Texts:

Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4 (3)
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48

You all are witnesses of this.  I cannot help but think: what are we witnesses to, exactly?  How do we make a witness to something?  What does the witness look like?  There are so many questions about this.  So often, we think of witness as beating someone over the head with our belief system, asking them to swallow - hook line and sinker - a pre-fabricated set of beliefs, to give intellectual assent to something that is intellectually un-assentable.  So we gravitate toward ideas of witness being something that we do with our lives, which, when I really think about it, is more scary to me than giving intellectual assent to something that is difficult to believe. 

This begs the question: to what do we bear witness?  The hard-and-fast answer that most people give in church is to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  But really?  Is that the thing to which we truly bear witness?  The thing that we talk about the most, the thing that we think about the most, the thing that consumes most of our time, that is the thing to which we witness.  This, to be sure, challenges us.  I don’t know about you, but I spend more of my time witnessing to something other than the gospel, whether it is a current frustration with something, a person with whom I am having a difficult time, challenges at work, struggles financially or emotionally… the list goes on and on.  Our lived witness not only betrays what we really believe, but who we really are.  Let’s be honest: sometimes our witness doesn’t point to Christ, but rather to ourselves, and it’s not always pretty.  Now, instead of witnessing to Christ, I feel exposed and vulnerable, unable to be human, unable to move out of fear that my witness will be flawed, which leads me to not act, to do nothing, to be witness to nothing at all.

And so they sat in the upper room, not really doing anything, not really talking, just sitting, dumbfounded.  “Peace be with you.”  The disciples had no hard-and-fast response, there was no, “And also with you,” but rather, Jesus’ greeting of peace was met with doubt.  They thought he was a ghost and doubts arose in their hearts.  They touched his hands and his feet, and still, “In their joy they were disbelieving.”  In their doubt, in their questions, in their fear, Jesus says to his disciples, “You all are witnesses of this.”  Witnessing is not something that happens after Jesus removes all of our doubt; it is not something that happens when we figure out the end of the story.  The disciples’ witness came in the midst of their doubt, in the midst of their confusion, and in the midst of their fear.

Like the disciples, we are witnesses though we are blind to that which is right in front of us.  Like the disciples, Christ comes to us in the midst of our fear and our doubt and asks us to proclaim the message.  We are witnesses to deep pain and horrific suffering.  We are witnesses to images of humanity we would rather not see.  Yes.  But we are also witnesses to the power of God made manifest in Christ.  We cannot be true witnesses without the full picture without the complications of life’s challenges and the promises in Christ which seem to contradict them.  The tension, rather than something that we should seek to eradicate, points to the deeper reality.  Peter’s sermon in Acts points to this.  He says, “You rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.  To this we are witnesses.”  Again, witness.  The witness does not come to people who behaved well or to who did the right thing.  In fact, the witness comes to the people who gave death the final word.  The witness came in spite of the reality of life, in spite of the reality of evil, in spite of the reality of death.  In these few sentences, we see a string of descriptions of what was done to Jesus, yet they are balanced by one thing, “but God raised him from the dead.”  Despite all of our actions and all of our responses, the one that turns everything on its head is the Word of God.  It is the “yes” in Christ Jesus that tells us all God’s promises are true.  It is this one “yes” that balances (no, better yet - obliterates) all of our “no’s”.  Protest all you want, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, sleep with the prodigal in the pig pen, but the truth of the matter remains the same: God raised Christ, and God raises sinners, from the dead.

Your life is transformed not because Jesus removes all your doubt, or because Jesus removes all of your questions, or because Jesus removes all of your challenges.  You are witnesses to this: that as much as life stays the same, everything is different in Christ.  We still witness the difficulties in life.  We still witness the challenges.  All of these, however, are turned completely on their heads in the reality of Christ.  So we hold in one hand the world, with all of its terror and beauty, and we hold in the other God incarnate - in all of his terror and beauty - in the other.  And somehow we find a way to live between the two.  Somehow, both proclaim the reality of our lives of faith.  Jesus does not make you a perfect witness; he simply makes you a witness.  Jesus doesn’t wait for you to understand or to stop doubting or to get your life together.  He simply shows up in your life, and beckons you forward, witnessing to the whole picture of what it is to be a person of faith.

And still, we want to wait.  But witnessing after we have it all figured out is a little like trying to learn how to swim from shore.  It is not until we are finally thrown into the pool of faith that we learn what shape our witness will take.  I’m not going to lie: it’s a bit scary.  It’s a lot easier to bear witness to the parts of our life that are easy to explain: our work, our relationships, and our experiences than it is to bear witness to our lives of faith.  But to witness only to one and not the other is to not witness to anything at all, for the life lived and the life of faith shape and inform each other.  The spirit nags at us, whispering, “Now,” and we say, “I’m not ready.”  The truth is, we are never ready.  You are never ready for God to come into your life.  You are never ready to be saved.  If God waited to act until humans were ready, the Bible would be an awfully short book.  You are a witness to these things now.  You are a child of God now.

Welcome, doubters.  God can use you.  Come to think of it, God only uses doubters.  Think about it: if God only worked through the people who never had any doubts, we would have no Abraham, no Moses, no Jacob, no prophets at all, no Zechariah (you’ll remember John’s dad), no disciples, no Paul - there would be no story at all.  God didn’t ask if you thought you were usable.  God made you because God knew you could be used, as you are, from wherever you are, whatever age you are, whomever you are.  You have been named “child of God” because that is what you are.  The Author of Life has authored your life, raised you up, and made you witnesses to these things.  You are a witness to the faith that leaves you scratching your head, to the God that always keeps you guessing, to the promises that are not threatened by challenge, by hardship, by anger, by fear, or even by doubt.  On the contrary, the promises given to us in Christ Jesus are strengthened by these things.  Your doubt gives God room to work and, indeed, it is in your doubt that God does God’s best work.  You are witnesses to these things, called to proclaim in spite of, or maybe even because of, your doubt.  You are not witnesses because of who you are, but because of who God is.  To witness is to allow God to make Godself manifest in your life.  Everything will surely be turned upside down but, after a while, you’ll find you see life, the world, yourself, and those around you in a whole new light.  You will see yourself as what you are: a child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.