3rd Sunday of Easter
Texts: Luke 24:13-35;
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; 1 Pet 1:17-23
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Mf0vAd-0Sgk
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
TRANSFORMING HOPE: FROM THE ONE TO THE ONE-FROM-MANY
“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” — Luke 24:21a
We had hoped. How many times in your life have you had that experience? You’re hoping for a positive outcome with an illness, like battling cancer. Or a positive outcome to a relationship, like trying to save a marriage. Or you’re hoping for a job, a life-changing job. But it doesn’t come through. Worse, you might experience a loss instead of a gain. We had hoped. And now hope is gone.
One of the more difficult we-had-hoped moments in my life began on Palm Sunday 1984. I was finishing up my last months of seminary in Chicago, when I got a phone call from home that Palm Sunday evening. Early that morning my parents had gotten a phone call from my Aunt Kay. She could barely talk. They had trouble even being sure it was her. It sounded like she was having a stroke. In any case they rushed over to her apartment and took her to the hospital. She wasn’t having a stroke. She had lung cancer that had already moved to her brain, causing stroke-like symptoms.
Aunt Kay was my Dad’s youngest sibling. He was the oldest, and there was 15 years between them. My Aunt Kay was only 13 when I was born. In 1984 I was 28, and she was still only 41. We had grown up together, in a way, sometimes being more like an older sister, not just an aunt. She brought boyfriends around from time-to-time but had never married. She spoiled us nieces and nephews with love and attention. I remember praying for a miracle cure as hard as I’ve ever prayed for anything. She was able to attend my graduation from seminary in June. She was so proud of me. But diagnosed on Palm Sunday in mid April, she was gone by the end of August. We had hoped.
“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” It’s such a strange irony that these two disciples on the road to Emmaus voice their we-had-hoped experience to the very one that they had placed their hope in — without realizing it was him. Their grief and loss of hope seemingly blinded them to the possibilities that this one they had hoped in actually was fulfilling their hope by suffering death at the hands of empire. They had hoped for someone to free them from the death-grip of the Empire, and instead he had been crucified by Empire. We had hoped. Their hope was apparently gone.
An even stranger thing, I submit, is that by the time they realize he is the one they had hoped in, he disappears! What’s that about? If you read the Easter stories, it’s common to see Jesus suddenly coming and going. He keeps vanishing. And he would keep doing that disappearing act until he made it more final by ascending to heaven to be with the Father. Were they disappointed once again? Here was the One who they hoped would free them from Empire, from the deadly powers of the One called Caesar, but he wasn’t behaving that way. They could see that God had defeated death itself through the raising of this One, but what was God doing in the way of freeing them from the Roman Empire? How was Jesus the one who would redeem Israel?
They were still asking these kinds of questions over the next week or so after the Ascension, when they received an even stranger answer. The dramatic coming of the Holy Spirit like a rushing wind and tongues of fire. The Holy Spirit filled the room where they were praying. The Holy Spirit filled them. They had hoped for the One. They received the Many. Many tongues of fire to fill them with a different kind of healing power. The power of love. They had hoped for One to lead them in violent rebellion and overthrow of the Empire. Instead, they received the power of life itself, the power of love, to fill not just the One, the powerful few, but the Many. As followers of Jesus, our hope is not to be placed just in the One but in the Many who are filled with his Spirit of love. The first mistake those disciples on the road to Emmaus had made was to hope in the One. For God’s answer in Jesus is to call us to hope in the Many.
As I look back on my loss of Aunt Kay in 1984, I can now see something else which grew out of the loss. Aunt Kay played a role in our family that we might have missed. In a family of alcoholics — both of her parents and all her other three siblings — she, the youngest, was the first to reach out for help. In the last couple years of her life, she had received treatment for her alcoholism and then slowly gained a life of sobriety from participating in Alcoholics Anonymous, or “A. A.” Aunt Kay died in August of ‘84. By February of ‘85, less than six months later, I persuaded my Dad to follow his little sister’s example. He entered treatment for his alcoholism for the first time.
I say “first time” because it would take two or three more times over the next nine years for it to stick. He didn’t take his last drink until 1994. It didn’t stick, I think, because treatment generally can only take you so far. What takes you the rest of the way is to really work the Twelve Step programs of A. A. to live a full life of sobriety. And it isn’t until I was thinking about this sermon this week that I think I’m more clear as to why my Dad kept failing for nine years. He had trouble with what we might call the ‘theology’ of A. A. The First Step in A. A. is to admit your powerlessness to the addiction. Alcohol, or whatever your addicted to, is a Higher Power in your life which you can’t beat on your own. You need another Higher Power. That’s the Second Step, to recognize the need for a Higher Power. And then the Third Step is to turn your life over to that Higher Power which can help you gradually leave addicted life behind for a life of sobriety.1
Well, my Dad, being the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors was steeped in a theology of looking for God in terms of the One. He trusted that God would one day free him from his alcoholism, even if that day didn’t come until the afterlife. But here’s the thing: in A. A. you are shaped to think of God not in terms of the One but of the Many. There’s a high percentage of people who come to A. A. not believing in God. They are put off by all the talk of a Higher Power. ‘Sounds like God to me.’ So early on they are reassured that you don’t have to believe in God per se but in the Higher Power — namely, the Higher Power of the A. A. process itself. In short, you find God, or the Higher Power, not in one person who becomes your savior, your redeemer. You find God in the Many who work together to care for and support one another in living this new life of sobriety. The Higher Power which saves you in A. A. is never One but the Many of the A. A. Community itself. My Dad kept relapsing until he experienced the power of God in A. A. not as the One but as the Many.
And here’s the urgent point for all of us here this morning. This is one of the ways in which I believe our theology has become corrupted by being in alliance with Empire for 15 centuries. (Not 15 years but 15 centuries.) Empires are authoritarian. They worship the power of the One, the power of the Caesar. All of us have come to believe that, when things are most dire, only handing our freedom over to the powerful king or dictator can truly save us. Don’t we fall back to that, time and time again? We look to Supermen.2 The king or dictator gets us to believe that they’ve been given this power from an all-powerful God, and that our only hope is to follow this One into war against our enemies. (Sound familiar?) I propose to you, my siblings in Christ, that that’s the kind of God we’ve come to think about when allied with empires for many centuries. It’s the kind of God that continues to make us susceptible to nationalism over and over again.
But, and this is a big “but”: it’s not the kind of God which Jesus reveals to us. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus had been hoping for the One. When they recognize the one they had hoped in, he vanishes, and he keeps on vanishing until he ascends out of sight altogether. It won’t be until Pentecost Day that they realize their hopes in the One were misplaced in the first place. The One they had hoped in was now the Many of the Beloved Community.
Our First Reading today is from St. Peter’s Pentecost Day sermon that begins by quoting the prophet Joel about the time when God’s Spirit is poured out on the Many, not just on the powerful but especially on those who are seen as powerless in this world, on the servants and even slaves. We hear in this morning’s portion that the promise is to everyone. Everyone! And at the end of Peter’s sermon, we read this: “Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:43-45). Sounds like redemption of Israel to me. And it wasn’t through One mighty person leading them to overthrow the Empire. Their redemption was coming through God’s spirit poured out on the many, learning to live in love even in the midst of empire. They were the change, the liberation, they hoped for.
Friends in Christ, a large portion of our country has fallen for the bad theology once again. Even many going by the name “Christian” have put their faith in the wannabe dictator who promises to redeem their lives from the evils he himself conjures up. What can we learn once more from a God who is not the One but the Many? Let’s not fall yet again for the One who will redeem us. And we even have taken the first baby steps toward a democracy. (250 years this year, and I think it’s only been baby steps yet.) And our democracy may be hanging by a thread right now, though we still might have time to save it. We have the right foundational idea, that all people are created equal.
And it occurred to me this week that we even have the right motto: e pluribus unum. One from many. Yes, that’s right. E pluribus unum, one from many. So if we are to extricate ourselves from this moment of madness, following a mad dictator down another rabbit hole, it probably won’t be by following one person. Maybe it will be a bunch of leaders united in common cause. Maybe it will even look more like the people of Minneapolis this past January, who came together seeking to protect and to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable. For the One we hope to redeem us does so by pouring out his spirit of love on many of us. Our Redeemer is not just the One but the One-from-many. The Three-in-One God calls us to live the divine love even in the midst of Empire. Who knows maybe we can help make that love contagious again, spreading it to even more of God’s children, so that we take the next steps in having a democracy.
We had hoped. Will be crushed in our hope once again? Or will we learn this time to hope not just in the One but in the One-from-Many, e pluribus unum? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 19, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Mf0vAd-0Sgk
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Notes
1. Here are the first three steps of the A. A. Twelve Step process of healing:
2. I’m thinking here of Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, “Superman,” that was an influential idea for Hitler and the Nazis. The thinking is that it takes men of bold ideas and bold actions to undertake things like the “final solution.” It continues to have influence among authoritarian leaders today, sometimes sifted through the work of other Nietzscheans like Ayn Rand.
