DISBELIEVING FOR JOY: JOURNEY TO EASTER FAITH
Text: Luke 24:36-53

I grew up loving and worshiping Christ before I knew to follow him. Worship was like breathing and I a natural believer. This is not true for all. My home and church offered me the grace of believing and I eagerly drank. Since those young days of believing, I've discovered that the heart of Christian faith is more: transformation and discipleship - - never far removed from worship.

Luke ends his Gospel as he began it: with worship in the temple. Zechariah started it off, he, a priest of Israel, offering incense in the temple - - with an angel's announcement and his disbelief, with his being struck dumb and thus unable to offer the priestly benediction to the people waiting at the temple steps to be blessed.

Luke ends with the risen Christ appearing to his discipleship, with his gracious forgiveness and new commissioning of them, to use the words of T.S. Eliot, "With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling."¹

It ends with disciples worshiping the risen Christ, and Christ lifting his hands and blessing them and with the disciples returning to Jerusalem, where they "were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God" - - the last words of the Gospel.

I've loved reading through Luke with you these five months, December through April, and today we end with the last two scenes from the Gospel. But these scenes are just a beginning. Again to use T.S. Eliot's words: "To make an end is to make a beginning."²

I

In our first scene it is still Easter evening. The two disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus and recognized him in the breaking of the bread have rushed to tell the eleven. The eleven disciples tell them what they've experienced through the day: The report of the women about the empty tomb and the angel's announcement, and Christ's appearance to Peter.

Then suddenly, as they were talking, Christ appeared to them and said, "Peace be with you." They needed the word of peace, for they were terrified. They thought they were seeing a ghost. You don't want to see ghosts - - that is, the dead come back as spirits to haunt us. "I see dead people," said the boy in the movie Sixth Sense, and chills went up your spine.

Easter is not a scary movie. The risen Jesus is neither a disembodied ghost nor a resuscitated corpse. He is something new: "A spiritual body" as Paul called it, or a "transphysical body" as N.T. Wright calls it, though both phrases point to the inexplicable.³

These resurrection appearances defy our common categories; they transcend our rationality. They are encounters with the mystery and beauty of God.

Jesus appears and disappears. He is recognizable and nonrecognizable. There is something continuous and discontinuous about him in this new dimension of his being. He is not a bodiless spirit; he is not a resuscitated corpse. He is something else.

If this were to happen to us, we'd be shaking. So welcome is his word, "Peace be with you." He is not a ghost come to haunt but the risen Jesus come to bless.

Then the risen Jesus showed them his hands and feet. We have a Lord with scars. Scars can be beautiful because they are signs of healing. You survived the wounds. You're still here. The Risen Lord is the same as the Crucified Messiah. Our Redeemer has wounds.

When Jesus showed them his hands and feet, the text says they "disbelieved for joy." I love this phrase. It captures those extraordinary moments where there's joy and there's disbelief all mixed up together. Goose bumps and doubts. There's excitement, there's wondering. It's too good to be true. It's too good not to be true.

Then Jesus says, "Have anything to eat?" I've always loved the ordinariness of Jesus' resurrection appearances. Mary thought he was a gardener. Jesus appeared like a fisherman to the disciples. "Caught anything, boys?" he yelled from the shore of Galilee. Then he cooked them breakfast.

"Have anything to eat?" he asked. And they ate fish together. The risen Jesus eating fish confounds my best understanding. It strains my credulity, and "I believe everything!" Or try to. There's a great line in one of Frederick Buechner's Leo Bebb novels. Leo Bebb is a slightly shady, but lovable, evangelist being investigated by a skeptical reporter named Antonio Parr. Bebb says to Parr: "Antonio, I believe everything! You may think this is easy, but it's as hard as hell."

Here is the best way my mind comprehends these experiences. At the resurrection God revealed the new creation. This new creation exists alongside the old creation; the "world to come" impinges upon and occasionally interrupts the present world. These resurrection appearance are moments where the new creation suddenly unveils itself and happens in our midst. They are temporal intersections of the new creation and the old, time and eternity.

Jesus' appearances had a physicality as well as a spirit-like character to them. Let me try to explain why I like to believe in "the resurrection of the body." When I talk about my beliefs I am not suggesting that this is what you must believe or even ought to believe. It is a way of holy conversation, where I share what is most important to me in my faith, and you share what is most important to you. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. The issue is not what you have to believe but what you need to believe: The faith God offers that you need in order to live as God has made you to live, the faith you need to thrive.

The belief in "the resurrection of the body" is important to me because it says that God is invested in what happens to our bodies. Matter matters, and in the new creation God is not manicuring heaven; God is transforming this material world by the Spirit. The kingdom of God is meant for earth, as Jesus taught us to pray. The transformation God has for us involves minds, bodies, relationships, communities, nations and Earth itself.

Then Jesus offered the disciples a new calling. He did not dismiss them for their failures and start all over with a new group. He started with the same old group, with people like us who sometimes doubt whether God can do anything with us and sometimes doubt whether God can do anything with the persons we see every week!

In Luke Jesus' new commission is described this way:

Repentance, turning to God and the good news of God revealed in Christ. The Hebrew word is shur, turn and return to God. The Greek word is metanoia, a turning of the mind, a new way of thinking, seeing, living. And forgiveness of sins. This is where new creation begins: In the forgiveness of sins. Here is where we begin again: "With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling."

II

And now the last scene of Luke's Gospel. Jesus took the disciples to Bethany, that nearby town where Mary and Martha and Lazarus lived, that town that seemed to be his home base at Jerusalem, his place of safety and friendship. Were Mary and Martha there, and Lazarus still bewildered by his new life after his days in the tomb? Was Mary Magdalene there? And Cleopas and his wife? And the eleven, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James and John? Was his own mother there? Was his brother James, who would be the leader of the church at Jerusalem?

When they got to Bethany he lifted up his hands in blessing and blessed them, and then was carried to the heavenly realm, to the world to come, to the new creation which impinges and interpenetrates and is transforming this old creation.

And it says, "They worshiped him." Jesus would not have countenanced such when he lived - - he always pointed us to God, whom he called Abba - - but now he is part of the divine realm of God. He is our way, our truth, our life, our center, the way of being which is God's way of being for us and the world, the window open to God's mystery and beauty. So we worship and so we follow. The road of discipleship and transformation.

III

People throughout the years have encountered the living Christ, not as those disciples in those first days of Easter did, but encountered his Spirit nonetheless: In the breaking of the bread, at the table together, in the opening of scripture, together on mission among the least of these, and in a myriad of ways. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:

...For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his
...through the features of men's faces.⁴

St. Francis met him in the body of a leper. Carl Bates found him, or was found by him, suicidal in a hotel room, when he opened a Gideon Bible.

Anne Lamott's story is one of my favorites. Christ came to her while she was recovering from an abortion. He appeared to her in her room "watching with patience and with love." She turned away from him and said out loud, "I'd rather die."

The next day she wondered whether it was a hallucination "born of fear and self-loathing and booze and the loss of blood."⁵ She writes:

She'd kept resisting him until she returned to her church in a ghetto of Marin County which had become God's salvation to her. "That's where I was when I came to," she writes, "and there I came to believe."⁷

When she sat in church that Sunday the sermon, she says, was about as sensible as someone trying to convince her of the existence of extraterrestrials! (You might have felt the same about my sermon today.) But the music did it:

She began to cry and left before the benediction. As she raced home she sensed Christ, like a little cat, running along at her heels.

When she arrived at her houseboat she paused, opened the door and said to Jesus, "I quit...all right. You can come in." This, she writes, "was my beautiful moment of conversion."

I've never had anything so dramatic happen to me. But there have been moments: in worship, in song, at table, at my desk, among the least of these, when I've felt like "one of worst of these, in the embrace of a friend, in church, along a mountain trail, in the face of another, Christ has been near.

And I've felt I could worship forever.