Acts 3:12-26

Easter 3 – Year B

Acts 3:12-26

Who is not lame from limping around a variety of altars? Lameness, even from birth as we deal with our cultural lameness, is a most unoriginal sin. There's not much to it, it's not like soul-searing thievery, murder, adultery. It's pretty lame to be lame.

Here we are without a foot to stand on, still in the midst of community, being carried to our assigned spot. The only thing equal to the gift of being carried where one needs to go is to be able to carry another.

This story, to which Peter adds a lot of interpretation bordering on speculation, is much more an Easter story than the preaching about it.

Imagine a lame culture, a lame individual, and there being a quantum leap from lameness to a lovely deer leaping o'er the hills to its lover. There is a move here from passivity to partnership.

Just live with the first 11 verses without breaking into talk at verse 12 about blame and conversion. Experience again the various shifts you have experienced of seeming to have no choice and then having a choice. It is astonishing. It is also astonishing that we so quickly forget those experiences. When it happens again, we get astonished all over again. See if you can sense the beginning of astonishment before its full-blown arrival and be ready to jump in with both feet. In this way we might lose our lameness come from limping around Lethe's altar of forgetfulness.