People of the Story

Delivered at Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, Benson, MN. Maundy Thursday, Year B.
Texts: Ex 12.1-14, 1 Cor 11.23-26, Jn 13.1-35

Every time we take Holy Communion together, we hear these familiar words: “On the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, saying ‘this is my body given for you.’… He took the cup, gave thanks and gave it for all to drink, saying, ‘this cup is the new covenant in my blood shed for you and for all people…’ It’s just like when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with relatives and you share stories of your own history. This is the story of our history, our shared story.

Tonight we gather together in darkness around this table to hear a part of that story again. But this story begins long, long before that night in the upper room with his disciples. Our story begins in a garden, the first garden. There, along the banks of a stream, the One Holy and Mighty God, stooped from heaven to create a figure in the mud. God’s hands were dirty with the muck of the stream as God formed arms and legs, a head and a heart. Then God breathed life into the mud-thing, gave it being and movement, and called it “human;” an act of supreme joy and love from the Supreme Being to the creature God called “child.”

Humankind grew from that garden into a multitude, but something was wrong; there was a corruption there, a mean streak. So God sent a flood to cleanse the world of this evil, to start over with a clean slate. But God’s loved us too much to wipe us out, so God saved a handful of people, a man named Noah and his family. God blessed them and promised them that never again would we be destroyed. God even set a reminder in the clouds, a rainbow, to remind both God and us of this promise.

Humanity once again grew numerous and spread out far and wide, and a man named Abram and his wife Sarai grew old with no children. God looked down at this man and woman whom God loved, and moved by compassion, God made them a promise to raise up from them a great nation and children as innumerable as the stars. Then God changed the name of the man to Abraham and the woman to Sarah, a reminder of the complete change God would bring about in the world through them and their promised offspring.

As generations passed by, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah multiplied and grew strong, but were they were enslaved to a great nation. They cried to God for deliverance, for rescue from their oppression, and God sent Moses to deliver them. With God’s help, Moses stood up to Pharaoh for the dignity and the freedom of God’s chosen people.

And one night, God spoke through Moses to the people and said, “Tonight, I will deliver you from slavery. Prepare a meal, but eat it on your feet, because you are on your way out the door. Eat quickly! For tonight, death is coming to Egypt, but I will bring you out of death into life!” And, good as God’s word, that night Death passed over the children of Israel, and they stood up and walked out as free men and women.

They crossed the sand and rocks of the waste places until they came to the sea. Behind them, Pharaoh’s army threatened to destroy them, and ahead of them, the sea waited to swallow them up. Yet God was with them. Lo and behold, the sea parted, and they crossed on dry land, out of Egypt and into freedom! Just as God had done with Noah, God delivered this chosen people through the water into new life. The people remembered this, and they sang God’s praises!

Forever after that night, the people recounted God’s miraculous promise and how Death passed over them. Generation after generation, every year as the story of God’s people continued through good and bad, they recounted the story of God’s faithfulness and love, of how Death passed over them, and how they passed into life.

Once again, many, many years later, God’s chosen people found themselves subject to a foreign ruler. Again, they cried to God for deliverance, and just as before, God sent a deliverer. But this time, the one God sent was no ordinary man, but God’s own Son, the Word who was there in the garden at the beginning, who was there on the ark in the flood, who was there at the first twinkle in Sarah’s eye and the first kick in her belly, who was there as Death passed over the people and as they passed through the water.

But God did not send the Son to deliver the people from an emperor. God knows that kings and emperors and generals come and go. No, instead, God sent the Son to deliver them for all time, to deliver them from Death itself, just as God had delivered them on that night so long ago in Egypt.

One night, gathered in a room with a dozen of his closest friends as they celebrated that very Passover meal and recounted once again the story of God’s unfailing love and mercy, Jesus, the Son, took bread, gave thanks to God, and broke it to share it with all of them. “See this bread?” he asked them. “This bread is my body. I am giving it to you. Remember me!” When they had finished eating, he took the cup of wine, gave thanks to God again, and said, “This wine—this is my blood, and I’m pouring it out for you and for all humanity. Remember me!”

That night, he gave them a new commandment. “Tonight,” he said, “we heard the story of God’s love, the story of Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses. Truly, truly I tell you, that immense love of God is the love I have for you. That is why I am giving you my body and blood to sustain you. Eat and drink it, and you will never die. That love, that life-saving, death-defying love, that God-love, that is the love you should have for each other. As God loves you and I love you, that’s how you should love each other.”
That night, tonight, Jesus, the Son of God was arrested by the very people he came to love. His friends, the ones he ate with, deserted him. He was stripped, beaten, tried in a kangaroo court and sentenced to death. Tomorrow, he will be lifted up on a tree and hung until he’s dead. He knew that’s how it would end. He knew that our selfish hearts can’t handle God’s love. We can accept that God loves us without condition or merit, but to think that we should love each other like that? Love like that threatens us, and so we try to kill it.

And yet, tonight, in this meal, he shows us once again, just like Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses all saw, that God’s love is stronger than Death. That love, like Christ’s body and blood, sustains us with life, life that cannot be quenched. It cements us together into community, it forgives us of the worst that we can do.

Tonight, in that meal, we tell the story of that God-love. More than that, we taste and feel and chew and swallow that story, we enter into that story, we sit around the table with his disciples and here him speak those words for ourselves: take this bread, take this cup. These are the body and blood of our Lord Jesus the Christ, given for you, so that you may live. Do this, and remember God’s love, remember that it is stronger than death, that it has saved us before and will save us again. Tonight, we eat that love as we eat the body and blood of the man who gave up his life to save ours, and we remember that this story we live tonight stretches back to the very beginning of creation. After all that God has done for us, imagine where the story will go from here, what God’s love has yet to do.

A Wafer of Bread, A Drop of Wine

Audio recording of “A Wafer of Bread, A Drop of Wine” recorded during worship. (12:39)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Easter 3, Year A. Mother’s Day
Texts: Acts 2.4, 36-41; 1 Pet 1.17-23; Lk 24.13-35

As we listen to these scripture readings today, we notice that there is a theme that runs through the lessons. It is a theme of separation, of isolation, of division. In the reading from Acts, we hear about Peter preaching to the people of Jerusalem about the death of Christ. They realize their own part in Christ’s death, and they are “cut to the heart,” they feel separated from God so that they ask Peter, “What should we do?” In Peter’s letter, he writes to a group of people who have been separated from their families and their society. They are still living in their own land, but they live there as exiles, foreigners. And, of course, we hear the story of the two disciples sadly making their way to Emmaus as they grieve the death of Jesus.

In this story of the road to Emmaus, only one of the disciples, Cleopas, is named. Some scholars believe that his traveling companion remains unidentified so that we when we hear the story might put ourselves in the shoes of that unnamed disciple, walking sadly along, grieving the crucified Lord, feeling alienated from and abandoned by God. I know that I have seen myself in that disciple. Like so many of you, I have my own story of isolation from God.

In 1991, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She struggled with the disease for two years before she died. I was 10, and my sister was 7. Since we were so young, we had trouble making sense of where God was in that tragedy. Why hadn’t God answered our prayers? If God loved us, why did this terrible thing happen? My father found himself suddenly a single parent, trying to cope with his own grief and to also comfort to two young children.

During that time, we walked with Cleopas on the road to Emmaus. We felt that loneliness that comes from God being so far away, wondering where God is and if God had any power to help us. Each one of us has been walking with Cleopas at some time in our lives and have felt that separation. When we look at our world now, we see division, separation, disunity. We see the chaos in Libya, the destruction in Haiti, the stalemate in Palestine, the contention in Washington and Madison.

We are a people defined by what separates us. Republicans versus Democrats, Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Left versus Right, we all feel that separation from one another and from God. Week after week, we come to this place and we hear the words of Scripture and we confess that Christ is risen, but then we go back out there and we ask, “Where is God’s promise? Where is the resurrection?” The death that separated Jesus from us on Good Friday continues to reign in our world and separates us even now from that promise of God’s kingdom.

But here is the good news in that story for us today. While Cleopas and the other disciple were walking, Jesus came and walked with them, even though they didn’t recognize him. Even though they didn’t understand as he explained to them about all that had happened, he kept talking. Even though they didn’t know who they were inviting into their house, he came and stayed with them. Even when we cannot see where God is on the road, God is still with us. Jesus doesn’t wait for us to find him or invite him into our hearts or accept him as our personal Lord and Savior. Even when we can’t see him, even when we don’t know who to look for, Jesus comes and walks with us.

They didn’t recognize him when they saw him, they didn’t recognize him when he explained that the Messiah was supposed to die and then rise again, they didn’t even recognize him in the waning light as they invited him into the house. When those disciples saw Jesus, really saw him for who he was, was when he took the bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it for them to eat. Likewise it is in that same meal that we recognize Jesus today.

It feels strange to talk about Holy Communion because on this morning we are not sharing the meal. However, in a way, that emphasizes the point. Today, as we talk about the meal, we notice its absence, just as in the Eucharist itself, we celebrate Christ’s presence, but we notice his absence. As soon as Jesus broke the bread and the disciples saw him, he was gone again. And again, they felt his absence. When we eat the bread and drink the wine, we too notice his absence. We believe that he is truly here in, with, and under the bread and wine, but he is not here how we would like him to be. He is not here to heal our pains, to encourage us with his words, or to take us in his arms.

This absence is painful. It is the same absence we feel at the loss of loved ones, like my mother. We know that there is this promise that we will see them again, that Christ’s resurrection paves the way for us to meet again in the kingdom, but though it is a nice hope for the future, that promise is not strong enough to move our lives today. Our liturgy calls the Holy Communion “a foretaste of the feast to come.” The meal is not enough to fill us, but it is enough to remind us of God’s unfailing presence.

When Jesus broke the bread in Emmaus, his disciples finally saw him, even though he had been there the whole time. It took me many years to see where God had been when my mother died. I couldn’t see at the time because death and division can cloud out hope, but looking back now, I see Jesus in my friends at school who shared their sympathies with me. I see Jesus in all those people from our church who prayed for us, who babysat for my parents, who cooked meals for us. I see Jesus in my dad and my sister and the way we consoled and supported one another. I see Jesus in my mother and her faith and love for God and her devotion to us in spite of her illness. I see Jesus in my stepmother, who became a part of our family and loved us as her own. I could not see Jesus then, just like Cleopas could not see him on the road, but in the time since, I have come to see that, without my realizing, he was there just as surely as he walked to Emmaus, wearing many different faces and speaking in many voices.

Holy Communion is a physical, tangible sign that even when we are blind to his presence, Jesus is Immanuel, God-with-us that we can taste and touch, a promise that we can hold on our tongue. Because Jesus is God-with-us in the meal, that same meal unites all of us with him and with one another. The miracle of Communion is that somehow, God gathers us all up like grains of wheat scattered on the hill gathered into one loaf of bread. God crosses all the lines and walls that divide us, crosses even death itself, and brings us together for one brief moment.

When I eat the meal, I am sharing the body and blood of Christ with my mother. I share it with my ancestors, with my descendants, with all people across time and space and with Jesus Christ in the kingdom. With all that divides us, with all that separates us from God and one another, somehow God is able to reach out and give  us union, give us com-union, in this simple gathering and these simple gifts: a wafer of bread, a drop of wine.

When God feels far away, when the resurrection seems distant and abstract, when we fail to see God in our pain, in our conflict, in our struggling, this bread, this wine, becomes for us the risen Jesus Immanuel. The meal is God’s sure and certain promise of life that God is always with us, that God walks and struggles and lives and dies with us even when we are unable to see God walking alongside us. And in this world of death and division, that is a promise that you can taste.

A Word that Sticks to our Ribs

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Christmas 2
Texts: Jer 31.7-14; Eph 1.3-14; John 1.1-18

I was 12, and we were about to begin confirmation classes at my church. As a way to introduce the program to the new students and parents, our pastor, an interim at the time, gathered everybody together for a potluck dinner the week before the first class. He talked about what confirmation was, what we would be covering, all the normal stuff. I don’t really remember what he said at all that night, except for one thing. After dinner at some point, he and I were talking and I shared some small bit of Biblical trivia with him that I had read in a footnote, and he asked me, “Have you ever thought of becoming a pastor?”

This was absolutely the farthest thing from my mind, and so I wrote it off. I had other plans, other directions in which I was headed. However, almost against my will, those words he spoke to me stuck with me, I unwillingly carried them around for almost ten years before I even considered them again, and now, here I am. There are some words that just stick with us, words that we take with us wherever we go. Sometimes we are not even aware that we are bringing them along, but they are there just the same. These words, like the words spoken my my pastor so long ago, have the power to shape us, to change the direction we are headed in life, to directly or indirectly affect decisions we make. These may be words from a parent or mentor, a friend, or an authority, words spoken off the cuff or with profound intent; words of advice, of praise, of discipline, or of news, both good or bad.

As we celebrate Christmas, we remember that just as there are words in our own lives that we carry with us, God’s Word is also with us. John writes that “the Word became flesh and lived among us;” literally translated, the Word “pitched his tent among us.” In our modern age of apartments and houses and condos, this sounds temporary and unimpressive, but John writes of a more significant tent.

After God brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, while they were traveling through the wilderness, God traveled with the people in the tabernacle. The tabernacle was the tent that contained the Ark of the Covenant, the box constructed to house the stone tablets containing the ten commandments which Moses brought down from the mountain. As God’s people slowly wandered through the desert away from the mountain where God had spoken to them and towards the unknown land which God had promised them, the tabernacle was always in their midst. Where their tents were pitched, so was the tabernacle pitched. In this way, the people could see God’s presence with them.

After they reached God’s promised land, King Solomon built a majestic temple to hold the Ark, a grand and royal house suitable for God’s dwelling place among God’s people. The temple was thought to be the place where heaven and earth met, the “navel of the world,” it was called, connecting God and humanity like an umbilical cord connects mother and child. Inside the temple, people were as physically close as it was possible to be to heaven and to God. It was in this temple that Isaiah had his sublime vision of the LORD seated on the throne of heaven, with the hem of God’s robe filling the temple, and he was surrounded by six-winged seraphim crying out “HOLY HOLY HOLY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS! THE WHOLE EARTH IS FULL OF HIS GLORY!”

Then came the Exile. An invading army destroyed their home and carried God’s people off to live in a foreign land. That army destroyed the temple, and the Ark of the Covenant was lost forever. In this dark time, God’s people lamented and wept because, with no temple and no Ark, they no longer saw the presence of God with them. Now, it seemed, the place where heaven stooped to meet earth, the place where God lived among the people, was desecrated and desolate. Yet, out of the darkness of their exile, God spoke words of comfort through the prophets. Jeremiah writes, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” In spite of God’s anger and punishment, in spite of the destruction of the temple and the loss of the Ark, God reminded Israel that God had not abandoned them. God gave them a promise of great joy, that they would return to their homeland and that God would once again dwell in their midst, just as in the days of old with the tabernacle, with the temple.

This promise of God’s eternal presence with God’s people came to pass on Christmas, when Jesus, the Word of God, took on flesh “pitched his tent” among us, just like the Lord of Hosts traveling through the wilderness with Israel in the tabernacle. On Christmas, the Word of God became Immanuel—God With Us. Unlike the temple which was destroyed, Jesus remains with us always. Even after his death, even after his ascension into heaven, Jesus is with us here and now in this place just as truly as he was present in the manger on that first Christmas morning, just as truly as he was present on the cross on Good Friday. Jesus is here among us in the bread and the wine—his body and blood. We eat him up and drink him in and he becomes a part of us, Immanuel—God Within Us, God who cannot be separated from us. We come together in this place to praise and worship God and to be reminded that in this gathering, in this meal of the Flesh and Blood of the Word of God, we have been transformed into the living, breathing, moving, being Body of Christ.

Jesus Christ is Immanuel—God Still With Us. He is present in, with and under us. To see the face of Jesus we need look only as far as our brothers and sisters seated here with us. Jesus Christ, the living Word of God sent to embody God’s love for us, to give us the power to become children of God, lives and moves and has his being in this holy catholic and apostolic Church, in us. Jesus Christ, God’s living promise of salvation and of hope for the whole world is alive in us. In the waters of baptism, in the bread and the wine, God has transformed us into God’s Word of promise for the world.

And the world needs us now more than ever. We see every day the darkness that still lurks in our world. War and poverty threaten our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters. Polarizing politics, apathy for those who suffer around the world, ignorance and hatred threaten our community. Financial hardship and natural disasters drag people into poverty and sickness. The darkness of evil and human sin touches and taints this world, and because of it, we grow sicker and weaker. It is into this darkness that God enters at Christmas. We, the Church, the living Body of Jesus Christ, are God’s incarnate promise of healing to a broken world. On Christmas, we remember not just a day 2000 years ago when a baby was born, we remember that that baby boy, fully God and fully human, lives with us today, lives in us today. Jesus, Immanuel, God Forever With Us.

Some words stick with us and change us in ways that we can’t always see. Jesus is the Word of God that pitches his tent with us as we journey through life. He is the Word of God that sticks to our ribs when we feast on his flesh and becomes ever a part of us, inseparable. This is the mystery of God, that the light of a single flame, of Jesus Christ, might shine in this wretched darkness for thousands of years, and through all of that time, the oily and pernicious darkness that creeps over this world of ours might not overcome that light. The light shines in the darkness, as it has shone from the beginning of creation, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Jesus is the light of creation, Immanuel—God With Us in the Dark. To us who have received him, he gives the power to become children of God, the power to bear God’s creative and redeeming light, God’s living and loving Word, to a world in need. When we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the presence of God, a presence that has never left us. We celebrate God’s hopeful and powerful Word of promise to our world, not meant for a day far off in some distant future, but a Word for today, for this very hour and minute. We celebrate the light which continues to shine in the darkness. We celebrate Immanuel, “God With Us, Even to the End of the Age.” We go forth from this place today, fed by the body and blood of the Word, out into the world with a simple message, with the words “Merry Christmas.” But these words stick with us, they follow us around and remind us of John’s words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and now the Word has become flesh and lives among us.”

No Corpse to Anoint

Delivered as supply preacher. Easter, Year C
Texts: Acts 10.34-43; 1 Cor 15.19-26; Lk 24.1-12

It is the first day of the week, at dawn, and three women come to the tomb to remember a fallen friend. They bring ointments and spices to prepare the body for burial, as is right and proper in their tradition. They come in sorrow to say goodbye, and to remember.

So often we come to church as people coming to a grave. We come to pay our respects, to honor and remember the departed. Like the women who come with their ointments and spices to do their duty by Jesus, we gather together to sing our hymns and pray our prayers, to do our duty, and afterwards we go home and change clothes and get on with our day. We come here expecting to find Jesus where he ought to be, buried in the tomb of history, safely sealed away from our modern lives.

Humanity seems to have this need to seek for the divine. Every culture in the world has a religion that has developed as we mortals grope and search for God. However, when God finds us, we find that as hard as we struggle to reach for God, when God finds us we are able to struggle even harder to hold God at arms length, to push God away, because God wants to change us and who we are. The Israelites groaned and wailed at Moses in the wilderness, “Why have you brought us out here to die? You should have left us in Egypt!” Once in the promised land, they fell away and worshipped foreign idols. When the temple was built in Jerusalem, there was just one tiny room, right in the center, the Holy of Holies, where God dwelt. The room was closed off with a magnificent curtain, and it was forbidden to enter except once a year, a priest, having ritually washed himself, performed the proper rites and said the proper prayers, could go in and offer a sacrifice up to God with fear and trembling on behalf of the nation. So complete was our separation from God that only once a year on the highest, holiest day did anyone come into God’s presence.

In the midst of this separation, God finds us. In the midst of the wilderness, God traveled among the people in the tabernacle. In spite of our sins and faithlessness, God continuously called us back. When we were gone astray, God sent us prophets. When those prophets were ignored or killed, God still called us to repentance. Finally, tired of our denial, our ignorance and our selfishness, God determined a way to break through our self-imposed isolation, to knock down the walls we had constructed between God and us. God said, “I will come to them in a way they cannot ignore. Instead of sending a messenger to tell them about me, I myself will come down and live among them. I will become a person like they are, someone they can see and hear and touch. I will be someone they can talk to and laugh with and love.” And so God did something that God should not have been able to do: God contained the majesty and glory and splendor of Godself in a human, in Jesus the Christ, and became Immanuel, which means “God with us.”

But with God suddenly so close to us, suddenly in our midst, we were afraid. Jesus and his words threatened us; they made us realize how God intended us to live, not as a people divided by money and power, not as a people who seek our own comfort and wealth, not as a people who hold God at arms length so that we can go on about our own lives, but as the people of God, living in love and solidarity with one another, seeking to ease the suffering of our neighbors and sacrificing our own desires for the good of friend and enemy alike. This was too much for us, and so we hastily hid behind the last barrier we could find to put between us and God: Death. We took Jesus and we crucified him, we killed him on a tree because he was too much a threat to our comfort and our privilege and our way of life. After centuries of ignoring and avoiding and forgetting God, on Good Friday, we outright rejected God.

But the story does not stop there. When the women went to the tomb to remember Jesus on that Sunday morning, they did not find Jesus where he was supposed to be. Instead they found messengers who told them that in order to remember Jesus, they had to look not in a tomb but in his words. They were not to remember Jesus by performing rituals or singing hymns or praying prayers, but by listening to his words. Jesus had foretold all of this. Jesus knew when he came that his road led to the cross. Jesus knew that all of this, the suffering, the crucifixion, the death, all of it had to happen; and Jesus did it anyway. Not even such horrible pain and suffering and shame was going to stand between God and God’s people. At the moment of Jesus’ death, the curtain of the Holy of Holies, the tiny room in the temple where God was, tore down the middle, proving that no curtain, no sin, no ignorance, not even death was going to be able to keep God from God’s people.

We come here as people coming to a graveside on an anniversary, expecting to find the deceased, wrapped in linen, lying peacefully. Instead we find a promise: we will not find the living among the dead. Instead of finding Jesus where we put him, we find that once again God has done something God should not have been able to do: the ultimate rejection and defeat of God by humanity has become God’s consummate victory over our power to separate ourselves from God. Once again, God has become Immanuel, God-with-us. That is why Jesus is not here. We will not find him in this tomb where we can perform our rituals and sing our songs and pray our prayers. Instead we will find Jesus where we do not expect him: on the road to Emmaus, in the locked upper room, even in this bread and wine.

In this world of pain and suffering, it is all to easy to see where Jesus is not, where God is not. We feel abandoned in our pain and isolated in our suffering. We sense God’s absence far more pointedly than we often know God’s presence. But here in this place, this empty tomb, and especially on this day, we remember that Jesus is Immanuel, Jesus is God-with-us. God has suffered with us, God has died with us, and God has risen from the dead to be with us, because not even death, neither ours nor God’s, can keep God from us.

Today as we celebrate Easter, we remember that when we experience the agony of losing a loved one, when our communities are torn apart by conflict and resentment, when we feel hopeless and abandoned, when we feel unloved or forgotten about, we can rest assured in the promise that nothing in heaven or hell can keep God from being with us. Even when we face death itself, we know that God has already torn through that dark veil once to come be present with us. We know that whatever suffering or pain or loss we might experience now, no matter how distant God might feel, Jesus himself has known that suffering and isolation. God has experienced our sorrows and suffers with us in our trials. More importantly, we know that even now God is charging toward us, refusing to leave us alone and broken. Christ is risen (he is risen indeed!) and he is Immanuel, God-with-us, for eternity.

The Jesus Club

Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Easter 3, Year B.
Texts: Acts 3.12-19; 1 John 3.1-7; Lk 24.36b-48

After Jesus died, his disciples locked themselves in a room apart where they felt they could be safe from a world which was very hostile towards them. This was the first official meeting of the “Jesus Club.” These eleven men had been hand-picked by Jesus to shake up the world, to help their teacher proclaim that in the kingdom of God, the last would be first and the first would be last, that the kingdom was like a mustard seed.

After their rabbi’s death, what these men needed most was consolation. They were understandably devastated, stricken with grief at Jesus’ death and depression at what must have seemed like the loss of the kingdom. This gave them consolation, a chance to grieve and to comfort one another; but can you imagine what history would record of the Jesus Club if this were the end of the story?

I can imagine that they would continue to meet on a regular basis to remember the “good old days,” the times when they went out with Jesus to preach and teach. They would share meals and probably go visit old friends like Mary and Martha, and they would probably even try to keep some of Jesus’ spirit alive by taking up food collections and going out to minister to the poor like they used to.

I suspect they would have continued to meet in that same room, unless they got some money together and bought a building of their own. I’m sure it’d be a very nice place to gather, with space for prayer and ample room to share meals. They might even gain a few members over time, people who had heard Jesus preach or who really just needed a place to go be with friends, but over time, as members moved or died, their numbers would continue to shrink until there was no one left.

Thankfully, that was not where the story ended up. Instead, during that first meeting of the Jesus Club, while they were gathered together in sorrow and fear of the outside world, Jesus came and stood among them. Jesus, the one whose loss they mourned and whom they missed so much came back to see them. At first, of course, they thought it was a hallucination, a vision brought on by grief, or even a ghost, but no, he had real flesh and bones like any of them, even an appetite for broiled fish.

And when he came to stand among them, the first thing he said was, “Peace be with you, don’t be afraid. Calm down, it’s me.” The second thing he said to them was to explain why everything had happened and that God had planned even for that when God sent him. The third thing he said, perhaps the most important, was, “You are witnesses of these things. You know the whole story now, and it’s a story that needs to get out. You need to proclaim to everyone that repentance brings forgiveness of sins.”

Proverbs 29:18 tells us that “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It was this appearance of Jesus which gave the disciples their vision, so that they would not perish. It was this appearance which began the transformation of this group from the Jesus Club to the Church. Easter is not just about the resurrection of Christ, it is also about Christ’s resurrection of God’s vision, a vision that could have been lost had his disciples remained locked in that room.

After Good Friday, they were hopeless and broken. In time, they would have ceased their grieving, but they could never have regained their sense of mission. It was at this, their weakest and most vulnerable point, that Christ rose from the dead and resurrected their calling, their motivation, their vision, and their mission: to preach the good news of the Kingdom of God, to proclaim to all nations repentance bringing about the forgiveness of sins.

In these days now, nearly 2000 years after Christ’s resurrection, the church often struggles with its identity. There are many who come to be a part of the Jesus Club, a social organization that involves food and fellowship and, once in a while, some community service. I’ve even heard people talk about paying their “dues” to the church, as if offering were a membership fee. Any congregation that is a Jesus Club will die. Just like the first Jesus Club, members will move away and die, and eventually there will be no one left, because there is no guiding principle: only a common interest in “the good old days” and in having a place to meet with friends on Sunday morning.

However, in any congregation which is truly Church, the members come to worship each weekend and find Christ standing in their midst, in the flesh and blood. Christ’s presence with us here, in the Word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, opens the scriptures to us and bestows upon us the responsibility to proclaim the gospel to all nations, starting from this town, right here. Christ reminds us that we are not called for our own good, but for the good of everyone else.

We come here not to be social or to bemoan the direction in which the world is headed; we come here to be fed with the bread of life, with God’s message and with Jesus’ body and blood, and to be sent out of this shut-up room. As Martin Luther says in his treatise on the Freedom of a Christian, A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, but is also a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. We are not here for us, we are here for them. We are here because they need us, they need Christ, and so we gather here for Christ to send us out to them.

Each and every one of us needs to look deep inside ourselves and ask why it is that we come to worship, or why we call ourselves Christian: is it because we enjoy the people and the fellowship? Is it out of a sense of obligation? Is it because we want to appear righteous before our friends and family? Or is it because we want God to empower us to change the world, to be the movers and shakers, led by Christ’s example? Is it because God has work for us to do which is as yet unfinished, and we need the strength of community to accomplish it? This question will help us determine whether we are gathered here as members of the Body of Christ or as members of a social organization.

But even if we are just members of the Jesus Club right now, even if we are locked away from the world in our little room by ourselves, we have this message from Jesus, which is both a promise and a warning: I will find you. I am coming to take you to myself, to make you my church. Locked doors cannot keep me out, death cannot stop me, and stone hearts cannot withstand my living presence. I will make you my church.

In a day and age when many churches are losing members and closing doors, it is easy to be afraid of what lies ahead and concern ourselves with how we might survive. That is exactly what the disciples did, exactly why they were locked away for fear of the people. If we allow that fear and uncertainty to fuel our mission, if we allow sustenance to become our chief goal, we become just another chapter of the Jesus Club, and our days are numbered. But, if we focus ourselves on Christ and on his mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God, no matter how many feathers might be ruffled or how many members might leave, the church will thrive because it will be fed and fueled by God’s mission, not our own. God does not want us to survive, but to live; as Christ himself said, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

As we celebrate Easter and Jesus’ nullification of death, we also remember that this power extends beyond our own deaths to the death of the church, a force which will never die so long as Christ is present in it and in us. Let us forever seek to be the Body of Christ and never a chapter of the Jesus Club. Amen.

Not Even Death…

Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Easter Morning, Year B
Texts: Acts 10.34-43; 1 Cor 15.1-11; John 20.1-18

It has been said that Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. This is because it was on Pentecost that the disciples received the Holy Spirit and began their public ministry, teaching and preaching about Jesus. It is the day on which the Church became alive and active.

Just as Pentecost is the Church’s birthday, Easter is its conception day. It is the events of Easter which define our ministry and our calling as Christians. We are an Easter people; today in not just a holiday for us, it is the very core of who we are. We see in the resurrection of Christ the powerful and amazing love which God has for us. We see that absolutely nothing can come between us and God, not even our own sin or disobedience to God, not shame of ourselves or embarrassment at God’s message before others, not even death can stand between God and God’s children. God is the raging mother grizzly who loves and protects us, her cubs, at all costs; nothing can withstand her power and determination to be with her children.

We see this because on Good Friday, Jesus’ disciples last experience with their teacher and lord was one of fear, betrayal, cowardice and desertion. They all fled when their teacher was arrested, and the last time Peter saw Jesus, he denied three times that he even knew him. When Jesus died and these disciples were robbed of their chance to be reconciled to him, they were broken. They were not only torn with sorrow, they were laden with regret and shame for what they had done.

It is in the midst of this that Jesus says “NO!—this is not the final word. This is not how I will leave you, alone, afraid and ashamed. I will not leave you helpless and hopeless; instead, I will go to your homes in Galilee ahead of you. Not even death can keep me from you.”

This is how determined God is not to give up on us. Like the psalmist writes, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed the grave, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there shall your hand lead me, and your right hand hold me fast.” (Psalm 139.7-10) Even after dying, God goes ahead of us to our homes to meet us. The resurrection is God’s way of saying, “What do I have to do to prove to you people that I love you? I will die for you a million times if that’s what it takes; but know this: I will rise from the dead a million and one because I will not leave you alone.”

It is because of this enormous love that God sent Jesus to us, and in spite of Jesus’ gospel of God’s acceptance, we denied God’s message and killed God’s messenger. Because God’s message for us was so radical, so frightening, and so subversive, we decided that we couldn’t let God run loose. We were afraid of God and of what God had to say, so we killed Jesus and sealed him up in stone, a place where we thought God could be safely contained, so as not to spoil plans. We needed a place to keep God where we could always know where God was.

We are not so different today. God still scares us with the radical and subversive gospel of Christ, with God’s claim of power over us and God’s all-inclusive love which extends to all people, including the ones we hate. And so, we have sought to lock Jesus up in THIS tomb, this building of stone, a place where we can keep God safely apart from us, where we can come visit Jesus on weekends and sometimes on Wednesdays.

But the end of the story is the same. When the women went to the tomb on Sunday morning, they found Christ gone; there was only a young man in white to tell them that he was risen. We find the same today. Christ’s body is not here! He’s not where we left him! Instead we come here to find a man in white loudly proclaiming that he is risen! Christ isn’t in this building, he’s out there, in the streets, in the hospitals, the taverns, the alleys and the homes. You’ve come here looking for someone who isn’t here. He’s gone ahead of you to your communities and your homes.

We have come here looking for his corpse, but we have found something better: we have found God and Christ present with us in the Eucharist. We have a place set for us at the Lord’s table where we can receive both forgiveness of our sins and strength for the work ahead. On this day in which we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, we come here to share a meal with him; we eat from his body and drink of his blood.

When we partake of this meal, something wonderful happens. Jesus’ radical inclusion, his subversive gospel, his dangerous love, they all become a part of us. They bond to our molecules and become the materials that build our cells. They give us both physical and spiritual nourishment and become a part of who we are in body and soul.

In this meal God re-creates us as Easter people. We come here as Good Friday people, lost and confused, often misguided, looking for Jesus’ corpse, but instead we find his body and blood and this assignment, “Go ye therefore to all nations, teaching them and baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

As we go out, we do so in confidence, with faith strengthened by God’s love and grace in this meal, certain that we can face whatever lies out there waiting for us as we go out to meet Jesus. We have this trust and this certainty because we have seen today that God is our mother grizzly bear, and that there is nothing out there which can separate us from her. Shame, violence, disobedience, and death all fall flat before the charge of the mother to her cubs. Because of this, we live and love fearlessly in Jesus’ name. Amen.