A Lecture on Forgiveness, Sorry

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John 20:19-23; Mark 2:1-12

Forgiveness is a common word in our Christian vocabulary much like the words grace, faith, truth, love, and even the word God.  These words reflect foundational elements in our faith, yet, I think we readily use them without really knowing about what they mean.  This morning I want to look at what we mean by forgiveness because I think what we think forgiveness means isn't exactly what we find in the Bible.  It’s important we understand forgiveness rightly because it is central to the ministry Jesus has entrusted to us and empowered us for by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Presence of God, in and among us.  

If people were to ask a congregation, “Why the church?  What are you here for?”, well Jesus gave us an answer to those questions when he appeared to his disciples on the evening of the day of his resurrection.  As per last week’s message, he appeared and spoke a creating word upon his disciples to make their fellowship the place on Earth where peace/Shalom exists.  He gave them the ministry of healing reconciliation that God the Father sent him to carry out saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  Being the place on Earth where there is peace requires we be about the work of forgiveness.  So, with that weight on our shoulders, what is forgiveness?  

First, before we get into what the Bible says forgiveness is, let’s trace our culture’s understanding of it back more than a few centuries because the meaning of words tends to change over the years.  In the last 30 or so years something called forgiveness has made its way into the world of emotional therapy and healthy lifestyles.  Several studies were done that demonstrated that forgiving can contribute to our being happier and healthier whereas not forgiving and bearing a grudge can do quite the opposite.  So, it seems that there is something cathartic or soul cleansing about forgiving.  This is why if you look the word up in a more recent dictionary you will find that the subject of feelings comes up.  They tend to define forgiveness as a process one goes through in order to stop feeling anger or resentment towards another or to stop feeling like you need some sort of retribution for a wrong done to you.  You've heard people say, "Just let it go."

When looking up what it means to forgive in older dictionaries you often find the topic of pardon, to grant pardon to one who has wronged you, to let them go without exacting punishment.  There's also the financial side of things too by ceasing to require the repayment of debt.  There's also the idea of granting permission or allowing things to go forward.  

If you go way back to the Old English roots of the word "forgive", we come across the word "forgiefan" which means "to give in marriage".  Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness and marriage go hand in hand.  In Old English, the word essentially meant "to give completely".  It is the act of giving with a huge sense of finality to it.  You can apply that to wrongdoings, to debts, and so on.  It is to relinquish a rightful claim to something forever, to utterly give it up.  

If I were to philosophize on this a bit, I would say that forgiveness and trust go hand in hand.  When a father gave his daughter's hand in marriage it wasn't just an exchange of property as some want to see it.  He was letting go of any claim he had to rightfully be the one who provided for and protected his daughter and in turn completely trusting another man and his family with that task.  “Forgeifan” was the act of giving total trust to another.  When somebody wronged another, they in essence broke trust with that person and with the clan.  Therefore, to forgive was to give your trust back to the one who broke it.  As doing something that breaks trust with someone involves breaking the trust of a community of people, forgiveness meant not only reconciliation or restoring trust with the one offended but also with the whole clan.

Summing this up, our modern idea of forgiveness has to do with the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment.  The Old English roots of the word, which go back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining trust in communities of people.  If you don’t see it, there has been a bit of a narcissistic flip between yesterday and today in the definition of forgiveness.  Today, forgiveness deals with me and how I feel.  Back then, forgiveness dealt with us and how we keep trust among ourselves.  Keep this in mind and let's move on to the Bible.

Looking at the Bible, when the concept of forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with how we deal with sins which are offenses in our relationship with God and with one another.  When we sin against one another, or rather break trust with and hurt one another, the Bible reveals that it also affects our relationship with God.  God is aggrieved.  God feels it when we hurt others and others hurt us and thus, our relationship with God is negatively affected by sins.   The biblical work of forgiveness also emphasizes not only our need to forgive but also our responsibility to seek it.  And on top of it all, we mysteriously find God in the midst of forgiving and seeking forgiveness.

To get our English translations of the Bible we have to find words in our language that carry the same or similar meaning as the words in Greek or Hebrew.  This is rarely an exact science and it quite often happens that essential meaning gets lost or corrupted as the meanings of words change over time.  As I demonstrated moments ago, forgiveness does not mean today what it meant in Old English.  How we came to use the word forgive to translate the Bible’s conceptual world of how to deal with our sins against God and one another is a rabbit hole to Wonderland worth going down. 

A long time ago the church began to use the Old English word "forgiefan" which meant “to give completely” to translate into English a Latin not a Greek version of the Bible.  Thus, there was already a conceptual jump from Greek to Latin.  The Latin word they were trying to translate was perdonare, which means to pardon.  This had the unfortunate side effect of getting the church to think of sins being a ledger of offences for which we are guilty that needs to be wiped clean rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown of trust in our relationships with God and one another and that destroys our God-given dignity as persons by making us feel ashamed. 

The Greek word Jesus used which we translate as forgiven does not mean a cathartic process of doing away with anger and resentment nor does it mean pardoning a person of a ledger of offences.  The word is "aphiemi" and it simply means "to send away" and sometimes “to pick up and carry”.  He used that word because it accurately reflected how the ancient Israelites dealt with sin in their once a year day of fasting and sacrificing, which they called Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement.  On that day they sacrificed a bull and two goats.  One of the goats was called the scapegoat.  It was called this because the priest would lay his hand upon its head and whisper the sins of the people into its ear so that it would then carry them in and upon himself.  Then, it was led away into the wilderness where it was then sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever.  In our Mark reading when Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven, he meant carried off, sent away as in scapegoated out of existence.  This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on the cross when he would be the Scapegoat for humanity’s sin.

That Greek word "aphiemi" (to send away or to pick up and carry) is the word that the Jews in Jesus' day were using to translate a particular Hebrew word, which we also translate as forgive.  The Hebrew word is nasah and it means to lift up and carry.  Think scapegoat as well.  The scapegoat carries away the sin of the people.  Our sin is born away.  I like to think NASA and the space shuttle.  

The Psalmist also uses a word, “kophar”, which means covered, for forgiveness.  This refers also to the Day of Atonement.  A bull and a goat were killed and their blood, which represented their life, was taken.  The blood now represented life that had passed through death.  The high priest sprinkled it all over the temple and the priests and even the ark of the covenant to do two things: to cover over or cleanse the stain which sin leaves on the people and the temple and also to unite God and his people in the blood, this life that had passed through death.  This is why the Psalmist says blessed is the one whose sin is covered over.  This sprinkling of blood of course points us to Jesus’ death and resurrection and also our union with him in the Holy Spirit.

So, with all that in mind, what was Jesus telling this paralytic when he said, "Son, your sins are forgiven".  Was he saying that God had gone through some cathartic process to let go of his anger at that man so that God now trusts him again?  I don't think so.  Jesus pronounced the man’s sins forgiven when he saw the faith or faithfulness or loyalty of the four men.  They had lifted him up and were carrying the paralytic on his mat to bring him to Jesus.  Jesus saw that they were nasah-ing this man and, moreover, along the way they were removing every obstacle (the roof) in order to bring him to Jesus where they knew he could be healed.

This act of faithful love by loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins were sent away.  That love, that fidelity bore his sin away or covered it over or cleansed it away.  These friends through their hands-on bond of fellowship with the paralytic showed him unconditional love and acceptance by lifting him up and carrying him, bringing him to Jesus to be healed and removing every obstacle on the way.  Jesus pronounced him forgiven and healed him and thus restored him to “normal” community.

Remember paralytics were viewed in the same way as lepers and blind people back then and much like addicts are today.  They were called unclean and cast out of the community because people believed them to be cursed by God for some horrible hidden sin that he or his parents had committed.  People would even refuse to touch them for fear of becoming unclean themselves.  

But these four men forgave this paralytic by carrying him on the mat of his disease to Jesus and willingly taking his uncleanness upon themselves because they knew Jesus could and would heal the man.  Jesus saw their unconditional love in action and that's why he said, "Son (meaning you're one of my people), your sins are forgiven."  Whatever was keeping this man cut off from loving community was obviously gone, sent away by these four men lifting him up and carrying him.  He was forgiven.

So, seriously, what is forgiveness as far as the Bible is concerned?  It is not the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment though I think that happens.  It is not pardoning a person of their ledger of offences though that happens as well.  Forgiveness is what happens when a small group of people unconditionally love and accept a sin-sick person, bearing with him in all his weaknesses, bringing him to Jesus, removing all obstacles on the way so that he may know unconditional love and acceptance in Jesus’ name so that he is no longer outcast (though he may have deserved it for what he had done).  Small groups of Jesus' people unconditionally welcoming and loving others in their brokenness and helping them to find wholeness in Jesus is what forgiveness is.  If there is a cathartic process of letting go of resentments, it is found while being nasah-ed by faithful Jesus people.  If there is such a thing as having the ledger wiped clean, it is found in the unconditional acceptance by faithful Jesus people.  Welcoming people into community where the unconditional love of Jesus rules the day and helping them to find peace in him is true forgiveness.  So let our way be the way of those four unnamed men.  Amen.

  

Thoughts on Peace

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John 20:19-23

This old world is screaming for peace.  I think it’s obvious to say that.  If we simply look at the amount of conflict in the world: there are presently 51 armed conflicts going on today.  That’s outright wars down to things like tribal and drug cartel skirmishes.  If we counted conflicts between neighbours, in work places, or within families, we’re probably talking in the billions.  We could even get into that nebulous realm of this elusive thing of inner peace - “I just don’t feel at peace within myself”.  This old world is screaming for peace.

 But…what is peace?  Have you ever sat down to ponder what peace actually is?  Good luck coming up with a definition for it.  Every culture seems to have its own definition.  Some cultures will say peace is when everything is in its place.  When somebody steps outside their rightful personal bounds and impinges upon someone else’s personal space, there is no longer peace.  Things are out of place.  When I want what is not rightfully mine.  Things are out of place.  If I follow through and act on that inordinate want.  Things get really out of place.  Some Eastern cultures like to define peace as the lack of balance.  When the work/life balance gets out of whack it leads to a diminished sense of peace.  When there’s too much pollution in the air, nature gets out of balance and Mother Nature is quite indiscriminate and brutal in how she strikes back.  

In our culture we tend to look at peace like the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as a lack of conflict.  To me, I don’t think that the lack of conflict is a good definition of peace.  I think conflict in itself is only one among many of symptoms that peace is lacking.  Moreover, constructive conflict can lead to peace.  But, to humour our culture’s understanding of peace, maybe we can get a definition of peace by looking at what causes conflict and once determining that, say that peace is the opposite of it.  If we look at the causes of war throughout the world, well…in my humble opinion, at the root of war we will always find a handful of greedy, power lusty individuals who have charisma such that to get more of what they want they can delude the masses with lies to the extent that the masses will murder en masse for them.  Looking more at the world of conflict in interpersonal relationships, well, I kind of like that definition for peace that involves everything being in its place.  Interpersonal conflict happens when people step out of their rightful place to impose upon others without permission.

Well, blah, blah, blah, are you still awake.  We can beat around the bush and run in circles all day and not come up with a good definition for peace.  Maybe we should just look at the Bible.  What did Jesus mean by saying “peace” when he appeared out of nowhere to his disciples who were cowering in fear behind locked doors afraid of what both the Jewish and Roman authorities might do to them due to their association with that Jesus of Nazareth, that revolutionist crucified dead whose body had gone missing presumed taken by his followers so that they could say he was the son of God and he had been raised from the dead to ascend to heaven to become fully a god; the sort of thing the Romans pretended to happen to their emperors.

Being a Jew steeped in the Old Testament, Jesus likely had the Hebrew word Shalom in mind.  Shalom arises as God’s blessing upon God’s people when we live according to the Ten Commandments.  Shalom involves what we have in rewarding, fulfilling, respectful, honest, love filled interpersonal relationships.  It involves the abundant prosperity that is found when everyone has enough.  It involves balance and rest built into that work/life thing (Sabbath).  There is gratitude and praise of the God who has abundantly provided.  

Shalom flows from living according to the Ten Commandments.  It arises as God’s blessing when we worship and serve the one true God and don’t try to project our images of what a god ought to be onto God.  Shalom arises when we honour the parents who gave us life and raised us, when we respect family ties.  Shalom arises when we don’t murder, steal, lie, and cheat on our spouses, but rather promote and protect personal trust of one another.  Shalom is what occurs when we are satisfied with what God has given us and don’t lust for our neighbour’s stuff, especially our neighbour’s spouse.  Peace therefore is Shalom in each home, neighbourhood, community, province, nation, to the extent of being global.  Shalom leads to justice in legal systems, equity in economics, and more than just a basic respect for individual human rights.  

In Shalom relationship to God is upheld.  Relationship within family is upheld.  Relationship in community is upheld, particularly with one’s immediate neighbours.  Simply put, Shalom is all about relationship and therefore, whatever we are going to call “Peace” must also be about relationship, our relationships with God and one another.  Peace exists among us.

Surprisingly, the Bible has very little to say specifically about inner peace.  To my knowledge, there is no mention in the Bible of “Inner Shalom” outside of Psalm 131 which says “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child together with its mother who is no longer demanding what has been denied him.”  Any other places that kind of refer to inner peace seems to indicate that inner peace is found when we let go of wanting that which we cannot have.  Looking back to what’s been said already, if we were to infer something about inner peace from our talk of Shalom, it would be that there is a sense of well-being, joy, and contentment that arises when one follows the way of the Ten Commandments, respecting the boundaries they establish in our relationship to God, family, and neighbour.  Maintaining rightly ordered relationships leads to inner peace.  There can be no inner peace apart from proper maintenance of our relationships and reconciling relationships when they get broken.

So, that’s sort of the Old Testament take on Peace/Shalom.  Let’s go post-resurrection Jesus here for a minute.  When Jesus appeared to his disciples that night, he didn’t show up and say to them, “Peace be with you” as if it was some sort of greeting.  He wasn’t saying “Hello” with some sort of Hippie-sounding greeting – “Yo, peace man”.  The best I can explain it is that Jesus was speaking a creating word upon the community of those who follow him.  He was creating their fellowship, creating their relationship to be the place on earth where peace/Shalom is.  Their fellowship was to be the place on earth where the ministry of the healing of our broken relationship with God and one another is found.  It is to be the place on earth where God’s Presence is found.

I think the most accurate translation of what Jesus says to his disciples would be “Peace among you”.  By speaking these words he was do the work of creati andng just like when on the first day of creation God said “Let there be light”.  Jesus spoke the word created Shalom/Peace among them, within their relationships, so that it can be found on earth.  He then again says “Peace among you” and speaks his ministry of reconciliation into them.  Then, he breathed the Holy Spirit, God’s presence into them, in such a way that what they forgive, God forgives and what they don’t forgive, God doesn’t either.  The implications of forgiving or not forgiving are implied.  Shalom/Peace will rest in and be maintained in their midst through forgiveness – but not forgiving, which results in bearing a grudge, will take their Shalom away.  Thus, it’s best to do the work of forgiveness.

If I were to put it all together, Shalom/Peace will be in existence present here in this sin-diseased world when the followers of Jesus do the work of forgiveness amongst ourselves, in our families, in our neighbourhoods, and when we lead the world to do the work of forgiveness as well as.  That is what Jesus has sent us into the world to do.  

In this Sin-diseased world there is an integral relationship between Shalom/Peace and the work of forgiveness.  Shalom/Peace can and will be found on planet earth, indeed the presence and workings of God can and will be found on planet earth, where and when the followers of Jesus do the work of forgiveness.  If we don’t do this work, Shalom/Peace will prove elusive.

Just a small example.  The Right Reverend Desmond Tutu now deceased was an Anglican Bishop in South Africa at the end of Apartheid.  He used to get up every morning around three o’clock to pray for peace in South Africa.  As Apartheid ended, he was integral in developing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which provided a vehicle to help victims of human rights crimes in South Africa confront and forgive those who sinned against them.  It’s fairly indisputable that Desmond Tutu was single-handedly responsible for averting mass-bloodshed in South Africa when Apartheid ended.  The followers of Jesus led the way to a taste of peace in South Africa by prayerfully and actively focusing on the work of forgiveness. 

Looking at our lives; how would our lives, communities, nations be different if we, the followers of Jesus, earnestly focused on the work of forgiveness.  How would it change our relationships with our First Nations neighbours, with individuals oppressed by addictions, in hurting marriages, in the area of Mental Health?  I believe there is a profound lack of Shalom in our communities that could be remedied if we the followers of Jesus in our own personal lives, in our families, in our church fellowship, in our neighbourhoods, at our jobs, in our communities, and on up focused on the work of forgiveness.  Amen.  (I guess I have necessitated a follow-up sermon on what forgiveness is.)

 

Peace and Forgiveness

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John 20:19-23

One of the things I appreciate most about John’s Gospel is how the stories John chose to share with us tend to be very reflective of our experience of relationship with God. If I were to say in my own words how John tries to some up our experience of relationship with God it is that we abide in Jesus by virtue of the Holy Spirit abiding in us and abiding in Jesus we then actually share with him in his relationship with God the Father so that we abide in them and they in us. We find our place in the loving, familial inner relational self of the God who is best addressed with the personal pronoun “We”. The Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus, unites us to him, and Jesus is in the Father. We are in him, he is in us, he is in the Father and the Father is in him. We know the Father through him and we share in their relationship by the Holy Spirit’s abiding in us. Abide. Abide. Abide. It’s all about abiding.

If I had to off the cuff a definition for abiding, I would say it is imbibing in the presence of another, having a present relationship. I am here for you and you are here for me and we sense each other’s presence. In fact, having a relationship with God is what John would call “eternal life”. At John 17:3 John defines eternal life straight from the mouth of Jesus. Jesus is praying his great prayer for the church. Jesus says: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (NRSV). Knowing another person involves being in a relationship with them. But how does one have a relationship with another whom we cannot see? How does one get to know someone they can’t see.

To answer that question, we need to step back to the beginning of Easter evening and look at how John has chosen this encounter to inform our experience of Jesus. The disciples are hiding in fear. They are disillusioned. They are in that numb, shock stage of grief. They don’t know what to do. The one they had invested their lives in is gone. But then Jesus does something only God can do. He shows up resurrected from death. He shows up and says, “Peace be with you.” He shows them the scars. It’s really him. Jesus showed up. To have a relationship with God in and through Christ Jesus, Jesus must show up. Jesus must step into our lives with the breath of the Holy Spirit and give us his blessing of peace. There is nothing we can do to conjure him up or make that happen. He must reveal himself to us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. It helps to sit and give him a place, like an empty chair, to help us welcome the presence of his person. It helps to make a regular practice of reading Scripture during the time in which we give space to Jesus. It helps to talk to him, to let it all out. Keep at it. He will show up with Peace.

Jesus showing up in the presence of the Holy Spirit can so often happen in the presence of the community of faith at worship. Do you ever wonder why people in small churches always sit in the same place? We make jokes about this, but I am reasonably sure that it is because that spot in that particular pew has been the place where they have had some very powerful experiences with our Lord. It is sacred space. My sacred space. This is where I was when Jesus showed up.

Just as he did on that evening with his first disciples, Jesus the wounded and risen One also sends us forth in his ministry as the Father sent him. He empowers us with the power of his own life, the Holy Spirit, to carry it out. We need to notice how he defines his ministry in terms of forgiving or not forgiving the sins of others. One of the key components in true Christian spirituality is working at the practice of forgiving. A lot of what floats around as spirituality today is simply learning how to conjure up feel good brain chemistry. But, the peace Jesus gives us drives us to make peace in our relationships with others. Almost always, if we are not at peace in ourselves it is because we are not at peace with those closest to us. Jesus pushes those who follow him in the spiritual practice of forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness is a tricky one. I say that because what the Bible means by forgiveness isn’t exactly what we think forgiveness means. We think of forgiveness as a transaction involving apology. The wrongdoer must hopefully be remorseful, apologize, and want to change. The one wronged must not bear a grudge against the wrongdoer, accept the apology, and try to keep friendship. The Bible’s a little different here.

The Hebrew word we usually translate as forgive actually means to pick up and carry; to bear the burden of another. On the Day of Atonement in ancient Israel, the day they dealt with the sins of the people, one of the rituals they did involved what we call a Scapegoat. The High Priest would place his hands on a goat and whisper the sins of the people into its ear, thus transferring the sin to the goat. They then lead the sin-laden goat off into the wilderness and let it go so that it could be destroyed by whatever was out there. By the death of the scapegoat the sins of the people were destroyed in death as well. Forgiveness involves our listening to the shameful stuff of others and not rejecting them, but rather embracing them to restore their dignity. Shame can only be relieved by touch, be personal physical contact, the touch that says we are still connected. You are not rejected. It is in the way we are physiologically wired. Shame is only relieved by the embrace of others. Forgiveness is I take your shame to myself in this embrace and I do not reject you and there the shame dies. Shame is not cured without affection.

I’m reminded of a story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that gives us a good image of forgiveness as bearing the shame of others. Four men are carrying a paralyzed man on his mat to Jesus to be healed. The crowd around the house where Jesus is teaching is huge. So, they climb on the roof and make a hole in the tiles and lower the man down on his mat and then they picked him up on his mat and carried him to Jesus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all three say that it was when Jesus saw the faithfulness, the efforts of the men, that he told the man on the mat his sins were forgiven. They were carrying him, bearing him as a burden, in all his brokenness, lameness, and shame to Jesus so that he could be healed. They touch his may. They touch him. They carry him in the weight of his shame to Jesus where he can be restored. That’s forgiveness.

I don’t think in this passage from John that Jesus is simply telling his disciples to forgive those who have wronged them rather than bear a grudge. I believe he is telling them to get involved in the shame-filled muckiness of the lives of others and bear them to himself where they can be healed and transformed like the paralyzed man becoming able to pick up his mat, his shame, and go home.

So how does a small congregation of elderly people who sit in the same pew week in and week out go about bearing others in their sinfulness to Jesus where they can be healed? Prayer is the place to start. Let me share with you a prayer an elderly matron of a small congregation once prayed out loud in a prayer meeting at church.

“Lord, I’m tired—so very tired. Please, Lord, I don’t want any advice. I’ve heard enough of that over the years. I don’t want to be told what I must do. I’ve been told often enough. Lord, I just want to sit here in quietness and feel your presence. I want to touch you and to know your touch of refreshment and reassurance. Thank you for this sacred little spot where I have heard your voice and felt your healing touch across the years. Thank you for these dear friends who share this pew with me. Together we have walked the tear-lined lanes. We know what it is to be lonely…we also know the comfort and strength of one another and the joy of your presence. O God, the child of my womb has become a drunk…Daily I watch her die before my eyes. Where have I failed, O Lord? How can I find the strength to continue? How can I help my dying daughter find herself?

O God, soon I will be going home to be with you and my husband. I am ready, even eager. But until that day help me to be a help to others. Give me strength to live this day and peace to enjoy it. Amen.”[1]

Friends, I think this prayer is what forgiveness looks like. The practice of forgiveness is in that question, “how can I help my dying daughter find herself?” This mother isn’t waiting for an apology. This is praying. She isn’t judging or abandoning her daughter. She’s asking how she can walk with her daughter in love to help her daughter find herself, find peace, find the Lord, find her home in the heart of God as beloved. Peace and forgiveness, they walk hand in hand. The peace of Christ be with you. Amen.




[1] Dudley, Carl S.; Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-first Century; Abingdon Press; Nashville; 2003; pg. 49.

The Peace of Christ

John 20:19-23
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The people in my first church in West Virginia told stories of a local woman named Rita.  Rita lived with a mental illness and spent a good bit of her day sitting in front of the church on a bench smoking and talking to something.  Back when they used to leave the church doors unlocked for people to come in to sit and pray, Rita could sometimes be found in the church, smoking, and playing the piano.  Even Sunday morning it was not unusual for Rita to show up in the middle of the service to stand quietly in the back of the sanctuary and listen and smoke.  

One particular Sunday Rita came, late as usual.  Instead of standing in the back she started walking down the centre aisle.  As she went, she would tap someone on the shoulder and ask, “Is Jesus here?”  After receiving a rather helpless glance she would move on to another and again ask, “Is Jesus here?”  

“Is Jesus here?”  That is a very good question to ask a congregation on a Sunday morning.  How would you know?  What sort of indicators would you look for?  Jesus has promised that wherever two or three are gathered in his name that he would be in the midst of them.  Okay, but then how does one know?  Would we see something?  Would we feel something?  Would things happen?  How do we describe the presence of the Lord among his people on Sunday morning?

Well, in the Old Testament they spoke of God’s presence using the word Kabod which we translate as glory.  The word means weightiness but with respect to God it is how God makes his presence known; everything from specific acts to the cloud of his glory filling the temple, a cloud so heavy the priests couldn’t stand to do their work (1Kg. 8:11).  The Rabbis of early Judaism used the word Shekinah to speak of God’s presence with his people.  It means dwelling and this was their way of speaking about the Holy Spirit.  The Shekinah could be felt.  It was experienced as light, a felt light.  The nature of light is that light itself cannot be seen, but it makes things see-able.  When Jesus spoke of himself being present in the midst of two or more, he was indeed tapping into the rich tradition of the Rabbi’s and their experience of the Shekinah of God.

With that in mind; it’s Easter evening.  The disciples are in a locked room afraid for their lives and confused.  The tomb was empty and Mary Magdalene said she had seen Jesus alive.  Jesus appears and says “Peace to you”.  He shows them his new seal of identity, his scars.  They see it really is him, alive and really in their midst.  They rejoice.  What else could they do?

Then, Jesus again says, “Peace to you”.  But this time he adds that he is sending them with the same ministry and mission that the Father had sent him.  He then breathes on them.  “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says.  He fills them with the new life of the Holy Spirit.  The Kabod, the Shekinah, the real presence of God is now upon them, in them, like the air we breathe.  Jesus then quantifies the mission they share with him – the ministry of reconciliation.  “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 

To let you in on a little secret, what Jesus is doing here is making his followers to be God’s temple, God’s dwelling place on earth, and this has implications that shapes their purpose.  In the Old Testament, the Temple wasn’t the place where the Israelites “went to church”.  All the reasons you can think of for people going to church today had nothing to do with what the Temple was for in Ancient Israel.  Then, it was the place where sin was dealt with.  As God was present in the midst of his people and his people are his image, sin and its effects, which mar the image of God, had to be cleaned up so that God would remain among his people.  The Temple was the place this happened.

We have a very legalistic misunderstanding of sin that we inherited from medieval Christianity.  We think of sin as a list of moral things that God says “If you do these things, I’ll send you to Hell.”  You won’t find that kind of thinking anywhere in the Bible.  Sin is not a simple list of “Do not’s” that we constantly feel compelled to do.  Sin is a profound disease that we have that effects our relationships and our self’s.  Sin makes human community in the image of God impossible.  Sin is the way we self-interestedly break trust with each other and cause one another to hurt. Sin is a relational matter over and above being a behavioural problem. 

So, we as the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Living God, must be the place on Earth where sin is dealt with.  We can either be the place on Earth where people can heal from sin or we can be the place that begrudges people their sins and makes them believe they are unlovable even to God.  Throughout its history, the church has done a better job of the latter, than of the former.  We’ve more often judged and begrudged rather than brought reconciliation and healing to troubled, broken self’s in troubled, broken relationships. 

Well, back to the question of the day: how do we know if Jesus is here?  I have another story.  Not long after I arrived at my last church in Caledon, I decided I would try something new one Sunday morning, something that the ancient church used to do but back then they did it with a kiss – a holy kiss, a kiss of love, a kiss to symbolize the peace that arose from the presence of Christ Jesus in their midst.  Don’t assume things.  I did not ask them to kiss.  I asked them to turn to the people next them and greet them with the peace of Christ.

Usually, in larger churches who greet with the peace of Christ they just turn to the people around them and say, “They peace of Christ be with you” and the person would respond, “And also with you.”  But that morning at my church something wonderful happened.  A woman named Judy (I’ve changed her name) jumped up and went and greeted every single person there with the peace of Christ and it caused everybody to follow suit.  Everybody greeted everybody with the peace of Christ…and they did that nearly every Sunday for the next nearly ten years I was with them. 

When you ask people in small churches to greet each another, they will likely do it that way.  It’s like a rule of small group dynamics.  But this was different.  Judy was in her 60’s and was going through a bitter divorce.  She was profoundly hurting.  But that morning she welled up with joy.  The love, the fellowship that she had with her family in Christ there was her anchor.  At the time, that church numbered in the 30’s.  Nearly all of them had come from churches were they had had bad experiences.  The congregation had suffered the effects of a bully, particularly the leadership, a bully who drove their last minister away…and here they were moving forward again.  They were joyful that morning.  That spontaneous eruption of healing fellowship truly embodied Jesus and his peace.  He was there bringing healing.  The Kabod, the Shekinah glory of God shone forth among us that morning.

Greeting one another with the peace of Christ is an ancient practice of the church that they did in worship.  There are liturgies reaching back to the 500’s that have it in it.  They did it as an embodiment of what Jesus did that Easter evening.  Greeting one another with the peace of Christ is a real act of peace, of reconciliation, of hospitality; of saying he is here with the ministry and mission of healing forgiveness.  By this act we share in that ministry and mission. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus and the Father, is here and we must really respond.

Jesus is in our midst with healing forgiveness and he has empowered us to share in his ministry and mission of reconciliation by breathing the Holy Spirit into us…and, like it or not, this is why we greet one another with the peace of Christ.  Friends, please greet one another with the peace of Christ.  Amen.

Feel the Calm, Share the Peace

Text: Mark 4:35-41; John 20:19-23
Audio Recording

Jesus calms the storm.  I knew a man who many years ago his life was a storm, a very painful storm.  He never was really all that interested in church.  His wife liked to take the children, but struggled to get him to go.  He had a good job building his own business, a home with projects to keep him busy, a monster garden in the summer.  Life was good.  But then the storm came.  His wife wanted a divorce.  He moved out.  The rejection, the loss of family, the loss of a home, the loss of an ideal…all that emotional stuff was a storm that did indeed threaten his life. 

In his old house he had neighbours on either side of him.  On one side his neighbour was a strong Christian, on the other side his neighbour was a devoted alcoholic.  In a way these neighbours represented the paths he could walk down.  Alcohol was winning.  Yet, from time to time though no longer neighbours his Christian neighbour would check in on him, listen to him, and encourage him, and tell him that God loved him and to seek Jesus and he would find the peace he was drinking for.  Don’t judge this man.  He was a very good man, well liked and well loved by everybody.  But what he went through when he was alone with himself was living hell.  He couldn’t work it away.  He couldn’t drink it away.  It was just the way he felt about himself.

The storm went on heavy for a couple of years.  One day he was in his car driving.  His work involved a lot of driving, a lot of time alone.  He was at the end of his rope and it wasn’t like this was the first time he cried out to God.  But this time, he told me something came over him.  He said it was the most peaceful feeling he had ever felt.  His old neighbour told him that was Jesus.  He started going to church.  Got some counselling from the minister.  The need to drink left him.  The storm was still there, but not like it was for he knew he was not alone in the boat.  Though Jesus can indeed calm our storms, he’ll let the storms continue while we learn that he himself, his presence with us, is the calm in the storm and it is a felt calm.

Jesus gives peace.  I know another man.  He had been raised around the church, and never got too far from the church.  As a child he enjoyed Sunday School.  He learned to read from the books some old lady brought to his Sunday School class on the church library cart.  He was the kid who very much enjoyed the story Bible for kids they had at home.  This man’s parents divorced when he was a young child bringing a storm into his life that he never asked for.  Broken homes are still broken no matter how normal you try to keep things. 

About the age of nineteen, all the anger and hurt caught up with him.  As far as he could determine his choices were to end his life or give it to Jesus.  He chose the later.  It was a fateful New Year’s Day morning after having hosted a New Year’s Eve party to which nobody showed up, not even his closest friends.  At the toll of midnight he was thinking to himself that if this was the sum total of his life why live it.  After a long squint at suicidal ideations, he went on to bed and New Year’s Day morning he rose and called his best friend’s mom and informed her he would be seeing her in church that morning.

He then went to church as often as he could and formed some strong opinions about things that passed as Christian beliefs.  At this small little Presbyterian church he was given quite a bit of acceptance because he was the only young person.  Regardless of church acceptance and his beliefs/opinions about God, the storm went on.  He still hurt but now there was a new direction to go in, a real purpose, a hope to hang on to.  Where would Jesus lead him?  There were no definites but it felt good to be on the right path.  

It happened that he met a girl who told him he should come to her “spiritually alive” church because the one he was going to was “spiritually dead”.  He gave it a try.  It was a new fellowship that met in an elementary school cafeteria.  The minute he walked in the door, he felt a peaceful feeling he had never felt before.  All of a sudden he knew God really was real and loved him and Jesus really was alive and with him and there really is something to this Holy Spirit stuff and it wasn’t crazy.  The peace that Jesus breathed upon his disciples, he had just stepped into and that’s what has kept him coming back to church for over thirty years now because he knows, push come to shove no matter how messed up things may get, he is a dearly loved child of God and God is faithful.  Moreover, there was someone in that church who led him to forgive his parents.  The peace of Christ begets peace through Christian people ministering with their gifts for ministry.  Jesus is the calm in the storm.

I received a phone call earlier this week.  The person called with a question that I think draws the line as to why some churches, most of them of the more charismatic variety, have been thriving since the mid-sixties all the while the Mainline churches have been dwindling.  The question this person asked was “You and Timothy both talk about the Holy Spirit.  I just want to know if I’m missing something.”  Basically, the root question was how do we know if the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives.  To be blunt, in the Mainline churches we tend to not talk much if at all about our experiences of God because we tend to think that people who do are crazy.  But it is time we get over that.  The church that will move forward into the future will be the one that insists on experiencing God, that promises spiritual awakening, that focuses on how to maintain a devotional life, and that indeed expects resurrection, expects people to find new life in Jesus.[1] 

Anyone can have religious opinions about God, Jesus, the church, and what’s right and what’s wrong.  The work of the Holy Spirit is to bring us to Jesus, God the Son, in a way that is relational, personal, and unique to us each and it quite often involves the storms and the result of that relationship is that we find ourselves sharing in his knowing and trusting of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father and in response we find ourselves sharing his love of the Father and desire to do the Father’s will.  When the followers of Jesus who know he is the calm in the storm get together we should be experiencing the peace he breathed on his disciples and has continued to breath on us through the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes to do his work.  That peace begets peace as we Christians learn to listen to and pray for each other.

Since we have this calm, the peace, we have something no one else in the world has.  The peace of Christ isn’t something we keep to ourselves.  I’ve a song to share with you that I hope captures what I’m saying.  It’s called The Peace of Christ by Glen Soderholm.  It’s rooted in Psalm 133 and makes use of the traditional Christian greeting of the peace of Christ.

The Peace of Christ

May the peace of Christ be with and also with you.

May the peace of Christ be with you in all you do.

Its like the precious oil that flows down Aaron’s beard.

And as dew falls from the mountain

The blessing bursts forth here.

So we throw down all our weapons and the things we long to control.

And call now for Jesus’ presence

To restore our very souls.

We turn now from the solitary

to the dance of kindred hearts and laughing with each other

as each one takes their part.[2]

The peace of Christ be with you.  Amen.

---

[1] See “15 Things Alcoholics Anonymous Can Teach the Church” at http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/6101/15-things-alcoholics-anonymous-can-teach-the-church

[2] Printed with the permission of Glen Soderholm.

The Testimony to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus

Text: Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-23
Audio Recording

“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:33).  What a marked difference from the picture that we have of the apostles in our reading from John’s Gospel.  What happened that powerfully transformed them from cowering in fear behind locked doors to being a well respected community of people who not only boldly proclaimed the message of Jesus’ resurrection but they also embodied it to the extent of sharing all things in common and effectively eliminating poverty in their midst.  Something huge happened.

Just to recount the story, several days prior to our reading in John’s Gospel the “Jesus Movement” was huge.  Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem like a king to the accolades of a massive crowd only to have the same crowd nearly overnight shouting, “Crucify him.”  The Romans did indeed do that.  They beat him to the point that he was unrecognizable and then crucified him. And so we find the Disciples, a very small group, the Twelve and the women, cowering behind locked doors for fear that the same would happen to them.  In fact, they really didn’t know what had in the end happened to Jesus.  His body was gone from the tomb.  Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had gone there that Sunday morning and found the tomb empty as did Peter and John.  Some mysterious angel-like men told them that Jesus had been raised.  Mary Magdalene said she had spoken to Jesus, but at first she thought he was the gardener.  Then there were two of them who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus.  Luke reports that after seeing him they hurried back to Jerusalem and it is while they were telling the others what had happened that Jesus shows up there in the midst of them behind the locked doors and says ‘Peace, be with you” and showed them the scars and eats some fish. 

Then over the next forty days Jesus appeared to the Disciples several more times and Paul attests that at one point over 500 people saw Jesus.  He does many things to prove he was really alive and all the while he continued to instruct them on the Kingdom of God just as he had done prior to his death.  The last time they saw him, Jesus told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait until the Holy Spirit would come upon them with power and he disappeared into some clouds.  Two men in white said he would return one day in like fashion.  The Disciples then went back to Jerusalem and spent a lot of time praying… a lot of time praying.  There were 120 of them.

Jesus’ ascension was forty days after his resurrection.  Nine days later came Pentecost and the power came.  Pentecost was the day the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai and so there was again a great crowd in Jerusalem.  The 120 followers of Jesus were gathered together in one place and the Holy Spirit fell upon them like tongues of flame.  They began to speak in the languages of the Jews who had pilgrimaged to Jerusalem to worship on Pentecost and so they went out into the streets and began telling what God had powerfully done there in Jerusalem forty-nine days earlier, that God raised Jesus who had been crucified from the dead. 

Peter then stood up and answered the accusation that they were drunk by saying that what was happening there was what the prophet Joel had prophesied about; that the Holy Spirit would be poured upon God’s people.  He testified about Jesus, how he was the Messiah, how the Jewish authorities had had him crucified, how he had truly been dead, and that God had raised him from the dead and he had ascended to the right hand of God.  The Jesus whom they had crucified, God had made both Lord and Messiah.  (Lord was what the Romans called Caesar and yes, Peter is beginning to take on the Roman Empire here.)  3,000 people that day welcomed his message and were baptised.  They began to share their possessions in common, selling stuff and sharing with those among them who had need.  Day by day they went together to the temple to pray.  They met in each other’s homes for meals and to study the Scriptures.  The fellowship must have been incredible and the Lord continued to add to their number daily.

One day on the way to the temple Peter and John healed a man born lame and they did it in Jesus’ name.  The man leapt around praising God and Peter again testified that Jesus whom they had crucified God had raised from the dead and it was by Jesus name that this man was healed.  Then the Temple authorities had Peter and John arrested and brought before the High Priest, the chief priests, and the elders.  Peter testified again to Jesus’ resurrection, the one whom they had crucified, and that this man had been healed in Jesus’ name.  All that these “powerful” men could do to them was order them not to speak in the name of Jesus again.  And so Peter answered them saying: “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.”  Keep in mind, Peter and John some fifty days earlier had been cowering behind a locked door in fear of these very same men whom they were now standing before boldly testifying to the resurrection of Jesus whom they had crucified.

“We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard”! which is the testimony of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus.  Whenever I read these first chapters of the Book of Acts, which I just summed up for you, I stand back with my jaw to the ground in wonder and then I scratch my head in bewilderment as to how the church as I know it today compares.  The early church went from cowering in fear behind locked doors to being unable to keep from boldly proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus the crucified one and his Lordship and reign; a reign which they embodied in their communities to the extent that they virtually eliminated poverty among themselves.  The fellowship was so deep and rich in their communities that they daily got together in each others homes to pray and eat and study the Scriptures.  In comparison, yes, they had seen, touched, and talked to Jesus risen.  Yes, Pentecost was a very real and powerful experience for them.  But for us, we’re the ones about whom Jesus said, “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet are faithful.”  Blessed?  We look more like the Disciples when they were fearful and behind closed than when they were emboldened and unable to keep from boldly testifying to the fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  

Let me say something about this but first let me make it clear that the last thing I want to do is blame the people in the pew for the state of the church today.  For truly, in this day and time if you are in church on a Sunday morning you are one of what could be called the faithful remnant.  It is not for your/our lack of faith that the churches struggle as they do these days.  So, just shy of 70 percent of all Christian fellowships in North America particularly those in the Mainline traditions have less that 60 people at their worship services and they are all worried about their institutional survival because they are encumbered with the buildings and salary packages of a church that in its hay day in the 1950’s and 60’s really was what we could compare to a market bubble.  Active participation in Mainline churches today statistically resembles what it was pre-World War II.  We have undergone a market correction so to speak.  There have been times over the last 300 years that the church has bubbled but it has always returned to smaller fellowships.

Our particular challenge today is that we are very heavy on the Senior Citizen side of the spectrum in comparison to the young family side of the spectrum.  The faith needs to be passed on and this is problematic when, and I hope I’m not out of line on this, when most to all of us oddly grow mute when it comes to speaking about our resurrected Lord whom we know lives and has indeed been personally faithful to us each in a steadfastly loving way.  Again, I do not want to blame us for this muteness for indeed it was God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus the Son from the dead whom the Disciples saw and it was the God the Father and Jesus the Son who poured out the Holy Spirit on the Disciples and empowered them to speak.  If we have mute tongues, weak hands, and lame knees when it comes to proclaiming Jesus risen and reigning, then we must not blame ourselves rather we must look to the Triune God of grace for the words, the strength, and the joyful leaping in praise to be able to give our testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Fearful and behind closed doors, believe it or not, is a good place to be for it is here that we realize the church is not in our hands.  It belongs to Jesus Christ.  We must turn it over to his will and care.  Yet, there is something we should be doing here behind these doors – prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship around the tables back there, around your tables at home, and even with our folks at the nursing homes is what we need to be doing.  It is in this kind of fellowship that Jesus, alive and in the power of the Holy Spirit, becomes evident, just like the Higher Power works powerfully among the folks in the AA fellowship that meets here Wednesday evenings delivering them from the compulsion to drink and healing their broken lives.  It is in this prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship that the Holy Spirit begins to overflow.  When we get together and share our lives and pray for one another and we begin to see those prayers answered, the more this happens the more we will find ourselves unable to keep from giving our testimony to the fact that Jesus is risen and reigns.

One last thing to say, this prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship needs to happen and your ministers cannot do it for you.  I would be tickled pink and I believe Timothy would be as well, if it just started to happen that you folks just started getting together regularly just to share your burdens and to pray for one another, or just to open the Bible and read a paragraph or two and start talking about it (simple as that), and share a pot of soup and some homemade bread or just a cup of coffee (food always helps).  This needs to happen.  It does and you know what?  It works.  Amen.

The Reconciling Breath of God

Text: John 20:19-23; Philippians 2:5-13

During my first summer in ordained ministry back in 1997 there was a week-long continuing education event that Presbytery required me to attend on the topic of the first year of ministry. One of the things that we talked about was maintaining our devotional lives. Pastors of all people should do that and you would be amazed the number of us who let it go. In one of the seminars they called in a man whom I shall refer to as the Synod guru to talk to us about spirituality. I arrived in the classroom to find books on meditation, candles, CD’s with relaxing music, and the lights had been dimmed. And then he arrived, the “Maharishi of the Synod of the Trinity” from Camphill, PA. He was in his mid-50’s, dressed all in white, and had somehow managed to achieve flowing white hair. If he had a golden sash and scepter, he could easily have passed for the Apostle John’s vision of the heavenly Jesus at the beginning of the Book of Revelation. I can’t explain precisely why, but I got really angry, an anger that needless to say kept me from fully appreciating the guided meditation he led us through. I wanted to grab the man’s neck like Homer Simpson getting a hold on Bart and scream at him, “Don’t give me none of them Baby Boomer, narcissistic, self-indulgent, feel good, candles and voodoo tricks. If you want to know about spirituality then go feed the poor.” I didn’t though. I saved it for the whole class later that day when we talked about what the man had said and done. He really made me mad.

I have to be careful of what I say here. I don’t want to be misunderstood as dismissing the spiritual life of another human being and especially the Maharishi of the Synod of the Trinity, PCUSA. But I would like simply to highlight that we must be careful with our definition of spirituality. What he was teaching us was coming dangerously close to confusing the Spirit of God with getting in touch with our human ability to have “numinous” experience. We live in a highly stressed, pragmatic, scientific, and technological culture that does not have much room for the intuitive, mystical, or dare I say psychic side of being human. What the Maharishi guy was doing was teaching us how to open those doors. That’s not a bad thing. It can help us experience this life more fully and can help us to hear Christ speak to us. The problem is that it is dangerously individualistic and too often a person can let their intuitive experiences supplant the role of reason, reality and community which are crucial elements of a truly Christian definition of spirituality.

As I read my Bible there is no call for us to get more “spiritual” meaning more “numinous”. Rather, the Gospel call is for us to live the new life that the Father has freely given to us with and in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit – the life of laying aside any rights or claims we might have to the power to serve ourselves and give ourselves to Christ Jesus for the love and service of others not ourselves.  Truly Christian spirituality is living in conformity to the cross within the community of faith.  Christian spirituality is community oriented over and above being an simply an individual practice.  The quintessential passage of Scripture for us as disciples of Jesus the crucified and risen One is Galatians 2:20-21: “ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Living the risen life with Jesus in this fallen world is living a life of conformity to Jesus' way of the cross and in that giving of the self, indeed dying of the self in the practice of being for others, we discover the risen life which is truly his presence with us. This way of life certainly will involve such things as contemplative prayer and sitting in the Trinity's presence meditating on Scripture the result of which will be our being reoriented, indeed recreated, around Jesus' resurrected life which he gives to us in the Holy Spirit which is life laid down for others in a community that reflects the image of the self-emptying, self-giving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Christian life doesn’t involve simply the “spiritual” side of life. It involves the whole life – mind, body, spirit, purpose, effort. We disciples of Jesus do not simply awaken our “spiritual” dimension and call that the Christian faith. Rather, we welcome the Trinity’s gracious life giving presence and friendship into our lives as he has welcomed is into his and it is a relationship with himself to which he has welcomed us. Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into us, upon us, and indeed into the very air we breath uniting us to himself so that we share with him his relational bond with God the Father in the Holy Spirit. The transformational effect of our new union with Jesus through the Holy Spirit as partakers of the divine life is the continual cleansing or removal from our lives of the brokenness we feel in ourselves and our relationships and our experience of alienation or being separated from God. He gives us peace, a new communion with the the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit among a new community of people, a community distinguished by forgiveness that leads to reconciliation. For the disciples of Jesus, the “spiritual life” is no private matter. It is primarily an effort to live in community with others in a cruciform way – in the image of Christ reflecting the self-emptying, self-giving love of the relational communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us back off the theology for a minute and visit our passage from John. We find the disciples are behind closed doors and afraid. Jesus comes to them to give them peace, to prove that he the resurrected One is still the same One who was crucified, to breathe the Holy Spirit upon them, and to commission them to go forth into the world to spread his peace through the real work of reconciliation. I would step out on a limb here and say that John is using an experience the disciples jointly had of the resurrected Jesus to describe what it is like when we gather together as Christ’s body. We will not see him for he’s ascended but he has given us his peace to sit in together and to rest in together, a peace who is the Holy Spirit, and a peace that manifests itself within our worship and fellowship.

This act of Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit upon his disciples is him breathing the breath, the very life of God onto, into, and around his disciples to bring forth the fulfillment of the Word God the Father has spoken through the incarnation of the Son as Jesus the Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a very Trinitarian act. The Father speaks the Word as Christ Jesus and the breath of God, the Holy Spirit, creates the Word in us, the Word of reconciliation and new humanity. Just as the Trinity and humanity are united in the physical body of Christ, so are we joined together in him and into his union with the Father, into his resurrected and ascended life by in-breathing his breath, receiving his Spirit, and accepting his mission of reconciliation.

There’s a lot of talk today about spiritual experience. A question many people ask is what does God feel like. The generation that came of age in the 60’s and ever since has been hungry for a God that can be really experienced. The underlying though is that if God cannot be experienced, then God is not real. I think John here gives us an indication as to what we should feel in our experience of God whom we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and it is the peace of Christ, the assurance of the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Trinity towards us. It goes beyond a simple peace of mind that some find in simply knowing they are forgiven. Pentecostals talk about the anointing or the blessing. St. Augustine and many of the mystics of the church talk about simply being overwhelmed with a feeling of being loved by God and having a love for God. It is something that is not part of everyday life. It comes from beyond us but undergirds every bit of life as we know it in the whole of creation. Yet, we must always stand back and humbly admit that “me” talking about “my” feelings or experience of God is simply talk of my experience of God and in all humility and respect my experience of God is not God. It is just how I experience him.

A true experience of the Trinity will lead us firstly to want to be part of Christian community because it is in the gathering of two or three that we find Christ. Jesus said “where two or three are gathered in my name there I will be in their midst.” The Holy Spirit calls us to Christian community because it is in the cruciform relationships of the community of faith that God is most clearly at work to heal human brokenness with his love, indeed his very self. As God is the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so is the church to be a communion of self-emptying healing love and support, a communion of true friendship.

Secondly, the distinguishing mark of the Holy Spirit’s presence in people is the desire to forgive and be forgiven and to be reconciled and indeed working towards that end. To forgive those who’ve hurt us and to seek forgiveness from those we have hurt is the one key spiritual discipline in the Christian life. When we do that we experience the work of reconciliation that Jesus was sent here to do. If you truly want to experience God then begin to ask yourself whom you need to forgive and who needs to forgive you and then work at reconciling. Ask how you can in all humility give yourself to and for one who is your enemy. Do that and you for certain will be experiencing Christ and will come to know him most fully, the Crucified and Risen One. Moreover begin to build all your friendships on the sure foundation of Christ's peace, the unconditional love by which he welcomes you into his life. You will find that the Holy Spirit, who is the grace of God and the peace of Christ is very present with you and in you when you work towards these things. Amen.