May 1, 2011
Floating on the Breath of God
by James McCrea
John 20:19-31
Don Hoffman once began a sermon on today’s gospel lesson by invoking an image from a movie. He wrote, “Do you remember the movie Mary Poppins, based on the book by P. L. Travers? Jane and Michael Banks need a new governess, and early in the morning a long line of women in black is waiting at the door of their home. Then the weathervane suddenly moves, and a wind comes in from a new direction. The governesses, who all look as grim and weighty as cannonballs are blown away as easily as thistledown [...]. Then out of the sky, floating down on an umbrella much too small to work as a parachute comes Mary Poppins, and the adventure begins.”
From that point, the winds of inspiration blew the Rev. Hoffman and me in two different directions. To me, the image of a line of nannies blowing away like tumbleweeds in favor of Mary Poppins, is an excellent symbol for the impact that both the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus had on the disciples.
In reading the gospels, we see how many times during his ministry Jesus tried to prepare the disciples for his coming death. Each of those times was followed by a promise of a resurrection. Jesus’ advanced preparation of the disciples seems as clear as a cloudless summer day to us when we read the New Testament centuries later.
But one of the consistant themes of the gospels is how the disciples simply couldn’t wrap their minds around either part of Jesus’ prophecy. They thought that surely the Messiah couldn’t be put to death, so the idea of a resurrection probably didn’t even make it to the level of their conscious memories.
Jesus’ arrest was enough to blow away like thistledown all their preconceptions about who Jesus was and what the Messiah would do. In spite of Jesus’ repeated warnings, his execution — when it happened — was all too devastatingly real. As a result, each of the 12 disciples in his own way was shattered, as were all of his other followers like Mary Magdalene and Joanna.
So this resurrection appearance in John serves the same function as Mary Poppins floating down on her umbrella to start the adventure. Jesus suddenly appears in the midst of the disciples, even though they were cowering inside a locked room with the shades pulled down and rags stuffed into every crack where light might threaten to shine through.
Surely if the resurrected Jesus could do that, the disciples had every reason to be afraid. Each of them had thoroughly failed him in his hour of need. I bet they would have been barely able to look him in the eye if he had walked into the room in the usual way. But since he miraculously materialized in a locked room, they had to be worried that he might respond like some kind of supernatural Rambo. Instead, he offers them free and unqualified forgiveness.
To quote Rev. Hoffman again, “It’s amazing! Jesus is always surrounded by anxious people, and he never seems to get anxious himself. His disciples generally behave like the famous fellow who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions. Jesus just stands there calmly, like he’s teaching cucumbers how to be cool. ‘Peace be with you. […] No fear. Just peace.’”
Then, Jesus does something that is consciously modeled after a part of the creation story in Genesis. There, at the beginning of all things, God forms a person out of the soil, kneels down and breathes his spirit into it so that it has life and has a spark of God within it.
Here, the resurrected Jesus breathes his spirit onto the disciples so that they will always have a portion of his spirit within them. Understanding that is essential to understanding what Jesus does next, when he says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
This is one of the most wildly misunderstood sayings in all the sad and sordid history of biblical misappropriation. At various times in history, the church has used this passage to claim the authority to extend or refuse forgiveness. Eventually that assertion led to that explosion within the church we know as the Protestant Reformation.
Jesus’ words sound as if he is offering his followers a grant of royal authority. It seems as if he is saying, “I’m giving you the right to judge which sins to forgive and which to punish.” But that’s not what’s really happening here.
Jesus isn’t transferring a privilege; instead, he’s sending the disciples out on a mission. In essence, he’s saying, “You have seen me forgiving people and you have experienced that forgiveness for yourselves. Receive my spirit of forgiveness deep into your souls and then go out and share that spirit with the world. For if you do not share forgiveness, no one else will.”
And so Jesus’ words blow the hinges off that locked door and send the disciples out into the world to transform it into God’s image. Oh, I know there are a few steps before that. Jesus has to meet first with our stunt double Thomas, who had somehow missed that initial resurrection party, so Jesus can answer his doubts.
Then the Holy Spirit has to come onto the disciples on Pentecost. But the tone has been set, the roller blinds have been sprung up and the windows and doors flung open. Jesus blows the disciples out of their fearful, huddled crouches and into the world like thistledown floating gently on the breeze. But their impact would be far more powerful than that.
They were empowered to transform the world because, through the gift of Christ’s Spirit, all barriers between who’s in and who’s out had been leveled.
- Robert Stimmel tells about how this works in his congregation. He writes: “I was in conversation with a young executive, a woman, who had been worshipping with the congregation where I was pastor. I knew her also from a service club in town. We were discussing why she came to that church. What attracted her there? Was she finding what she was looking for? How could we help her in her spiritual growth?
“There’s usually no one obvious reason why people come to church. For most people, it’s a combination of things. In this case, she wasn’t able to describe her own reasons. She borrowed the language of some of her friends. ‘My friends tell me,’ she said, ‘that I’m on a search for Jesus.’
“That’s a good search to be on. I told her, ‘You can find him here.’ In fact, because she was looking, I think she did find him there. When she moved a couple of years later, she told me she was going to miss us a lot and she hoped the United Methodist Church where she was going would be as good, and as good for her, as we had been.” I strongly believe that that is the story of our congregation as well.
- United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon tells a similar story, but his comes from the inside out. He says, “A pastor told me about how his congregation struggled with how to relate to their neighborhood. In the beginning, their neighborhood was a lively center of activity.
“Over the years, most of the members of the congregation moved to the suburbs, leaving their church as a neo-Gothic island in the middle of a decaying part of town. The […] apartment building next to the church, fashionable in the 1930s, was now a run-down, cheap hotel for drifters.
“After two major burglaries, the church was forced to buy an expensive alarm system. No longer was the door to the church office open to anyone who came in off the street. Now, weekday visitors had to press a button next to the front door, state their name and their business on the intercom, and await entry. The greatest concern after church meetings or services was to make certain that all of the doors were locked and the alarm system was armed.
“One evening, at the congregation’s usual monthly business meeting, after the usual business had been discussed, Mary said, ‘On the way into the meeting tonight, coming in from the parking lot, I dropped my wallet. But I didn’t know it until this young man came up to me and handed it to me before I entered the church. He was poorly dressed and looked thin. Of course I thanked him profusely for returning my wallet. He asked me what sort of church we were, what denomination, and I told him.
“’We had a short talk there on the steps and in the course of our conversation he told me that he had taken up residence in that horrible hotel on the corner. He can’t stay with his family anymore, he said, he is sick.
“’I am fairly certain what his sickness is. The hotel is full of these unfortunate young men. And here we sit as a church with our doors locked tight. [Just like the disciples cowering in the Upper Room with their doors locked tight.] Is there anything we can do for them?’
“There was a great silence in the meeting room. Someone said, ‘Well, I don’t really think there is much we can do for them.’
“Someone else said, ‘They probably wouldn’t feel very comfortable at our services.’
“Mary said nothing else and the meeting ended.
“But after the meeting, out in the parking lot [where the real action in most churches takes place], Sue Smith said to Mary, ‘I was proud of you tonight. You really touched my heart. I think we ought to take this matter up with our Bible study group on Wednesday.’
“They did. The women at the Wednesday Bible Study prayed and asked God to lead them in the path of service to the men in the hotel.
“I heard this story about a year later. The pastor said that the women in that group began visiting in the hotel. A few weeks later, they moved their Wednesday Bible study into the dilapidated lobby of the hotel, bringing refreshments, inviting the residents to join them. That led to their ‘Lunch With the Lord,’ a regular Friday free lunch of soup and sandwiches at the church for the men. Now, each Sunday, at least a dozen of the men attend worship, often sitting with some of the older women who are members of the Bible study group.”
But those needs never stop coming. And they are everywhere. People are still struggling to rebuild their lives after severe earthquakes hit New Zealand and Japan. And certainly the same is true following the massive tornados that hit the southeastern section of the United States just a few days ago.
But reconstruction after disasters is far from the only need. People in our own community are barely scraping by in this weakened economy. Others are trying to get their feet back underneath them after being laid low by illness or grief. Others, like the woman mentioned by Robert Stimmel, are searching for Jesus, whether they know that or not. We can help with all of that.
We have been called to bring the winds of change to their lives. So, let’s go out from here and help the adventure begin. Amen.
(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)