NRS Acts 2
38 Peter said to them, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

NRS 1 Peter 1
17 If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.
22 Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

NRS Luke 24
35 Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Well, it looks like Easter has come and gone. The pews aren't quite as full either, and maybe the music is just a little bit less grand. Only two weeks ago, of course, we were pushing the praise envelope, shouting the good news, banging the Easter drum, and I couldn't help but wonder, "Why can't it be this way every Sunday?"

After every great celebration, I suppose it's natural to have a little letdown. After this last Easter, I certainly needed a break, and I imagine most folks couldn't handle all that Easter intensity 52 Sundays a year, myself included. But sometimes I wonder if maybe we spend so much time and energy building up to Easter that we neglect to follow-up on the all-important "what now?" questions. Like,
" After the Easter lilies, Easter bonnets, and Easter parades, what now?
" After the Easter baskets, Easter bunny, and Easter ham, what now?
" After all the Easter hoorays and Easter hallelujahs, what now?
You know, in the church we often joke about the people who only come to worship on Christmas and Easter, but I ask myself, "Have we made a really compelling argument for people to do anything more than just show up a couple of times a year and put a few bucks in the offering plate?" I suspect that a lot of people figure that as long as they check in at church now and then and try to be good, that's pretty much all there is to Christian life.

A primary mission of the church is to teach discipleship, that is, to show people what it means to "live and move and have our being" (Acts 8:28) in the light of Jesus' Easter glory. There really is more to it than just filling a pew, or writing a check, or beating the Baptists to the cafeteria. In fact, in each of this morning's three New Testament readings we hear key elements in an overarching answer to the question "What now?" I don't want to call these steps in the way of discipleship; I certainly don't want to suggest that we're climbing a ladder to God. Instead, think of these passages as, maybe, dance steps, movements that together engage us in the great dance of God's boundless grace.

In the lesson from Acts we hear Peter directly address the first "What now?" question of the New Testament. After hearing Peter's sermon proclaiming the Risen Jesus as Lord and Savior, his listeners ask him and his fellow apostles, "Brothers, what should we do?" I think that maybe Peter was hoping someone would ask that question, because his answer is very quick and very to the point, "Repent and be baptized" (2:38).

Now repentance and Baptism are really two sides of the same coin. Once we find ourselves standing in the light of Christ's resurrection, we can't help but see ourselves, warts and all. The things we normally hide from ourselves - the contradictions in our character, the bad habits and hurtful patterns of our daily lives - all these things become painfully obvious to us as the eyes of our hearts and minds are truly opened. But the same light that exposes our gracelessness also reveals to us the source of all grace. Even as we are made to see ourselves all the way down to our big feet of clay, we're also set running to throw ourselves into the living waters of Christ's loving forgiveness.

This is the dance of discipleship that Luther called "daily dying to sin and daily rising to Christ." Obviously, this is not one of those "Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt" kinds of things. In the same way an athlete continuously disciplines the body and a scholar the intellect, the practice of daily dying and daily rising is what finally makes the difference between a Christmas and Easter pew-sitter and a disciple of Christ.

In the lesson from First Peter we hear another pair of responses to the "what now" question of post-Easter discipleship, the key words being "live" and "love." To everyone standing in the light of Jesus' Easter glory, First Peter counsels, "live in reverent fear during the time of your exile" (1:17). What does that phrase mean, "During the time of your exile"? Well, that's a way of saying that we live now in the tension between the already and the not yet. Already we have seen God's kingdom in the triumph of Jesus, but that same kingdom is not yet fully realized in our world, homes, or even our own mortal bodies. No less than the people who came over on the Mayflower, we're also pilgrims on a journey, determined not to fall back into the way of sin and despair, but always keeping our eyes on the prize of God's eternal kingdom.

In the ancient church, when candidates were presented for baptism, they were positioned with their backs to the sunset and their faces to the sunrise. Likewise, in reverent fear, we put behind us everything that would distract or deter us from living in the light of Christ. And in the light of that Son rise, not only do we see ourselves as redeemed, but we also see our brothers and sisters as fellow heirs of God's grace. People we once saw as enemies, or competitors, or rivals, we now see as sheep of the same fold, lambs of the same flock, brothers and sisters washed in the blood of God's true Lamb. So if Easter sets us on the road to live in reverent fear, that same road inevitably leads us, in the words of First Peter, to "love one another deeply from the heart" (v. 22).

To repent and to be baptized, to live and to love, this is the basic Christian two-step, but the dance is not really complete without a third movement. In today's Gospel the Risen Jesus joins two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. In the gloom of their own despair and disappointment, they don't recognize the light of the world who walks right beside them. So Jesus enlightens them. First, he interprets for them the Scriptures, and then second, he makes himself known in the breaking of the bread. Once the disciples recognize him and Jesus vanishes, Luke tells us, "That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem" (2:33). Not the next morning, not the following day, not after they'd had time to think and write a report, but that same hour, they got up and beat a path back to Jerusalem to tell their dearest friends and closest associates what they had seen and experienced.

When I was in college, just off campus there was an all-night doughnut shop that had this flashing neon sign with rings of light that moved in and out and in and out. If you drove past that shop in the wee, wee hours of the morning, you could usually find two, three, or four lost souls standing in the parking lot just staring at that sign. Having imbibed, ingested, or inhaled God knows what, they would stand there for hours at a time, stoned out of their minds while watching the lights blink and saying things like, "Wow. Cool. Groovy." (It was the '70's; what can I say?) But I have to wonder if we don't do something similar in the way we respond to the good news of Christ's resurrection. When Peter got a preview of Easter on the Mount of Transfiguration, he wanted to set up shop right there, so completely was he taken by the glory of God's Son. And after coming off our own Easter high, we're also tempted to squander our discipleship by looking back, trying to recapture the grandeur of it all, hoping to hang on to the moment or wondering, "Why can't it be this way every Sunday?"

And of course, it can, and does. In one sense, every Sunday is an Easter Sunday, and we're all Easter people, who dance, dance, wherever we may be, dying and rising, living and loving, going and telling.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.