Sermon Text - March 30, 2008
“Peace Be With You”
Rev. David Kratz
John 20:19-31
As we become before God’s word to us let us pray. Oh Holy one we thank you for speaking to us and high holy days and mundane Mondays and great anthems of faith and in moments of doubt, we pray that you will be with us and this moment. May the words of my mouth and the reflections of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord, our rock, and our Redeemer, Amen.
Our scripture reading today is actually the first reading of the first Sunday after Easter every year. It is from the 20th chapter of the book of the Gospel according to John. It's actually the story of what happens on the night of Easter after the tomb was discovered in the morning. The disciples were hiding away because they were frightened. And the second part of the story happens a week later, on the first day of the week, and it's one of the reasons why we celebrate worship on the first day of the week, on Sunday. So listen for God's Word to you.
“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 authorities, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘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.
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’ A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
Well it’s a fascinating passage of scripture, isn't it? It's one of the pieces of scripture that I think you could read again and again and always find something new, some way that it speaks to your heart. There is the story of Thomas for instance, which is usually what I think of when I think about this particular scene. He has become the kind that patron saint of the United Church of Christ. He is one who doubted and was accepted maybe because of his doubting. In any way doubting Thomas has kind of become a watchword for us as a denomination. There's also that wonderful scene where Jesus comes in and breathes on his disciples. We hope he had a breath mint or something after rising from the dead, it wasn't so much the halitosis he was worried about. It was really a symbol, a sign of giving the Holy Spirit. It was kind of a replay of the first part of the second chapter Genesis where God pulls together that mud and breathes into them and makes them living beings with his breath.
As I alluded to earlier, the whole notion of when we worship, we worship on the first day of the week and this is the touchstone for why we do that, rather than on the Sabbath of Jews. And then there is that wonderful part of the story, troubling and in some ways where Jesus, who Jesus is, what it mean to be the body of the risen Lord. He goes through shut doors, and locked doors, and then all of a sudden he shows them his hands and his feet as if you could touch him. So which is it, is see touchable or invisible? It’s hard to know and the story doesn't really answer that but you could think about that for your whole life probably, and maybe beyond.
The passage that got me today and it’s said three different times, is “peace be with you.” Peace be with you. Now I suppose you could just say it’s a kind of greeting, but greetings can very important. I want to read to you just a paragraph from the Sojourners commentary and this by a woman named Laurel Dykstra. She evidently has preached in a bunch of street churches and she says whenever I can in worship and right before the passing of the peace.
She says something like this. “When Jesus appeared to his disciples they were hiding upstairs in a locked room. The friends who knew him best, who had learned about him had just betrayed them and said they didn't know him at all. Who had pretended they didn't know him, who had run away and when he was dying, who when he was arrested, who were frightened and ashamed. He appeared to them and greeted them. He didn't say ‘what happened, where were you? You really screwed this up.’ He greeted them saying, ‘peace be with you.’ The first time I used these words, a tiny woman who is addicted to heroin and an occasional prostitute, whispered to me, ‘that was the first time in so many years that I felt like I was good enough to be part of this.’”
Sometimes greetings make all the difference in the world. I don’t know if any of you saw this new series “John Adams” last Monday on HBO. And he was supposed to be the ambassador to France, and he went over there and Benjamin Franklin was already there kind of smoozing it with the French court. And John Adams, full of you know that invigoration of this new revolution and inspired to give this speech and desiring that the French would come to the aid of United States because he knew we needed it to defeat the British.
There was this little moment of greeting and Ben Franklin tried to ease into it, but Adams would have none of it and he plowed right ahead to the point. You know we need your help, you gotta help us, this is an important time. And soon Adams was out of the French court. Because sometimes greetings, kind of the way you build the relationship, is as important as the point of having a relationship. In fact, that might say a bit about covenant. But of course there are some people that really don't care about greetings, they don't care about peace even. They don't see the importance of peace.
There are some people who believe that life is better when its agitated, when it's exciting, when something is happening – I want to do 10 best thing before I retire. Some people are angry, and they feel like their life is only real when they can really be angry. Some people don't care about peace, I guess. I have my doubts, sometimes it seems to me that even people who yearn for the action, love to be known for who they are and to be at peace with themselves to hear those words, “peace be with you.”
Most of us, I suppose, would like someplace deep in us yearns to be at peace with our selves, with our families, with people we know and love, our neighbors, our church, our nation and our world, God. But for the most part we handle it pretty well, as far as the world is concerned, you know, we take care of business by either luck or good fortune or the grace of God, or the forgiveness of people who know us. We’ve been able to have some success in our work, at least enough to stay employed. Maybe because of the forgiveness of people that know us we’ve been able to stay in our families. We’ve been able to look good and keep our fingers and our lives kind of manicured around the edges at least. So that at least picture that we give the world looks good.
I guess there are a few people in my life, who I've known, who are actually at peace with themselves – we call them saints. I don't know if you know any. I think maybe in my life I've known two at the most. I was shocked, maybe you were, when I found out that Mother Teresa had such a distressing prayer life and how much of her prayer life was spent in the absence of God – agonizing, yearning for the presence of God. But for her it was not to be. More people, as you get to know them, you know, they look good on the outside, but when you get to know them they are distressed on the inside.
That was the way it was with my dad when I was growing up. I thought he knew the answer to everything. And the answers that he didn't know he wasn't particularly defensive about. He was a great guy in my life, but as I got to know him more and became older and he did share with me and I read some of his journals, I knew that beneath the exterior of his life, as well as most of us, there was the sense of his own unworthiness. His anxiety about whether he was a hypocrite in public or not. It was a powerful moment when I realized that he, like all of us, need to hear those words. “Peace be with you, peace.”
Most of us manage to hold our lives together well enough We haven’t broken any of the Ten Commandments or maybe not the first one exactly and maybe we have coveted a few things of our neighbors, but really, we’ve tried to love God and love our neighbors and when we haven’t we’ve had good enough excuses – at least to live with. But my guess is that all of us, at some deep place in our lives, yearn to have God come to us and greeted us by saying ‘peace, peace, peace, peace be with you.’
Jesus goes on to say, ‘peace be with you as my father sent me so I send you.’ Walter Bruggeman says that the mission of the church is to offer this forgiveness. Whatever sins you forgive are forgiven, whatever sins you retain. He said not all sins are forgiven. It’s not something that we should do carelessly or romantically. It's hard work, we bear the crisis and burden of forgiveness, he says.
But let us not forget that it is our primary purpose, both in word and sacrament and in the way we live our lives and greet our neighbors our task is forgiveness. John Snow and his commentary in this passage said that Christians like us often scorned those folks who only come at Easter or Christmas perhaps. Or maybe not even that often, but the people who come are yearning for the presence of God or feel the absence of God, and like Thomas there not been a settle for just a rumor of love, they want the real thing.
Laurel Dykstra at the end of her little commentary says, “whatever it is that churches are saying, what poor people and people who are marginalized hear from us is this – you are not good enough, you are not welcome, the food bank entrances around back. Peace be with you, are we to say, “damn it why aren’t you better?” Is that what we’re supposed to say? “You screwed up again you white liberals!” Is that what we’re supposed to say? “Get your act together!”
No. We are to say “peace be with you. The deep abiding peace of God be with you, and you, and you.” And let us be a place where this is not only the greeting, but this is the life.