We Too Are Witnesses

sermon at Trinity Church on Passion Sunday 2009
The Rev Scott Homer

In Luke chapter 24, after all the events of Holy Week are over, after his victory over the grave the resurrected Jesus says to his disciples, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (46, 47) Today we celebrate Passion Sunday. It is a bi-polar sort of day. Our readings begin with shouts of joy, ecstatic people greeting their king, lining his pathway with their garments and waving palm branches in celebration and our readings end with Jesus dead and the hope of glory extinguished. Light to dark—manic to depressed—hope filled to hopeless. No wonder they call it the Passion.

Holy Week has begun and for the next seven days Churches all over the world will retell the ancient story as they have every year for the past two thousand years. It is the story of Jesus of Nazareth and his final confrontation with the forces of evil. The story is familiar to us but we continue to rehearse it year after year because contained within the story is the promise. Our personal future and the future of the whole world is wrapped up in the events of Jesus’ final days. We listen to it, reflect upon it, look at it with fresh eyes, because through it we witness the miracle of God’s salvation. The story of Jesus’ humble walk to the cross is the story of God reaching down from heaven and drawing us up to himself even as his Son is lifted up on the cross. This week, Holy Week, God calls us to be his witnesses by being present and staying awake through the final hours with Jesus.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” This is the question asked of witnesses. The judge wants a vow of honesty before he will listen to our testimony. He wants to know that their testimony is true, complete, and unvarnished. The judge relies on the testimony of the witness because neither the judge nor the jury were present at the events under consideration. The witness is, therefore, absolutely essential. The witness must present the facts and then the jury can arrive at the correct decision. But if he was not observant, if he was not paying attention, if he did not commit the events to memory in the just the way that they happened, then he will mislead the jury and they will err in their decision. We are called to be witnesses and people will make life decisions based on what they hear from us so we need to get the story right. That is why we have been telling it over and over, in exactly the same way, for all these years.

Jesus chose disciples to be witnesses to his life. (Andrew, Peter, James and John, Judas and Nathaniel, Matthew and the rest of the twelve, but not just the twelve, Jesus sent out seventy-two at one point, and there were probably many more than those) Disciples were given a very specific task: They were to bear witness and give testimony about Jesus the Christ. Through their eyewitness testimony everyone in the world could hear about Jesus Christ. They were given the opportunity to make a decision to receive him as their Lord and Savior. Disciples are sent to testify about Jesus. You and I are disciples in our day. If you have heard and believed the testimony about Jesus and if you have made a decision to receive him as your Lord and Savior then you have also been chosen as a disciple and you have also been assigned the task of being a witness and giving testimony to those who have not yet heard and do not yet believe. God has called each of us to be his witnesses. Now we may not like it. And many of us don’t do anything about it. We deny it, we pretend it isn’t true, we say we will do something about it tomorrow, or we make excuses for why we aren’t complying, but make no mistake about it, God has issued the call to you and me.

We began, this morning with a reenactment of sorts—Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. We had a little joyful procession around the church. We carried palm leaves. We cried out “Hosanna.” Our reenactment was based on an eye witness account of the Christ riding into the City of David on the back of a donkey. It is the story of a would be king entering the Holy City Jerusalem and making the claim that he is the Anointed One of God who has come to take his rightful place on the throne of Israel. We have just listened to another reenactment of sorts. It is what we call the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Mark. It is the story of Jesus’ final hours on earth and it tells about his arrest, his trial, his punishment and his death on a cross. And all throughout Holy Week we will hear the old stories about the King of Glory and his self-sacrifices on our behalf. And I pray that you will experience true joy and supernatural hope and immense peace through these stories because these stories are not myths or legends. They are not fables or fairy tales. They are eyewitness testimony, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth by God’s help. They were first told some two thousand years ago by the apostles—disciples who had been with Jesus and who had witnessed these events firsthand. They were there when Lazarus came out of the tomb. They were there when Mary anointed Jesus with perfume. They walked beside the donkey up the Mount of Olives. They heard the crowd crying out “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” They saw Jesus’ tears and heard his laments. They were frightened for him when he drove the money changers out of the Temple. They ate the bread and drank the wine at the Last Supper. They watched him suffer and die on the cross. The stories are the testimony of witnesses to the actual events that comprise the stories we tell this Holy Week. And we can rely on their testimony because we know the price they were willing to pay to tell us. They were beaten and imprisoned and eventually killed for giving their testimony. People aren’t willing to die to protect a fairy tale. Few of us would die to protect the truth unless that truth were so important to the survival of mankind that it must be guarded at any cost—even the cost of our own lives.

Jesus chose disciples to be witnesses, that is, to live in Jesus’ presence and to observe his life, to learn the lessons he taught them, and to see what happened to him, so that later on these witnesses would be able to give testimony. That is what witnesses do. They see, they hear and they experience and later on they testify in order that people who were not present at the time may nevertheless be able to understand what happened. Those first disciples received a special name. They became known as ‘apostles’ which is a Greek word that means messengers. They bore witness and their testimony was the most blessed message in the history of the world—that Jesus Christ died to save sinners.

Their stories were highly personal relating not just the facts of Jesus’ life but also showing the ways in which the risen Christ continued to touch them, continued to transform them, and continued to lead them into God’s presence. They carried a priceless message of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and by their eyewitness testimony people in remote parts of the world came to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And these remote peoples began to experience Christ’s presence in their own lives. Through the apostle’s witness people all over the world came to know Jesus, not just about Jesus. Their words opened the way to new life, life defined by hope and joy, all made possible through relationship to Jesus Christ.

We are able to do our reenactments this morning because Jesus sacrificed himself for our sakes but not just because of Jesus’ sacrifice. Jesus’ disciples risked their lives, sacrificed their own interests, compromised their own health, so that the world would know about the all surpassing love of God in Christ Jesus and so that they would believe and be saved…but we are indebted to others as well. The disciples died martyr’s deaths or grew old in imprisonment. And a new generation of witnesses had to take their place. This new generation committed the stories to memory and wrote them down and rehearsed them year after year. They began to do what they saw the apostles do. They took risks, they reached out beyond their comfort zone, they mustered up the courage to tell the old stories just as they had received them and they took the gospel message out to their generation. And after them another generation of witnesses was born, and another and another, generation after generation—a great cloud of witnesses from every tribe and tongue and nation all testifying to the One True God and the One True Savior of all—countless individuals from every corner of the earth making costly sacrifices in order to bring you and me these priceless eyewitness accounts, in order that you and I might know God’s grace and blessing in our lives. If you know hope, if you know peace with God, if you know the joy of your salvation you know because of this great cloud of witnesses, these humble and self-sacrificing children of God who suffered to deliver these stories to you.

We can sometimes take these stories for granted. But they are precious, more precious than we can possibly imagine. They have been bought at a terrible price. They have been preserved through the blood, and the sweat and the tears of faithful men and women who would not allow the story to end. They fought and died to preserve this message for us. Our world is fighting very hard to destroy these stories. There is a concerted effort to make them into meaningless fairy tales, and the battle is not being waged by outsiders. It is being waged from within our churches. And so now it is our turn. We are called to be Christ’s witnesses and to tell the stories and to guard them from those that would abuse them for their own gain.

We must begin honoring the ancient stories again. We have to start picking them up and dusting them off and placing them back into a position of high honor in our lives. We have got to start sacrificing our time, and investing real effort into being present at the retelling of the story, and devoting real time to engage in the events of Holy Week. Words in a book, even a book as wonderful as the Bible, are just words. Unless they take on real renewed meaning in our lives, and unless the story begins to demonstrate power in our lives the words will have no impact on anybody else. These stories have real power—they have the ability to heal us. They have the power to transform us. They are strong to save us, if we will let them truly touch us. The disciples of old got to know Jesus’ power by living with him by being steeped in his teachings. We must live with the stories and be steeped in their teachings

I invite you to join wholeheartedly in the events of Holy Week—to surrender to the power of the ancient story in your life once again. Give yourself over to true worship by giving honor and glory and blessing to our Lord, by sacrificing your time and by walking the Road to Calvary with him. I believe that as we immerse ourselves in the story and as we allow God to speak to us through the events of his Son’s Passion we will find renewed strength and new life through them. When we learn to live in and through these stories we will find that sharing them with the world will no longer be a chore. It will no longer be an option. It will simply be the way that we understand our daily lives. And then we will have a testimony that is the whole and nothing but the truth so help us God.

Amen.