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.
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