Believe With Our Bodies

Luke 24:36-48

Peace be with you.

...

 

We know (mostly) how to respond to that greeting, since every Sunday we say this – me to you as a body, and to each other individually:

“Peace be with you”

“And also with you”

Our response is usually words, and also often gestures. We shake hands, often. Wave, or make “V” shaped peace signs with our fingers, occasionally embrace – similar to other ways we might greet friends.

 

After years of Episcopal worship experience, these responses become almost automatic for many of us

(you might even start hearing yourself respond that way outside of church: I know I react automatically when a friend says "May the Force be with you")

But I wonder how automatic it would be for us if you or I were greeted that way by a ghost – a person upending all you know about reality; a phenomenon you know can’t be real.  A good friend, recently dead, just appearing, like magic, in front of you.

 

It’s about as big a shock as you’ve ever had or imagined.

Do you respond?

Do you shake hands?

 

Jesus wants us to shake hands.

More than that, to touch flesh and bone to flesh and bone, to respond with our muscles and the sensitive cells and nerves of our skin. To respond with all our senses. To feel – see, touch – the reality of the impossible. Touch the miracle of the physical body.

 

That’s why Jesus shows up at all among that group of the earliest disciples trying to come to grips with Easter – at least according to the way Luke tells it. Most of this story we read this morning is about the assurance of physicality – the real, flesh-and-bone reality of Jesus, normal to our senses.

 

Touch me. See me. Feed me.

 

This piece of broiled fish that Jesus eats is one of my hands-down favorite morsels in the gospel stories – the banal practicality of “got anything to eat?” and carefully practical, physical description: He took it (his hands can hold things!) and ate it (like a normal person, with bites and chewing and swallowing, not magic vanishing) in their presence (no mystery!).

 

The only reason to tell that as part of a resurrection story, a Jesus story, is so that those first stunned and uncertain disciples, and those who heard their story, down to you and me, can be absolutely assured that Jesus is physically alive. Real; not a spirit, not a ghost, not a figment of imagination or a supernatural phenomenon. Real – physical – death turns into real, physical life.

 

In the story, that fish-eating, hand-to-hand assurance of physicality moves those first rattled and shaken disciples from terror to joy, from an inability to respond to an openness to understanding. The physicality of God’s presence matters, makes faith possible in that moment.

And it matters theologically, too.

Luke wants you and me, reading his story of this revelation, to recognize that the physical, touchable, chewing and swallowing body of Jesus means that flesh – all flesh, our flesh – is redeemed and renewed in Jesus’ resurrection just as much as our spirits and hearts might be.

This complex, messy, touchable flesh and bone is fundamentally good, holy, true – and is the place where we deeply encounter God.

 

That’s not just what a small group of anxious and hopeful people needed to know two millennia ago in a house in Jerusalem. That’s what Luke knows, Jesus knows, that you and I need to know, now and here.

 

That flesh and blood and bone are the home of new life (even flesh and bone that creak or ache or don’t look like we want them to, or break or bleed, or even die) – that flesh and bone and working digestive systems are holy and good and full of the presence of God.

 

Luke and Jesus may also want you and me to know that we – two thousand years or so after Jesus’ resurrection – should also expect the physical, touchable, presence of God among us.

 

Here – in this church where we gather with our own questions and weariness and hope (even here in the separate places where some of us are worshipping together online) – here, now, is the physical presence of God. The Body of Christ.

 

Inviting us to touch, to feel, to see, to swallow, to believe with our bodies.

 

Across the miles and the centuries, you and I are invited to feel, to experience, the physical presence of God, and the risen body of Christ, in each other and for ourselves.

 

Our church encourages that, with physical symbols and actions we can touch, to feel the texture and shape and physical nearness of God’s presence, Christ’s love and gifts of life.

We meet eyes, or touch hands, or share physical gestures of Christ’s peace with each other. We breathe in to pray (or sing) together.

[We splash water, and apply scented oil, to convey the refreshment and love of baptism.]

 

We share a meal with Jesus – not broiled fish, but bread of a sort, and wine of its own sorts. Our own hands touch that “body of Christ”, and we eat it – our bodies taking in Christ’s body with taste as well as touch, like Jesus’s risen body chewing and swallowing that piece of fish so long ago in Jerusalem.

 

And we eat that, we listen and look with our senses, wonder and pray with our hearts, alongside, in touch with, the body of Christ that is the whole network of the physical bodies you and I bring with us.

 

This body, your bodies, achy, strong, fragile, soft, stretched, growing, bleeding, broken, healing – bodies touching and looking and taking in the physical world with five senses and more – these bodies are, should be for us, Christ’s body, real and taking up space and filled with the life-giving presence of God.

 

Take that in for a moment.

Touch your own hands, or the hand of a person near to you if that’s right for both of you.

Hear Jesus say “See that it is I, myself; touch me and see.”

Let your body recognize the physical presence of God, in the flesh – redeemed and holy flesh, that eats and drinks and breaks and bleeds and is so good, so full of God’s own life.

 

That physical presence of Jesus comes – day after day, week by week, through some two millennia and counting – comes to us to meet our uncertainties with warm reality, to hold our hands, and make a place for our doubts to turn to hope, our minds to open to understanding, our hearts to be assured, through our skin and eyes and ears, of the reality of not just God’s presence among us, but our own presence with God.

 

Like those gathered long ago in a room in Jerusalem, Jesus invites you and I, today, to touch the divine, to see and feel the holy, to know with our bodies that God has come to us, to give the life that changes everything.

When We Can't Do

Mark 16:1-8

What do you do when it doesn’t matter what you do?

 

When nothing you can do will change what has happened, what is happening?

When the forces of life and death, inertia and change, world events or entirely personal experiences are obviously beyond your control?

 

Mary and Mary and Salome do something anyway.

They buy spices – spices to mask the unpleasant scents of death. It’s almost certainly too late to prevent a stink, by the morning of the third day, but they buy spices anyway.

They get up early, probably when no one else is around, and go to the tomb of their friend, knowing – acknowledging to each other – that they can’t get into the tomb with their spices, anyway.
They know they can’t budge the heavy stone that seals the entrance to Jesus’ tomb. 

And they go – with their spices – anyway.

 

They know it’s futile.
They know nothing they do is going to change the fact that Jesus is dead, murdered by the manipulation of the governing authorities. They know – probably – that their spices are hardly going to make a difference to the stink or to the process of decay, even if they could get into the sealed tomb.

I can’t tell – Mark doesn’t say – if they walked to the tomb fully aware of the weight of impossibility, or if they felt irrationally hopeful. Don’t know if they just wanted to say they tried, or if they are too numb to even think that far.

 

But there they are. 

Doing what they do, whether it will matter or not.

 

And all of a sudden, the little impossible things – the smell, the heavy rock; the things they, we, can’t do anything to change – disappear into the biggest impossible thing of all. 

Into what God has done.

 

The stone is unsealed.

The tomb is empty.

The story isn’t over.

Impossibly – impossibly – Jesus has been raised from the dead.

Is alive.

 

And left them – and their friends – and Peter – a message. 

You will see him in Galilee – just as he told you.

It would make perfect sense if their hearts stopped for just a moment. Mine would.

I imagine the precious spices dropping from hands suddenly numb with shock, before the moment unfreezes, and they run.

 

Twice in one short morning Mary, and Mary, and Salome face a situation in which nothing they can do will change what has happened, what is happening.
The first time, they do something anyway.

The second time, they run away.

 

Leaving you and me – as we read, as we watch their story unfold – with nothing we can do to change it.

And once again, God acts.

 

Mark drops his pen (or his quill?) with everything unfinished. Mary and Mary and Salome running, gasping in panicked awe, their good news, their message to the disciples (to us) silenced with shock. 

The tomb empty and Jesus gone.  

Resurrection hanging on a cliff – the miracle accomplished, but not recognized, accepted, or rejoiced in.

 

It drives me crazy, that abrupt and unfinished narrative.
And I love it.

 

Because the only way we get from there to here – from the silenced message of the empty tomb to a church full of flowers and alleluias, to people who know death does not win, is God.

God bridging the gaps.
God changing everything when it is impossible for anything you or I could do to change anything.

 

I’m not sure, but I think maybe that’s why Mark stops right here.

Right here when awe and shock leave the story incomplete, 

the story of what humans do stops, 

and you and I – with Mary and Mary and Salome, and the other disciples and Peter – we hang on the edge of what God does. 

The story – this story, your story and mine – are entirely in the hands of God.

 

And in the hands of God, everything changes.

Death – the one eternal certainty (besides taxes) – death is canceled.                 

Life expands – life becomes full of the impossible, breaks realistic and practical into scattered fragments, and sweeps us into God’s reality, where every moment is full of the glory of eternity. 

Where joy will always have the last word, even when we have no words to claim that joy.

 

 

I don’t know about you, but I need this now.

These days, this world is so jammed with things I can’t do anything to change.

Full of forces I can’t stop or slow, immovable stones I can’t get leverage on. 

Wars and atrocities, devastating weather and tragic accidents – both on a global and a personal scale. Constant assaults on human dignity, and on our ability to trust one another, on TV and social media, in legislatures and courts, at a scale I can’t figure out how to mitigate – on my own or with others. 

Every day, like Mary and Mary and Salome, I – maybe you? – have to figure out what I do when faced with those things where nothing I can do will matter.

 

Sometimes, we can act.
We can buy spices to make the mess a little more livable. We can care for someone else, in the face of the things we cannot change.

We can show up, even where there’s every reason to expect that we can’t get past the barricade – of a stone on a tomb, of official indifference, of money, of social inertia.

This probably matters more than it seems to.

 

But what I need, what we need, I believe, is to enter this story, and to come face-to-face with the reality of miracles, the startling, gut-punching awe of God doing the impossible.
I need (we need) to stand in front of what God has done, is doing, can do, bring that once-and-far-away wonder right into the middle of all of our own impossibilities. 

 

I can’t promise you that when you walk into your next impossible, you’ll find all the barriers knocked down, endings obliterated, and a world of possibility in front of you.

But I can’t promise that you won’t, either.

 

I can only leave you where Mark leaves us, suspended in the moment where God must act. Leaves us in the hands of God.

The only place where death is canceled.

Where every moment – every unfixable moment, every ordinary moment – is edged with the glory of eternity. And where joy will always have the last word, whether we ourselves are indifferent, or awe-stunned and silent, or whether we cannot keep ourselves from singing, whispering, shouting: Alleluia!

 

Unreasonable

Genesis 7:11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13; Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21; Ezekiel 36:24-28; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Mark 16:1-8

This is a night for drama.

A night for letting yourself get swept into the dark and the light, the symbols and the stories.

A night to let go of making sense, and to plunge into the deep end of mystery and miracles; of awe, and wonder, and promises.

A night to enjoy the reality of things that look unreasonable in the light of day.

 

Because there’s nothing reasonable, nothing that stands up to the practical light of day, about earth-drowning floods, dried with a rainbow.
Or dry land suddenly disrupting the whole ecosystem of a sea to rescue a rag-tag tribe of refugees. 

Or stone hearts; or vast and lonely valleys of scattered bones reassembling at a word. 

 

But tonight, we live in those stories. We inhabit the world of absurd miracles and preposterous promises. We immerse ourselves tonight, in the darkness, and in the light, in the power of story to tell truths that are utterly impractical – and absolutely essential.

 

Like resurrection.

Of all the unreasonable things – new life here, physically, after death?

Any of us might want our loved ones back, but I suspect few of us are prepared for them to be abruptly missing from the grave and demanding we rush to Galilee to meet them.

Upending the process of grief, demanding that we take the unimaginable as fact, the impossible as just what we do next.

 

Mark doesn’t try to smooth the rough edges of resurrection. He just sits in the bizarreness, the impossible, with us as he tells the story of Jesus, raised from the dead.

 

Because the truth tonight (always) is that God is unreasonable.

And that that is, in fact, the good news.
The way it should be.

Because hope and joy and wonder and possibility should not be confined to the reasonable. The deepest loves and deepest needs of our hearts should not be practical, sensible, restrained.

 

The world we mostly live in, day by day, tends to demand skepticism, pragmatism, and caution. It’s much easier to get through our days when we limit the possibilities for risk and disappointment, and many of us have learned to be expert at managing expectations, living in the reasonable.

 

But sensible, practical expectations make no room for heaven, make no room in our hearts and souls for impossible glory, for eternity to take up residence inside us.

And yet, that’s what’s happening tonight.

That’s what the stories and the candles and the lights and the bells insist on.

That’s what baptism is. 

Heaven, eternity, taking up residence in us.

Us taking up residence in resurrection.

Living in the holy unreasonable, the sacred impractical heart of God.

 

So tonight, dive deep in wonder, miracle, mystery and promise. 

 

Embrace the you that’s been rescued tonight from flood and from enemies and oppression, that’s been transformed from the inside out with a non-surgical heart transplant, that’s been reassembled from scattered bones and been made whole.

The you that stands with Mary and Mary and Salome on the threshold of a tomb where death has been obliterated, and life impossible demands you leap into it.

The you that wades through the waters of baptism to find in your ordinary self the extraordinary fullness of Christ’s own eternal life and love.

 

Because only when we let the unreasonable be real for us – embrace and trust the divine wonder that isn’t provable, or practical – can that wonder transform what is practical and provable, and everyday. 

Only when we’re immersed in resurrection do we catch the glimpses of eternity on the edges of our own errands, the flickers of glory in a passing conversation, the deep, strong glow of divinity in an act of ordinary friendship. 

 

This is a night for embracing the unreasonable with all our heart and soul.

Because this is the night that God, wild and fiery and tempestuous and free and utterly amazing, fiercely and unreasonably embraces us and all the wonder that we can hold.