Peace Be With You: A Sermon on John 20:19-31

When I write a sermon I always need one good image or idea to get me rolling, and this week that idea came from the picture on the bulletin cover this week. The bulletin cover art, by the way, comes from an online subscription service we have that has all the readings, music, worship pieces, etc. that we use in worship planning. Each week there are like five or six images that relate to the readings for that Sunday. So when I’m working on the bulletin I flip through them and generally just pick the one I think is the prettiest, and then promptly forget what I chose and am as surprised as you are when it shows up on the cover on Sunday. But this week I chose this one specifically because when I saw it, something about the way Jesus is standing, or the look on his face, or the way the door kind of looks like a door you’d see at an elementary school, but my first thought was, “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said,” “Ta-da!” Something about this picture makes me feel like Jesus is giving the disciples jazz hands.

This story, and really all of the end of the Gospel of John, is one of my favorite parts of scripture. There is this lightness and humor to the resurrection appearances in John’s Gospel that feels like such a contrast to the iron-fisted control Jesus held over the scenes of the Passion. The Passion in John’s Gospel is powerful, but in a heavy, dark, somber way. But in the resurrection scenes, Jesus always feels playful to me, almost like he’s messing with the disciples, like the way you mess with a favorite younger sibling or a cousin.

Let me describe to you how I always envision this scene playing out. “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples were met were locked for fear of the Jews.” This opening sentence tells us a few key things about the setting. “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week.” If you remember last week’s Gospel, the beginning of John chapter 20, it started, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.” Mary came to the tomb and found the stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty. So she ran and told Peter and another disciple, and then they ran to the tomb, saw that it was empty, “and believed; [but] they did not understand the scripture.” Remember that part, they saw but did not understand; that’s going to be important later. Then, “the disciples returned to their homes.”

But Mary did not return to her home, she stayed by the tomb weeping. Soon Jesus approached her, but remember she didn’t recognize it was Jesus, she thought it was the gardener. Until Jesus said her name, “Mary,” and she replied “Rabbouni,” which means “Teacher.” Then Jesus sent her to tell the disciples, and she “went and announced to [them], ‘I have seen the Lord,’ and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

So now it’s “evening on that day, the first day of the week,” less than twelve hours after the foot race to the tomb where the disciples “saw and believed; [but] did not understand,” after Mary came and announced to them “I have seen the Lord,” and where are the disciples? The disciples, these men who we all look up to as great heroes of the faith and models for how we are to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ are… locked in a room in fear. Great work, team.

I always imagine the disciples not just in a room, but huddled together, like a football huddle, when Jesus just sort of sidles up next to them, puts an arm around Peter and John, and says, “hey guys,” “Peace be with you.” Then, “he showed them his hands and his side,” and the disciples went bananas. Which, on one hand, sure. The guy you literally just watched be crucified and die is now not only standing next to you, inside the room you thought you’d locked the door to, still bearing the marks to indicate that yes, in fact he was crucified. But, on the other hand, Mary Magdalene literally told you about this less than twelve hours ago. I know Christianity has a bad history of forgetting that women can also teach about Jesus, but were the disciples so bad at it that they forgot what she told them in legit twelve hours?

I’m clearly a little judgey and sensitive on the issue. But Jesus was not, because despite what to me seems like a clear display of faithlessness, Jesus came, stood among them, said “Peace be with you.” Then “he breathed on them and said… ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’” Which is cool because what this means is that the work of the beloved community in the time of Jesus’ resurrection is the forgiving of sins. And sins, remember, in John’s Gospel are not moral failings, they’re not doing or saying the wrong thing. Sin in Johns’ Gospel is separation from God; it is being unable to recognize the presence of Christ. In other words, what the disciples were doing until Jesus showed up among them and said, “hey guys,” “Peace be with you.” But Jesus didn’t judge the disciples for this failing, for being unable to believe, or remember, what Mary said, for understanding what they themselves had seen and believed. No, Jesus showed up in their presence, showed them what they needed, and then gave them the power and authority to give that same gift to others. And not just the authority, but the obligation. “If you forgive the sins of others they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of others, they are retained,” sounds to me like responsibility, like if we don’t do this work, it won’t get done. And certainly it is work that needs to be done.

But Thomas, for whatever reason, was not with them when this happened. And history’s given Thomas a bad rap for this, for not believing when the disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But can we maybe remember real quick who else didn’t believe when they were told, “I have seen the Lord”? That would be the disciples. So why Thomas gets a bad rap for not believing the disciples when the disciples did the exact same thing to Mary is beyond me, but either way, that’s beside the point. The point is, just as Jesus had done for the disciples, he now did for Thomas. He showed up, showed the marks on his hands, and gave Thomas everything he needed to believe.

Then with Thomas, Jesus took it a step further, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I don’t think Jesus said this to knock Thomas, I think Jesus said this for us. Because while Jesus isn’t doing the whole popping up behind closed doors and showing us his hands thing anymore, Jesus is certainly still showing up and revealing himself to us through the beloved community. That, as the end of this morning’s Gospel reading reminded us, is the purpose of this book, so that we who do not have the experience of Jesus just popping up in the flesh “may come to believe… and through believing may have life.” In John’s Gospel seeing is the first step to believing, and in this text we see Jesus expanding the definition of seeing, so that like the Pharisees with the man born blind, we don’t get too stuck on physical sight, and are open to many ways of seeing.

Jesus gives us what we need to believe and to have life. Those ways are many and as different as we are, and they may take time, but these stories of the resurrection appearances of Jesus demonstrate for us Jesus’ patience in showing up, again and again and again, with what we need. For Mary, it was her name. For the disciples and for Thomas, it was his hands and his side. With patience and with presence, Jesus shows up in our world, behind whatever locked doors we may have constructed, with hands open to give us peace. So take a deep breath, dear people of God, and relax in the knowledge that you cannot miss Christ’s presence. Even if you do not understand. It’s not about understanding, the disciples certainly didn’t. It is about a God who continues to show up. Again and again and again. Greeting us with peace, breathing life into us, and breaking down the walls that divide us from God. Thanks be to God, who will not be stopped. Amen.

Loved to the End: An Easter Sermon on John 20:1-18

On Good Friday I talked about how in the Maundy Thursday reading, John chapter thirteen said that Jesus loved his own to the end, and that the Passion story from John shows us not what the end looks like, but what love looks like. Well guess what friends, this morning we get to see what the end looks like; what it means to be loved to the end.

So to recap, what’s been happening these past few days in John’s Gospel has been rough, to say the least. John thirteen to seventeen was Jesus’s final good-bye to his followers and if you love a good love note, oh man, it’s beautiful. Then we get to chapter eighteen where one of those same followers whom Jesus loved so much, betrayed him into the hands of the Chief Priests and the Pharisees. Jesus was questioned by Pilate, beaten, mocked, and hung on a cross, abandoned by all but a handful of his followers, his mother, his mother’s sister Mary, and Mary Magdalene. He declared “It is finished” and died, and his body was gathered not by one of his closed followers but by Joseph of Arimathea, who’d followed Jesus in secret and laid him in a tomb in which no one had been laid.

The story of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and crucifixion is a story of love, a story of what it means to love. Jesus said at one point there is no love greater than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, and that is what we saw Jesus doing in the long hours of Thursday night into Friday, laying down his life for us and for all of humanity, whom Jesus called friends. When I tell the Passion according to John, I stage it so that Jesus is always in the center of the scene and the other action is taking place around him. This is because as chaotic as it must have felt for the disciples, the crowd, and even for Pilate, the narrative described Jesus as totally in control. The soldiers in the garden followed his command to leave his followers alone; he was handed off to Pilate to fulfill how he said he was to die. Pilate tried to question him and ended up being questioned himself, Peter denied just as Jesus had predicted, the soldier who crucified him divided his clothes as the scripture had described. He drank wine, his legs weren’t broken, and his side was pierced, all as the scripture said.

The passion of Jesus is the story of love, of God’s love for the world, of Jesus’ love for us, a story about a love so deep it will go to death and beyond. Jesus’ death was not payment, it is gift. At the very beginning of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist called Jesus, “the Lamb of God!” I wonder if these words were ringing in the disciples ears as Jesus was dying on the day of Preparation for the Passover, the day the Passover lambs would be killed. This is important because the reason the Jewish people celebrate Passover is because it is a reminder of God’s love for them, a reminder that when they were slaves in Egypt, God led them from that slavery into freedom. Jesus’ death is about granting the whole world freedom, not from a corrupt Pharaoh but from sin and death itself. And this gift of love was given not to a world who was praising and united, but to a broken, hurt, scared one. Judas betrayed, Jesus washed his feet and then died for him. Peter denied, Jesus washed his feet and died for him. The whole crowd of followers either fell away quietly or joined the mob shouting for his crucifixion yet to the cross and beyond Jesus went for them also, because love, God’s love, is unconditional. Jesus died for us not because of who we are, but because that is the kind of love Christ has for us. The kind of love that cannot be stopped by anything. The kind of love that conquers death. When Jesus “loved them to the end” this is the kind of love that was.

But that was Friday. This is Sunday, and now we get to see what the end looks like. “Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.” We don’t know why she came that morning, what brought her out so early. Maybe she heard Jesus’ promise to love them to the end, and now after what so clearly had to have been the end, his end, she came to demonstrate that her own love too would last to her end.

Whatever brought her there, after the end, when she arrived she saw that the stone had been rolled away, and the body of Jesus was no longer there. As she stood weeping outside the tomb, she was approached by a man whom she assumed, being in a garden early in the morning, must be a gardener.

Now I want to pause here for a moment and point out an interesting similarity. The Gospel of John starts out with the phrase “In the beginning…” and now, at the end, we’re in a garden. Can you think of another Bible story that starts “In the beginning…” and ends up in a garden? The creation story. In the beginning, the book of Genesis begins, God created a whole bunch of things, day and night, the land and the sea, the sun and the moon and starts, birds, and fish, and animals. And then God created man, who ends up with the name Adam, a shortening of the Hebrew adama, the name for the dirt from which he was formed. And from Adam, God made woman, in Hebrew ishshah, so called because the word is a play on ish, the Hebrew word for man. The point is, naming occurs. These new creations are named, man and woman, Adam and Eve, and tasks are given. They are to have stewardship over creation, to care for all that God has made, all that God has called good.

This, if you remember, didn’t end well. The serpent came and tricked them into eating what they should not eat, sin entered the world, and man and woman, Adam and Eve, were forced to leave the garden and toil, until they reached the end and return to the ground, for “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Time past, Adam and Eve had children, and their children had children, and their children had children. Nations rose and fell, kings and emperors came and went, tens of thousands of years of time passed and now we find ourselves with a woman in a garden again. Only this time, the story ends differently.

So Mary stood weeping in the garden, when a man she supposed to be a gardener approached her and said, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She looked at Jesus, but didn’t recognize him to be Jesus and said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” To which Jesus said a single word, “Mary.” Her name. And out the sound of her name, when he named her again, she recognized him and replied, Teacher. And just as had happened so very many years before, Jesus sent Mary out of the garden. The difference though, in this time after the end, was that Jesus sent Mary out not as punishment but with a mission. “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Go and make known to them that the end was not the end, it was only the beginning.

John chapter thirteen said Jesus loved his disciples to the end. On the cross we saw what loves looks like. At the empty tomb and in the resurrected Jesus we see what the end looks like, and what it looks like is life. In the resurrection of Jesus we see the end for what it truly is, not an end at all but the beginning of all that is to come. There is no end of Christ’s love for us, because beyond the end there still is Jesus, calling us by name and sending us out. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Our Story: A Palm Sunday Sermon on Luke 19:28-40 and Luke 22:7-57

So why did we do that? Why did we act out the readings today with no warning, no practice, and no one really knowing what they were doing or where they were supposed to be? It was certainly not the most polished gospel drama, and I’ll tell you what we just did went against all of the worship planning suggestions, which stress the need to rehearse these big worship services so that the assembly can enter into the experience without feeling uncomfortable or anxious about what’s happening next.

Well friends, there’s a method to my madness, because that discomfort was exactly the point. I wanted us to feel just a little bit uncomfortable; I wanted us to feel just a little bit lost. And when I say “us” here, I mean us. I create these things and then I just let them loose in the world, and I have no idea how it is going to develop or be received. I wanted us to feel uncertain, because that is how the disciples felt.

We read this story every year, multiple times a year even, and its always more or less the same. Minor changes, in Matthew Jesus rides both a donkey and a colt in some sort of weird gymnastics, today you may have noticed we had palm fronds, but Luke only talked about coats. But the overarching narrative, Jesus paraded into Jerusalem with great fanfare, he had a meal with his disciples, Judas betrayed him, he was arrested, tried, and crucified, that’s true no matter who tells it. We know that pattern of this.

But the disciples didn’t. Think about this from their perspective. They’d been traveling with Jesus for a long time now, they’d learned to expect the unexpected. They’d seen him feed multitudes with just some bread and fish, they’d seen him walk on water, they’d seen the blind see, the lame walk, the dead brought back to life. They knew to expect the unexpected from Jesus, but a very hopeful and life-filled unexpected. And the triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the crowds cheering, and the banners waving, and the shouts of praise, “Blessed is the king,” to the disciples this seemed like exactly how things ought to play out. Jesus had spoken often in their travels about the Kingdom of God, and now as they entered Jerusalem with all the trappings of an imperial procession, it must have seemed like that promised kingdom was about to come to life. That they were entering into the city to removed Herod and Pilate and the long arm of Roman law and reestablish the Kingdom of Israel as it had been in the old days, with Jesus, the branch of Jesse, the descendant of King David, on the throne. The message was not subtle; the Pharisees saw it too. It’s why they came and told Jesus to quiet his followers, they were afraid such an obvious show of force would frighten those in power and lead Herod and Pilate to feel there was no option but to silence the opposition.

If they’d looked closer, if they’d really paid attention, they would have noticed the subtle clues that Jesus had come to reign, but as a very different king. The “warhorse” was a baby donkey, the gathered crowds were peasants entering for the Passover, the coats strewn on the ground were the patched, worn garments of travelers. But they didn’t look closer. So when things started to get out of control, they responded in very expected ways. Judas got spooked by the same gathering pressure that had alerted the Pharisees, Peter, James, and John fell asleep in the garden, Peter denied knowing Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest, and they all drifted away, so that by the time Jesus was crucified, laid in a tomb and buried, it was not his closest disciples who did that work, but Joseph of Aremathea, who’d kept his faith secret.

You hear people say sometimes that if Jesus came back today, no one would recognize him and we’d kill him again. And I think that’s true, but not for the reasons I think that sentiment is often said. Often I feel like people say that as a condemnation of this current moment in history, making the argument that we live in a particularly corrupt and unfaithful era that would be uniquely unwilling or unable to recognize the savior in our midst. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot about this current moment in history that I find deeply disturbing and problematic, but I’m just not ready to give us that much credit as to claim that we are, to take a word from the Gospel reading a couple of weeks ago, “worse sinners” then all other times in history.

I think if Jesus came back today this story would play out in the exact same way because this story is a human story. You could set the life and ministry of Jesus Christ in any moment in history, and you would find the same players ready to enter into the drama. There will be a Tiberus, captive to his own demons, a Pilate, ruthless and cruel, a Herod, fearful and power hungry. There will be Judas, caught up in the panic, and Pharisees trying to preserve the status quo. There will be Peter, outwardly boastful and inwardly weak, disciples who quietly fall away, and the few faithful Marys, Mary Magdalenes, and Salomes who stick it out to the end. There will be Josephs of Aremathea, who arrive in the aftermath to quietly and without fanfare pick up the pieces. These are timeless people; they are timeless characters. They are us.

What we do this week is not remember a historical event, what we do this week is refresh in our minds the story that is always unfolding, the story of Christ’s saving work for us. While it’s annoying that Easter skips through the calendar with a rhythm that only makes sense if you have an exacting interest in astronomy, it is helpful because it keeps us from being able to pin a day to the resurrection event, it reminds us that this week is not an anniversary. The early Church did not have a set day of the year to remember Christ’s resurrection, but they celebrated Easter every Sunday, because every Sunday when they came together around water and the word, bread and wine, was an opportunity to experience again the saving power of Christ’s death and resurrection.

And in a way, we do the same thing. We go a bit more all out at Holy Week, because it would be a lot of ask Tish, Jeff, and Justin to play brass for us every Sunday, but every Sunday is an opportunity to live again the resurrection. To gather around the font and remember we are claimed, to hear the stories and interpret them for our own lives, to come to the table and be fed by Jesus. Easter is not our history, dear people of God, Easter is the lived experience of Christ’s love for us today.

So this week I invite you to enter into the story. Come on Thursday, eat a meal with friends, pray in the garden, experience the betrayal. Come Friday to stand by the cross and bear witness. Come Sunday to marvel at the empty tomb. This old, old story is the new thing God is doing. So come and be changed. Amen.

You've Got Someone In Your Corner: A Sermon on John 12:1-8

My best friend recently sent me a meme that made me laugh out loud. It was a pink text box on a background of leaves and daisies. Written in the pink text box in bubbly feminine handwriting was the sentence: “Behind every great woman is another great woman replying to her frantic texts in the middle of the night.” This meme was perfect because frantic, spastic, late night texts and just a touch of co-dependency really is the description of our relationship. Friends, I have to say, there’s nothing better than having someone in your corner.

There’s a lot that can be said, that has been said, about our Gospel reading for this morning. About the intimacy of Mary’s action, the cost of the perfume, Judas’ challenge, and Jesus’ remark about the prevalence of the poor. All those are deep, and powerful and real and challenging and important. But what really caught my attention this week was that what Mary is demonstrating to Jesus through this action is pure, unadulterated love. Mary is showing Jesus that he’s got someone in his corner.

Today is the fifth and final Sunday of Lent; we’re in the home stretch now. Next week is Palm Sunday, where we’ll process in from the Social Hall with waving palm fronds and loud shouts of Hosanna to the Son of David, and then we’ll plunge immediately into Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, the trial before Pilate, and Herod, the sentence of death, and then death on the cross. Then next week we’ve got Maundy Thursday with the last supper and Jesus praying in the garden and the Good Friday walk to the cross, dark, and solemn, and somber. Easter’s coming, with lilies and trumpets and shouts of Alleluia. Resurrection, new life, is on its way. But before we get there, things are going to get dark.

Things are going to get dark, and let’s face it, they’ve been dark. Lent does not present us with the fluffiest of bible stories, these past couple weeks have been some hard hits. We’ve had Jesus’ temptation in the desert, the lament over Jerusalem, repent or perish, the underachieving fig tree, and the parable of the two brothers, each selfish in their own way, and the father who only wanted to love them. We’ve found grace in all the stories, but it’s been hard grace. The sort of grace that loves us enough to call us out, to take deep looks at ourselves, to be honest with our failings, and to force us to change. And that is grace. Honest, hard, tough talk is absolutely grace. It’s a phrase I use a lot, but I think all too often we mistake grace with niceness, and they are not the same. Niceness is passive; it allows the person being nice to keep their distance, to hold the object of that niceness at arm’s length. But grace is relational, connected, close. Grace by its very definition is intimate.

The sort of tough, honest, in your face grace is grace because its corollary is the grace of this passage. A grace that is extravagant, exuberant, over-the-top, almost unnecessary in its elaborate display. A grace you can smell, touch, taste, as the rich heavy aroma of the perfume wafts through the building and out into the air. A grace as soft as tears, a grace stronger than death. A grace with no limits, no requirements, no obligations. Grace unmerited, unconditional, unbounded. Hard truth is grace because it is anchored in love.

This kind of unconditional, thinking the world of you, believing your future into existence love, is the kind of love Jesus had throughout his lifetime. We’re in John’s Gospel now, and in John we saw it before the world began, when “In the beginning was the Word,” and “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” It was there at his baptism, when a voice from heaven declared, “you are my Son, the beloved, in you I am well pleased.” We saw it demonstrated by his mother at the wedding at Cana, when Jesus told her, “My hour has not yet come,” and she said confidently to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” And at the Transfiguration when the voice again declared, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.” Every time Jesus was at a turning point in his ministry, a place where the journey’d been long and the road felt hard, the Gospels tell us of these anchor points, these moments of sheer love, grace, trust, and acceptance, where someone came and declared to Jesus who he was, and whose he was, and exactly how completely unbounded was their love for him. Some of those moments we got to see, like the ones I listed. But others, I think, were more private. The Gospels all tell of Jesus drawing apart, away from the crowds and his disciples, to go off by himself to pray. I think those times of prayer were touchstone times, where Jesus could again be reconnected to the Father and grounded in the hope and the truth and the promise of his mission.

This Gospel passage this morning comes from just such a turning point. Jesus had just raised Lazarus from the dead, a move that set the chief priests and the Pharisees off and they began to make plans to kill him. We are six days before the Passover, just a day from the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday. Jesus’ hour has almost come; things are just about to get really real. And Mary comes and gives Jesus this gift of pure, sheer love, of love so rich, so expensive, you can taste it, love that hangs on the air, and catches in the fabric of your clothes, so that long afterwards, every movement releases the rich fragrance in the air, reminding Jesus in the long days and hours to come, that he has someone unequivocally in his corner. Someone who will stand with him when everyone else has failed. When Judas had betrayed and Peter has denied, and the disciples are in the locked room alone, Mary will be there, at the cross, in the tomb, fulfilling the promise demonstrated in this act of devotion.

And friends, that’s Jesus’ love for you as well. Because, guess what, you’ve got someone in your corner. Someone who pours out that same love for you. Who “in the beginning was the Word,” “before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Who calls you beloved, who declares you chosen, who claims you as heir. Who died for you, so that death itself will be defeated. We’ve had tough talk all through Lent, and the talk’s going to get tougher. Yeah, the world is big and dark and scary and painful, and when we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve cause some of that fear, some of that pain. This journey through Lent and on to the cross is a journey of confession and repentance, it is about changing so that we can make change. But it is grounded in this promise. Jesus is in your corner. He is for you. He is on your side, on your team. No matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.