Preaching Notes

Preaching Notes

Easter 3.B.2015

Luke 24:36b-48

If this scripture reading sounds familiar it may be because it is remarkably similar to a reading from John that was the Gospel lectionary reading from last week.

John wrote that on in the evening of the day that Jesus’ body was discovered to be missing from his tomb, Easter day, the disciples were hiding out behind locked doors for fear that they might be the next target on the hit list of the authorities who had called for the crucifixion of Jesus.So they had gathered together, maybe thinking there was safety in numbers, and Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” He breathed the Holy Spirit on them and told them that they had the power to forgive others in the name of God.

Thomas apparently wasn’t present at this first appearance, so when the disciples reported to him that they had seen the Lord, he responded that unless he saw the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands and put his hand in his side, he would not believe it.So according to John, about a week later the disciples were back at the same house and this time Thomas was there. Once again Jesus came and stood among them and greeted them with “Peace be with you.” He then invited Thomas to touch the wounds in his hands and his side, and to believe in him.

John’s gospel also reports that Jesus appeared to several of the disciples, including Peter and Thomas, on the shore by the sea of Tiberius, and that in that meeting the disciples at first didn’t recognize him. They were out fishing near the shore and Jesus asked them if they were having any luck catching fish, which they weren’t, so he told them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat.

They did this, and they caught a whole bunch of fish. One of the disciples then realized that it was the Lord who had given them this advice, and so they quickly returned to the shore. They lit a fire and cooked some of the fish they’d caught and ate it along with bread for breakfast. John says that the disciples didn’t ask straight out who the man was, but they knew it was Jesus. This was the third time, according to John, that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he had risen.

So in Luke we have this story that contains some details that are remarkably similar to those recorded in John’s gospel. In both accounts Jesus came and “stood among them” and said the words, “Peace be with you.” In both accounts Jesus showed them his hands and feet or his hands and side and invited someone to touch him. In both accounts Jesus asked if there was anything to eat, and then ate fish. In both accounts Jesus commissioned the disciples and breathed the Holy Spirit into them or promised that the Holy Spirit would be coming to them.

So the thing that I’ve been thinking about are these words spoken repeatedly by the risen Lord Jesus to his disciples in the days following the crucifixion and resurrection: “Peace be with you.” Luke, which scholars believe was written earlier than John, reports that Jesus spoke these words, and in John’s account he is recorded as having spoken those words more than once.

Peace be with you. Jesus is there, miraculously alive, in the flesh, with the disciples, and of all the things in the world he might say to them at this crucial moment, the words he chooses are “Peace be with you.”Words of peace, spoken to a group of people who are hiding behind locked doors, in fear for their very lives, and who are clearly feeling no sense of peace.

The lives of these disciples have just been shattered: their Lord, whom they gave up everything up to follow for three years, has been crucified by the Roman government. Everybody in the community knows that they were his associates, and so they are terrified that Pontius Pilate is going to give an order that they also be arrested and tried, found guilty, and hung on a cross to die.

In addition to their fear, they are also reeling from grief over the death of their beloved teacher and friend, Jesus. They have lost everything they had and now their lives are in danger. These guys are not feeling at peace; not even close.

What is peace? My American Heritage Dictionary defines it in a couple of ways: the absence of war or other hostilities; an agreement or a treaty to end hostilities; freedom from quarrels and disagreement; public security and order; inner contentment, serenity.

These guys aren’t feeling peace by any of these definitions. They are hiding behind locked doors because of the hostility of the Jewish and Roman authorities towards them. And they don’t have any peace within their own hearts because they know that they betrayed Jesus by abandoning him, by allowing him to take the fall for everybody, and they didn’t do a thing to stop it.

So into this situation walks Jesus and he says, “Peace be with you.”

Is it simply a customary greeting, much like you or I might greet each other today by saying “hello”? Is it a request? Is it a commission? Is it an order? Is it a plea?

And does Jesus really expect these men to have peace? How can the disciples ever be at peace again after what has happened? These are the questions that I’ve been wresting with, this calling upon the disciples, and, indeed, upon all of us. Peace be with you.

Because, of course,this story isn’t just about the disciples. It is also about you and me. How do we get back to a place of peace after things have go wrong in our lives? How do we find peace after our world is shattered? Can someone just say to us, “Peace be with you,” and make itso? Not usually, at least not in my experience.

We human beings—unfortunately, we are just not naturally creatures of peace. Whether we attribute our hunger for violence and betrayal and corruption to original sin, or to irresistible selfishness, or to the power of the superego, the fact of the matter is, we have to struggle mightily to live in peace with one another.

We don’t just betray each other or fail to take care of each other. It’s worse than that. We refuse to forgive each other. Instead, we choose to hurt and kill each other, and we go to war with one another, and then we try to justify those actions.

We do these things and then we make excuses for ourselves. We say we did it because we couldn’t help it, or because that person deserved it. We refuse to take responsibility and own up to our mistakes. We look for someone else to blame so we don’t have to feel guilty. We refuse to reconcile, to love our enemies. No wonder we don’t feel any peace!

I think about the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived during a time in Israel’s history when the people of Judah had committed the ultimate betrayal: they had turned away from God and begun worshiping false idols. So God called Jeremiah to go and deliver a message to the people: turn back to God, or suffer the consequences. But the people didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to face their sinful ways. They made excuses. They blamed others. They refused to take responsibility for their actions.

So Jeremiah, speaking for God, put it as plainly as he could. He told them what they had done and he told them what was going to happen as a result.

For from the least to the greatest ofthem, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord (Jeremiah 6:13-15, NRSV).

From the time back as far as Jeremiah, to the time of Jesus appearing to his disciples, right up until our time today, we hear the words “Peace be with you” and we cannot abide them. We simply cannot.Instead of working with all our might towards being at peace, towards living as people of peace, we hold on to our anger. We cling to our grudges. We refuse to forgive each other. We speak unkind words and spread false rumors. We live in fear and mistrust. We say “peace, peace,” and we preach “peace, peace,” but there is no peace.

How do we get there? How do we let go of the past and allow the peace of Christ to enter into our hearts and truly give us peace?

I know it is not easy. I know that it takes more than four simple words for folks to begin to really heal the wounds and to finally move forward from the grief, the anger, the pain, the fear, and the guilt. But still, don’t we as pastors want that for our congregations? Don’t we pray that for them? Just as much as Jesus surely wanted that for his frightened, hurting, feeling-a-little-guilty disciples to be able to find some peace, don’t we want that for the people we serve?

In my mind, there is only one way. Wehave to accept the grace that has been offered to usthrough Christ Jesus. Wehave to accept that God loves us just as we are, and know that Christ has already forgiven us. We have to believe that he is risen, and we have to know that his words to his disciples are also his words to us:

Peace be with you.

We have to accept his offer of peace and let it fill our hearts with the Holy Spirit, that we might, in turn, forgive others, and help enable healing. Can you help the people in your congregation to do that? Can you invite them to lay their burdens downat the foot of the cross and really believe that Jesus loves them? Can you convince them that he is there, risen, standing right in their midst and saying tothem, “Peace be with you?”

Acts 3:12-19

As Barbara Brown Taylor notes in her article on this text in Feasting on the Word, if you preach on this passage, what you will be doing is preaching a sermon about a sermon, because this text is a portion of the second sermon that Peter preaches in the book of Acts.

Peter’s first two preaching opportunities emerged out of transformational events. His first sermon followed the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples gathered in Jerusalem for the day of Pentecost. The people who witnessed that event were completely mesmerized by the powerof God they saw displayed. They wanted to see more! And so Peter stood up and interpretedwhat they had just experienced by pointing them to the story of God’s power and love revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Many people who heard Peter’s sermon were converted and invited to repent of their sins and be baptized, and the Christian church was born.

The next thing to happen is Peter and John go up to the temple to pray the afternoon liturgy. On their way they pass by a lame beggar who works every day in front of the entrance to the temple. This man asks Peter and John for a few coins. Peter says he has no money to give the man, but he can offer healing in the name of Jesus Christ. Peter then reaches out his hand and orders the man to get up and walk, which he does. The man’s newly healed feet carry him straight into the temple, where people see that the power of God has miraculously cured this well-known beggar, and once again they are astonished and want more.

Peter interprets the experience for them by pointing out that the power they have witnessed does not come from him, but from what God has revealed in Jesus Christ.Without mincing words he calls out the crowd for rejecting Jesus and allowing him to be crucified. He then invites the people to repent of their sins and join with him in following Jesus, the promised Messiah.Two things happen as a result of Peter’s sermon. First, he and John are arrested and put on trial for their teaching; and second, about five thousand people are converted to the faith.

The first converts to Christianity came to the faith as a result of witnessing something powerful beyond comprehension, which was then interpreted by a preacher in light of the power of God shown in Jesus Christ. Witnessing this power and then hearing the Good News proclaimed caused them to want to repent of their sins and be born anew into the body of Christ.

We would do well to follow this pattern in our own preaching. Maybe we think we can’t do what Peter did, because there are no miracles of the magnitude we see in Scripture: no flames of fire appearing on peoples’ heads and no lame beggars being miraculously healed on a public street. But I would submit that we are wrong when we think there are no miracles of this magnitude in our world today.

Miracles are all around us. All we have to do is open our eyes to see the miracles of each and every day and name them as such.

• Does it not fill us with wonder and astonishment that every morning the sun rises and every evening the sun sets?
• Are we not in awe of the way each spring the trees and the grass and the flowers all come back to life, each fall they turn glorious colors and die, and then after a long winter the cycle repeats itself, year after year?
• It is not amazing to look at the perfectly formed fingers and toes on a newborn baby, or to wonder at the way our own bodies have been made and the things they can do?
• Is life itself not a miracle?

My goodness! Miracles abound! The problem is we just don’t see everything around us a miraculous. We take our bodies for granted. We take the wonders of modern technology and medicine for granted. We consider all of these to be ordinary things, these incredible wonders which people born only a hundred years ago, or people born in less prosperous lands, would consider nothing short of miraculous.

Life itself is a miracle worth not just recognizing, but celebrating. Do you not find it absolutely astonishing? When you consider the manifold works of God, are you not inspired by the glory of creation and moved to want to be a good steward of this earth? Are you not struck in your very heart by the sins you have committed in failing to care for it and sustain it for generations yet to come? Do these things not cause you to repent and beg for mercy?

Let us open our eyes to the world around us and be astonished! Let us see in the miracle of life itself plenty of reason to believe in God, and to follow Jesus and be his disciples seeking transformation of the whole world. Let us give God the glory and offer our lives in thanks and praise.

1 John 3:1-7

One of the things that I used to love to do to my children, when they asked me why I wouldn’t allow them to do something that one of their friends was allowed to do, was invoke the phrase that I learned from my mother and my father, who probably learned it from their mother and father. It was the phrase that they spoke as a form of torture throughout my childhood. It was the phrase that every child dreads hearing from his or her parents. And that phrase is, of course, “I don’t care how the Smith’s do it. You are not a Smith. You are a Chesser. And you have to do what the Chesser’s do.”

And while technicallymy sons did not carry the Chesser name, they knew exactly what I meant. They knew that they were members of the Chesser clan. It was their heritage. It was their identity. It was who they were.

That’s what we do, isn’t it? We identify ourselvesby our family name, which points to a family characteristic, a family lifestyle, a family identity that defines who we are, what we do, and what choices we make.

Likewise, Christians can be recognized by our family name. The name “Christian” is, after all, a name that points to a defining lifestyle with recognizable family characteristics. We claim this identity at our baptism, and we practice and develop this identity throughout our lives.

What characteristic defines the identity of a person who takes the family name
“Christian?” According to First John, the defining characteristic is love. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (I John 3:1, NRSV).

How do you know people are members of the Christian family? You know them by the way they love the Lord God with all their strengths and souls and hearts and minds and their neighbors as themselves.