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Happy Eastertide, Epiphany Family!
We have just been through a big week together. I think it’s safe to say that Holy Week is the most momentous week in the Christian liturgical calendar. Here at Epiphany we live into that week in a powerful way. Holy Week at Epiphany sees transformation everywhere.
The rooms on this beautiful church campus got made over into lush landscapes on some days during Holy Week, and those same spaces become stark and minimalist on other days. The rooms became saturated in candlelight one night, and on another night there’s only darkness. Sounds that emanated from our music and our speech became more deliberate or more urgent in their pensiveness.
It was high drama.
Now, we didn’t do all of this for drama’s sake. Every year, we bring Holy Week to vibrant life with the hope that we can know and be with and love our Lord Jesus Christ more deeply.
The high point that we were arcing to is Easter Sunday, with the celebration of the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Now, here we are, after Easter.
The celebration has come and gone. The drama of Holy Week is over.
Our rooms are no longer made into new landscapes. The brass has gone away. Now we can say finally our alleluias.
Transformation is no longer right in front of us. You might say life has become mundane again. Especially since we participate in these services year after year.
And yet, Jesus is resurrected.
This is resurrected life.
Life is supposed to be different now, right?!
But what if you don’t see your everyday life transformed? It might be unclear how to make Jesus’s resurrected life, your resurrected life.
This sermon explores two questions:
First, now that Easter has passed, what if, you don’t feel differently?
Second, how can we live a Resurrected life in our everyday lives?
Today’s story gives us some insight.
The text tells us that Jesus is resurrected. Right before today’s story, Mary Magdalene was the first person the resurrected Jesus appeared to. He tells her to go tell his brothers – the disciples – that she has seen him and that he is ascending to his Father. She does that. Then in today’s story, Jesus appears to his disciples. Even though Jesus tried to prepare them that all this was going to happen, now that it has happened, I imagine they don’t know what to believe and don’t know what is going on.
They are locked in a room, where they are hiding and afraid. I can understand why. They have seen Jesus crucified and they are afraid, perhaps that that might happen to them too.
Then the Risen Christ shows up.
God has revealed God’s self. God is not hiding.
Yes, the disciples were afraid…but Jesus interrupts their fear.
Yes, the disciples were hiding…but even a locked room cannot stop the relentless love of God.
I fall more in love with this passage each time I read it, even now talking about it with you! The Bible has an amazing way of breathing life into our world. Because this is no ordinary book. There is nothing mundane about it.
What I love is how this passage unfolds to reveal more and more of who God is. I find it profound how God shows up: God reveals God’s self with wounds.
What I think Jesus could be doing here is showing the disciples and us . . . the fullness of God.
The fullness of God is the totality of everything God is, the everything that God is, the completeness of God.
Now, I know that’s a big idea. So just stay with me.
The fullness of God means God’s attributes, God’s character, God’s holiness, God’s power, God’s nature, God’s love and . . . . God’s presence here on the earth. Everything that God is, dwelled in a body, in a human being, in Jesus.
So when Jesus walks though those walls and bursts through those locked doors he does not do that as a superhero . . . he does it with the fullness of God. That is what he was sent here to do. Jesus lived everything that God is while he was here on the earth. [1]
The fullness of God is in full effect in today’s story. We see God’s divinity: Jesus had just been resurrected from the dead. And we see God’s humanity present, because Jesus shows the disciples his wounds.
During his earthly life, I don’t think we see him wounded. It’s only in his resurrected life that he has wounds.
That’s significant because it leads us to this main point ~ The fullness of God…includes God’s wounds.
Those wounds…Jesus shows them to the disciples before they even ask him to do that. Jesus knows that that’s what they need to see to believe he is the Risen Christ. He did the same when he appeared to Mary Magdalene. She didn’t recognize him until he called her by name.
What is significant about this is that our God of love – in all of God’s fullness – communicates with the disciples in the most personal way, in a way each of them can understand.
Jesus gives them what they need.
The hands that were nailed to the cross…Jesus shows them, open with scars of love.
His side that he shows, it is pierced, perhaps in a nod to Adam’s rib.
God is personal even with Thomas the disciple.
You know sometimes when you read a book or watch a movie and there’s a moment that makes you well up with tears, which turn to awe?
That’s what this next point in the text does to me.
I tear up because Jesus gives Thomas what Thomas needs. Thomas wasn’t with the disciples when they first saw Jesus. He doesn’t believe them when they tell him they saw the Risen Christ, and now he wants proof. I imagine Jesus could be saying, “Okay, I’ll put this in words and actions that you can understand. You want proof? You want physical, tangible proof? Well, here it is.”
Jesus gives them what they need.
What happens in that room, is Jesus breathes on the disciples the fullness of God. He knows he is going away, and he believes that what the disciples need – and what we need – is Jesus’s presence to help us navigate this world. So he leaves the disciples, and us, with the Holy Spirit.
He breathes on them ~ breath paired with words, very particular words: Peace be with you.
Family, let me tell you what an incredible invitation that is.
Jesus says it at three different times in the text:
“Peace be with you.”
“Peace be with you.”
“Peace be with you.”
In today’s world, we need all the peace we can get. Violent acts happen all too often. Rhetoric about domination and annihilation abound. There seems to be an eagerness for war. Peaceful protests seem a relic of the past.
Today’s headlines make it clear: not everyone intends peace. I want us to be mindful that these are more than just headlines.
This is the reality of what the world is sending our way.
As Christians, we are called to live the reality of Jesus Christ, no matter what the world sends our way. The reality of the peace of Risen Christ is this: he is not talking about a passive peace. He is not wishing the disciples a superficial sense of manners or of not making waves. He is not talking about the absence of conflict. There was, is and will be conflict!
Today’s reading in First Peter, echoes this when it talks about how we will suffer various trials in our lives. We are going through trials right now, we have been for 2000 years. People are suffering out on the streets and struggling here in this church. Most of us in this church might not ever be in a war, but we have personal pain. We have our wounds.
So does Jesus.
Let’s look at it like this: if the Risen Christ appeared pristine with his wounds erased and all smoothed over, it would make sense that the world would be perfect. But that’s not what the text shares with us. The Risen Christ, filled with the fullness of God, still has wounds on him. So it makes sense that our resurrected life has wounds! The world isn’t perfect, it has wounds. And God blesses the mess of the world anyway.
Jesus blesses it with “Peace be with you.”
The Hebrew origins of “Peace be with you” is the word “Shalom.”
Guess what “Shalom” means? It means completeness, wholeness, fullness.
When we say someone’s complete or whole, I think it means the integration of your soul within all the areas of your life. It means you live this way: by letting your spirit, which is your physical self, your decisions, actions, your will…letting those be guided by your soul – that inner part of you given by God that is unalterable and is divine.
That completeness is echoed in Shalom. Jesus says “Peace be with you”, and breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples because it is through the Holy Spirit that they are blessed with fullness of life lived in and from and through the love of God.
Later in this liturgy, I love that we have the chance to do the same, by greeting one another with the sign of the peace.
The thinking behind it is that you offer the sign of the peace to your neighbor to restore your relationship with them. It’s reciprocal, we are receiving and offering.
You are asking, how is your completeness in God going? You’re not asking that from a place of judgment. Shalom shows you care about someone’s well being. Not only do you care about it, you wish their well being to be full and healthy, and aligned with God.
It can be easy here, to wish wholeness for the person sitting next to you. This liturgy shows us the world at its best. But outside those church doors, it can be much harder.
As much as we recognize one another’s wholeness here, we are called to do the same outside those church walls. Even when it’s hard, even with strangers, even with family or friends who have hurt you and know your every wound, and even people who do not intend peace.
How can we be at peace while dealing with the messy chaos of life? How do we live in peace, within a struggling world?
Today’s story invites to look to Thomas. Outside this liturgy, outside these church walls, Thomas is our guide to shalom in the world.
Let’s look at Thomas in the rest of John’s gospel. He appears three times. The first time is in John 11, before today’s story. Jesus tells the disciples that he is going to Judea to see Lazarus who has died, the disciples caution against returning to Judea because Jesus had just been nearly stoned there.
Guess what Thomas says? Thomas is the one who rallies the disciples with “Let us also go so that we may die with him.”
That does not sound like someone who doubts. Thomas wants to in it, in the muck, in the mess with Jesus and with their close community.
The next Thomas appearance is in John 14, at the Last Supper. Jesus says he is going to prepare a place for the disciples in his Father’s house and that his disciples know the way. Thomas asks, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
That does not sound like doubt. That sounds like ride or die loyalty who yearns to be with his Lord. You know that person who has the guts or the humility to ask the question or say the thing others may be thinking but no one asks? That sounds like Thomas. His inquisitiveness sounds like discernment. He may be trying to discern where Jesus is going so he can be there with him.
Last, Thomas is in today’s story in John 20. Thomas says he won’t believe until he sees Jesus’s wounds. He even puts his hands in the wounds! This is not Thomas trying to a flex. I think this is Thomas being faithful and stalwart. He wants proof so that he can go deeper.
How do we have peace in this struggling world? We take a lesson from Thomas.
He shows us how to live in this world of wounds. By being all in. By going toward the wounds of the world. By not turning away. Most of won’t be in a war, but all of us drop into rooms and move out of them. We cannot pass through locked and closed doors the way Jesus did, but we do have direct access to people as they come and go. We can share that blessing of the peace, of Shalom, with each other with intention. We can remember that “Shalom” in Hebrew and “Shalem” in Arabic both mean “Peace be with you.”
Whatever the context of your life, this text invites us to be all in in the world. Don’t turn away. Touch the wounded. Which is work you already do. Like volunteering at the YWCA, writing a check, visiting someone in the hospital. This posture in the world sounds like, “Peace be with you…I will do what I can, with what I have.”
Then come to church, you will be blessed by your church family to touch the wound of the world. We come to church to be empowered like Thomas was, so that we can deal with the wars of nations, with the struggles on the streets and the ache in our hearts. That’s how we encourage and support one another. Then go back out again and again, until you think it’s becoming mundane. But it’s not mundane it’s your life. It’s the life in Christ that God doesn’t want you to miss out on.
We’re coming to the end of this sermon. At the end of this service, we will receive the dismissal, the gracious words, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” We don’t just stay in church, we are sent out.
No matter what room Jesus finds you in – whether you’re alone like Mary Magdalene, or in your church community like the disciples, or locked within a mindset or habits that fall short of God’s desire for you, we are called to go out. We Christians belong in the world. That room is a threshold between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. We are constantly moving through it. If we were only in the Kingdom of God, there would be no war! So we go out in the world to help make it more complete. We Christians are called to walk into the rooms of the world with open hands. Not hiding ourselves or our wounds, but to walk into the wounds of the world, filling them with Christ’s peace.
In the room of the world that is the kingdom of God, Jesus moves through us. There’s a reason the body of Christ is called Jesus’ hands and feet. Jesus is resurrected. This is our everyday life. Our King of the Universe, our God of love, our Lord and savior Jesus Christ is risen. In us, Jesus has his whole life ahead him.
[1] Hopeiscalling.com