The Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025

The weekly lections do not always seem to have a coherent, let alone unifying, theme. As we
celebrate The Great Fifty Days of Easter, I think we can recognize variations on a theme in this
week’s readings–variations that can meet us in and inspire us from a range of contexts in our
life-in-Christ together. The theme and first variation appear in the reading from Acts.
“And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those
who obey him,” Peter and the apostles told the high priest and council.
We are witnesses.
5:32 is one of the many instances of the term “witness” (martus, μάρτυς) in Acts of the Apostles.
In this short pericope, the author of Luke-Acts situates their witness in the trial of a council
meeting. Peter and the apostles bear witness to the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus as
salvific events as only someone who has witnessed these events “and can provide legal testimony
to the same” can do (Williams, Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles, 8).
Process preachers and congregations ought to appreciate how the theme of “witness” pays
attention to and values persons’ experiences of the world. The context of our Acts pericope is the
classic case for Christian witness: telling the truth about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
before a prosecuting inquiry. Even if you’re not under the stress of prosecution–whether the
prosecution of the council and high priest or the prosecution of the Empire before a bloody
death–we can find exemplary courage (Catherine Keller, of course, reminds us that courage is
that amorous struggle to take heart, from the French, coeur) in the simplicity of Peter and the
apostles’ witness.
Bear witness. Tell the truth. Set the record straight about your experiences of the incarnation,
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Christian process theologies of various kinds have long engaged questions of experience in
epistemology and metaphysics alike. In the United States, and I’m sure elsewhere, mis- and
disinformation abound. For our life-in-Christ together, it has never been more important to
discern our experiences of the real world and the possibilities for creative advance with God and
each other! Become witnesses to these things: to Love-in-Action in and through our shared en-
Christed life!

Notice what’s missing in our theme even in the first iteration: dominating, imperial, colonial,
coercive power. It’s missing because it is not part of a faithful Christian witness.
Distortions of witnessing have, at best, numbed a lot of US Christians to the great value of our
stories of life-in-Christ and, at worst, have actively harmed our human neighbors, our creaturely
kindred, and ourselves. Our reading from Acts clearly distinguishes between the prosecuted and
prosecuting persons, the marginalized and those who are at the very center of power.
Only one of them bears witness: the prosecuted and marginalized.
Bearing witness is not some devolving into “sharing my truth” relativism. Our life-in-Christ
emerges through the fertile soil of receiving and sharing the truth of our experiences of Christ in
and throughout the world together. Together as church, we have gifts to interpret and discern the
truth and God’s lures for goodness, beauty, and peace that intensify the truth in our next
moments. Even if we haven’t always done a thorough job with explicit ecclesiology, Christian
process theologies depend upon this very relationality in our metaphysics. No actual entity can
happen alone, for every event are complex and interdependent drops of experience! Our holy
attention to and prayerful discernment of our experiences will be inadequate so long as it
reinforces liberal paradigms of discreet individualism.
As we bear witness, as we tell the truth, as we set the record straight about our experiences of
Love-in-Action, we must do it together and with all of creation.
~~~~~~~~
Psalm 150 resounds the second variation on the theme witness.
“Let everything that breathes praise the LORD!”
I said we must bear witness together, and the Psalmist challenges us to expand our notion of
together to include everything that breathes! In the Lukan Palm Sunday reading a couple of
weeks ago, Jesus expands the Psalmist’s challenge and proclaims that even the stones will cry
out!
Bearing witness cultivates holy habits, virtues of humble awareness and gratitude. It is gracious
that we have received other folks’ witnesses and humbling to realize the immensity of the stories
of life-in-Christ that reveal and enact Love for the life of the world–even when those stories are
not ours in the first place.

In the Psalm, we are called to participate in a polyphonic spree of praise, witnessing to the
greatness of God! Rather than getting hung up on the language of greatness–as process
theologians are wont to do–get caught up in the record being set straight before you in
tambourine, dance, lute, cymbals, trumpet, and more! We can parse the metaphysics of divine
attributes with such precision that we ignore the truths proclaimed through aesthetic
communication. There is time for the deep, thoughtful, and careful critical and self-critical
reflections that constitute theology, yet the Psalmist’s variation on witness challenges our
tendency to verbosity with an invitation to participate in something greater than your immediate
urge.
Do you turn to process theology as an act of “well, actually” self-interest? Lord knows that I
have, risking selfishness and arrogance by ignoring the profundity of my relationality and the
humility and gratitude that can only be cultivated in those vulnerable depths.
When we try to bear witness alone, we sin against one another, cutting ourselves off from the
influences of our relations, including our Christ.
~~~~~~~~
Our Christ is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
Look! The Revelator calls us to attend to a third variation on witness.
When we bear witness to the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are
bearing witness to the faithful witness. Jesus’s own witness to the Reign of God matters for our
witness today. Church happens through many influences, including the influences of Jesus of
Nazareth. The relationships that constituted Jesus’s world, including the salvific relationship
between God and Israel and Jesus’s ministry for the Reign of God (basileias you Theou,
βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ), are salvifically important for becoming church today.
Along with Bernard Lee and Norman Pittenger, process theologian Marjorie Suchocki
emphasizes the vital connection between christology and ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is “the
ongoing completion of christology,” she writes (Suchocki, God, Christ, Church, 179). We
participate in the benefits of Christ for the life of the world, through the continuing activity of
God with the world, in how we experience, critically and self-critically reflect upon, and then act
to shape the church.
As church, our witness is intimately and crucially woven in with Christ’s witness. We do not
merely bear witness, alone or together. We live from our identity in Christ, from our en-Christed
life, and participate in Christ’s revealing and enacting the Reign of God in and throughout the

world. Faithful witness balances a continuity with the past that we inherit, a responsiveness to
change that virtuously appropriates the Gospel in the present moment, and a willing openness to
future judgments and transformations in the radical love of God.
~~~~~~~~
He’s not Doubting.
Okay, maybe I’m biased. My name is Thomas. I asked a lot of questions as a child. I began
reading academic theology in middle school. I asked even more questions then. After graduating
high school, I dove right into what became three degrees over nearly fourteen years of higher
education in theology, philosophy, and classics.
I’ve been called “Doubting” more times than I can count, and rarely has the person meant
anything good by it. More often than not, it was an insult that purposefully aimed to cast me out
to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the burning trash heap, where disobedient ne'er do wells
go to become forgotten.
Yet, even with my bias, I don’t think he’s doubting.
The gospeller offers a fourth and a fifth variation on witness. Afraid after the events of the
resurrection, the disciples were in a locked room, and Jesus came and stood among them. The
disciples had not yet figured out how to bear witness to the events that they had experienced.
Jesus appears among them, shows them his wounds (for even Jesus’s body is not magically
“made whole” in resurrection after the disabling nails and spear leave real wounds), and graces
their discipleship with apostolary breath.
Afraid, the disciples became apostles, became ones sent to bear witness in the world, through the
grace of the Holy Spirit and the peaceable presence of Christ. Christ recognizes and calls forth
their power to shape the world they live in through the intimate acts of forgiveness of sin and
retention of sin. Graced by the Holy Spirit, living in the presence of Christ, the gospeller fully
expects the Johannine audience to know that they are to forgive as Christ forgave, for
We know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in
God, and God in them . . . In this world we are like Jesus. . . . Whoever claims to love
God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and
sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen (1 Jn 4:16, 17b,
20).

More than merely having the choice to forgive or retain sin, Christ graciously calls us to
participate in the opportunities to forgive sin. Our very actions in the face of sin can bear witness
to Love-in-Action in transformative ways.
Yet Thomas wasn’t there, and his response to the other disciples' witness further distanced him
from their fellowship. Sinning against his comrade disciples? Quite possibly. Doubting? I doubt
it.
Christian process theologies, as I have said above, take experience seriously. The cosmos
emerges through complex, interdependent drops of experience after all. What had Thomas
experienced that was so devastating that he wasn’t with the other disciples?
The answer is so obvious that the question might seem silly. He had experienced the torture and
crucifixion of his rabbi. He had experienced the proof of death–unda fluxit et sanguine–as water
and blood flowed from Jesus’s pierced side. He had experienced the grace of Joseph of
Arimathea and Nicodemus.
We don’t ask, “What had Thomas experienced that was so devastating?” enough.
When do we ignore the very experiences that are who we are?
Christian process theologies take experience seriously, and we also understand that the future is
but a possibility, radically open for the actualizing concrescence of each moment’s drop of
experience. If the future is radically open, then where are you going so fast that you ignore the
experiences bubbling all around you?
The faithful Christian witness to the Reign of God tells Thomas, “Put your finger here and see
my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” as if the Faithful Witness knows exactly
what Thomas has experienced in his encounter with Death and what Thomas needs in order to
experience life and life abundant in that moment. “Do not doubt but believe,” drips from the lips
of the Faithful Witness, heavy with compassion, not condemnation.
When we slow down, when we take one another’s experiences seriously, when we take our own
experiences seriously, we can learn to graciously, creatively, and compassionately respond to the
real moments of life in our world. With Christ and one another, we can bear witness for the life
of the world amid the traumas of Death, calling an otherwise-possible-world into an actual,
meaningful present.

When our witness creates spacetime with God and one another for true and loving relationships
to flourish, each one of us can recognize Thomas’s profession making a way where there was no
way.
“My Lord and my God!” is not the empiricist’s “Eureka!”
“My Lord and my God!” escapes on the breath of one who receives Life where there was Death,
who knows the Life-Giver as their Friend (John 15:15), who feels the Life-giving as a lure into
holy, beautiful, loving, peaceable adventure.
Blessed are we who have not seen and yet have come to believe, yes. May our witness never
pursue truth, beauty, and love at the cost of those who have seen Death and need to feel Life on
their fingertips.

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.