Jesus, again, says, “Peace be with you.” He tells them that, now, they are the ones who are being sent, just as God has sent him. And he shares another reminder of his physical self with them—he breathes on them. He tells them to receive the Holy Spirit. And he tells them, in no uncertain terms, that they are to be about the business of forgiveness.

This is a remarkable moment. Think about who is with Jesus in this room. These are the remnant of Jesus-followers… the ones who ate with Jesus on the night before he died…the ones whose feet he washed. The ones who, instead of following Jesus to his trial and cross, ran away. Here is Simon Peter, the one who Jesus correctly predicted would deny even knowing him. And at least one person is missing who, by now, everyone knows was the one who betrayed Jesus for a bag full of silver.

And Jesus has just told them, their work, their mission in the world, from this moment on, is forgiveness. I imagine first on their list of people to forgive—for many of them—would be themselves.

Image: “Apostle Saint Thomas” by El Greco (1541-1614), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This is the feast of victory for our God! It is Easter Sunday, the most joyful day of our Christian year. It is the day when I say, “Alleluia, the Lord is risen!” And the people reply: “The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!” It is a day of beautiful flowers, and glorious music, and hearts lifted high as we celebrate together.

It is a day when we hear again the marvelous story of Mary Magdalene going to find the tomb where they had placed Jesus, and all the wondrous things that happened after.

But we can’t skip from the cross to the empty tomb without remembering Saturday.

Photo: Stained glass window, Union Presbyterian Church, Endicott, NY. 1907- present day.

At the Church of the Resurrection in Amsterdam,

there is a wonderful setting for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

The Communion table looks much like what we would call a picnic table.

That is, it is a long flat table with benches on each side, and at each end of the table.

The table is set with a cloth, two candles, a pitcher and chalice, and plates for bread.

When it is time for the sacrament,

the people come forward, sit on the benches that surround the table,

and they serve one another the bread and the wine.

I don’t know what they call that method in Holland,

but here, we would call it “family style.”

Image: “The Lord’s Supper, Rock Presbyterian Church, used by permission of Wikimedia Commons.

We are witnesses today to Jesus’ Passion, a word that means “suffering,” but also, “love.”

Powerful love.

Life-altering love.

Love that gives of itself until the end.

Image: Stained Glass from the Gothic Cathedral of Strasbourg, depicting Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The one who has been called “the Great Physician” is reclining at table with tax collectors.

This is a great banquet, and a lot of people are there.  Also, a lot of people are watching.

Seriously, what do you offer in thanksgiving for life?

Do you simply say "Thank you?" (I feel confident that has already happened. Most likely, many times.)

Do you throw him a dinner party? Sounds like a good idea—and, yes, that happens to be the exact setting for our story today. It takes place in Bethany, in the home of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. There is a dinner there, in Jesus’ honor.

But what else? How to say “Thank you?”

Isn’t there some kind of grand gesture that would get this level of gratitude across?

This is a story about forgiveness, and grace.

It might also be a story about how hard it can be to forgive.

It might even be a story about the stories we tell ourselves, so that we feel justified in saying, no. I will not go in to the feast. Not for him. Not for her.

Image: James TIssot, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Brooklyn Museum, used Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This story is central to what it means to be a Jesus-follower. The disciples are doing good work. They can go out on their own. They can teach and heal and carry the good news where it is needed.

But they need to do this, too. They need to feed the hungry, and they need to show the people—show the world, in fact—that there is enough..

Image: MAFA Jesus, Cameroon, “Jesus Feeding the Multitude”

Sanctuary. A word that signifies a holy place, a place set aside for the worship of God. It also signifies that such a place provides, by mutual consent of the law and the people, protection from the dangers of a dangerous world.

This morning’s gospel passage from the Revised Common Lectionary begins with Jesus hearing the news of the violation of a sanctuary.

“At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”

Man hu? That’s Hebrew for “What is it?” Maybe.

I invite you to a time of imagining.

I invite you to close your eyes, if you like, and imagine with me.

God’s people were stumbling through the wilderness, half starved. See their thinning bodies, the patches where their hair is falling out. Imagine their rumbling, cramping stomachs and leg muscles. Remember true, deep hunger, the kind of hunger that could make you faint.

They wondered whether it might not be better to be living slaves than dead freed people.

Jesus calling Herod “fox” speaks volumes. Herod preys on his own people, crushes them, keeps them poor and struggling by exacting taxes from them that break them. In return, he gets to be, tetrarch, live in a palace, and, occasionally, uses his power to annihilate someone who threatens him, like a prophet. Like John. Maybe, like Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t seem scared. In fact, Jesus speaks and acts with determination. You might even say, determined passion.

Image: Photograher Michael Verun, "Mother Hen and her chicks exhibit a great social behavior which human mankind needs to learn from;” available courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Jesus, his mother, and his friends are all at the same wedding. Years ago I read a book that asked the rhetorical question, “When were you ever at a wedding with both your parents and your friends?” My first response to this: This happens all the time in a small town. My second response: This also happens in faith communities. But the writer insisted, It was your own wedding, wasn’t it? So this must have been Jesus’ wedding!  I think that writer was wrong. I also think that writer was right.

This is a vividly described story: I can almost see the colorful clothing and hear the celebratory music. If there were six stone jars there, for people to have ceremonially washed their hands prior to eating… this was a large wedding. Maybe the wedding of two big, wealthy families, able to provide a meal and a celebration, not only for their own kin, but for the entire village.

Image: Daniel Sarrabat (1666-1748), “Wedding at Cana,” Public Domain. Used Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This morning’s reading from Deuteronomy marks a momentous occurrence in the life of another faith community; in this case, it was the imminent entrance of God’s covenant people—who had journeyed for forty years in the wilderness along with Moses—into the land of promise. In fact, the original Israelites who had escaped from Egypt had died out. It was a new generation coming into the land of promise. All of Deuteronomy is a sermon, really—a farewell sermon by Moses, to the people who will, finally, after all those years, enter into that land without him, their founding pastor. They will begin their new life, greet their future, with new leadership.

But before that, they will remember their past. That’s the main purpose, it seems, of the whole book of Deuteronomy, this sermon that goes for thirty-four chapters. The people must not forget their God-drenched history, which included:

Their own founding fathers and mothers, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Rachel and Leah; their travel as refugees to a new land, driven there by drought and famine; their lives as slaves in Egypt, generation upon generation of slavery; God hearing their cries of misery, and raising up Moses as a prophet and a leader, to confront the brutal Pharaoh and ultimately win their freedom; God’s mighty hand parting the very sea so that they could travel through it with “unmoistened foot.”

They must remember the years in the wilderness; their hunger, which God answered with manna from heaven; their thirst, which God answered with water from a rock; their utter dependence upon the God who led them as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; their awe as God provided the law on Mount Sinai; their shame at their wayward actions of creating a golden idol while they waited.

They must remember all of it: their travel, their prayer, their faithfulness, and their unfaithfulness; the people lost and buried in the wilderness, including Moses’ sister, the prophet Miriam; the babies born on the road; their quarrels and infighting. Through it all, the presence of God, faithful fire; looming cloud, holy of holies in the tabernacle they carried.

They are to give thanks…

Image: Original Log Church, Riverside Cemetery, Endicott, NY.

Last week a friend of mine, a psychologist in Nebraska, sent me a poem he had written, in anticipation of the season of Lent. He wrote:

We give up the wrong things

Eliminating candy instead of self-criticism

Sex instead of selfishness

Acting as if what God desires most

Is for us to be on a diet from joy

Perhaps lent should instead

Be a time of letting go

Of all that prevents community

(As an aside, do people really give up sex for Lent? Maybe it’s a Nebraska thing?)

I heard someone say that each Ash Wednesday, we begin again, to take a long, honest look at our lives; to speak humbly to a loving God; to turn back to God. The church, from its earliest days, has found that certain activities, done deliberately and repeatedly, can help us to do this work. We call them the “Lenten Disciplines,” and in a few minutes, I’ll invite you to commit to them. But before that, I’ll invite you to take on yourself the sign of ashes…

Poem: Steven Andrew Westby; Image P. Raube, all rights reserved.

What is “glory”?

We sing it every week… “Glory be to God, Creator…,” as if it were within our power to confer glory. And, in a sense, it is… “Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” was the Latin motto of the Jesuit priests who taught me at Boston College, and it means, “To the greater glory of God.” So, all they did—whether they taught theology or Latin or physics, whether they were chaplains to the football team or pastors of congregations or choreographers of modern dance—all their work was dedicated to that greater glory.

But then, in our passage this morning, we witness two figures from the long history of God’s covenant people, appearing alongside Jesus, and they do so “in their glory.” And the three disciples who are roused from their drowsiness see Jesus, and “they see his glory.” And then it seems as if glory isn’t something we can give at all, but rather something we recognize, something we witness. A brilliance, a greatness, a holy and fearful beauty beyond our power to tell of it. And all we can say is “Hallelujah, Glory!”

Image: The Transfiguration of Christ, MAFA Jesus, Cameroon.

What kind of caffeine high—that rush of optimistic energy that makes you feel indestructible and brilliant and hopeful and even happier than usual—what kind of mood altering substance was I on when I thought, “Hey, I’ll totally preach on Luke 6:27-38!”

Why did I want to tackle what feels like an endless list of stuff most of us find nigh on impossible?

It’s possible I am just speaking about myself.

Image: Normal Rockwell, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You.”

Blessed are you poor, Jesus tells us, for yours is the kingdom of God. And I can just imagine how that sounds to those who are financially on the edge—or worse, who have fallen off the edge completely—coming from an unimaginably wealthy monarch (not to mention, from a preacher who clearly hasn’t missed any meals). Blessed are the poor. And not only that, but woe betide the rich, because they have already received their consolation.

What does this mean? Is Jesus truly dismissing any possibility for those other than the poor—or the hungry, or the weeping, or the hated—to be blessed?

Image; James Tissot, “The Sermon on the Beatitudes,” Brooklyn Museum. Used courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

What must be going through Simon’s head? What is he thinking? Let’s imagine, he’s heard Jesus at the synagogue, which means he also witnessed a healing there. And then he brought Jesus back to his home, where he witnessed Jesus healing, first, his mother-in-law, and then, all those people that were brought to him. It’s clear that the people, the anxious crowds with their desperate and their ill, can’t get enough of Jesus—his words and his healing touch. And now… Peter’s boat is a kind of floating pulpit for Jesus, and he’s teaching these enormous crowds, and the crowds keep growing.

Is Simon thinking, “This is great! This is so exciting!”? Or maybe, “Why do I keep running into this guy?” Or even, “What am I doing? What is happening to my life? This is getting out of hand…”

Or maybe some confusing combination of all of these?

Image: Deep Water. P. Raube, January 2019. All rights reserved.

In 1940 Thomas Wolfe published a novel about a young writer named George Webber, who, in his first published work, writes extensively about the place he grew up, the fictional town of Libya Hill. The problem is, the people in his hometown don’t like what he has written—they see it as a distorted version of the place they love, and so they start sending Webber nasty mail. Death threats. It’s almost as if they’d like to throw him off a cliff.

The title of Wolfe’s novel? “You Can’t Go Home Again”…

Image: View From Mt. Arbel, Photograph by Jesse Davis of Kingston, Canada. Used by permission of Wikimedia Commons.

In a Presbyterian Church in 2019, when the preacher sits down, the sermon is over. In a synagogue in ancient Palestine, when the preacher sits down, the sermon is just about to begin. All we get today, is Jesus’ opening line: 

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

(Tune in next week for the rest of the sermon.) 

But… what an opening line!