Holy and Incomplete

Luke 24:36-48           While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.

+++

I have a picture of my two daughters when Kira was five and Willa was just a baby.  Willa is in a baby seat on the floor and Kira is sitting next to her, wearing her school clothes and a paper pilgrim bonnet and big white collar.  Obviously, it was near Thanksgiving.  In her kindergarten class they had been remembering those pilgrims who were the first to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Every schoolchild in America must know what a pilgrim looked like, because I think we all have done this study unit.  It’s an important chapter in our American history; we learn the story and re-enact it every year because it tells us something important about who we are.  Even though we may argue about the accuracy of the story; even though we should acknowledge that the story could have been told differently, from different perspectives; even though it is only one of many possible stories about our beginnings as a nation, it is still a story that matters a great deal to our identity.

People have to have stories about where they came from and how they became the people they are.  And the stories don’t just crop up fully formed.  The histories don’t just write themselves.  A lot of time and telling and retelling and conversation have to go into the process of defining who we are.

The same is true for us as Christians - our identity.  And the first stories, the most important stories for us, are the scriptures. 

The story we hear today from Luke is like the one we heard from John last week, so it might sound like deja vu all over again, as the great Yogi Berra said.  But it’s an important story, so worth hearing twice.  In Luke’s telling, two of the disciples had just returned from a road trip. They were walking from Jerusalem toward Emmaus.  It was the day of the resurrection, but these men did not know that. They only knew that the tomb had been found empty.  And while they were walking and talking, they encountered the risen Christ – whom they did not recognize.  As they walked together he interpreted for them the things about himself in the scriptures.  And when they stopped at an inn and sat at table together, he opened their eyes to him in the blessing and the breaking of bread.  They ran back to Jerusalem to tell the others they had seen and spoken to the risen Christ.

So this is where we are when our story begins and Jesus enters the room with them.  Just as John told it in chapter 20 of his gospel, they were terrified.  And just as John told it, Jesus greeted them with words of peace.  He shows them his wounds to convince them of who he is, and in Luke’s telling he goes a step further, eating a piece of fish to prove he’s not an illusion or a hologram.  He is a real presence among them.  They might not be able to explain this but they know they didn’t imagine it.

In John’s telling of the story, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on them at that moment.  He simply breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  Luke differs on this point.  He says, in verse 49, “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”  Power from on high – the power of the Spirit of God.

But the Holy Spirit won’t be given until the day of Pentecost, 50 days later.  It will be more dramatic than the story John tells, but you’ll have to come back for that one on May 24. At any rate, the stories of John and Luke are telling us the same important things:  The resurrected Jesus came to them and, although this appearance was mysterious, it was real.  He opens their minds to understand who he is.  And, finally, they both tell us the risen Jesus has work for his disciples to do.

Luke makes it clear here that the good news of repentance and forgiveness must go out to all the nations of the world.  He also makes it clear that it is the responsibility of Christ’s disciples to proclaim this message.  And, furthermore, he makes clear that it begins here and now.  Make no mistake about it – the church has a mission that is the core of its identity.

That’s why these stories are so important for us, because they tell us where we came from and what purpose we were created for:  Faith and Action.  This is who we are.  This is what we are all about.  This is where we are going.

All good in theory.  It’s just when we try to live it we run into all kinds of problems.  If we try to live lives faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ not a day goes by that we don’t encounter trials and our own weakness and uncertainty about what we are trying to do.  The gospel sounds quite clear until you try to put it in action.  We see this reality, also, in our scriptures.  We see the difficulty of living the good news through the epistles.

In the letters of Paul to the churches he established, we see signs of conflict and confusion and faithlessness.  And in the letters of John, also, we see signs that there was trouble in paradise.  The letters in the New Testament were all written to the church of the first century in the various places it took root.  They give us one side of a conversation, from which we can imagine the kinds of problems that they were struggling with.

We can tell there were divisions among the people about how to be faithful in the midst of a world that was indifferent or even hostile toward Christ.  We can see there were misunderstandings about what it means to live in faithful Christian community, and we can see that there were even disagreements about the fundamental beliefs they shared.  There were schisms in the faith communities when the conflicts couldn’t be worked out, and then sometimes hostility toward the ones who had split from the church, who seemed to be proclaiming a different kind of gospel.  At the root of all the trouble seemed to be a problem about reconciling what they believed with how to live out that belief.  Don’t we still struggle with the very same things?

We believe we are forgiven, but we may not be sure what it means to be a forgiven people.  In some way it separates us from the rest of the world, but by the same token it demands that we remain in the midst of this broken world.  We are called to be a living witness to the message of forgiveness through God’s undying love. 

Our relationship with Christ sets us apart in some way, but it doesn’t set us apart as models of perfection – that is abundantly clear, isn’t it?  Our status as forgiven people merely shows that if it can happen for us it can happen for anyone.  We are on the road, but not far beyond the starting line.

The story of ourselves has to include these two paradoxical realities: that we are forgiven and cleansed of our sin, on the road to holiness, and also that we are everyday sinners standing in the need of God’s grace.  As John says, “We are God’s children now, but what we will be has not yet been revealed.”  We are both holy and incomplete.  We need to hold these things two things in mind, as difficult as that may be, because otherwise we lose sight of our mission. 

Christ didn’t die so we could live more comfortably in this world.  Christ didn’t die so we could be swept away into another world where we can live in comfort.  In short, he didn’t die for our comfort.  He did it for love of creation and he asks us to help in the redemption of creation.

It is in this way that we are co-creators with God.  As the Word of God became flesh and lived and died among us, we human beings were drawn into the story.  As the Holy Spirit was bestowed on us, we were given the power to be co-authors of this story.  And the story has continued for generations.  This is also part of our story: that the community of faith continued to go out farther and farther into the world to proclaim the good news of repentance and forgiveness.  And at the same time they continued to be in conversation with themselves about who Jesus is in relation to the world and the God of Israel, what it means to believe in and bear witness to Jesus Christ, and what it means to put our faith in action in the world.

We are, and always have been, a people of faith and action.

The stories of scripture tell us this, and it is important that the stories we tell about ourselves don’t disconnect us from this truth.  As messy as it is, we need to stay connected with these old stories.  As uncomfortable as they might make us, we need to see our stories as extensions of these stories.  As I said on Easter Sunday and will say again and again, our ancestors who gave us the scriptures merely gave us the beginning of the story.  It is up to us to pick up the threads and continue writing it with our lives.