Magic

Acts of the Apostles 2:14a, 22-32

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them:

‘You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. For David says concerning him,
“I saw the Lord always before me,
   for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
   moreover, my flesh will live in hope.
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
   or let your Holy One experience corruption.
You have made known to me the ways of life;
   you will make me full of gladness with your presence.”

‘Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying,
“He was not abandoned to Hades,
   nor did his flesh experience corruption.”
This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.

We’re working backwards a little here—partially because last week, we skipped ahead, so I guess we’re just evening out. For Easter Sunday, we talked about the fact that, despite the resurrection of Jesus being the reason for our celebration on Easter, our scripture from the gospel of John was much more concerned with the ascension, to come soon after the resurrection. But we are back deep into the resurrection with today’s passage—we have Peter making a speech of which the entire point is to explain that the resurrection did indeed happen, and that this is what separates Jesus from all other kings and prophets who came before him—so quite a pivot from last week.

And upon first reading this passage, my initial reaction was to say out loud to myself in my office on Tuesday last week, “I don’t like this one.” First of all, to me, this comes across as almost a little desperate on Peter’s part. He’s really, really trying to convince the folks he’s speaking to, mostly Jews, but probably with a mix of Gentiles in there, by using all these psalms and other Old Testament texts to prove his point. But Peter is no Jesus, and to me, it comes across as him trying a little too hard, especially due to the fact that some of his references aren’t really accurate, and one could credibly accuse him of stretching the truth a bit, but we’ll get to why Peter feels he needs to be so convincing very shortly.

But the other reason I was initially disappointed that this is what I chose to preach on for this Sunday was that I was really struggling with what this speech could possibly tell us today. We just celebrated Easter, we just celebrated the resurrection! We flowered the cross, we sang joyful hymns, we gathered at Hammond’s Hill at sunrise, we’ve accepted and celebrated the resurrection, what new information could we possibly get from this speech in which Peter is trying to convince folks that the resurrection happened and that’s what makes Jesus special? I mean… yeah… we know that. We get it. Can we really learn anything new from this?

But as always, we have to look at the bigger picture and put things in perspective. We have to realize that Peter was preaching and evangelizing during a very specific time in which there were a lot of different beliefs and theories about Jesus—there were the Gnostics and other sects of believers who didn’t think Jesus ever had a true physical body, and that him walking the earth was kind of an illusion—which kind of renders his death and resurrection null. There were people who just thought he was another David or simply another in a long line of  powerful Jewish prophets—so Peter did have some convincing to do. And the main thing he wanted to convince people of was that, unlike any prophets or kings before him, he was truly divine, but also truly human, and the only human over whom death had no power. And that’s why my favorite verse from this passage is 24: “…God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held by its power.”

Though, the interesting thing about this is when Peter starts to expand on this—he uses a psalm of David, Psalm 16, which it’s written, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; / my body also rests secure. / For you do not give me up to Sheol, / or let your faithful one see the Pit.” The faithful one, possibly being a prophesy of Jesus, and Sheol being the same thing as “Hades” that Peter mentions—they simply just adapted to the Greek term for the ambiguous underworld. But here’s the thing—this Pit, or Hades, or Sheol, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t the type hell we think of today. It wasn’t a pleasant place, but it was someplace where someone would go who died violent death, or died heartbroken, or in some kind of unjust punishment—all of which Jesus did. Jesus checks all the boxes to be sent to Sheol, but he was resurrected. While there is a very interesting apocryphal account of Jesus going to Sheol entitled the Harrowing of Hell, but that’s another story, maybe for next Holy Week, who knows? But beliefs like this are exactly what Peter is preaching against—he’s saying that despite everything we’ve ever thought of when it comes to life and death and what comes after, Jesus changes everything, Jesus makes things new again, and so he was really trying to make people understand this unbelievable thing that happened, and he was trying to make them understand how wonderful and hopeful it really was.

I know we just got past Lent, the time of sacrifice and the time of giving something up or committing to something for those 40 days—and there’s a reason I didn’t really focus on that idea of a 40-day sacrifice during Lent. Honestly, I think the pandemic really made think of Lent differently. We lived about two full years of Lenten sacrifice, didn’t we? We still are to an extent, our world has changed. And so we do need to think beyond Lenten sacrifices and commitments. We need to think of the hope and new life that Jesus brought us with his resurrection, we need to think of new lives for ourselves and new life and hope for our community, for our world. We may not need to be convinced that the resurrection happened; we may not need a scriptural evidence that the resurrection was prophesied all along; but we need reminders of what the resurrection means, of the hope it brings.

Cormac McCarthy’s newest book Stella Maris is about a brilliant but mentally ill young mathematician, Alicia, and her conversations with her psychiatrist. At one point in their conversations, Alicia briefly refers to math as being magic. Her doctor asks her, “But surely you don’t think mathematics is magic?” She replies, “I think that it’s magic if you don’t understand it. As you learn more about it, it becomes less magical. Then as you realize that there is a clear sense in which you will never understand it, it becomes magical again.”

Isn’t this a perfect way to think of the resurrection today? In Peter’s day it was the talk of the town, the miracle of miracles, it was the promise that had been prophesied all along! Then, as Christianity became a dominant religion, a religion of the state, I think things got a little less magical. It was just what happened, no need to think deeply about it, just believe what kings and popes tell you to believe. But now—now we’re in this strange time where we’re allowed to question, where were allowed to wonder how this happened, and to really think about what resurrection can mean for us, for this world—we can really think about and wonder at resurrection while realizing and accepting the fact that we may never truly understand it. But that’s what makes it magical again.

We can kind of move on, in a way from the way Peter preaches resurrection, trying to convince and persuade. We can move on from Christianity being a forced religion of the state in which everyone is supposed to believe in the resurrection the way the popes or bishops or kings do—though, unfortunately, we’re seeing people in power in this country trying to force certain harmful “Christian” beliefs on the masses. We can move on to a time of wrestling with the lack of logic and the leaps of faith we must take in order to find and feel that magic again; and in turn, think about what the hope and promise of resurrection means for us in our modern world. We can, while accepting that we may never fully understand the resurrection, make it magical and awe-inspiring once again.

So let’s backtrack even more now to ancient Greece, nearly 400 years earlier— (Chris inspired me with this part, are you surprised?), and to the philosopher Socrates—the oracle of Delphi proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest man in all the world, and when Socrates was told this, his response was confusion, and he supposedly replied with something to the effect of, “I know that I know nothing.” And he expanded to say that it was only because he recognized that he knew nothing, that made him wiser than others.

I think we can learn something from this in regards to the resurrection. We don’t need to be convinced with cherry-picked scripture from Peter. We don’t need to be told by powerful, out-of-touch men how we should believe or think. What we need is a clear and humble understanding that there will be things we will never understand, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to try to understand and wrestle and learn from something as unbelievable as the resurrection.

Verse 32 of today’s reading—“This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.” How can we be witnesses to something we don’t understand? Simple—we demonstrate that hope and awe that we receive from the resurrection in our everyday lives. And the very fact that we are humble enough to admit that we may never understand something so mysterious is being a witness already. It’s exemplifying the humble nature of Jesus Christ the human being, it’s exemplifying the true nature of being a Christian—always being subject to the great mystery, the divine plan, as Peter mentions in verse 23. This divine plan is something we can never understand, it was even something Jesus struggled understand in his grief and his fear in those last days of his life.

“…it was impossible for [Jesus] to be held in [death’s] power.” What negative powers hold down today? I mean, we could list them until the end of time— addictions, anxieties, depression, despair, the list goes on and on, and many of those negative powers take a lot of support and professionals and medications to deal with. But, for the sake of today’s message, and for the sake of improving our well-being, there is one negative thing that holds us down that I think we can work on exorcising from our lives— and that is any kind of arrogance or egoism that makes us think we know the “right” way to do things. It’s any kind of arrogance or egoism that makes us assume, as I kind of did when I first read this passage, that there’s nothing we can learn from a scripture reading like this, nothing more, nothing new that we can learn from Peter preaching about the resurrection.

When we lose our curiosity about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that’s when we’re doomed. When we loses that magic and humility of that fact that there will always be something that we’ll never quite grasp, of the fact that there will always be that mystery we will never quite solve, we are doomed. But once we accept that we know nothing, while continuing to grapple with the great divine plan and mystery, I think we’ll actually get somewhere. Because we’ll realize that we need one another, we’ll realize that we can’t do it alone. We’ll realize to really exemplify the hope of new life that comes from the resurrection in our everyday lives, we need to engage with others, we need to work together. Once we let go of some of that control, of that need to know everything, maybe, together, we can experience some mystery and magic once again. Amen.