April 21, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

What It Means to Follow Christ

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
Acts 9:36–43

God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.

1 John 4:16b (CEB)

Eleven days ago violent storms ripped through many parts of our country. I remember seeing a news report about a massive tornado in northern Arkansas that completely destroyed, among other buildings and homes, a church. No one was injured, but I couldn’t help wondering what to make of an “act of God” that leveled a “house of God.”

On Monday of this week, a pair of homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people—one of whom was an eight-year-old boy—and injuring more than 150. By Thursday two suspects had been identified. After violent chases, shootouts, and a manhunt that shut down Boston for most of the day on Friday, one suspect is dead and the other is in custody.

This week it was reported that Chicago has already suffered 100 homicides since the beginning of the year.

Heavy rains on Wednesday and Thursday night in the Chicago metropolitan area resulted in massive flooding and have caused extensive damage to roads and homes.

Meanwhile in the small town of West, Texas, an enormous explosion at a fertilizer plant destroyed more than fifty homes, injured more than 200 people, and killed at least fourteen—most of whom were first responders trying to help.

Yesterday a large earthquake struck southwestern China, killing at least 180 and injuring more than 11,000.

And these are just the headlines. Who knows how much more suffering has taken place at the same time as these events? Whatever that total may be, between so-called “acts of God,” acts of human depravity, and perhaps simply tragic accidents, it has been a devastating two weeks.

For the theologically minded, weeks such as these beg questions of divine providence and sovereignty. Where is our all-loving and omnipotent God in the midst of such sustained suffering, death, and devastation? Is God asleep at the controls? Does divine sovereignty implicate God as the cause—direct or indirect—of these tragedies? Is it too much to expect God to hear our cries in the way God is said to have heard the cries of God’s people in a variety of biblical stories? Is it too much to expect God to intervene in our history in the same way God is said to have intervened in numerous stories of the Bible?

In this season of Easter, during which we celebrate what Christians have for nearly two millennia considered God’s greatest intervention into human history, is it too much to expect—or at least hope for—some modern-day miracles?

In today’s story from the book of Acts, we find Jesus’ disciple Peter performing the exact kind of miracle the Gospels describe Jesus performing. Through Peter’s prayers, a young woman named Tabitha comes back from death. Oh, how we wish for the same for the hundreds (or thousands?) of victims who have lost their lives over the past two weeks alone. If only the prayers of holy people today could bring back eight-year-old Martin Richard, killed by a bomb in Boston, or Jonathan Santiago and Miguel Cancel, two nineteen-year-old young men killed by guns in Chicago this week.

Post-Enlightenment rationality and empiricism suggests that such miracles never occur in real life. These are nothing more than myths and legends from antiquity, some would say, originally told to bolster the appeal of an emerging religious movement. For some, to hope for such things today is delusional at best.

A critical analysis of this story from Acts further suggests that it bears the marks of a literary duplication of a story from the Gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, the daughter of a man named Jairus dies while Jesus is on his way to heal her. When he finally arrives, he brings her back from death by calling out to her in Aramaic, “talitha cumi,” which means “little girl, get up!” Some manuscripts have instead “Tabitha cumi,” the same words spoken by Peter here in Acts.

Whatever the relationship is between these two texts, it is clear that what Peter did in Joppa for a disciple named Tabitha was intimately connected in the minds of the early church to what Jesus did for Jairus’s daughter in Galilee. It is a literary way of saying, “See what Jesus did? Go and do the same.”

Friends, whatever we may or may not believe about miracles in the world today, whatever we may or may not believe about divine providence and sovereignty, however we might describe God’s presence or absence in the world today, we are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world. Suffering and death is all around us and not just in headline news but also in our own lives. A year ago a young man I knew took his own life. We all know people dying from incurable diseases. Tragic accidents happen every day. Wars are raging around the world, and people are dying on the streets of Chicago. Relationships end, and families fall apart. Jobs are lost, and people are homeless and hungry. Children are born into lives bereft of opportunity.

What does it mean to follow Christ through suffering and death into new life? What does it mean to follow Christ through the darkness of Good Friday and into the light of Easter? What does it mean to follow Christ from the world of ancient stories into the world we live in today?

Peter was an uneducated fisherman. For him, following Christ meant doing what Christ did. He evidently took this quite literally, and it worked for him. A little girl was brought back from death, just as Jesus had done before.

Life from death may not look the same for us, but we must believe that new life is possible. We may not be able to bring back the young children killed in Newtown or the hundreds of young people killed in Chicago, but if we don’t believe that some kind of redemption is possible in the midst of tragedy, what hope do we have? The central story of the Bible, told in a variety ways, is that there is no devastation, no tragedy, beyond the redemptive power of God’s love.

This, above all else, is our Easter hope. This is what Jesus lived and died for. This is what his disciples experienced in his resurrection. This is what we experience today in his living presence with us still.

Easter hope in the midst of tragedy, in the midst of suffering and death, in the midst of darkness that threatens to consume us.

A rather famous community organizer from Chicago once spoke of the audacity of hope. Hope is audacious because there is abundant evidence that things do not change. There is abundant evidence that darkness prevails. But suffering and death, fear and terror cannot win. Through our skepticism and doubt, through our weariness and fatigue, through our sadness and heartbreak, through our anger and indignation, through our resignation and despair, through our complacency and apathy—hope wins. God’s love prevails.

“Get up,” Jesus spoke to a little girl. “Get up,” Peter spoke to Tabitha. “Get up,” we are called to speak today. Not in a naïve, Pollyannaish, or insensitive way. But with compassion and hope that transcends all that we know about how the world works, all that we know about pain and suffering, all that we know about the finality of death.

“Get up,” we must remind ourselves. Where is God in the midst of the suffering of the world? God is right here among us. God is the love we share, the care we provide, the hope we live.

Get up, children of God! Follow Christ into the world. Follow Christ from death to life.

Amen.