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Hebrew Scripture       Isaiah 52:7-9

7 How beautiful upon the mountains     

are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news,     

who announces salvation,     

who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” 

8 Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices;     

together they shout for joy, for in plain sight they see     

the return of the Lord to Zion. 

9 Break forth; shout together for joy,     

you ruins of Jerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people;     

he has redeemed Jerusalem.

Greek Scripture          Luke 24:36b-48

36 … Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 37 They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38 He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41 Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering, and he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate in their presence.

44 Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 

Alison Boden

Union Congregational Church of Hancock

August 11, 2024

Luke 24:36b-48

It Starts with Peace

Let’s travel in our minds back to the days just following the resurrection of Jesus.  The friends are huddled together, they are in a room with a bolted shut door, bolted windows, it is very dim.  No candles are lit.  They try not to make a sound in the darkness.  They are terrified.  They were on the wrong side – the losing side – of history, apparently.  They were the closest associates of the leader of an amazing new movement and they’d staked everything in their lives to do that.  He was tortured and executed like a common criminal; everything about what they’d stood for with him was mocked and crushed.  The empire gets the last laugh again.  And it gets its revenge.  Everyone wants to find these friends and kill them too.

And if that’s not enough to cause terror, there is a report from friends in Emmaus that they actually saw Jesus alive.  Crazy.  Or NOT crazy?  They really believe it.  They say it was indisputably HIM.  He told them things only he could know.  He opened the scriptures to them in ways that only he could.  They have no doubt that they were in his presence.  And then he vanished, leaving them with hearts on fire.  They’re not afraid anymore.  They are proclaiming what they believe with a passion that will not stop.  But the hopes and the curiosity of the friends in this darkened room are eclipsed by their fear.  They are going to need their own proof.

So Jesus comes to THEM.  While the friends are talking about it, he just appears.  He says, “Peace be with you,” and they are terrified.  Those words were a common greeting in that place and time, and even today; you see a friend or stranger and say “Shalom,” or “Aloha.”  But in Jesus’s usage, and particularly in Luke’s gospel, the word “peace” also connotes “salvation.”  The friends are so agitated not simply because someone magically appeared in their hideaway and said, “Hi,” but because he said “Peace.”  They are terrified because this might BE Jesus.  So, so patiently does he help them through their terror.  First he helps them accept that he is not a ghost – he shows them his feet and hands, and they have real bones in them (folks then were sure that ghosts don’t have bones), his feet touch the floor (ghosts float, of course), and the ultimate test – they bring him real food and he eats it (because we all know that ghosts can’t eat).  Now that they are better able to listen to him, first, he stills their fears, then he opens their minds.

We could use both of those things too, couldn’t we?  The stilling of our fears and the opening of our minds.  We, like the first friends of Jesus, have come through the crucifixion and resurrection, even if it was 2,000 years ago. WE are thus Easter people, but really critical things hold us back from being Christ’s witnesses to this new reality of the universe.  It is about OUR fears, and about our ignorance and unbelief.  So let us understand Christ to be joining US today.  He met those disciples exactly where they were – physically, emotionally, spiritually.  He offers US the very same presence.

What do WE fear, and what can Jesus say to us about those fears?  There are our very human fears, first.  We fear death.  We learned in Sunday School that after death is a space of total blessing but where’s the proof?  And we don’t want to let go of this brief, brief life on this earth.  We tell ourselves to appreciate every second of every day but we lose so much of our conscious moments to worry, to being pissed off, to being dissatisfied, to being afraid.  A now departed friend of mine used to talk about the unholy trinity as we age:  envy, bitterness, and regrets.  And we worry that our lives may end so suddenly.  Over.  For myself, I worry less about my own death than of getting a phone call or knock that begins, “There’s been an accident,” and I lose someone I love with all my heart.  We have other fears – of vulnerability, vulnerability to financial challenges or to violence, vulnerability to rejection, vulnerability to failures on many levels, and we live compromised lives to try to stay safe from it all.  We do not risk.  Our fear overcomes our hope, and our joy.

We have spiritual fears too – will I look like an idiot to the world around me if I boldly proclaim my belief in this crazy story of resurrection?  Will I be considered anti-intellectual?  Especially in the kind of academic settings I’ve called home for 33 years there are followers of many faiths who practice their beliefs quietly.  Another fear that people tell me about is, what if I make real changes to my life because of my faith?  What if I let it redirect everything I thought I was going to do?  What if it reorients everything I have valued?  Am I ready to get rid of most of my possessions?  And, do I have the guts to buck every social convention around me?  I haven’t forgotten a student who graduated from my university a few years ago, who I always saw wearing the same brown sweater.  I applied my own lens to his life and decided that it was simply his favorite, or maybe he had financial challenges that restricted his ability to purchase clothing.  Then I learned that he was from a quite privileged background, but that as an item of faith (in his case, Buddhism) he had decided to give away anything he didn’t really need.  He could only wear one sweater at a time, so he had one.  He still lives this way today, with as much simplicity as possible, and with as few THINGS as possible, only what he needs.  I know that many of us avoid considering options like this for ourselves because we FEAR that we might actually make deep changes to the way we live.  There is a kind of safety in sticking with the majority of people in the choices that we make, and to stockpiling assets.

Jesus tells his friends in every age, fear not.  Painful things WILL happen, that is unavoidable when living in this world.  Keep living, the life that truly is life.  Whatever happens, he says, I AM, and I’m holding you.  Jesus never told us that life would be easy, only that we are blessed to be always in the unending arms of God’s love, no matter what becomes or befalls us.  Our faith doesn’t save us from suffering but it reminds us of its context – in this world, that we are the inheritors of the gospel of salvation and putting it into practice in our humble lives every day, and in the next life, that we live in light perpetual, immersed in a pool of holy love that defies our human imagination.  

The other thing that Jesus does for his shattered, hiding friends is to open their minds.  They and we are human, so yes – we live in ignorance and in unbelief.  We think, “If Jesus showed up right here and now and revealed the truth of the scriptures to me I’d get over my ignorance and unbelief really fast.”  True.  What we do have are the scriptures themselves, and the good teachers who have gone before us.  For each of us is the responsibility to work on whatever actually limits our minds, be it narcissism, fear, avoidance, smallness of imagination, doubt, self-doubt and lack of self-esteem.  So many things.  I think smallness of imagination is my greatest obstacle.  I don’t REALLY GET the enormity of salvation, the profundity of God’s love, the depths of holiness in every moment.  I recently had the privilege of being at the bedside of a dying person and was reminded that so many of us, as we approach the end of this life, finally start to really GET it.  But I want my mind to open now, not then.  As one pastor has put it, “The power of the resurrection is the power to plant the seeds of transformation.”  A mind transformed, a life transformed, a death transformed, eventually – I want all of these things, but if I’m being honest I fear them too.

So many things to consider from Jesus’s teachings for us today.  How do we let the Good News we’ve heard most or all of our lives unlock our minds so that we might truly live?  How do we recognize the locked doors we are living behind?  Many of them may appear to us to be the blessings of structure and security in the form of certainties and plans.  Locked doors, as the early friends of Jesus found out, don’t bring us peace OR security, and they actually exacerbate our fears.  They create an echo chamber for them and amplify them.  Peace and security MAY be (I don’t know) the same thing in terms of international relations; peace and security are not the same thing in terms of daily life, and certainly not the life of faith.

Jesus showed up and he said “Peace.”  It starts with peace.  The foundation is peace.  WE hunger for peace, the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that persists no matter what hard things happen in our lives and in our deaths, the peace that connotes salvation.  Perhaps the key to letting our faith vanquish our fears and ignorance is, in all simplicity, to center our hearts on that peace which is our salvation.

Amen.