Acts 4:5-12

I keep seeing these signs.

Not hints or mystical nudgings. Rather, actual signs. Billboards claiming the Truth. They have an 800 number. Simply call them and they will give the Truth to you.

I’ve seen three during the last week. The first said, “Lust will drag you to hell.” And then a phone number for truth. The next showed an x’d out symbol for evolution and said simply, “God created.” Call this number for the Truth. The last sign I saw said something about the Bible being accurate, final, and clear. It offered the same number.

I wonder which sign has inspired the most calls. I also wonder about the folks on the other end of that number. I don’t mean to be uncharitable. I’m sure their intentions are good. But, the agenda sends off danger signals. “We have the truth. It is in our possession. And, thankfully, because of us you can have it too.”

You might say, “Well, isn’t that what a church is for? Isn’t the church supposed to give you the truth? Isn’t the church supposed to tell you the answers?” You would be asking good questions, and certainly we do claim to witness to certain truths. So, maybe that puts me (us?) in an awkward position.

I’ve shared with you that I’ve been reading a bit of Thomas Merton lately. He was a prolific Catholic, mystic, eccuminist, contemplative, justice and peace seeking monk and priest. In this latest bit he’s talking about the “sanity” of modern people and how worthless it is to be well-adjusted to a mal-adjusted world. It doesn’t make you sane to operate fluently in a mentally and spiritually ill system of truths and assumptions about what is right, wrong, real, and important.

“The ‘sanity’ of modern man, “ he writes, “is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane… or perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally, ‘sane.’”[1]

Merton isn’t as cranky as all that. He’s the same guy that talks about God shining bright as the sun in each and every one of us. There’s a blinding divine light of God’s love bursting from us all, if only we had the eyes to see it! But, often we don’t. Often we devote ourselves to lesser truths, truths by which we can justify ourselves, grab a bit of certainty and control, save others or, if not, judge them.

I worry about the kind of truth that can be put on billboards, the kind of truth that’s about being right and unquestioningly “sane.”

We read from the book of Acts every Easter season because it gives us the earliest post-resurrection accounts of the lives of the disciples and the growth of the Church. In today’s passage Peter and John are on their way to the temple. There’s a man there, disabled from birth, who’s carried to the steps each day to beg for alms. He sees the two disciples and he asks for help. Peter replies, “I have no alms to give you, but what I do have I give in the name of Jesus Christ. Stand up and walk.” And up the man goes.

The man’s healing, as you might expect, attracts a crowd. And, seeing the crowd, Peter begins to preach. The preaching results in added conversions so that by the end of the day there’s more than 5,000 new believers. There’s also a jail cell prepared for Peter and John. The Sadducees arrest them because it’s their job, at least, the Romans expect it of them, to keep the peace. They know from experience that Rome pays attention to large groups of agitated subjects, and when Rome intervenes things get ugly and people get hurt.

The Sadducees are afraid of what might happen if Rome feels threatened, and of course they are threatened themselves. They are the authorities; they are the experts; they have taught the people that there is NO resurrection, and yet here Peter and John and a bunch of nobodies have excited the people over a bunch of rubbish about Jesus, and a holy Spirit, and a resurrection for the dead, and a life everlasting.

“Who do you think you are?” they ask. “By whose authority? In whose name are YOU of all people doing what you are doing?”

The Sadducees acted out of fear, but Peter’s done with fear. He’s not afraid of failing because he’s already failed about as badly as you can fail, but Christ overcame it.   He’s not afraid of jail or even of dying because Christ overcame that too. Peter is not just Peter anymore. He is Peter shining like the sun, bright with the light of God within him. And so, he offers his answer. “I of all people have not done this. I haven’t healed this man or given these people good news. It is Christ. It is his name, his power, his authority, that all this is done.”

Peter ends with a line that is often unfortunately misused, claimed by the “well-adjusted” faithful to bolster their certainty. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” …What he means is that the authority to do these things is not his. Power is not his. Neither is it the Sadducees’. And, despite all appearances, neither is it Rome’s.

The power is God’s. And, therefore, Truth is God’s. What we know of it, the Truth that is given to us, is never ours to own. Rather, it is ours to experience. It is there to shape us, and to grow us, and to teach us to discover the Good News of Divine Love that pours upon us all despite our contradictions and absurdities, regardless of our failures, even overcoming them, even guiding us to be the Good News to one another, to our neighbors, and to the world.

[1] Essential Writings, p. 101.