Fourth Sunday of Easter- Year B: April 22, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Fourth Sunday of Easter- Year B- Sunday, April 22, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Roy Parker

I’ll begin with a paraphrase from the Acts of the Apostles which was just read. Peter exclaims, “There is salvation in no one other than Jesus, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Speaking at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California  several years ago, Krister Stendahl emphasized that Peter’s words were essentially love language, not intended as doctrine.  

Love language, nonetheless, which informs some remarks about resurrection by John Dominic Crossan, who says, “An exclusively divine initiative — the Resurrection — (has changed) into (a) divine-human collaboration as believers are called to live the radical ethics of a new creation or a transformed life and thereby co-create with God a nonviolent world of justice and peace. That is why Jesus could tell his companions to go out and do exactly what he was doing: heal the sick, eat with those they healed, and announce that the kingdom of God had already started in that mutual sharing of spiritual and physical power — that is, in healing and eating. 

The coming of the kingdom meant, as the Lord’s Prayer said, the doing of God’s will on earth — and it had already begun. So also with Paul. It was not ecstasy but accuracy which made him declare that ‘all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory into another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ That presumes, of course, that believers are living the resurrected life that incarnates the nonviolent God of justice and peace who was revealed in Christ. We are not waiting for God to act. God has already acted and is waiting for us to react, to collaborate, to cooperate, to get with the divine program.

The ultimate claim made by the Resurrection, to put it clearly, accurately, and bluntly, is that at Easter, God’s Cosmic Clean-Up has already begun. The Resurrection-event claims that something has literally started and is therefore literally present. If it only spoke of a future event, it would be, like all such future announcements, beyond proof or disproof. But, once you announce that something has begun (in this case, God’s transfiguration of all creation), you must be able to show something. And Jesus or Paul would have accepted that challenge by saying: Come and see how our communities live. Come and see how God-in-us and we-in-God are transforming the world. Come and see how surprised we are at the way God is actually doing it.”

This admonition recalls an address to the Episcopal clergy and layfolk of the city of Boston in 1968 by the Boston City Councilor Thomas Atkins. Councilor Atkins strove throughout his life to break down barriers and become a political leader in spite of mid-century American racism. Even before entering Boston politics his career was a kind of African-American phenomenon of achievement in high school and university.  After coming to Boston to study at Harvard, he became the first African-American elected to the city council and the first to serve as a Massachusetts cabinet secretary. One could catalog other accomplishments, including his persuasion of the Mayor of Boston not to cancel the James Brown concert which was broadcast live on TV the day after Dr. King’s assassination.

Councilor Atkins’ remarks to the Episcopal establishment on that day went something like this: “You know, there was a time when African-Americans strove to move out of Roxbury and into the suburbs, but that’s no longer the case, because now  we feel that we’ve found community in Roxbury in a way that you white folks can’t find in the suburbs. And,” he added with a twinkle in his eye,  “if you’re real good, we might let you in on our secret.”  And, with Paul the Apostle, he might have added, “ .  .  . our secret, that is the mystery that has now been revealed to us in Roxbury, to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory of this mystery for which we toil and struggle with all the energy that God powerfully inspires within us. Come and see how surprised we are at how God is actually doing it, and if you’re real good we might let you in on the secret.”

Jesus and Paul would have said, “Come and see how our communities live.”  I’ve pondered Thomas Atkins’ unspecified remarks for a long time, and the closest I’ve come to divining their meaning was suggested to me by an elderly resident of St. Monica’s Home for Women in Roxbury to which I was chaplain at the time. Ada Seth told me a story of raising two daughters during the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, how they had to close off most of the house in the winter and live in the remainder, and so forth.  Ada said that one day, out of the blue, arrived a large check from a mysterious benefactor which allowed them to expand their lifestyle. About a month later, her daughters came to her and said, “Mama, it was such fun to be poor! Can’t we be poor again?” They were not as mindful as their mother of the ghetto conditions later described by the Kerner Commission in its investigation of Dr. King’s assassination decades later, but were very aware of the enduring bonds of affection and love which  accompany the interdependence, sharing, cultural richness, diversity, and such, which characterize communities  living with adversity.


In 1968 the Kerner Commission established by Lyndon Johnson to examine the causes of the racial riots of the previous few summers released its report which rendered the failings of institutions and social forces that had delivered the country to that moment of racial reckoning, beginning in the Colonial era and continuing through the formation of what were then called ghettos. The report stated, bluntly, that what white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, maintain it, and condone it. The report is best remembered for its warning that, barring corrective measures, the nation would continue on its path toward becoming two societies — one black, one white — separate and unequal.


One of those weird passages in the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, pictures the final defeat of the ultimate evil won by God’s faithful servants. It says, “They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death.” The Greek translated “the word of their testimony” is ton logon tes marturias — literally, “the logic of their martyrdom.”

Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and firearms have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can.


When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a firearm, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course, their power and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness — whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love — continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. I do not know Roxbury at present, but I suspect the 1968 secret of which Thomas Atkins spoke had to do with the deeper secret of the Good Shepherd who, appearances to the contrary, proclaims that no one takes his life from him but that he gives his life according to his essential being as fully God and fully human, gives it  as the destined means of being with us to subvert oppressive empire and racist culture, his way of taking up the life which God has written into his DNA.