as strangers and friends—and that is the love into which I am pulled today. We get to be a part of Jesus' movement to keep reaching out to a world that keeps rejecting God, knowing that in the end, God's death-defying love persists, nevertheless.

Good Lord, today let us see ourselves truthfully and hopefully. Break down again the walls we have built to keep you out—keep besieging us, Lord, with the love that will not let us go.