In honor of the royal wedding that took place Friday, I want to read to you an email that my daughter, Molly, sent home from an overseas semester in London during the spring of 2002. She wrote with no little excitement,

“I went to the Queen Mum’s funeral procession this morning in St. James Park. I now can say I can come home HAPPY! I have done what I wanted MOST OF ALL to do while in England : I’ve seen Prince William! I was only TWENTY FEET away from him. He is even MUCH BETTER LOOKING in person! I don’t think the pictures I took are going to turn out because as soon as he came into view everyone started jumping up and down with their cameras (ironic at a funeral procession, I guess, but, heck, I did it, too.) But my friend, Emily, got it all on her videocam and she said she would make me a copy! You’ll really be able to see him good in that! AHHHHH! I’m happy for the rest of my time here! Love, Molly.”

William had been the subject of countless teen magazines that Molly had read over the years. (Remember, I am talking ten and more years ago now. She married her own prince last fall.) She had seen William on television. No doubt his picture was plastered on kiosks all over London that Molly saw every day. But William became “real” in a different way to Molly when she actually saw him face to face.

In writing his gospel, John knew that “seeing” carries weight with people. Our common aphorisms about seeing say it is so: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” “Seeing is believing.” “You would have to see it to believe it.” Or, conversely, “out of sight, out of mind.” Seeing connotes a kind of proof that, when applied to matters of faith, seems oddly oxymoronic. So St. Paul cautioned us about putting to much stock in the appearances of things, writing for instance, “That which can be seen is temporary, but that which we cannot see is eternal.” And John, despite the story we read today about the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples, ends by Jesus saying to them, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet have come to believe.”

John tells us that he wrote his account of the gospel so that his readers “may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing they may have life in his name.” John admits that he is not trying to produce a history or biography of Jesus. John is not writing dispassionately or objectively. Because in his own experience Jesus exuded God, because his relationship with Jesus changed his life, John wants others, us, to encounter him, too. John wants his readers to know the life-changing power of the God who was in Christ. John is an evangelist writing gospel, conveying good news for our lives that centers in God whose presence and promise John experienced powerfully and poignantly in the life and ministry Jesus the Christ.

Writing to people sixty years after the resurrection of Jesus, and now to us two thousand years later, John is appealing to people who never knew or saw Jesus in the flesh. So, with literary flair and license, John sets out in his gospel to accomplish his purpose. People living decades after Jesus, like us in our day, want to know what kind of “evidence” there is that God raised Jesus from the dead. They and we want to know that God vindicated Jesus and that he is thus worthy of trusting and following and committing our lives to, that the God who was in Jesus offers hope and direction and resurrection for our lives, too. John’s answer? Followers experienced the presence and power of Jesus after his death, so he must have been raised.

In the intervening years between the resurrection of Jesus and the time of John’s writing and ever since, many, many people experienced the presence and power of God through the story and Spirit of Christ Jesus. Instructed, inspired, led, and accompanied by that Spirit, lives were changed, restored, renewed, reconfigured, raised from lives that felt more like death. By the story we read today of Jesus appearing to his disciples who were huddling behind locked doors in fear, John means to say that the locked doors and forbidding walls of our lives are no impediment, either, to the power of the living God. That is the message that John is seeking to write on our hearts, even all these years later.

Why were the disciples afraid? Undoubtedly they were frightened that, since they were known to be companions of Jesus, those who killed Jesus might come after them next. Perhaps they felt like failures or even fools to have followed one who came to such a seemingly inglorious end. Maybe they feared that they had left their lives and families in vain to follow this Jesus and had no idea of what they would do next now that he was gone. Why the disciples were afraid is not the point of John’s writing, though. What he is getting at is for us to ask ourselves where and how and why we live some or part or much of our lives behind locked up doors and hearts.

The thing is, not only do we close off parts of ourselves to others but we close them off to ourselves, too, in conscious or unconscious fear. There are truths and circumstances, hurts and failures that we want to pretend do not exist or with which we do not want to deal, afraid of what might happen to us if we do. But John is insistent. Easter is not the story of one dead person coming to life again long ago. Interesting story if that was so, but hardly of any meaning or import to us.

Church, the gift of Easter rising is for us all. Remember how we began in Lent with the story of Nicodemus who knew there was more to life than he was experiencing and Jesus told him that he needed by the power of the Spirit to be born anew? Recall our Lenten stories of the woman at the well who received living water from Jesus and how the blind man received sight? Those long-ago stories are not meant as history to be held up and revered but as descriptions of the way God then and now works in our lives to give us second and third and thirtieth chances at new life, how our own parched souls can be irrigated by the water of divine life, how the scales that cloud our vision of God’s kingdom can be made to fall from the eyes of our hearts and minds so that we can enter into the joy of it.

Are there parts of your life by which you feel imprisoned? Locked up or locked in by fear? Trapped? Feeling as if there is no way out or through? Feeling hopeless, helpless, or hurting in a way you hardly want to acknowledge even to yourself for fear that the pain might overwhelm? Do you feel as if something in you is dead or dying? Are you afraid that if one brick falls the whole house of your life might crumble and so you keep the status quo even though it is crushing you to do so? Do you feel as if you are in the prison house of other peoples’ expectations and you want to reclaim your life but cannot find the courage? Are you locked up behind the voice of the “inner critic” of your ego who keeps yelling “should” and “ought” in a way that defines and confines you rather than allowing you to be borne on the winds of the Spirit? Are you locked up by the fear that your life right now, unsatisfying as it might be, may still be preferable to a life you cannot now imagine, and so the jailhouse of the present seems preferable to the risk of resurrection?

Can you somehow summon the honesty to name these places and parts of yourself to yourself?

Of course, the same questions apply to us as a church and a community and a nation and it would be well for us to deal with them, too, but, today, I hear John talking to each of us about our own lives.

I want you to know that there is no place or part of your life so tightly locked that the power of God in Christ cannot get in and through to work healing and newness and resurrection in you. There is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no fear that cannot be cast out, no failure that cannot become a springboard to success, no detour that can keep you from a good destination and destiny. We surely are not meant to sit here in 2011 and recall wistfully an Easter that happened long ago but does not happen today. Easter still happens. Of that I am certain. The same Spirit that was in Jesus, the Spirit of the living God and of his Christ, can do in us what she did in and through Jesus, and even more.

I read something that grabbed me recently by William Temple who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the middle of the last century. It is something most of us need to hear. Writing on that wonderful though sometimes troubling and often misused statement that John pictures Jesus saying – “I am the way” – Temple says, “That means that the way (to deep and true and authentic life) starts where each one stands. We do not have to go and find the starting place. The way starts right where we are.” Right where you are. The way the Christ of God will make for you where there seems to be no way, where you feel locked up and locked in, begins – not where you need to be or where you should be – but where you are.

Because where you are, Christ is. That is in the story, too. The disciples were huddled in fear in a room behind locked doors. But there was Christ in the midst of them. What did he do there? Well, he breathed on them. That’s it. He breathed on them. Breath of God. Breath of life. Remember in the creation story in Genesis how the human being was all knit together – out of the clay and dust of the earth came bones and sinews and flesh – but it did not vivify, come to life, until God breathed on him? Our story today is John’s way of saying that in Christ God still breathes on us, calling us to life beyond our immediate imagining.

The Jewish name for God is Yahweh. Many scholars along the way have been convinced that the name was meant to imitate and replicate the sound of breathing, the sounds of inhalation and exhalation. The one thing we do, then, in every moment of our lives, literally with every breath, is to speak the name of God. (Try it…it is why, I think, prayer masters always tell their students to attend to their breathing. Yah-weh. Yah-weh.) Breathing such makes the name of God our first and last word as we enter and leave the world. The story of Adam’s start to life begins with the divine breath. The gospel tells of the death of Jesus by saying that “he breathed his last.” And now our post-resurrection story today tells how the risen Christ breathes Holy Spirit and peace on disciples of every age.

You have received the sacred breath of life and are invited to breathe it yourself, over and over. When you are troubled or in travail, when you need hope or help, attend to your breathing as a reminder that you are participant in the eternal breath of life, that God is as close as your breathing. And in so doing, receive also the divine benediction: “Peace be with you.”

Peace be with you.

Amen.

Return to the Sermons and Articles Page

Return to the Sermon Archives Page