Abide in Me

 

John15:1-8

Several days before Jesus was arrested and crucified, he was spending some quality time with his disciples; the ones closest to him, those who had left behind lives full of work and people and purpose. They had dropped everything to go with Jesus – to be with him. And they stayed with him, wherever he went, whatever he went through.

So during these days leading up to the end, an end he knew would be coming, he spoke a lot to these disciples about all the things that seemed most important for them to know. It was a very tender period in their lives together. One evening, he took a towel, filled a basin with water and knelt before these men to wash their feet. To their bewilderment and discomfort, he said, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”

Later that same evening they all sat at table together and Jesus shared bread and wine with them, which is something we remember every time we share the sacrament of communion. And as they dined together he said to them, “Little children, I am giving you a new commandment now: that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus told them other things as well, including this: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit.”

I am sure that these words, like so many of the words he said, were not fully understand at that time. But later, in the light of the resurrection, they could see it all more clearly. And they began to understand what it means to be a resurrected people in the world.

Many years ago a friend told me that she used to feel jealous of the first disciples because they got to see Jesus. And we poor souls who were born too late missed that opportunity. But now, she said, she takes comfort in the realization that she and everyone else has access to him always and everywhere. I thought, yes this is true. But still, most of us have a longing for Jesus in the flesh.

It is like the story about the child who woke up crying during the night because of the thunderstorm outside. His mother came to him to comfort him, and she said, “You never have to be afraid because you are never alone; Jesus is always with you.” And the tearful child said, “I know that, mommy, but I need Jesus with skin on.”

We are all just as much a scared little child, needing the human, flesh and blood, connection with the kind of love Jesus brings. We want him to open the scriptures to us, like he did for the two disciples walking with him on the Emmaus Road. We want him to assure us that we need not be afraid, like he did for the disciples in the upper room. We want to sit with him over breakfast and have a little one-on-one encouragement, like he did for Peter one morning after fishing. We want all this and more.

And there is a way for us to have this. It is the church. The church is the post-resurrection life of Jesus, and in the community of the church we share Christ with one another.

But there are some caveats.

If you have been around church long enough – any church – you will know that it doesn’t always look like Jesus.

I once served a church that had gone through a brutal conflict. It happened that a cohort of members had what they saw as a deeply spiritual experience. They were changed … converted … full of the Holy Spirit. And as a consequence of that they started running around the church trying to exorcise demons from other people who had not experienced the same kind of conversion they had. They argued vociferously in meetings and they schemed in secret. And they developed a habit of saying to those who disagreed with them, “I don’t see Jesus in you.”

The sad truth of the matter was no one else could see Jesus in them either.

During this difficult period, none of the sheep were being fed or cared for. No one’s spirits were being tended. Many in the flock walked away from a place they had once loved but now seemed like a spiritual wasteland.

The war was officially over before I got there. A wise and experienced interim pastor had guided the small remaining flock into remembering who they were, whose they were, and how to love one another. Pastor Wiley was a good and faithful shepherd for them. And then I came and served them as their pastor for two years.

These were tough times for several reasons, including the fact that it was a very difficult period in our denomination. The PCUSA was in the midst of its own war about loving our gay and lesbian and transgender neighbors. We were fighting about who should be permitted to be ordained or married in our churches – even about who could be baptized. And there was shouting, there was name-calling, there was scheming.

Over the years we have seen other denominations go through the same kind of war. And in the end of our battles, we all come away a thinner version of ourselves. No denomination gets through it without seeing a large portion of our membership getting peeled away.

I don’t know if this is a part of the pruning that Jesus is talking about, I really don’t. I only know that I have to remind myself often that it is God who does the pruning, not us. And God does not ask us to pick up the pruning sheers. God only asks us to remain faithful, to abide in Jesus.

And I realize that if we were able to abide in Jesus always, we would not have these church wars with shouting and name-calling and scheming. When we do abide in Jesus we look more like Jesus – washing one another’s feet, sharing bread and cup, and loving one another just as he commanded us to do.

To abide with Jesus takes a little effort for us, some discipline. Individually and communally, taking time for prayer and meditation to deepen our personal relationship with him. And serving one another, just as he served us.

What God desires – what Jesus desires – is that the risen Christ be visible in the church. That anyone who walks through our door could see Christ and know Christ in our midst. That any one of us could go out into the community and be the embodiment of Christ for someone who really needs to see him, to be a channel of renewal and healing in this broken and hurting world.

There may be a lot more pruning needed before we look the way God wants us to be. Each of us, personally, might suffer having a few branches removed that are not bearing any fruit. But, beloved, always remember this one thing: do not ever cut yourself off from Christ or his church. Seek to always abide in him who is the vine, the source of all life.

Photo: ChurchArt.Com

Open Table

 

1 John 3:1-7       

Luke 24:36-48   

I heard a funny story that, I think, actually happened, probably a few decades ago. A couple of girls go into a jewelry store, and they tell the saleswoman they want to buy cross necklaces. Crosses were very fashionable back in the 90’s, thanks to Madonna. The young saleswoman takes the girls to the glass counter where all the crosses are displayed, and she tells them, “There are different kinds. Do you want a plain one or do you want one with a little man on it?”

I guess she didn’t know who the little man was. We do, don’t we? Even though Presbyterians do not have crosses with the little man on them, also known as a crucifix, we know who he is.

And we know that Christ did not stay on the cross. He died on the cross, but he did not stay dead. He was resurrected on the third day, and so Presbyterians believe that the empty cross is a better symbol of our faith than the cross with the little man on it.

In fact, some go so far as to say maybe the cross is not a good symbol at all. The cross reminds us of his death, but we ought to have a symbol that reminds us of his resurrection. The empty tomb, for example.

We know that story, too. On the third day after his crucifixion, early in the morning, some of the women went to the tomb for the purpose of tending to his body in the ways they hadn’t been able to on Friday. And when they arrived there, they found the stone rolled away from the entrance, and the body of Jesus gone. There was an angel there who told them, “He is not here.” He has arisen.

And it is this story that leads some Christians to think, why are we even wearing crosses? Why not little empty tombs? Isn’t that more meaningful?

I remember one year when the worship committee chair for the church I was serving was ordering some special bulletin covers for Easter. She decided she really liked one that pictured the empty tomb. It was a lovely soft-focus photo of a cave entrance, on a beautiful sunny morning. It was fine, I didn’t pay a lot of attention.

It wasn’t until Easter morning when I saw all the bulletins in the sanctuary, with the words printed over the picture, “He is not here.” And I realized “He is not here” is definitely not the message I want to give today.

He is not on the cross. Nor is he in the tomb, but Christ is everywhere, and this is the truth we receive from the Easter stories in the scriptures. In the gospels there are many stories of the resurrected Christ coming to his disciples: on the road, sitting at table, in the upper room, on the beach, in the garden, on the mountain. He’s like that old country song, “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.” Only, unlike Johnny Cash, Christ really has been everywhere and truly is everywhere. The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” He is everywhere.

And the encounter we hear about today from Luke’s gospel is a part of a larger story about that first day of resurrection. We are still on that first day – even though it is the third Sunday of Easter, we are still dwelling in that first day when the women found the tomb empty and ran back to tell the others.

Last Sunday we heard the Gospel of John’s account of the evening of that first day, when Christ came through a locked door to see the disciples in the upper room. But Luke tells us about other events from that day, tells things a bit differently.

Earlier in the day, after the word began to spread about the tomb being empty, two of Christ’s disciples were walking to another town called Emmaus, about seven miles outside Jerusalem. As they walked and talked together about all the things that had happened the past three days, another man joined them on the road. When he asked them, “what are you guys talking about,” they stopped dead in their tracks. Their faces filled with grief; it was as if they were experiencing it all over again. They said to him, “Are you the only person in Jerusalem who did not hear about this?” So they began to tell this stranger everything about Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom they had hoped would be the redeemer of Israel. But now, they said, he was crucified. And what’s more, they learned this morning that his body is missing from the tomb.

And the stranger, very patiently, began to explain the scriptures to them as they walked. The two disciples are in the grip of his story when they arrive at an inn. They urge the stranger to join them – it is late, let us rest from our travels and continue our conversation. They go into the inn and together sit at table for their evening meal. Then the stranger took the bread, he blessed it and broke it and then their eyes were opened to him. Yes, it was the risen Christ who had walked with them from Jerusalem.

And in that instant of recognition, he vanished. The two disciples say to one another, “Weren’t our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” Now they are no longer tired, or weighed down with grief, and they get back on the road, walk those seven miles back to Jerusalem, back to the other disciples to tell them what just happened. When they arrive, they find that he has appeared to some others as well, so they share their stories with one another, including those who have not yet seen the risen Christ.

And this is where we are in the passage for today. These are the things the disciples are talking about when, once again, Jesus is there. And the text says, “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering,” so Jesus suggests they eat. Because food always helps, doesn’t it?

Once again, the risen Christ appears. As he has before and will again. Christ plays in ten thousand places.

He appears to his followers on the road. in the upper room. on the beach. across a table. in the garden. on the mountain. Every appearance is a special and meaningful event, but the one that I find the most meaningful is sharing a meal together.

Table fellowship always was important for Jesus. The gospels chronicle Jesus’ table fellowship with all kinds of sinners and saints. The Pharisees and the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the upper-class and the lower-class, the powerful and the powerless. He shared a two-top with Zacchaeus and he held impromptu picnics for thousands of diners in the open air. He was sometimes the guest and sometimes the host, but either way, table fellowship with Jesus was always surprising. When Jesus shared a table with someone, lives were changed. And it still happens, all the time.

There is a wonderful scene in the film It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood where we see this beautiful mystery. Mr. Rogers is sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant with a journalist named Lloyd. Mr. Rogers asks Lloyd to take a moment and just think about someone who helped make him the person he is – or, in Mr. Rogers words, someone who loved him into being. For the next full minute, the film is silent. The camera shows us the faces of all the people who are in that restaurant. As they sit across the table from their dining partner, we see that they are all having this same experience – the transformative experience of being loved into being.

I don’t quite know why; I just know that sharing a meal with someone can be meaningful in ways you don’t expect. It was a major part of Jesus’ ministry, and so it is quite fitting that it would also be a key part of his resurrection stories.

This is why I think that a good symbol of our faith is a table. Just an ordinary table that people can gather around and share food. Because when we do this, beautiful and amazing things can happen.

 

 

Seeing/Believing

 John20:19-31

When it comes to doubts, I have about as many as anyone else does – maybe more. I confess that I have doubts that my children always told me the truth when they were growing up. I sometimes doubt that the doctor really has as much confidence in her diagnosis as she would like me to believe. I have doubts about the weather forecast, often. Sometimes, when I feel ill, I doubt that I will ever feel good again.

Now and then, I doubt that someone likes me as I would wish to be liked. I guess Sally Field had those doubts too, judging from her emotional acceptance speech that time at the Oscars, when she stood in front of the microphone clutching her award. She tearfully cried, “You like me!” As though she could hardly believe it was true.

She needed the proof. We all do sometimes, don’t we? Can we take it on faith that we are really and truly loved? Or do we need to see the evidence?

To take something of great importance on faith is a hard thing to ask of anyone. We need evidence, some assurance of what we hope for, what we need; something to ease our fears. And this is what the disciples of Jesus needed at the end of that harrowing weekend.

The disciples were afraid. They locked themselves into the upper room, hoping the bolt on the door would somehow keep the authorities out, should they come to arrest them too. John says it was the Jews they feared. In some way that was true. They had reason to fear the Jewish authorities who had negotiated with the Romans to hand Jesus over for the sake of what they called “peace.” They had reason to fear ordinary Jews, just like themselves, who might be tempted to give up these followers of Jesus if it would buy them any favors or save them from persecution. It is interesting that John makes no mention of fear of the Romans, but maybe that just goes without saying. It was the Romans who held all the power in those days.

The disciples are afraid, John tells us so. And it is likely they are all feeling doubtful, as well, doubt and fear go hand in hand. Because they have not seen Jesus – yet. Mary saw him in the garden, and she told them so, but did they believe her? probably not.

They are sitting in that room, behind a locked door, all their nerves on edge, despairing and confused. Then Jesus walks right through the door – literally, right through it. He speaks to them, he breathes on them, and now everything is changed.

Thomas, however, was not there. I have no idea where Thomas was, why he wasn’t there. Was he not as afraid as the others? Or was he just sent out to get food? Anything is possible.

But when he arrives, and they tell him what he missed, he is having none of it. Nope. Thomas lets them all know: he was going to have to see it too, and why not? He was simply asking for the same thing the others had received. He was simply voicing the same doubts that all of them had probably felt when Mary told them, “I have seen the Lord.”

So a week later, the following Sunday, Jesus appeared once again. This time it was for Thomas’s sake because Thomas needed the evidence. And so do we.

I have spoken at times during this season about the wish to see Jesus, as we hear about so frequently in the gospels. People were always wanting, wishing, to see him. This wish, it is something we all might have too, maybe buried deep inside of us. Buried, perhaps, because we have doubts that it is even possible. And because we have many other things to think about. Our lives are really very busy with the ordinary things.

It is a wish we might bury deep under layers of fear – because we, too, have plenty of fears that occupy our minds –everything from the fear of how we will pay the bills, to the fear of whether we can do this job anymore, to the fear that we might lose a loved one to sickness, to addiction, or to a rift in the relationship that we can’t seem to mend. There is plenty of fear – fear that blinds us to possibility, robs us of hope, buries our deepest desires.

This is the reason the scriptures so often tell us not to fear: fear can block out all the good things. The power of fear is the power to destroy.

The scriptures also tell us that the antidote to fear is love, and love is what we see in Jesus. When the disciples saw Jesus, all their fears evaporated into thin air. Suddenly, they didn’t need to lock the door anymore. Suddenly, they knew that they had a higher and stronger power than anything that might harm them, because they have seen the Lord, who is the embodied love of God.

This is something we all need. And the good news is it is something we may have.

We may see Jesus, too. It happens in the community of the faithful. It is when we see faith in action. It is in the embrace of the church – the people who come together to proclaim the risen Christ, to share his peace with one another, to offer encouragement and care, strength and healing. A community of ordinary people who come together and do extraordinary things.

The community that practices forgiveness because, without forgiveness, there can be no community.

John fervently urges his readers to believe – and we do believe, but not simply because he tells us to. We believe when we too have seen the resurrected Lord in the community of the faithful, who are his hands, his feet, his heart.

We have our own resurrection stories to tell. We have seen the evidence. It is right here in this room.

Photo by Andrey K on Unsplash

That First Story

 

Mark 16:1-7       

Baptized at the age of two months, I guess you could say I have been a Christian my entire life. I have been swimming in these waters ever since I can remember. And so the first time I realized just how strange our gospel story is was when I read it with a Chinese college student. I was ministering to a college campus at the time. A young woman came to me. This was her first semester in the United States. Her English was pretty good, but she was eager to improve it – and she was also curious about Christianity. So we agreed to meet weekly in my office to read the gospel story together.

As we worked through the passages, more than once she stopped and looked at me. She would scrunch up her face and say, “Huh. Why did he do that?” “Why did he say that?” She was more than surprised. She was, perhaps, disdainful.

If you can remember hearing the story for the first time, then maybe you know firsthand how strange it is. C.S. Lewis, that wonderful writer who expressed the essence of Christianity so powerfully and so imaginatively, calls the resurrection story “the strangest story of all.” I wonder if we can see how strange it is.

We have a habit of putting a nice filter over it – gauzy, soft light. Gentle faces. Smooth skin. white, clean cloth. It’s a pretty picture, our Easter story.

Mark gives us the shortest, most concise version of the story. After the Sabbath, the women went to the tomb with their spices so they might anoint his body, which had been laid in the tomb on Friday. This is Sunday, very early in the morning.

And as they walk there, they chat amongst themselves. They share a concern about how they would move the stone. The Friday before, when his body was taken down from the cross, Joseph of Arimathea brought it to a tomb hewn out of rock. He rolled a stone in front of the opening before they all went home. The stone, these women knew, was quite heavy. They doubted their ability to move it on their own so they could anoint the body of their Lord.

When they arrived there, these women were stunned to see the mouth of the tomb open before them. Is it possible that some of the men had come earlier to do this for them? They stepped inside the tomb where they saw a young man in a white robe.

A young man in a white robe – an angel, of course. Right? How many times have you seen a young man dressed in a white robe who was not an angel? His first words to them were the same words that angels always open with: Do not be alarmed. Do not be afraid. That is what they always say.

The angel explains to the women that Jesus is not here, of course not. He has done what he said he would do. Just a few days ago, in fact, he said, “When I am raised up I will go before you to Galilee.”

And if you followed the link at the top you know that is where we left it. He is not here. He went to Galilee, just like he told you he would.

Perhaps we don’t think much of it, because we have heard the story so many times, we fill in the rest. He is not in the tomb. He is raised. Now you will see him again in Galilee. Go and tell the others, and so on and so forth.

It is a story that has been told in bits and pieces, pretty much as we do – little bits and pieces every Sunday morning – over and over again. The first witnesses told it to someone else, who then told it to others, who told it to others. The story handed down from one to another to another over the ages.

It traveled across deserts and rivers and oceans, through forests and cities, from mouth to mouth, the story of Jesus Christ. Little bits and pieces, here and there.

The story that Mark wrote down was handed to him by others, in bits and pieces and woven together to create the narrative we now have in our Bibles.

The story we ended with verse 7 of Chapter 16.

But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

But this is not where Mark ends the story. There is one more thing.

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

This is the story as Mark told it. Maybe Mark himself sat around the fire with others in the evening sharing stories. and he told his story. His listeners leaned in to hear. He says,

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

And his listeners are motionless, mouths open. Waiting for him to go on. And then what, they ask. Mark shrugs. That’s all I’ve got. Is it not enough?

Well, no, we say. It is not enough. Because we want to know that the disciples carried the good news of the resurrection with them back to the others. We want to know that they did, in fact, see Jesus again as he promised they would. We want all the post-resurrection details.

We wouldn’t get it from Mark, though. Mark left that to others to tell. Other evangelists, like Matthew, Luke, and John. Other apostles like Peter and James and Paul. And the next generation, and the generation after that.

But let us not leave behind the first story – Mark’s story – where the women fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Let us hold this story close in all its sparseness and severity, because it is this story that assures us that, yes indeed, something profoundly, powerfully, awesomely otherworldly happened that day.

Something that terrified them because it utterly upended everything they knew about the world.

Something that terrified them because it was unnatural. This is more than the return of new life in the springtime, bulbs that flower, trees that bud with new leaves. That is all that we expect, but the dead resurrected? This is something new.

Life came back into his beaten and broken corpse, and he arose. Jesus rose from the tomb where his body had been laid, to become the living proclamation that death has been defeated. That love wins. That in the end is life.

In the end is life. and this life comes not from our own good intentions or cleverness, or the strength of our human will. It comes from the awesome power and love of God. That is the only way life comes.

We are no stronger or wiser than these first disciples. The women who ran away confused and terrified. Like them, we need time and experience to form our faith, to teach us these truths about life and death. To recognize that this truth is a perfect fit for that gaping, dark hunger deep within us. It fills us, it completes us. In it we know that, as T.S. Eliot wrote, in the end is our beginning. In the end is life.

Again and again, whenever we are faced with death, the church asserts this belief: That God has defeated the power of death in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a hard truth because we wish to never have to face death at all.

And so when we have to face this truth, whether for the first time or the hundredth time, perhaps we are ready to say what we believe…what we know deep in our souls had to be then and is now and forevermore: Jesus is risen.

Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed.

All praise be to God.

Amen.

Photo by ArtHouse Studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/entrance-to-cave-4581191/