What Else Is There?

What Else Is There?

The message I give you today is not my own, nor was it Peter’s when he spoke it nearly two millennia ago: “We are witnesses of everything he did, both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him up on the third day and allowed him to be seen, not by everyone but by us. We are witnesses whom God chose beforehand; who ate and drank with him after God raised him from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead.” In addition to Saint Peter, Saint Paul writes that over 500 of Jesus’s disciples saw him resurrected. Their eyewitness testimony has been handed down to me, and I hand it on to you today.

If you accept it, then you will begin a journey with twists and turns and detours that you cannot imagine, as was the case with Peter. Here he is delivering the Good News to a Roman Centurion named Cornelius, in the home of a Gentile, which was forbidden for Jews following the Law of Israel as Moses received it . And yet, here he was, because a day earlier, he had been up on the roof of another house, praying at Noon, and getting hungry. Then he saw a vision of every kind of animal coming down from the sky, and a voice saying, “Get up, Peter! Kill and eat.” But since some of those animals were forbidden for a Jew to eat, Peter had protested, “Absolutely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The Voice’s reply called up short Peter’s attempt to place categories of humans in the “Other,” and has done so since to anyone who has tried to make others “Other.” — Never consider unclean what God has made pure.

And so here was Peter, in the home of an “unclean” Gentile, telling him that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, and when Cornelius accepted that message, baptizing him. Peter could never have imagined when he ran toward the empty tomb where his running after Jesus would lead him. But he had the courage to do so. It took courage on that first Sunday morning for Peter to run toward the tomb of the one whom he had thrice denied just two days earlier. Perhaps Jesus’sprediction was finally starting to sink in. I will be killed, Jesus had said, and then rise again. Perhaps Peter had begun to realize that it had actually happened. But what could he possibly say if he actually saw Jesus? Sorry?

Perhaps he said what he had said earlier, when many of Jesus’sfollowers had left him. Many had left when Jesus insisted that only be eating his body and drinking his blood, could we be fed with the food of eternal life. “Do you also want to leave,” Jesus asked the Twelve disciples closest to him. “Lord, where would we go?” Peter answered.“You have the words of eternal life.” After we have grieved the loss of the ones we love, or the things we love, or our failures: after we have faced head-on our fears of the unknown future; what is left but the One who has the words of eternal life? What else is there to do but run to the tombs in our hearts, where He is waiting? What else is there to do but listen for his voice in the unexpected? What else is there to do but follow wherever he leads?

God allowed Peter to see the risen Jesus. And through the testimony that has been handed down, and in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, God allows us to see the risen Jesus. What else is there?

April 5th, 2026

The Feast of The Resurrection

Easter Sunday

The Rev. David Kendrick