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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’m going to be referring mostly to the first reading from the Book of Acts today. Maybe you’ve noticed or not that during the Easter season there are no readings from the Old Testament. It’s always from the Book of Acts instead. And apparently this is something that started about the fourth century in Christian worship with the idea of during Easter to focus on celebrating the resurrection and also looking forward from it to today’s time.
So instead of looking back to the Old Testament, it’s just kind of an always looking forward from the resurrection, looking at the stories from the Book of Acts and what happened with the apostles in the first years after Jesus had risen. So the reading, a little background first here, is that Peter and John have just healed a lame man in the temple in Jerusalem. This guy who had been there for many years, could not walk, and they heal him and he’s clinging to them. They’ve healed him, and they’re trying to move on, and the guy is like, “Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I owe you guys. What can I do?” And they’re trying to move on.
This causes a crowd, of course. And the crowd is, it says, astounded. So, like any good preacher, if there’s a crowd, you preach, right? So Peter does that. And Peter says to them, “Why do you wonder at this as if we did it?” And then it’s interesting, Peter doesn’t go on to talk about the healing, but basically he begins to chew out the crowd for their part in Jesus’ death. Maybe some of the crowd there, maybe some of them were actually directly involved in Jesus’ crucifixion. You blew it, Peter pretty much tells them.
Basically what Peter is doing, he’s preaching the law. I think Peter would have made a great Lutheran. I think he would have been great. But then Peter gives them some gospel. First he talks about, “You guys killed Jesus, you did this, you wanted the murderer, Barabbas,” all this. But then he gives them a little gospel saying, “God raised Jesus from the dead.” But he stops there and kind of shifts gears and says this, “And by faith in his name has made this man strong whom you see and know, and the faith that is through Jesus has given the man perfect health in the presence of you all.”
Peter says it’s by faith in Jesus that this guy was healed, not by Peter, not by John, not by the efforts of the lame man, but by faith in Christ. Faith. Let’s talk about faith a little bit. Faith is very central to Christianity. Actually, every religion is kind of a faith-based organization, but too often the Christian faith I think is misunderstood. People who aren’t Christians see it as some sort of hopeful, wishful thinking sort of faith. And Christians get criticized for having a blind, pie-in-the-sky, irrational faith. And some opponents of Christianity will even say that faith is just a crutch for weak people.
So before we get more into what Peter says, let’s talk a little bit more about faith here. The book of Hebrews, chapter 11, first verse, maybe you’re familiar, it says basically that faith is the assurance and conviction of things hoped for and not seen. It’s true. We can’t see what Jesus did. We can’t see that He died on the cross and rose again. But there are witnesses to that. Peter, John, and the others, they were witnesses. And they would go on to tell that gospel good news of Jesus to others and then eventually even some of them to write it down to preserve it.
So our faith isn’t just some blind and hopeful, wishful thinking. Faith in Christ is faith in what has happened. It’s faith that’s based in history. And there are witnesses to that history. And Peter points it out in the reading. Yeah, there are witnesses, the disciples and people that were right there, but there are other witnesses to what Jesus has done. And Peter points them to the Old Testament, okay? He says, “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers glorified His servant Jesus.”
See, the history of the work of Jesus goes back into the Old Testament, prophesying about Him that He was coming. And He was going to heal and save the world by His suffering and His death and His resurrection. In fact, Jesus even points to it in the Gospel reading today. He said it in that Luke 24 reading to His disciples. This was on Easter night, the first Easter Sunday night when Jesus comes. This was part of the whole Thomas thing, when Thomas wasn’t there. This all is part of that event, too. But anyway, Jesus says to his disciples, “Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them, ‘It is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations.'”
Moses’ books, the prophets, the Psalms, all of the Old Testament tell that Jesus was coming to die and rise again for the forgiveness of sins. And that’s what the Christian faith is in. In this history, in this prophecy, in these writings, in this proclamation, faith in Jesus is what healed this lame man. And it’s what Peter wants for the crowd too. Peter points them to the prophecy, to the writings, the Old Testament about Jesus, and he wants them to have faith in Him too, the same faith as the lame man. Peter wants it for the crowd, okay?
So then after talking about this faith thing, Peter gives them more gospel. Again, Peter would have been a great Lutheran pastor. He says to them, after all this law, then he says to them, “Repent, so your sins are blotted out that times of refreshing may come from Christ.” Ah, great words to hear. Words of healing for them.
After all that law, you killed the Author of life, but God raised Him from the dead. Now repent so that you too can have forgiveness and refreshing so that you too can be healed like the lame man. Words of healing for them, but they are words of healing for us today, too, and we need them. Boy, do we need them, right? Life sometimes is really hard, and we feel beaten up by it. We feel just crushed by it. We feel injured by it, and we need healing.
We need healing when life sometimes we just kind of seem to be limping through it when finances are tight, when the future is uncertain or there’s pressure on you from work or from school or there’s a strain in some relationships you have or when there’s medical situations. In those times, faith is trusting that God can and does care for you, but we need more. We need healing from something even more. We need healing from our sins because sins can injure us. Sins can cause our hearts and our conscience to kind of lamely limp around with a burden of guilt or shame for what you’ve done, said, or even thought.
Sins make us responsible for the death of Jesus too. My sins, your sins, do that. And they need to be blotted out so that we can have refreshing times from Jesus too. We need forgiveness. We need that healing. And it comes the same way as it does to the lame man in the reading, by faith in Jesus. Not by our power, or our piety, or by Peter, or John’s, or anyone else’s. It’s all by faith in the power of Jesus.
It’s faith in what he’s done for us in his death and his resurrection from the dead. It’s faith in the gospel good news that is in the New Testament and in the Old Testament scriptures. And that message has been witnessed by Peter and John and others. See, it was really vital for Peter to talk about this to the crowd there. It was really vital for him to talk about faith before he gave them gospel because it’s by faith that we understand the gospel. It’s by faith that we receive the gospel’s benefits.
Maybe a familiar verse to you from Ephesians chapter 2 that says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It’s the gift of God, not a result of your works.” The grace of God, the forgiveness of sins, the healing of your soul are God’s gifts to you received by faith. This is the Christian faith. This is Christianity, that faith does things. Faith isn’t just some pie-in-the-sky, irrational, wishful thinking kind of thing. No, faith does things. It saves us. Peter and John knew that, and so did Martin Luther.
Luther said that faith is God’s work in us that changes us and gives us new birth. He also said, “Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace.” Faith does things. Faith receives what God gives us. Faith receives that healing and forgiveness in Christ that He gives to us. And that’s what Christianity stands on. Christianity stands on faith. And that’s why Luther—I think Luther said what he did at the Diet of Worms when he was being questioned and ordered to recant. His response to that was this: they said, “Will you recant?” And he said this, “I am bound by the Scriptures that I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me.” Amen.
Now, tradition says that Luther also inserted this before saying Amen. He said, “Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me, Amen.” Now whether he said it or not, that’s where we stand on faith, on faith in the gospel as recorded in the scriptures, the Old Testament and the New Testament. Our faith is in that historical gospel that Christ fulfilled. Our faith is a faith that saves and heals.
Faith isn’t just some wishful thinking or pie in the sky or a crutch. I wanna talk about that a little bit here, that faith is a crutch. Maybe you’ve even had somebody say that to you, kind of accuse you of being a weak person and needing a crutch in life, this thing called faith. Okay, here’s what you can do with them. Two approaches here. One, just agree with them. Okay, so be it. Faith is a crutch, but everybody in some way is lame, you know. Everybody has weaknesses. Everybody limps around in life in some way on something, and everybody leans on a crutch of some sort, whatever that is: drugs, alcohol, money, fame, your work, whatever. Everybody leans on a crutch of some sort.
Christians, we happily stand, walk, limp, and lean on faith—in faith in the Scriptures and what has been fulfilled in Christ in them. We stand, we lean; our crutch is God’s grace. Everybody has some sort of faith and some sort of crutch, and faith is ours. People say faith is a crutch, just say, “Yeah, but faith is a really good crutch. Better than yours.” That’s one. Another one, do this. Disagree with them. Say, “No, I disagree. Faith is not a crutch. Faith is a stretcher.” Because no one can even limp into God’s forgiveness and healing. He carries you there. He takes you there. You can’t get there; He comes and gets you.
And faith is receiving those gifts. Faith is a stretcher that takes us into that grace and that mercy and that healing. And like that healed, I call it the not-so-lame man now, he clung to Peter and John, we cling to God by faith, healed by His grace in Jesus Christ. So, fellow lame people, let’s keep clinging to God. Stand on the Scriptures and receive His healing by faith. That is Christianity. Amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
