How god Loves Us
Scripture: Luke 24:36-40
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, April 4, 2010
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you - that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."
Suppose I came to your door with flowers in my hand and I rang your bell. What would you do? Maybe the first thing you would is take a look through your peep hole to see who this is. Or maybe you'd keep the chain on the door and open it just a crack to take a look at who's disturbing your peace and quiet. Then you'd see me standing there with these flowers. Maybe I'd say, "Look! I've brought you flowers!"
Would you accept them?
That would probably depend. It would make a big difference if you knew me. If we had been through a lot together, and you knew that I knew what was happening just now and flowers were just the thing, that would make a big difference, wouldn't it?
But what if you didn't know me? Then maybe these flowers are a trick. A ploy of some kind. A way to get something from you. Maybe your first thought would be, "What do you want from me? What are you trying to sell? Time shares? Subscriptions? Religion?"
The key to offering, and accepting a gift, is a relationship. And the key to all relationships is, "trust". When there is trust a gift can be offered, and accepted. Without it, flowers become, well, meaningless.
It turns out it's really not that simple to bring somebody flowers...
God has a problem.
God loves us, beyond telling. Beyond words, or poetry, even flowers. The problem is this: How does God help us be able to accept His love? Given that life has taught us to keep the chain on our door, because God knows we've been hurt, and burned and played. God knows how we've dabbled in the same ourselves. Maybe that's it, we know ourselves all too well.
So somehow God has to break through our defenses, like that wild man John the Baptist preaching to the the people in the cities to come back out to the river Jordan and cross back through. He was trying to wake people up. Get numb people to feel again.
God loves us, beyond telling. Beyond words, or poetry, even flowers. The problem is this: How does God help us be able to accept His love? Given that life has taught us to keep the chain on our door, because God knows we've been hurt, and burned and played. God knows how we've dabbled in the same ourselves. Maybe that's it, we know ourselves all too well.
So somehow God has to break through our defenses, like that wild man John the Baptist preaching to the the people in the cities to come back out to the river Jordan and cross back through. He was trying to wake people up. Get numb people to feel again.
Somehow God has to find a way to free us up because God knows what we're up against. There are forces at work here that want us asleep, and numb, and indifferent, to not even answer the doorbell.
We've been praying for our friends in Haiti, and thinking about what happened, and why. How tempting it is to blame God for tectonic plates that move, and shabbily constructed buildings, and the economic desperation, ignorance, and greed that led to poor construction in the first place. Not to mention land that is 98% deforested, and disease. How tempting it is for the Haitian people to succumb to the sheer force of suffering, to become defined by it, to be reduced to a stomach and a mouth, to forget that no one can live by just bread alone. How tempting it is to some to finally conclude that life is meaningless, even a cruel joke. How tempting it is to just keep the door locked. It's subtle. To blame God gives us a pass, for a while. But the thing is God doesn't give us a pass. God wants to free us up. God wants us out there.
Over the years we've gotten involved with supporting farmers cooperatives, and a little clinic up in the mountains southwest of the Port au Prince, and helping with the education of about 14,000 children in that same region. It's absolutely amazing the kind of faith you see in places like Haiti, and what gets accomplished because there is trust.
See, it's God's problem and burden not only to offer us the gift of his love, but also to help us accept this gift.
The only way to do this is to gain our trust.
It seems it was Jesus' mission to convince the world to put their trust or faith (they are synonymous) in him. Because there are all kinds of places where we can put our trust and faith. We all have our faith in something, somewhere, don't we? No one lives without faith. Even atheists believe in something called "randomness" or "luck", or even in "nothingness". Maybe we put our faith in money, (or the stock market!), or in personal achievement, or brains, or brawn, or having things turn out a certain way - which is sort of like putting our faith in the weather... But what happens to where we put our faith with the storm comes? And come it will.
By the way, Biblically speaking, "faith" or "trust" can be seen in what we do, not just in what we say we say we believe. So we put our faith in our cars to get us here this morning (although lately this has been the subject of a lot of conversation). Faith always leaves a vapor trail. You can see where it's going by what it's been doing, by where the money gets spent, and where the time goes, and the decisions that get made in the business, or in the family, in how we respond to failure and success.
Do you trust that God loves you?
At the end of the day this is the most important question.
But it's not that easy. Even after the women had reported a strange conversation at the empty tomb, even after Peter had seen for himself Jesus' burial clothes strewn around like a teenager's bedroom, his friends were (and this is Luke's word) "terrified" to find him standing next to them.
You'd think they'd never met him. It's like he was a total stranger standing on the front porch holding up flowers.
His first word was the right word, "Peace be with you."
Not only to say, "Calm down, easy!" because they thought they had seen a ghost, but "Peace" as in Shalom, as in how it all goes together, what it all really looks like when all is finished and done, and what it looks like looks like this-like hands and feet they could touch, as real as touch itself, as real as breaking bread around the Table with old friends. This "peace", of God with them, and with you, and me. Peace as trusting, as opposed to fearing, and what fear does to us, what it makes us do, and what it does to the people we care about more than anything. Dear God, please deliver us from behind our locked doors.
Risen Jesus standing there was another way God loved us.
To show us in the End what it will be like for us, what we'll look like. That we'll look like ourselves, like persons. That we're not just disembodied souls and when we die we become like a wave on the endless sea, or a breath on the infinite wind. That you as an individual person, created in the image of God, you matter. But so does the person sitting next to you, matter. And so does the person on the other side of the planet we've never met, matter. Jesus standing there is a gift-if we trust him. And his gift has a way of changing how we see any person.
He showed us something else. He said, "See my hands, my feet"-to see that he still bears scars on his body. That he never forgets what it's like for us. It means there is no denial of pain, or suffering, or evil. That this is how God loved us, if we trust him ... to take all this on. It's how forgiveness works. We know this. The one forgiving takes on what the other person has done. They "absorb" the pain. They wear the consequences. Forgiveness is always personally costly, isn't it? Jesus carried what we can never carry, to put it all to death. And leave it there. Done. Finished. Gone. Forgiven.
But we have to trust him. That he can do this.
Everything Jesus ever did, ever said had one simple purpose. His healing people, raising them from the dead, arguing with religious leaders, bouncing children on his knee, calming a storm with just a word, teaching us how to pray honestly, and how to treat each other, and keep our vows, and even love our enemies-all of it had one simple goal, and that was to convince you and me, and us, to undo the chain on our doors.
And accept his gift.
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Westminster Presbyterian Church |