To Be Jesus to the World
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
May 1, 2022
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections – this morning we return to the post-resurrection stories by looking at John 20:19-29 from the New Revised Standard Version of scripture.
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin[a]), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
“Now, what are we to do?” That must have been the question running through the disciples and followers of Christ’s minds.
“Now, what are we to do?”
Today, we heard in our text of the disciples cowering in fear behind locked doors. Fearing not only the Roman Empire, but also the religious leaders of the day. No one was safe at this time.
I believe the disciples were in fear just as many of the people in Ukraine or Palestine are today.
The disciples knew that the religious and state authorities had found a way to have Jesus crucified, and they knew they were already on the trail to find and do the same thing to them and the other followers of Christ.
Let’s be honest, religious and state authorities don’t often like the followers of blasphemous, rogue teachers, who want to make their leaders out to be martyrs.
No, they would want to eliminate any possibility of this happening and do everything to keep their religion and state pure. This is sadly true of many religious and governmental groups in our world, still today.
Change is hard, and prophetic voices are those usually rallying for change.
It is one thing to watch someone die for a cause, but when you find out that the attention has turned on you because of your followership of this person, ANXIETY, FEAR, the NEED TO HIDE quickly overcome you.
Your mind flashes with visions of you being tortured by the authorities, carrying your own cross through the city of Jerusalem, and being hung to suffer the agony of public execution on a cross. These would have been vivid images in the minds of the followers of Christ at that time.
The process the disciples were running through in their minds was, what I would call, a personal incarnation. They were beginning to incarnate (becoming a living embodiment of) what Christ had just gone through. And the disciples were left to answer that big question,
“Now, what are we to do?”
Jesus never really taught about Part B…and let’s be honest, the disciples hardly understood Part A – let alone having a plan for after Jesus was gone from their presence.
You may be thinking this is hard to relate to – but just ask yourself:
· When have you said, “Now, what are we to do?” or “Now, what am I to do?” in your own life.
· What was your difficult situation?
· Have you ever been gripped by fear wondering what was going to happen?
· Have you ever felt like you had no plan B – that life was at a dead end?
Just like where we find the disciples this morning, it is often in our lowest moments, when our plans, our ideas, our hopes, our beliefs are stripped away, this is often when the presence of Jesus is felt and made known – or maybe it is in these times we finally recognize that God has been with us all along.
The text says that Jesus was literally “standing among them” and they didn’t even realize it. How long was he standing there before someone noticed?
Isn’t that how it is for us, often? The presence of God is in our midst, or even in our own hearts, and we don’t recognize or acknowledge God.
Folks, we are Quakers, the ones who are always to look for that of God in those around us. How often has the presence of God been in our midst in the likes of a friend, a parent, a child, at teacher, even a complete stranger, and we totally missed it?
And then comes those famous first words from Jesus, “PEACE BE WITH YOU.” The scriptures have recorded for us several other times when Jesus used those same words. Each time the disciples heard them he was using them to calm their lives.
If you remember, it was these words that Jesus used to calm the storms on the water as their boat was violently shaken by the storm and everyone was in fear. The disciples would have known these words to be an acknowledgment and reassurance of God’s presence in the storms of their lives.
Yet, with all that they had been through during the last several days leading up to their best friend being executed in front of them, they still showed doubt this time. This time they had been so shaken that he had to prove to them who he was so that their joy and peace would return.
The disciple, Thomas, even must go one step further – I think you and I might have been the same. Thomas needed a hands-on-experience before he could believe.
Sometimes our lives are in such tumult that we need something a bit more tangible – a real-time, real-life experience.
Sometimes we need a physical – incarnate – experience. We need to hear a parent’s voice, sometimes we need a hug, sometimes we need a physical connection. I think Thomas has been shafted by history.
Beyond needing proof, beyond assurance, beyond even finding inner peace, Thomas needed a physical connection as he tried to wrap his mind around that question, “Now, what are we to do?”
And that physical connection again takes the shape of incarnation – embodying flesh or taking on flesh. Thomas was understanding the deep need for incarnation at this moment – he needed flesh to come to grips with what was going on.
I think too often the reason we cannot relate to Jesus, is because we cannot truly see him as a human being – with flesh. He was no different than any of us in this meetinghouse. He had skin and bones, aches and pains, he bled…no different. And what we need to realize is that Jesus showed us how with these fully human, fleshly bodies to truly live!
He taught us how to forgive, how to bring hope, how to reconcile, how to “incarnate” his life and ministry to our neighbors and to our world in this present moment.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said it so well, “What Jesus wants from us is not admiration, but rather imitation.”
It wasn’t just about the incarnation of Jesus, folks – no, it’s also about OUR incarnation. This is what Jesus was getting at in our text.
“Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you!’ As the Father has sent me, I am sending YOU!”
You and I are now the incarnated Christ to our world. We are the light-bearers being sent into our world.
I know I mentioned this two weeks ago in my Easter message, but have you ever thought about the fact that the gathered meeting (or the universal church) was considered or called “The Body of Christ.” We are the official incarnation of Christ to our world. Let that sink in for a moment.
St. Teresa of Avila prayed a prayer that speaks to this incarnation – it went like this:
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands but yours,
No feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which
Christ’s compassion must look out on the world.
Yours are the feet with which
He is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which
He is to bless us now.
We are the incarnation of Christ – We are the light bearers.
What we are being called and sent to do is be Jesus and live as he did in our world. We are filled with his light and love. We are to take our inner light into our world and become the presence of Christ to our neighbors.
To sense God’s peace, forgiveness, his love - we must embody and live it in our world. We must take on the attributes of Christ.
Yet along with this call naturally comes fear, as is illustrated well by the disciples cowering in the upper room in our text this morning. Fear is real for most of us.
Being a peacemaker, standing up for what you believe, seeking justice and mercy, even asking or giving forgiveness are not always easy and often they cause us to fear living out the life God is calling us to.
Fear translates to hiding and worrying about what others think of us. It leads us to cower, to isolate, and even build walls.
Sadly, a great deal of our politics, our military, our economics, our sports, our parenting styles, even much of our religiosity is based on fear and fear tactics.
But God is sending us into a world – not in fear – but rather in peace. Filled with God’s spirit and light to offer forgiveness, to reconcile, to heal and bring harmony. We are to offer the attributes of Jesus Christ – Grace, Mercy, Justice, and Peace. But sadly, it is our own fears that get in the way...
It’s like what Quaker Gene Knudsen-Hoffman wrote,
Fear which lingers,
Fear which lives on in us,
Fear which does not prompt us to wise remedial action,
Becomes engraved upon our hearts,
Becomes an addiction, becomes an armor which encases us.
This fear guards and guides us and determines our action.
It leads us directly toward that which we fear.
We can’t let our fear keep us in a tomb of death.
We can’t let fear keep us worried or fretting about what is going to happen. We can’t let fear keep us hiding and avoiding and not acting.
That I believe is the case too often with the church, today.
People who take up the mantle of Jesus Christ – people who incarnate Christ in their own lives. People who live out of peace, forgiveness, grace, mercy and love have learned to embrace their fears and step out in faith.
Fear is a major issue, but I think there is another. Let’s be honest, many people have given up on Jesus and his ways in our world. For many the followers of Jesus that the world sees portrayed in the media and on T.V. no longer represent Christianity or for that matter Jesus – and many see them as an embarrassment and have a real fear of being misrepresented. Blogger and commentator, John Pavolitz, addressed this in one of his blog posts. He says,
The Jesus I knew as a child and came to aspire to in adulthood is still here, and it is the heretics who are preserving him.
It is the maligned backsliders, the Godless heathens, and the derided social justice warriors who are replicating his compassion for hurting people, his welcome for foreigners, his generosity toward the hungry, his gentleness for the marginalized.
I’ve been visiting these local Progressive faith communities every week, and they are doing joy-giving, life-affirming, wall-leveling work—alongside people of every color, orientation, and nation of origin.
They are providing Sanctuary for refugees, making meals for multitudes, offering embrace to the estranged, standing between the vulnerable people and the opportunistic predators around them—you know, like Jesus would.
And in our gatherings, Atheists and Muslims and Jews and Agnostics have stepped into these communities and found something they have not found in the counterfeit Christianity so loud in this country: they have found welcome.
It’s all been fully and beautifully surprising, to see this Jesus still alive here in these people.
You may have given up on a Christianity that resembles Jesus, and I can’t blame you. The people claiming his name right now who have the microphone, the platform, the headlines, and the legislative pull—are providing good reason to lose hope, ample cause to imagine Jesus’ extinction, great evidence that this thing is devoid of goodness.
But there is a quieter, more loving, less self-seeking, less headline grabbing expression of faith in this country, that is everything Jesus said he would be: good news to the poor and the disenfranchised, hope for those feeling tossed by the storms of this life, refuge for the oppressed—and trouble for the wolves who come to devour them.
In these progressive Christian communities all over this country, the peacemaking, neighbor loving, foot washing, leper-embracing Jesus is not only still present, but being multiplied by kind people determined to perpetuate him here.
There is a Jesus here who invites women into ministry, who feels compassion and not contempt for the poor; one who calls disparate people to join him, one who destroys all barriers.
There is a Jesus here of justice and mercy; one championing diversity and equality, one committed to altering the planet in a way that gives voice to the voiceless and resistance to the hateful.
This Jesus is here, and he will never be driven to extinction so long as there are heretics, heathens, and backsliders who refuse to let him die simply because religious people have no use for him.
These people are still reaching out a hand to this hurting world because they are compelled by their faith to do so.
If you are a person of faith and you’re exhausted from a Christianity of cruelty and malice; if you’ve given up on finding anything more redemptive or anything worthy of your presence and time, seek out a Progressive faith community this week—and allow yourself to be beautifully surprised by a radically loving, lavishly welcoming, compassionate activist Jesus you thought was gone for good.
Be encouraged.
So folks…Now, what are we to do?
My hope is that we here at First Friends would see ourselves as one of those Progressive Faith Communities that radically love, lavishly welcome, and are compassionately activist. That we would be known by incarnating the true Jesus that the world needs. That, I believe, is what we are to do!
Now as we enter a time of waiting worship, I ask you to ponder the following queries:
· How am I incarnating Jesus to my neighbors?
· What fears are getting in my way?