Acts 4:32-35 | John 20:19-31
Jeremy Richards
This sermon was preached at Grant Park’s first in-person worship service in the sanctuary in over a year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brie and I are big fans of the show Friends. I know some of you are as well. I also know that some of you are not, and before I go on, I just need to use my pastoral authority to confront a very flawed, very problematic way of thinking when it comes to Friends. I have had people in this congregation say to me, “I don’t watch Friends, I watch Seinfeld,” as if it isn’t possible to watch them both. What a dualistic, exclusive way of thinking. As a church that prides itself on inclusivity, we should recognize that one can (and let’s be honest, should) watch both Friends and Seinfeld. Can I get an amen?
For Brie and I, Friends is one of those shows that you can pick any episode at random and watch it at any time, and it’ll be good. Well, lately we haven’t had any other show to watch, so we started watching season 7 of Friends again, and season 7 is largely about Monica and Chandler planning their wedding. In one of the episodes, Rachel and Phoebe, Monica’s two best friends and bridesmaids, are whispering about something, and Monica assumes they’re planning her surprise bridal shower and says so. Now, if you don’t watch Friends, Monica is very a-type and very on-top of things. Rachel and Phoebe, on the other hand, are not. They’re pretty scatter-brained. They hadn’t realized that it was their responsibility to throw Monica a bridal shower, and after looking at their calendars, they realize there’s only one day that will work: that coming Friday, which is two days away.
Rachel and Phoebe scramble to get everything together last minute. To come up with a guest list, they steal Monica’s address book and invite everyone in it who’s able to come with only 24 hours notice. Somehow the party comes together: Monica’s friends (or at least people from her address book) are there, the decorations are all set up, the food is prepared. Phoebe and Rachel try to get to know some of the guests, so they strike up a conversation with one woman, who it turns out is Monica’s account from 4 years ago and is mainly there to find out who’s been doing Monica’s taxes for the last 4 years. Then she asks, “What time is Monica supposed to get here?” and Rachel and Phoebe say in unison “I don’t know,” and they realize that neither of them invited Monica to her own bridal shower! They had been so busy planning, getting everything in order, that they forgot to invite the bride!
I have to say that I was in danger of making the same mistake this Sunday. We had more than two days’ notice, but still our decision to begin meeting in person again came fairly quickly. There was so much to get in order. I was so busy not only trying to figure out safety precautions, volunteers, seating arrangements, and the like, but also wifi, Zoom, and audio (thank you to Matt and Karla for all their help with those details!), that I nearly forgot to invite Jesus to the party we were throwing for him. I got so caught up in the details that I almost forgot the reason we’re getting together this morning.
Another reason that I nearly forgot to invite Jesus was not only the details of how to put this service together, but also the excitement of simply being together. After over a year of not worshipping in our sanctuary, the emphasis in my mind, if I’m being honest, was not on Jesus, but simply on our getting together.
We’ve all been so starved for community, so starved for in-person interaction, that – for those of us who are here in-person this morning – it’s easy to forget that while community is a vital part of church life, it isn’t community alone that brings us together. It’s community drawn together by Jesus Christ. There is no church without community, without each other, but also there’s no church without Jesus Christ. “Where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them,” Jesus said, and that’s the basic understanding of what church is, at least from a Baptist perspective. People gathered in the name of Jesus.
So, at the beginning of the week, I was in danger of focusing only on the gathering, and forgetting about Jesus. But thankfully, our scripture reading from John this morning addresses this very problem: what happens when the church comes together, but Jesus isn’t there. Our reading from John begins with the disciples gathered behind locked doors, cowering in fear, despite the fact that just that morning Mary Magdalene had shared the news with them that she had seen the risen Christ – that he was alive.
Tom Long, a famous professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, says that “disciples” in this passage not only refers to those who followed Jesus during his earthly ministry, but is meant to symbolize all believers. He says, “…most scholars think that ‘disciples’ also symbolizes the church – John’s church, our church. What we have theologically, then, is disturbing: a picture of the church without the risen Christ. It is a picture of the church locked off from the world, crouching in fear.”
Long makes a subtle but important observation: disconnection from Christ leads to disconnection from the world. Without Christ, the disciples have turned in on themselves, overcome by fear. They have locked themselves in, and locked the world out. But then Christ appears in their midst and says to them, “Peace be with you,” and he shows them his hands and his side, which have been pierced, and the disciples’ fear is turned to joy. But Jesus doesn’t come only to comfort them, he also comes to send them out into the world. This is very important. They are not to stay in the locked room. They are not to live in fear.
After the initial shock and joy of Jesus’ appearance, Jesus again says to them “Peace be with you,” but then adds, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” The Holy Spirit, the presence of God in them, will lead them.
It’s time to break the locks and throw open the doors. It’s time to get out there. Peace, not fear, will become their defining characteristic of this group of Jesus followers. Just as Jesus was sent to the sick, the poor, the marginalized, the suffering, the hopeless, the mourning, the forsaken, the ostracized, so the disciples are sent, so we are sent. A church that remembers Jesus is a church that remembers others. A church rooted in Christ spreads it’s branches out into its community, into the world. A church that forgets Jesus, on the other hand, turns in on itself. It locks the doors. It becomes afraid. “What will happen to us?” it asks. Self-preservation becomes the primary focus. Survival becomes the most it can hope for.
And there’s a reason many churches are afraid. Just a little over a week ago, Gallup announced some rather shocking news: for the first time in its 8 decades of keeping track, membership in houses of worship in the United States has dropped below 50%. That means that less than half of the U.S. population “belongs” to a church, synagogue, or mosque. That’s down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.
Experts – and common sense – attribute this disillusionment with religion, especially Christianity, in the U.S. to the growing negative association between “Christian” and a particular kind of politics. It’s a kind of politics that could very well be characterized by locked doors. Quite literally, it’s a political stance that has tried to “lock” the border, but is also concerned with locking out the LGBTQIA+ community, those of other faiths, those who are not white (or at least those who are unwilling to play by the rules of whiteness), those women who don’t “know their place,” etc., etc. In short, it’s a politics based on fear: fear of the “gay agenda,” fear of critical race theory, fear of religious pluralism. Fear of change.
Many white American Christians long for the good old days, when they had all the power, when they set all the rules, when their way of life was the norm. And so, in both the religious and the political spheres, they are attempting to “lock” the door. From the Southern Baptist’s renewed emphasis on fundamentalism to the religious rights slew of exclusionary policies, the focus has been on keeping certain people out – those who aren’t “orthodox”, those who aren’t true patriots, the “sinners.”
But we can’t help but wonder where Jesus is in all this? Jesus, who came to the disciples as they huddled behind locked doors, offered them peace, but then in the same breath sent them out into the world to love the world as he had loved it, who gave them the Holy Spirit not just for some personal, individualist salvation but for the salvation of the world.
Adam Taylor Russell, recently wrote a piece for Sojourners reflecting on Gallup’s report on the decline of church membership. Like us, he laments Christianity’s current association with political stances and policies that seem so far from the way of Jesus. He says, “Instead of being defined by all the things we are against and the people we want to exclude, Christians should be striving to be defined by our radical love, especially toward those who have been most excluded, as well as by our commitment to advance justice for all.” In other words, we shouldn’t be in the business of closing doors, but opening them.
This is the kind of church Jesus calls us to be. Not a church that hides behind locked doors, that lives in fear, that thinks exclusivity is the key to survival, but a church that is sent out to the world full of joy and hope and love and…peace. A church brimming with good news! Christ is risen! We’re to proclaim this not just with our words, but with our very lives. We are to live as resurrection people – people transformed by the life of Jesus Christ. Did Jesus stay locked in the tomb? No! Neither should we be locked in our churches or in our homes. Like the women from our Easter reading last Sunday, we are told to go out and tell others of the risen Christ. How could we keep this news to ourselves?
The church we want to be is the early church of Acts. The end of Acts chapters 2 and 4 depict a church that few other churches through history have lived up to. They are our ideal. As we heard this morning, the first church was characterized not by fear but by mutuality and generosity. The rich sold what they had so that there would be enough for everyone, and they held everything in common, so that “there was not a needy person among them.”
This is a church that hasn’t closed and locked its doors, but has flung them open in radical welcome, radical love, and radical compassion. And over all of this there is the blanket of a radical kind of peace – a peace “not of this world,” a peace that comes only through the Holy Spirit. They have enough peace, enough confidence, that they don’t hold on to what they have, fearing the unknowns that might come down the road later in life. Instead, they happily give what they have for the good of others. Like Drake says in the song “Crew Love,” “Tell them I’ma need a reservation for 20, I’ve never really been one for the preservation of money.” The early church wasn’t about preserving what they had, but giving generously to those around them.
You can’t live like that if you’re operating out of fear and anxiety. Fear causes us to hold on to what we have. Peace loosens our grasp, relaxes our shoulders, frees up our chest to take deep breathes. We breathe in the Spirit, we breathe out fear. We breathe in the love of God, we exhale the love of neighbor.
While this past year has been very difficult, by and large I would say we have been a church that’s been characterized by peace and not fear. We didn’t hold on to our finances, but following the murder of George Floyd chose to donate a large some of money to organizations supporting and empowering the black community here in Portland. We just decided to partner with Family Promise and use our building to serve houseless families in our community. We just hosted our third food drive in only a few months, and a number of us have participated in the demonstrations that take place 3 days a week on the corner of 33rd and Knott, calling for racial justice.
Despite Covid’s attempts to lock us in, we have found ways to open our doors and serve our community, and I’m so proud of all of you for that. It’s something we need to recognize and celebrate, especially after the year we’ve had.
This decision – to live out of peace and love instead of fear – is not a one-time decision though. It’s a decision we must make again and again. Fear is always creeping outside the door. Despite all the good that’s been done in us and through us over the past year, I’ve personally felt the presence of fear at times. I’ve worried about whether or not we’d survive the pandemic. I’ve worried that I as the pastor and we as a church were failing to meet some of your needs (and I’m sure that did happen at times). I’ve worried about finances as we begin this new ministry with Family Promise, which requires building improvement expenses that we didn’t budget for.
The draw of fear is strong, especially for a small church. But again and again, you have chosen peace. You’ve given of yourselves freely. This speaks of a certain kind of confidence, a trust. It speaks of faith. A faith in what? It must be in Jesus Christ, the one who appeared to the disciples and said “Peace be with you,” the one who sent them out, the one who sent us out.
As we enter this new chapter, which is in some ways the beginning of a return to normal, but is in other ways a beginning to something altogether different, because we’ve changed from the church we were a year ago, may we continue to be a church increasing in peace, a church increasing in generosity, a church increasing in compassion and welcome. May we in our own flawed way, be Christ to our little corner of the world. May we be sent out as he was sent out. And may he always be with us.
May we never forget to invite him to the party.
Amen.