{"id":3040,"date":"2026-05-03T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/twochurches.org\/?p=3040"},"modified":"2026-05-08T14:00:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:00:58","slug":"5th-sunday-in-easter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twochurches.org\/index.php\/2026\/05\/03\/5th-sunday-in-easter\/","title":{"rendered":"5th Sunday in Easter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Year A Readings<\/strong>
Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10
+ John 14:1-14<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Collect<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Homily<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I had a nickel for every time I\u2019ve been asked if my church was a \u201cBible-based church\u201d why\u2026 I could buy you all lunch. I\u2019ve always experienced irritation with that question, because what the question implies is that there\u2019s only one way to read the Bible. But I feel differently. I think that for a community of people to base their fellowship and work on the Christian scriptures, must mean that Jesus of Nazareth has a special place in people\u2019s heart, both as the Messiah and as the interpretive principle for the whole Bible. That means when Paul says that women shouldn\u2019t speak or lead, he\u2019s wrong, because Jesus commissioned Mary Magdalene as the first Apostle of the Resurrection. That means that you don\u2019t have to be Christian to be loved by God, because Jesus loved everyone kind of person the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has it ever bothered any of you, for instance, to think that all those billions of people who never heard of Jesus were just going to go to hell? It\u2019s always bothered me. Today we have a chance together to think it through, and I hope you\u2019ll find in this little speech that not only is the condemnation of other faiths unethical, it also misses the point altogether of what Jesus teaches us about his being the Way the Truth and the Life. A church obsessed with control assumes this teaching of Jesus is about correct belief. But the context of the passage makes clear that this interpretation is dead wrong. Following the washing of the disciples\u2019 feet, this teaching of Jesus has to do with our way of being in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us pray: Most gracious God, out of all the words that will now be spoken and heard, may it be your Living Word that stays in our hearts. Give us the grace to receive it, and give us the charity to let all the other words slip away. We ask this in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In today\u2019s Gospel lesson, we hear these famous words: \u201cI am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.\u201d Famous: Yes. Because, for centuries now, and certainly for the entire history of Christianity in the United States, this scripture has been interpreted to mean that if you believe the right things about Jesus, you\u2019ll go to heaven<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interpretation arises out of the creedal period of early Christianity spanning roughly 450 years from 325 to 787 A. D. during which the Roman Emperors insisted that Christian leaders get their story straight. The emperors forced the bishops to produce philosophical formulas, articulating the intellectual content of the Faith. The repository of this forceful politics that we still use every week is the Nicene Creed. This casting of the faith into a set of bullet points ruined everything, because it gave the mind precedence over the understanding which comes from experience in life of discipleship. Indeed, from the early Middle Ages on, Christianity has been for the vast majority a matter of the head and not of the heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allow me to share a few examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early fifth Century, Jerome translated the Greek scriptures into Latin so that everyone could read the Bible. Over the centuries, however, the Western Catholic Church began to believe that the Scriptures should only be read in Latin and everything else was dangerous. So nearly a thousand years later, when John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, you know\u2026 so that everybody could read it, the wise old Church condemned him as a heretic and burned him alive at the stake for doing just want Jerome had done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And at about that same time in the history of the Western Church, the great Catholic intellectual of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, merged the Greek philosophy of Aristotle with Christian theology in order to nail down just exactly how <\/em>ordinary bread and wine can become the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Aquinas was very convincing, and from the 13th<\/sup> Century onward, unless one consented to the intellectual premise of transubstantiation one was considered a heretic and, well, you know\u2026 burned at the stake for one\u2019s incorrect belief<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right belief was arbitrated by a few and used with increasingly punitive force as political and economic leverage: you\u2019ve all heard of the Spanish Inquisition, I presume. Well, it only took two-hundred years for that powder keg to blow, but nothing much changed. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with an Augustinian Roman Catholic Monk, Martin Luther, beating everyone over the head with the belief<\/em> that human beings are saved from sin and death and hell by faith alone<\/strong>, and that this faith had to do not with meritorious acts whatsoever, but with the ordering of the mind to accept the message of Jesus\u2019s identity as the Messiah, the Son of God. No matter what you did or didn\u2019t do, it was your belief that mattered. So, you see Luther and Calvin and those other rowdy Reformers changed what was acceptable belief, but not the notion that belief was all that mattered. This terrible mistake, which has no basis in the Gospel, remains rampant to this day, so that all of us have grown up in a religious culture in which intellectual subscription to the principle of Christ is all that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I\u2019ll be so bold as to say that this whole history shoots very wide of the mark of Jesus\u2019s teaching to his disciples on that Thursday evening when they ate the Passover meal together for the last time: that moment when Jesus washed their feet, told them to love as they\u2019d been loved by him, and said \u201cI am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, in the context of the Last Supper, it\u2019s clear that this teaching of Jesus isn\u2019t about the content of anyone\u2019s belief, it\u2019s about the quality of our love. This seems like an easy argument to make, since the disciples all seemed to be pretty much at odds with Jesus about who the Messiah was supposed to be. His disciples believe quite differently than him, but correct belief isn\u2019t the hallmark of discipleship. Correct love was and remains the mark of discipleship: so, Jesus says, \u201c\u2026by this they will know that you are my disciples.\u201d (John 13:35)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let this move your heart and tell your mind to go sit down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus, the Incarnate Love, washes the feet of Judas Iscariot and then says: this is the Way\u2014the only Way\u2014 to the place where I am going. In other words, loving those who can\u2019t or won\u2019t love you back is the starting point of the Christian Faith, no matter what you believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus cares far more about the quality of our love,
than about what we say we believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

slowly\u2026measure every word<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus cares far more about the quality of our love,<\/strong>
than about what we say we believe.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is not born of faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faith is born of love. The mind follows the heart, baffled and incredulous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means that a faith which is not lived in and through acts of love loses its direct connection to Jesus. It is not what we say we believe that marks us as people of faith; it is what we do that shows who we are and to whom we belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the great things about continuing to work at moving into my office has been to get my books out of their boxes and talk with my old friends. One of my old friends is the great 20th<\/sup> Century theologian, Karl Barth. In his massive exploration of Christian Faith, Church Dogmatics<\/em>, he writes about all this in Volume IV, \u201cThe Doctrine of Reconciliation.\u201d[1]<\/a> As Barth introduces his theology of reconciliation, he sets up some parameters that are actually quite simple to understand:<\/p>\n\n\n\n