Sermon: "What's for lunch?"
You gotta love
the story.
The disciples are
huddled behind locked doors in Jerusalem, trying to make sense of what’s
happening around them. It’s the third
day after the death of Jesus and they are in shock and grief. Some of the women have told them Jesus’ tomb
is now empty and that some angels told them Jesus is alive. Two disciples who left earlier that day for
Emmaus have come back and say they met Jesus along the way, and knew him in the
breaking of bread.
Really!!??
It’s more than
they can take in and understand.
Resurrection is not familiar territory.
Death and grief we know and can handle, but resurrection and new life
seem to draw us beyond this world into some other realm.
Then Jesus
himself appears among them, and they’re really undone and afraid. Is it a ghost – the spirit of Jesus come back
from the other side to haunt them for their failure to follow him to the
end? Or is this appearance of the apparently
back-from-the-dead messiah maybe something even more – maybe the absolute melting
of the world as we know it, the final breaking down of this world to make way
for the kingdom of God – a prospect both comforting and terrifying for
imperfect, all-too-human beings.
Jesus looks at
them terrified and silent, sees and knows what they are thinking and feeling,
and says two things. First, he says, “Peace! God’s peace, be with you.” And then he says, “Do you have anything for
lunch?”
Well – not really
lunch. According to the story it’s already
night. So it’s a late supper or an
evening snack that Jesus is looking for.
They have some broiled fish and they share it with him.
It was the early
church’s way of saying that resurrection is of body and spirit, not just
spirit. Also, bread and fish was probably
the first memorial meal the early Christians celebrated, and only later changed
it to bread and wine. It was what they
always ate with Jesus when he was with them.
Plus it was what he used – just a few loaves and fishes, to feed
thousands on the hillside. It made sense
that bread and fish were special.
But really: “Do
you have anything for lunch?”
The resurrection
of Jesus is about ordinary life as we live it every day in this world. It’s not just about life after death. It’s about the healing and rebuilding of life
before death, in the midst of death, against the powers of death in this
world. It’s about life in this world
coming to be the way it would be if Jesus were here, because Jesus is
here.
You know I like
to bring The Spectator into the pulpit from time to time. Karl Barth said we should preach and live the
Christian life with the Bible in one hand and the daily paper in the
other. Beyond that, it’s fun to see if
what the Bible tells us about life actually jibes with what we see every day. It’s an act of faith – not faith in The Spec,
but faith in God – that what we believe about life and the emergence of new
life in the world because of God, is actually borne out in the news of the day.
So … witness to
the risen Jesus in The Spec? On Easter
weekend they ran a front-page story about the Christian celebration of Easter,
with an eye-catching picture of the cross-topped roofline of the convent of the
Sisters of St. Joseph.
That’s not what I
mean, though.
I mean something
like the story last Thursday about a young man who spent 10 or 15 years of his
life trafficking cocaine and Oxycintin, spending time in and out of jail, who
now has moved back to help his mom run the family farm, and whose life and
spirit are being turned around by giving himself to caring for the land and the
animals. Is that a story of
resurrection? Of what Jesus made happen
for people in Galilee, still happening?
With that story
in mind, I brought along Friday’s paper.
On the front page, “Community: crowd lifts vehicle off pinned
teen.” What do you think? Might that be a story of unexpected,
spontaneous life-saving community equal to the time when four people got
together to cut a hole in a roof of a house to lower a lame man down to Jesus
for healing?
Farther on
there’s a story about a used-bookstore owner overwhelmed by dozens of people
from the neighbourhood – aged 6 to 72,who simply showed up to help her pack her
inventory of 13,000 books into boxes so she – and they, could then paint and
refurbish her store.
“Brandon Clark
still not awake after gunshot surgery” isn’t a story yet of the healing people
want, but it’s one of people coming together across all kinds of lines and
divisions to offer support and care for someone in distress.
A few pages on, a
story about a group of men at a half-way house for federal offenders and a
McMaster University student working on a project to chronicle the kinds of hope
that helps turn around the lives of men once they leave prison. Another about a young man named Randy Kay –
whose wedding I officiated at maybe 20 years ago, who for several years has
been organizing tree-planting projects in some of the poorer and bleaker parts
of the city. Another about the Mayor and
City Council wanting to maintain the practice of prayer or some sort of spiritual
focusing before Council meetings, regardless of what the Supreme Court says
about it. An op ed peace reprinted from
The Miami Herald supporting the new openness between the United States and Cuba. And a story about a Seattle CEO cutting his
own $1 million salary to $70,000, to help finance the raising of all salaries
in the company to the same level of $70,000 over the next three years.
I don’t
know. Are those stories of the kinds of
things Jesus would be making to happen if he were here today? If he were walking through our time as he
walked through Galilee? Are those
stories a witness to the resurrection – of Jesus not being defeated, and still
gathering communities of new life that in the midst of all the bad news still help
to shape and re-shape the world according to God’s good will.
Which brings us
to the second reading. I almost didn’t
include it in our worship. In the shadow
of the Holocaust, Peter’s speech to the leaders and people of Jerusalem sounds
like a first recorded Christian judgement of the Jews, and the beginning of two
thousand years of anti-semitic rhetoric.
But that’s not
what Peter’s speech is really about.
What’s happened is that having come to know the risen Jesus, the
disciples start to live in his spirit and strength. They move out from their hidden and
fear-filled room to take the life and spirit of Jesus and his trust in God’s kingdom
to the streets. Peter, on his way in to
the Temple one day, is met by a lame man who asks for help and in response,
Peter reaches out and helps him be healed.
People start thinking
Peter is the new wonder-worker in town.
But Peter knows he’s no celebrity miracle-man. He’s only too aware of how only a few weeks
before he was among those who denied even knowing Jesus, and others know it too. Before that it was Peter who tried to remake
Jesus into a different kind of messiah than he was, and was rebuked by Jesus as
a voice of Satan. Peter knows he is no
different and no better than anyone else – no less complicit in Jesus’ death
than those who arrested him, made accusations against him, and had him put to
death.
So what Peter is
saying to the leaders and people of Jerusalem – and to us, is that it’s
ordinary, sinful, imperfect people like him and like them and like us – who
often don’t get it right, who don’t act as followers of Jesus at critical
moments, who even act against God’s ways and God’s good will at times in their
relations, to whom God reaches out with forgiveness and healing, and invites to
be the agents and vehicles of God’s kingdom in the world. That’s how Jesus worked in Galilee, and it’
still the way it’s done – because he is
risen and still living and moving in the world that God loves.
Which brings me
to one last story in Friday’s Spec: “Hamilton’s amazing Women of
Distinction.” It’s about eleven women
honoured by the YWCA Hamilton for their contributions to the community. It’s good they’re honoured. They deserve it, and we need to know such
people still exist.
But it’s not just
those eleven, is it?
The people of
distinction in our community are also seated right here in this sanctuary. The wall of distinction is the church family bulletin
board in the Lower Hall and the framed picture there of all the families in our
church directory – which needs to be up-dated, by the way. Because what the resurrection of Jesus is
about, is that ordinary people like you and me are still being touched, healed
and taught by him, as people were in Galilee, and still being stirred in our
spirit and sent out by him, as they were, to help love, heal, forgive, feed,
care for, and re-shape the world around us in his name.
You just gotta
love the story. Resurrection sounds like
unfamiliar territory. But really it’s
about the ordinary landscape of all our lives, lived in openness to the risen
Jesus.
“Do you have
anything for lunch?” It’s about ordinary
life being lived by ordinary people in such a way that life in this world comes
to be the way it would be if Jesus were here, because Jesus is
here among us.
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