A Sermon Prepared by the Rev. Jeffrey A. Packard	For the congregation of Christ Church, Spotsylvania, Virginia
To Be Delivered on April 22, 2007	On the Occasion of the Third Sunday of Easter

Text: Acts 9:1-20

Consequences of Resurrection

Poor Ananias. Remember, he’s the guy that God sent to lay hands on Saul of Tarsus so that he may regain his sight. Saul, later to become Paul, as you recall had just had a remarkable experience on the road to Damascus. He had been struck by a terrific light, that left him blind. He had also heard the voice of Jesus, the one “whom [he was] persecuting.” He was told to go on to Damascus and he would be told what to do.

Then we jump to Ananias. Ananias has a vision. When God tells him to go to Saul, he responds, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.” Oh, he had heard about Saul alright. Who hadn’t? Saul was all over CNN. He was a great persecutor of the followers of Jesus. He was there when the crowd stoned Stephen to death just outside Jerusalem. He was a witness and consented to his death. After that, Saul went from house to house and dragged people out, men and women, and sent them to prison for being a follower of the Christ. He was a dangerous man. Ananias knew that. And it was a dangerous time to be a Christian.

Ananias had also heard that Saul was coming to Damascus. He was coming with authority from the Chief Priests in Jerusalem to bind and take away anyone that he identified as a follower of Christ. He was coming “breathing threats and murder”. And Ananias knew all of this. Ananias had every reason to fear Saul of Tarsus. He had every reason to hate him. He had no reason to have any sympathy for him… except that God told him in a vision to go and lay hands on him.

Not since Jonah fled in the opposite direction when told by God to go preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, has a person had such revulsion for the mission that God had given him. Why would God want Ananias to go lay hands on such a murderer? Ananias couldn’t have known about Saul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Even if he did, how could he have known that it was genuine? Still, Ananias decides that he would do what God had asked of him. He goes to the street called Straight, to the house of Judas. He walks through that door not knowing for sure what lies on the other side. It could have been arrest, even death. But he goes, and he places his hands on the most reviled man in his world, a man with whom he would rather have nothing to do.

In that touch, that simple contact between two people, Saul’s eyes were opened. From that moment on, his life was utterly dedicated to serving God and his Son, Jesus. He does indeed suffer much on account of the Name of Jesus. Saul, renamed Paul, did become the instrument God used to bring the Good News to the Gentiles, and before kings, and even the People of Israel. But it was Ananias who first had to be the instrument God used to open his eyes. Perhaps Saul’s conversion was not complete until Ananias laid hands on him and addressed him as brother.

God demands great things of us. He demands that we act like him. We were created in God’s image, and it is our truest nature to behave with the same characteristics of God. When we began our liturgy this morning we recited the ancient festal shout, “Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.” Those words are not just words. They point to a reality that has changed the world. As we take them upon our lips, and their meaning into our hearts, their reality begins to change our world, if we allow it. At first, we become aware of God’s unconditional forgiveness of our sins. His Son was willing to die on the cross to take upon himself the sins of the whole world. That included our sins, not to be committed until two thousand years later. The second thing we realize is that death no longer holds the sting it once did. It no longer has the final victory. The resurrection of Christ from the dead assures us that he will never die again. His eternal life with the Father is our pledge that we too will bask in that glory for all eternity. We too will be reunited with those we love who have died before us. When we realize the power of that promise, we can’t help but respond with joy, and our “Alleluia” is heart felt.

Then, the longer we ponder the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, the more we, like Ananias, are turned toward other people, other people for whom our Lord died and rose again. That’s when things become difficult. It would be so much easier if this were just between me and Jesus, but it isn’t.

Other people do things and say things that I don’t like. We know about the horrible things that people do. It is all over CNN. We can’t escape it. We certainly couldn’t escape it this week as Virginia Tech became the focus of such horror.

God demands great things of us. This week, awash in the news about how many people were killed and wounded, we weep with those affected: those who lost their lives, their families, their friends, all the students at Virginia Tech, even all the students on campuses across the state. As we learned more about the killer, we may have felt sorry for him, or feared when we looked into his eyes on the video he made of himself. We may have hated him. God knows we have every reason to.

This week there were bomb threats and other kinds of threats in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, the headlines continued about mass killings in Iraq, and the NASA gunman killed one and himself. They all served to remind us that we live in a world of fear and hate. It is only natural for us to respond with fear and hate. Indeed, this week it seems like the gates of fear and hate were flung wide open. I have to be honest with you, all week I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to preach the resurrection against the backdrop of Virginia Tech. Then it dawned on me. Just preach the resurrection. All week long I kept thinking about poor Ananias. What are the consequences of the resurrection? What is it that God expects from us?

Not that one can compare the two incidents, but perhaps we have something to learn from the way the Amish community responded to the killings at their one room school house in Pennsylvania last October. Within the space of one news cycle, the story there quickly changed from the shock and horror of the shootings to the fact that those crazy Amish people were saying that they forgave the gunman. They forgave him because they felt like they had no choice. They forgave him as if their own salvation depended on it. In one interview I recall, a shocked TV reporter asked a man how he was able to forgive someone who had murdered his granddaughter. The grandfather responded that he wasn’t. It was beyond him to be able to do that, but God could do it, and he was trying to allow God to bring about that forgiveness within him. His first step was to decide to forgive; he was then praying to God to help him truly forgive.

Jesus taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” There is a power that defeats fear and hate. We saw evidence of it this past week, as we often do following a great tragedy, when people came together to support one another. Across the state, the country, and around the world there were expressions of solidarity with those affected by this tragedy. That is the power of the resurrection! Life reasserts itself over death. Hope blots out despair. Love conquers hate. But that is not all.

Forgiveness heals guilt. One person reaches out to another that does not deserve a second chance, and that touch opens his eyes. We are resurrection people. We are forgiven people. God calls us into the most difficult of ministries: reconciliation.

Peter was reconciled with the resurrected Jesus while they shared breakfast beside a charcoal fire next to the sea. Three times Jesus asked him, “Do you love me?” And three times Peter answered, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” Peter was given the opportunity to negate the three times he denied Jesus by the charcoal fire outside the Chief Priest’s house.

In order for us to live in the power of the resurrection, we must first decide to let go of fear and hate. Then we must continuously pray that God will make it so. As Saul would later write in his letter to the Church in Rome, “God… reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” How can the families of victims be reconciled with the family of their killer? The power of the resurrection. How can victims be reconciled with their killer? Only through the power of the resurrection.

And now, fully realizing the consequences, let us stand, and say again, “Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.”

AMEN