"Easter Is In Our Hands"
Luke 24:36b-48
April 26, 2009
St. Paul United Methodist Church
Rev. John A. Fleming
I don't know about you, but to me Easter Sunday seems like it happened a month ago. The day was a glorious one for sure, despite the rain. The Annex was about as full as I have ever seen it at our early service and when it came time for our late service, it was pouring down and thankfully people were pouring in. The title of the song the hand bells rang were words we believe are true, that the strife is o'er. Then we sang our first hymn. There is nothing like singing, "Christ the Lord is risen today. Raise your joys and triumphs high. Sing ye heaven and earth reply, alleluia!" With the hand bells ringing and the church full of voices, we were not afraid to sing out. By the end of our service, we left here singing and humming the Hallelujah Chorus. I don't know about you, but that tune stayed in my head for days.
On Easter Sunday, it is the easiest thing in the world to believe that Jesus is alive, that death has not won, that God still has something to say to the powers of this world.
That was a couple of weeks ago now. Why are we still reading these resurrection stories? Were you like me and woke up on the Monday after Easter realizing that things did not look all that different than they did on Good Friday? In the news there was a story about a woman who missed a turn late in the night. Her children in the back seat, three of them, all drowned.
A worship service full of celebration and Easter lilies helps, it really does, but is the world all that different today because of what happened two weeks ago?
A campus minister I know says that one of his students popped into his office on the Tuesday after Easter. She's just a few short weeks from graduating and is worried where she will work and so she said jokingly, or maybe not, to her minister, "Easter morning was great and all, but I sure wish the risen Christ would get me a job!" The minister said that you could see her fear of the future by looking in her eyes. She was worried about the real world.
The real world, well that is where we find the disciples of Jesus this morning, in the real world. For the past couple of weeks, we have looked at John's telling of the resurrection story. Now it is Luke's turn. Luke doesn't have Jesus whispering Mary's name, he has Jesus walking with two disciples on the seven mile trek to Emmaus. Those two are kept from recognizing him; that is the way Luke puts it. When they arrive in Emmaus and begin to eat together, Jesus breaks a loaf of bread and immediately the two recognize him. As suddenly as he appeared to them he disappeared and the two ran back to Jerusalem to tell the others what had just happened to them.
They are doing that when Jesus appears to his band of followers. If you have ever doubted, been troubled or afraid, then you are in good company with these disciples. Luke tells us that Jesus walked into their room, right into their conversation about him and said, "Peace be with you."
The disciples thought they were seeing a ghost, an apparition, a spirit. Jesus asked, "Why are you frightened and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have." And Luke includes this wonderful line, "…while in their joy they were disbelieving and still wandering..."
In other words, the disciples think that Jesus is still dead. They think he is a ghost. Ghosts go boo and clank around in old houses and churches, but more importantly than that, ghosts don't have bodies. Jesus said, "Look at my hands and my feet…"
Now, I've got to tell you that I think that is strange that Jesus says that. I know what he is doing. He is proving who he is, but still I think it's strange. He didn't say, "Look at my hands and feet" to Mary. He whispered her name and she recognized him. He didn't say, "Look at my hands and feet" to those on the Emmaus Road. He broke bread and they knew. I wonder why he didn't say, "Listen to my voice." I wonder why he didn't say, "Look in my eyes and you will see that it is me."
I know, of course, why he says to look at his hands and his feet; that is where the nail marks could be found. His hands and feet told his story and to some extent our hands and our feet and our bodies say something about who we are. There a scar on my knee that tells of the time I was riding my bike and slid in the gravel in front of Thomasine Witherspoon's house. I remember her kind hands that day; they helped wash away the blood and gravel.
I asked my mom about me and who I looked like in my family. She said this, "There's little Fleming in you. You have my mother's nose and my father's build. Your love of sports comes from your Uncle Dutch." My hair is like my mother's hair, wavy, and so that's why I keep it so short.
Who we are tells the story of where we came from. The way we cry at the same point in the movie, the way we laugh when Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it, the way we looked at the one sitting across the table from us at dinner that night and just knew that some day we would marry. Since then, life has not been the same. The way we think of those that we love and the way they did things and the way they looked. It was their grin, the way that hugged you when you had not seen them in months. For my sister, it was the way she pursed her lips, put her hand on her hip, and shot her leg out. I knew she was about to give it to me when she did that. And when they are gone, we try our very best to remember how they looked and what they did, how they smiled, the expressions on their faces. We recall what it was like when we looked deeply into their eyes, peeking into their souls. And when we cannot recall those things it bothers us, it bothers us very much.
Look at these hands of Jesus now, disciples. What do you see? When those gathered in Jerusalem saw them, they saw everything that Jesus had ever been to them. They saw the hands that had broken the bread and blessed the fish on that hillside when they were sure there could not be enough to feed everyone. They saw his hands, the ones that had reached into the mud to make a pad that opened the eyes of a blind man. They saw his hands, the ones that danced when he was teaching and was really excited about something he was saying. They saw his hands, the ones that reached out to the leper; he didn't think twice before doing that.
They saw his hands, but they also saw his feet. His feet, the ones that carried him hundreds of miles, taking the good news to anyone longing to hear it. His feet, the ones that were once washed with the tears of a woman and dried with her hair; they are wounded now, these hands and feet. They are bruised and there are scars on them, but Jesus is still very much alive.
And into that room Jesus walked in and said that he was a real as anyone else. He was not a ghost. He was hungry and asked for food. He showed them his hands and feet and said that ghosts do not have flesh and bones. He is right about that!
After convincing the disciples that he was alive, he did something else. He opened the scriptures to them, from the books of Moses to the Psalms. He pointed out the passages that foretold his story. And when he was finished, he said to them, and this is the New Revised John Version, "Easter is up to you now. You are the ones who will tell the story to others. You will write the next chapter. It is up to you now. I have given you my hands and my feet, so give your hands and feet to everyone else. What will your hands and feet say about you? Where will you go? Who will you touch? Where will you serve? What will your hands and feet say about you? You are the body of Christ. You will bear witness to my love for the world. You are the ones who will hold the lonely and cradle the baby. You are the ones who will feed the sick and offer words of encouragement. You are the ones who will reach out to those who believe they aren't worth saving and you will say to them, ‘You are a child of the King.' You are Easter now. Do not fear. Do not doubt. Where you go, Easter will go."
Let me close with this. I read about a pastor whose mom, on the occasion of his graduation from seminary gave him a great gift. She gave him a clock, made from the roof of the barn that was on his grandparent's property, where she grew up and where he played as a child. Underneath the clock were the ancient words of St. Teresa of Avila. These are her words, "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which to look at Christ's compassion to the world. You are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now."
Easter, friends, is in our hands and it is in our feet. What will our hands and feet say about us? Let us pray.
(Special thanks to the writings of Barbara Brown Taylor for the ideas about the hands and feet of Jesus. And thanks to the preacher who helped me to with some of the words and the closing story of this sermon).