“Can we become a community that has the courage of Jesus? Can we be a community where even when we have wounded each other, we stick together and give each other something to eat?”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, April 15, 2018.
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Jesus stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
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The most important part of any sermon for me is prayer. And my prayer centers on one question:
“God, what word do you have for your people?”
I hold in my mind and heart the community of All Saints Church, and all that is happening in our lives and in the world and I pray that question and then listen as deeply as I can. And I do it for at least two reasons.
First, because I have no shortage of things that I would like to say, and asking God for what word she has for the community is a way to at least try to ground what I say in a wisdom that is far greater than my own.
Second, because this community is incredibly and wonderfully diverse, and anything I say as a preacher is going to intersect and impact each of you differently and in a way I can’t predict because each of you bring different stories and circumstances into this place. Which is why there is a different prayer I pray silently before I begin to speak each Sunday and that is simply:
“God … use this.”
Now usually, when I pray: “God, what Word do you have for your people this week?” something emerges. And from that point, my task is just to try to be as faithful to that Word as I possibly can. But this week was different. This week I prayed and I listened and it was just crickets. This week, I realized what was emerging was less a word, less of something definite, and more of a wondering. A wondering that wasn’t lending itself to a clear word. A wondering that was touching my heart so much that I wanted to share it with you. A wondering about Jesus that I have no idea whether it was factually true and frankly don’t care, but one that led me to a wondering about us. And whether it’s the word God would have for us this morning, that’s the wondering that I have.
Luke says: “While the disciples were telling how they had seen Jesus rise from the dead, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”
Now here is my wondering.
What was that like for Jesus?
And when I wonder that, my heart breaks. And my heart longs.
I read this text and I remember the story of how we got to this point. The disciples abandoned Jesus. Peter denied Jesus. In Luke’s Gospel, even the most faithful of them – the women and a few others – only watched the crucifixion from a distance.
Jesus had been rejected and wounded – not just by Herod and Pilate and the crowd – but by the people whom he had loved and who had loved him the most. And now he was standing among them.
What was that like for Jesus?
Was Jesus afraid? Because I think I would be. I think I would be afraid that I would be rejected again. That these people who had literally left me to die once already wouldn’t welcome me back, wouldn’t be so happy to see me. The wounds Jesus had weren’t just on his body, they had to be on his heart. I think about the love and courage it takes when someone has hurt me to go back to that person, and especially to go back in love. I think of all the times I don’t have that courage.
And yet that’s exactly what Jesus did. And the disciples were afraid, they were startled and terrified. And what was that like for Jesus? To have his love met with fear.
Did the disciples try to explain themselves? Did they get defensive and try to justify what they did and didn’t do? That certainly would have been human. That might have been what I would have tried to do.
What was it like for Jesus?
What was it like for them?
If I press pause at this moment, my heart breaks and my heart longs. My heart breaks because in that moment there is so much pain. There is so much fear. It is so incredibly raw.
My heart breaks because I know what it’s like. Maybe I don’t know what it was like for Jesus, but I know what it’s like for me. I know what it’s like to have been hurt by somebody, and I know what it’s like to have hurt somebody. I know what it’s like to have my love met with fear, and I know what it’s like to have someone else love me so much it’s scary. And then I wonder again. I wonder if you know what it’s like, too. My hunch is that you do. I don’t think it’s just me. It seems like a pretty human feeling. And so my heart breaks because I imagine that a lot of us are carrying a lot of this around all the time. We carry it around silently. The pain. The fear. The love.
My heart breaks and my heart longs.
My heart longs because I want so badly for there to be healing of that pain. I want so badly for all of them – Jesus and the disciples – and for all of us — to be able to get past the fear and be in that space in love together. I long for it because in my experience when that happens it is absolutely extraordinary. I long for it because my experience is that usually doesn’t happen. My experience is that the pain is usually too much and the fear is usually too great. My experience is that we tend to lash out at one another and shrink back from one another instead of leaning in to one another.
And then we press play on this scene and Jesus does two things that make my heart weep and dance.
The first thing Jesus does is show his friends his wounds. The simplest act of a child and a parent. Show me where it hurts. What an incredibly courageous thing to do. Offering our wounds is so hard because we cannot offer them without risking being wounded again in our most vulnerable places, and yet showing our wounds, offering our wounds is the only way healing ever happens. And Jesus says not only see my wounds but touch them. Feel them. Feel what it is to be me.
Jesus showed his friends his wounds. And then … then… he asked them for something to eat.
Jesus showed his friends his wounds and then he invited them to share a meal together. Sharing a meal is the mortar that cements a community together. When Jesus was being accused, a chief accusation was who he ate with “you ate with tax collectors and sinners.” That’s because who we eat with, who we share meals with, those are our people. It’s why family dinners of all kinds are so important.
Jesus showed his friends his wounds, and then he invited them to share a meal together.
Jesus says not only see my wounds, but touch them. Feel them. Feel what it is to be me. And let’s be a community where this is what we do. Let’s be a community where we no longer hide ourselves but show ourselves. Let’s be a community where even when we have wounded each other, especially when we have wounded each other, we stick together. We say: “You got anything to eat?”
And that’s where this wondering about Jesus leads me to a wondering about us.
Can we be that community, too?
Can we – in our families, in our circles of friends, in this city, in this church — be a community that has the courage of Jesus? That recognizes that like any community – like every community we’ve probably ever been involved in — despite our best efforts we wound one another, in fact we wound one another deeply.
Can we be willing to be unlike nearly every other community and show each other our wounds, and when we are shown them to react not out of fear and defensiveness but compassion? Can we show each other where it hurts.? Invite each other to feel what we feel – no matter how imperfect the invitation might be or the feeling might feel? Can we even seek out the knowledge of the woundedness of each other and ways we might be a part of one another’s healing?
Can we be a community that faced with the wounds we have inflicted on each other as every community does, faced with the reality of our pain and our need of healing, as every one of us has, continually says to each other “you got anything to eat.” Can we as All Saints Church be a community that not only says “whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith you are welcome to come to Christ’s table to receive the gifts of bread and wine made holy” but lives that out not only at this table but at countless others in our homes, in cafes and restaurants, on hillsides and in parks and in shelters and in prisons.
Jesus stood among the disciples and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
He showed them his hands and his feet.
He said, “Got anything to eat?”
I wonder what was that like for Jesus?
I wonder what was that like for the disciples?
I wonder what that is like for us?
Amen.
