Sunday - 04/14/13 RWJ/Pottersville
UMC
Sermon: “Resilient”
The Early Church Series, Part 2 of 6
Scripture Lesson: Acts 9:1-6 (7-20)
Gospel Lesson: John 21:1-19
Good morning brothers and sisters! Welcome
to this the third week of this Easter season. This season in the Christian
calendar, in which we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. The
season were we celebrate the empty tomb, the reality that “death was swallowed
up victory,” and the realization, “that the grave could not hold the king”.
For this Sunday then, like every
Sunday is a “mini-Easter”. You see this is the reason that most churches
worship on Sundays, because this is the day that the Lord overcame death, and that
he was resurrected from the dead. Since the first Easter happened in the year
33 AD, it has been quite some time since the first Easter. Shortly after this
first Easter though, the Christian Church began growing rapidly. The Gospel of
Jesus Christ began spreading far and wide, as Jesus had commanded.
As we discussed last week, the early
Christian Church was heavily persecuted, for preaching the name Jesus Christ.
The early Christian Church, and even a portion of the modern day Christian
Church in fact, still suffers oppression and great persecution for sake of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.
With all of this said though, this I do
know, the Christian Church is not going anywhere. The only thing that will end
the Christian Church is the victorious second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For the scriptures say regarding the church, that “the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it”.
You know I heard a Christian leader on the radio recently,
and he was talking about a conversation he had with a person who believed in
God, but yet rejected Christianity and all other religions. Yet this is what
that person told the Christian leader, “I am convinced that the Christian
Church must come from divine origins, because if it hadn’t how could it have
survived for this long?” What a “stop you in your tracks” kind of question!
Further, brothers and sisters this I also know, if the Lord does not return by
the year 2033, which is 20-years from this year, the Christian Church will
celebrate 2,000 years of “death being swallowed up by victory”. We will
celebrate 2-milleniums, 20-centuries, and 2,000 years of the Gospel of life
being spread and preached throughout the world. The salvation offered freely by
Jesus Christ will have been present and available for 2,000 years!
We don’t have an infantile or young faith then, rather we
have an ancient, and an historic faith. For we as believers are “resilient”. I
say this because, against all odds, shouldn’t this church or other churches have
probably closed down by now? Yet here we are. Every year, this church and others
often have just enough to get by, and praise God sometimes just a little more.
How can that not be of divine origins? How can all of this just happen? Further,
how can it just happen for nearly 2,000 years? We are “resilient”.
This past Tuesday all United Methodist Clergy 40-years old
and under, or “young clergy”, met with our new bishop, Bishop Marcus Webb, to
discuss the church from the perspective of “young clergy”. In this discussion,
people were asked to freely air there praises of concerns. Some of my young
colleagues were concerned that they were too young to be pastors, and that
people didn’t think that they should be in the roles that they were in, due to their
age. Some young clergy expressed concerns over what they saw as a United
Methodist Church in decline. Then I raised my hand and said, “Bishop, we are
not in decline, we are entering into a period of rebirth, renewal, and revival.
We are strong!”
In realizing that I just blurted that out to the Bishop of
all people, I was shocked when he came up after the meeting and thanked me for
my honesty. Then before we left, he said to all of us, “Take your place of
leadership in the church, and be the leaders that God has called you to be”.
Our Bishop, a man who next year, yet again, will be preaching about half of the
Sundays of whole the year, throughout this United Methodist conference to model
his faith, his devotion, and his leadership. This bishop, who is the youngest
United Methodist Bishop in the United States, and among the two youngest United
Methodist Bishops in the world, encouraged us young clergy to lead, to love,
and be “resilient”.
“Resilient” brother and sisters, we are “resilient”. We
believe when it’s hard, we believe even more when it is harder, and God always
comes through does he not? How else could the early Christian Church start as a
movement with our savior Jesus Christ and just a handful of people, and then
grow to the largest faith in the whole world today. In fact, in the world today
there are about 7-billion people, and about 2.2-billion people are Christians.
Just to put that in perspective, this would be as many Christians as about
7-times the population of the United States. Christians make up about one-third
of the whole world.
So, a movement that started with the savior and less people
than are in this church today, and nearly 2,000 years later, here we are
2.2-billion strong. For we are “resilient.”
In the early church, the Apostle Paul extended the gospel to the gentiles.
You know who I mean by the Apostle Paul. You know, the former Pharisees named
Saul as our scripture reading for this morning from the Book of Acts discusses.
The one who was involved with the stoning of the Christian Stephen. The one whom
Jesus came to in a vision on that road to Damascus. Then Saul entered Damascus,
which is in modern day Syria, blinded. God then used Ananias to heal him, and
this this underground place, which is now a church, is on this morning’s
bulletin cover. This church is likely almost 2,000 years old. Church tradition also
holds that the Apostle Thomas might have made it as far as India. You see the
early Apostles went out with the good news, as did the early Christian Church.
Ultimately though brothers and sisters, what make us so “resilient” is
love of Jesus Christ. Listen to this excerpt that I found about the early
Christian Church. Here is what it said:
“At no other time in the
history of Christianity did love so characterize the entire church as it did in
the first three centuries. And Roman society took note. Tertullian reported
that the Romans would exclaim, “See how they love one another!” Justin Martyr
sketched Christian love this way: “We who used to value the acquisition of
wealth and possessions more than anything else now bring what we have into a
common fund and share it with anyone who needs it. We used to hate and destroy
one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country.
Now, because of Christ, we live together with such people and pray for our
enemies.”
“Clement, describing the
person who has come to know God, wrote, “He impoverishes himself out of love,
so that he is certain he may never overlook a brother in need, especially if he
knows he can bear poverty better than his brother. He likewise considers the
pain of another as his own pain. And if he suffers any hardship because of
having given out of his own poverty, he does not complain.”
“When a devastating
plague swept across the ancient world in the third century, Christians were the
only ones who cared for the sick, which they did at the risk of contracting the
plague themselves. Meanwhile, pagans were throwing infected members of their
own families into the streets even before they died, in order to protect
themselves from the disease.”
Imagine
a love like that. Imagine really living the Gospel of Jesus Christ like that.
The early Christian Church was “resilient,” and we are also “resilient”. In
fact, the early Christian Church invented the public hospital as they took in
the sick and the poor. If continue to recapture this power of the early
Christian Church, I believe that the fires of revival will continue to burn
strongly across this great land of ours, and Lord willing the whole world.
I
would like to close with story from this week in the news that really touched
me. It is about a United State Metal of Honor recipient, who served in the
Korean War. This metal, which is the highest military honor one can receive,
was awarded just this week, to Captain Emil Kapaun. Emil Kapaun, was also known
as Father Kapaun, was a Roman Catholic Army Chaplain who served during the war.
Here is his story:
“Among the dying, Capt. Emil Kapaun
traded his watch for a blanket at a North Korean prison camp—and cut the
blanket up and made it into socks for fellow prisoners.
President Obama awarded Kapaun (pronounced Ka-PAWN), an Army chaplain
who died in that prison camp in 1951 at age 35, the Medal of Honor Thursday.
The son of Czech immigrants to a
small Kansan town, Kapaun enlisted during WWII and was dispatched to the
Southeast Asian theatre of war, where he gained a reputation for just
appearing wherever the fighting was. He
returned home, received a master’s in education from Catholic University, and
picked up as a parish priest in Pilsen, Kan. But Kapaun re upped for military
service in 1948. “Serving in those parishes…it
didn’t work out,” Kapaun told a fellow prisoner in the bleakness of the
North Korean camp. “I mean…my God, Bob! Have you ever had to deal with one of
those women’s committees of a church Altar Society?”
In Korea, Kapaun resumed his constant
presence under duress. When enemy fire rendered his jeep inoperable, he took to
riding a bicycle along the front lines. One of his fellow prisoners, Ray M.
Dowe, Jr., wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1954 about the
chaplain’s rides: Helmet jammed down over his
ears, pockets stuffed with apples and peaches he had scrounged from Korean
orchards, he’d ride this bone-shaker over the rocky roads and the paths through
the paddy fields until he came to the forward outposts. There he’d drop in a
shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach,
say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole.
Kapaun was awarded the Bronze Star in
Korea for heroism in August 1950—the chaplain ran through enemy fire, dragging
soldiers to safety—months before his detention.
But he was captured, uninjured, by
the Chinese military in 1950, after refusing to leave wounded soldiers. The
chaplain pushed away the weapon of a Chinese soldier standing over an
American with a broken ankle, and the two were taken on the Tiger Death March
to a North Korean prison camp, Pyoktong, with Kapaun carrying the solider for a
time.
At Pyoktong, prisoners lived on less
than 500 grams of millet a day and might die at three or four a night in
a room. Kapaun turned old t-shirts into
bandages, and snuck out to wash old bandages and old garments for the
suffering. He was called “The Good Thief,” delivering stolen food retrieved on
trips inside guards’ areas. He recited American menus for starving
prisoners, and led officers in “America, the Beautiful” and the
national anthem (“God Save the Queen” for Brits in the camp). He fixed leaking
water pouches with burned down soles of rubber boots; held a sunrise
Easter Mass; and became a huge problem for the Chinese guards who were trying
to indoctrinate the prisoners, saying “Where is your God now?” In the moments
Father Kapaun would say “Right here.” (Walt) Mayo one day heard a Chinese
officer lecture Captain Kapaun. The Chinese officer said “Don’t ask God for
your daily bread,” the officer said. “Ask Mao Zedong. He’s the one who provides
your daily bread.” “If this is an example of God’s daily bread,” Kapaun said,
“then God must be a terrible baker.”
“He joked with them, and said prayers for them, and held them
in his arms like children as delirium came upon them,” Dowe wrote in
1954. “But the main thing he did for them was to put into their hearts the will
to live. For when you are wounded and sick and starving, it’s easy to give up
and quietly die.”
Kapaun fell ill in the spring of
1951. Despite an apparently improved condition, guards took him away to a
dingy, dark building to die alone. En route, Kapaun asked God to forgive the
Chinese guards. “Tell them back home that I died a happy death,” he told
fellow soldiers. Kapaun was declared a “servant of God” by the Roman Catholic
Church, and he might even be considered for sainthood.
The Gospel of
John reading from this morning was about when Jesus told Peter, “Feed my Sheep.”
Father Kapaun was a Peter in the Korean War. Father Kapaun, like many of us,
was “resilient”. He stood on the promises of almighty God, and nearly 2,000
years after the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, we sit here
today, still proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ. For we are “resilient.”
In his name I bring this message to you today. Amen!
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