The pandemic disrupts our sense of normal. Jesus invites us to join in the transformation because normal isn’t the point.
Preaching forgiveness in the pandemic
Easter 3B | Luke 24:36b-48
Something I didn’t talk about last week was how scary the resurrection is. But that’s where we start today. When someone we’re convinced is dead—just shows up.
Jesus isn’t supposed to be walking around. And yet here he is. That’s gotta mess with anybody’s head.
And last week, the disciples were all gathered in the upper room. They locked themselves in. They didn’t know what was going to happen. And Jesus just barges in.
This time, we’re reading a different gospel account: Luke. In it, a couple of disciples have just been walking along with a stranger. Just some guy who turned out to be Jesus! And now, they’re talking with the other disciples about that crazy experience and then…poof! There he is.
If this were a screwball comedy, Jesus would be entering with a Heeeeyyy, I’m back! or a D’ja miss me? But it isn’t funny…or serious. It is just so…unbelievable. He’s supposed to be dead.
So they’re thinking what anyone would think: they must be seeing things. What they want to see. Therefore, it must be a ghost. Somehow, the thought of paranormal activity is more believable than the resurrection. Like ghosts make more sense than Jesus rising from the dead. That’s telling, isn’t it?
And as if to deal with the obvious, Jesus is like, OK, let’s prove all of this is real. Anybody got some fish? He’s going to prove he is really there. It is really him. And that he really died. All of it is true.
This is a story of physicality
Jesus is physically there. It’s about his being there physically.
Being in the same space, touching the body, eating food. This is just like Thomas’s I’ll believe it when I touch it. Just without the question of believing without seeing. This isn’t a test. Here, Jesus shows up and shows them what they need to experience: to see, touch, even smell. They are there to witness a miracle.
For all of us, the last year has been a real uninvited challenge. We have attempted to live displaced. Out of routine and out of time.
How easy was it to lose track of what day it was. How long it has been. Just by removing a few routines from our days. And really, for most of us, it was only removing a few things: a morning commute, a trip to the gym, a weekly coffee date, or driving to church on Sunday. But the impact on our hearts has been immeasurable.
This hasn’t been a real out-of-body experience, but the opposite. We’ve very much experienced an in-the-body experience. These last thirteen months have made us incredibly aware of our bodies and their limitations.
But what we’ve felt is a profound dislocation.
These are our bodies. This is our experience. And yet all that is around us is transformed. Our sense of belief, trust, is threatened and breaking. Breaking as the certainty of the lives we’ve made for ourselves is evaporating.
What we’ve struggled with for over a year now is being in the midst of disorientation. Being true, ourselves, faithful, decent, hopeful, generous, alive. Like being the stable center when all the world is spinning.
Some of us have handled it OK, but for the most part, we’re all cracking up a bit. Because as alone as we may feel, like the stable center of a spinning top, we are all feeling this dislocation. We aren’t alone in the feeling—it is happening to us.
This isn’t anyone’s individual crisis in faith. It is a common, public crisis that only faith can help us make it through.
Grounded
The world isn’t actually spinning. Well, of course, technically it is rotating and making its trek around the sun, but it is not spinning any faster than ever.
As unmooring as this time has been, there has also been a deep rootedness that is found in our tradition. Praying the daily office. Reaching out to our friends—at a time when we are all the “shut ins”. Making community of our households, even when that includes me and a cat.
Our tradition, from that moment after the resurrection, has centered on grounding—not in the world, but in God’s dream for the world. It has always been about that; never how routine our lives become. How happy we are to be doing what we normally do.
Jesus taught his followers to make the Kin-dom come. He showed them the way, invited them into a process of active learning where they could learn by doing. He gave them the power to heal, forgive, and bring wholeness to the world. And they did. Over and over all over the world.
Then he died.
And their world seemed to collapse around them. They didn’t know what to do.
In the midst of that, Jesus appeared to them and answered that question, saying they really do know what to do. Because they’ve done it. Over and over.
“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.”
We are witnesses.
Jesus reminds them of Scripture and Tradition, two legs of the stool. And then he reminds them of the third leg: reason.
This is what they witness. Yes, the suffering Messiah and his rising again. Yes.
And repentance and forgiveness of sins.
Proclaiming repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’s name to all nations.
We are witnesses. Not only of an historical event, but the transformation Jesus brings. To us. And to the world.
We are witnesses to transformation.
WE are witnesses. Not just because we were there at the right moment to see it take place. But because we have eyes to see and ears to hear. We are called to be a people given the power of forgiveness. To heal our neighbors and our world.
This is our story.
And it is a story that strangely makes more sense when the world seems crazy. When we’re feeling dislocated and everything is becoming a new normal. Because that’s when our eyes are open, when our hearts look for stability. A foundation. When all is chaos:
Faith.
The thing that has been with us all along. Inviting us into something way bigger than facemarks and liturgy. Witnesses to repentance and forgiveness of sin. True transformation. Becoming whole within ourselves and our community.
As much as we want normal, that isn’t the work. The work is restoring the world. And that hasn’t changed a bit.