Fourth Sermon at St. Paul's

Year B, Third Sunday of Easter, RCL
Luke 24:36b-48

The women had seen the empty tomb and the two men in dazzling clothes admonishing them for “looking for the living among the dead”, Peter had gone and seen the empty tomb for himself, and Cleopas and his companion had walked with and broken bread with the risen Lord… And after all this where do we find the disciples? What are they doing? Today’s Gospel reading from Luke has them gathered together talking about these things amongst themselves.
Jesus finds his disciples closed up in discussion with each other and the first thing he says to them is “peace be with you”, and do they accept this peace? No, rather they are startled and terrified by Jesus, mistaking him for a ghost. The disciples become scared, and quite honestly I imagine I would have as well. But Jesus reassures them and calms their fear. “Peace be with you”… Do not be afraid, do not doubt…
Jesus accomplishes this by showing them his humanness, that he is not in fact a ghost, but has indeed risen from the dead body and all. His first proof for them is, look… my hands…, my feet…, and presumably my scars…, see this is me, this my body, the body you saw beaten and broken, it has now been restored. And we are told that the disciples and their companions “while in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering”. They are no longer afraid, they are joyful, and it’s starting to sink in for them, but they cannot fully make that jump yet, they are still uncertain. So Jesus does the most logical thing you can do when trying to prove you’re not a ghost, he asks for dinner.
(But seriously/Think about it) this is a great way for Jesus to show the disciples it is indeed him. Jesus’ ministry was filled with teaching and eating, so that is exactly what he does, he asks for dinner and then begins to teach them again. He “opened their minds to understand the scriptures”. He showed them how everything has been leading up to this, to Jesus’ death and resurrection.
So, the disciples now understand what has happened, and how it was meant to happen. And this is where it gets good. Not only do the disciples now understand this, what they’ve been a part of throughout Jesus’ ministry, but they are to be witnesses to it also. They can no longer close up in conversation with each other, but rather they must go and proclaim this good news to all nations.
Now, what strikes me about this whole sequence is how Jesus finds his disciples. They’re together, seemingly closed off from outsiders. Luke’s account doesn’t say it as explicitly as other Gospel accounts, but I think it’s safe to assume that they were afraid even before Jesus appeared in the midst of them. They are followers of a man who had just been executed for treason, the dominant culture clearly was not in favor of what they were doing and what they had been doing. So they’re closed up with each other afraid, and this is how Jesus finds them. Fear is holding them back from witnessing to the world everything they had seen, fear is holding the eleven remaining apostles back from continuing to proclaim the kingdom of God and healing. Fear, we all know, can be very powerful. (But we’ll get back to this)
If you follow the Daily Office Lectionary you will be aware that this past week we have readings from the Book of Daniel. Daniel, as we know, was an Israelite in the Babylonian exile, who grew to prominence as an adviser to the king of Babylon. Along with Daniel in this book are three other exiled Israelites. Long story short, these three men were faced with an ultimatum, worship the king of Babylon or be thrown in a furnace.
They did not, however, let fear overwhelm them, but staying true to their faith they answered the king’s ultimatum saying that they will trust in God and be thrown into the furnace. And thrown into the furnace they were and the faith that these three men possesed allowed them to survive their time in the King’s furnace. I bring the story of these three up as a reminder that even though fear can often stop us in our tracks, it can be overcome, for fear is no match for what our faith can do. We need not fear anything because God is stronger than anything we can fear.
Now back to today’s Gospel. After witnessing Jesus’ execution, it is not a big stretch to imagine the disciples very much aware and fearful of their own mortality. And this is how Jesus finds them, discussing amongst themselves, afraid for what might happen to them. But Jesus shows up with them, his very presence tells them that death need not be feared, for through his resurrection Jesus has conquered death, and our faith allows us to share in that resurrection. Jesus tells us that we need not be afraid of anything, our faith frees us from fear.
Hopefully by now I’ve made it clear that we need not be afraid, that our faith is stronger than fear. But what next, what now that we are freed from our fears, after Jesus eased the fear of his disciples he sent them out to be witnesses, to proclaim the repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations. Jesus did not free them from their fears, from death so that may stay couped up together in an upper room somewhere discussing what they had seen and heard. NO… Jesus freed them from their fears in order that they could leave the safety of their group and go out and spread the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.
I’ll be honest with you all. For quite some time, evangelism really freaked me out. Coming from New England, growing up religion was pretty personal and private outside of church and other appropriate settings and most of my experiences and understandings of evangelism haven’t been the most positive. There was televangelism, which never seemed all that genuine to me. There were the Baptist and non-denominational groups who at times seemed forceful and overbearing with their evangelism. And the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who a few months before I began school down here, upon coming to my door and conversing learned of my plans to go to seminary and God willing be ordained an Episcopal Priest handed me a pamphlet on false churches, said goodbye and walked away.
So evangelizing took me a while to really get my head around. These experiences as well as growing up in a culture where religion is becoming less and less a public topic has instilled if not a fear at least discomfort within me regarding evangelism. But we see in today’s Gospel, that fear, or discomfort, is no reason to refrain from proclaiming the “repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations” Fear is no reason to not be a witness to these things. If you remember, even in the face of death the three companions of Daniel I mentioned earlier, did not use fear as an excuse to cease from proclaiming that they would not worship the king of Babylon because they worshiped the living God.
Fortunately, evangelism need not happen over a television, or by going door to door handing people pamphlets telling them that they’re wrong, and although in some places it is still dangerous, in our society it does not lead to being thrown into a furnace. There is no set formula for how we are to proclaim our faith, we are told what to do, but not how to do it. We will all have different ways of carrying this out, but as long as we are true to the Christian faith and to ourselves and each other the differences don’t matter so much as long as we are doing it.
So, what happens in here, and in churches all over, cannot be an end in itself. Today’s Gospels reading tells us that we are not to remain in groups, or churches, discussing these things amongst ourselves, afraid to go beyond our walls. But what we do here should rather give us the strength, should give us the courage to proclaim to all the nations the good news that Christ has risen from the dead. Alleluia.