God loves our whole, embodied selves

I also reference Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35.

 

A reading from Acts 11:1-18

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard

       that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.

²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem,

       the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying,

              “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them,

       step by step, saying,

              ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying,

                     and in a trance I saw a vision.

                     There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven,

                            being lowered by its four corners;

                            and it came close to me.

                                   ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals,

                                          beasts of prey,

                                          reptiles,

                                          and birds of the air.

                     ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me,

                            ‘Get up, Peter;

                                   kill and eat.’

                     ⁸But I replied,

                            ‘By no means, Lord;

                                   for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’

                     ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven,

                            ‘What God has made clean,

                                   you must not call profane.’

                     ¹⁰This happened three times;

                            then everything was pulled up again to heaven.

              ¹¹At that very moment three men,

                     sent to me from Caesarea,

                            arrived at the house where we were.

                     ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them

                     and not to make a distinction between them and us.

              These six brothers also accompanied me,

                     and we entered the man’s house.

                     ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel

                            standing in his house and saying,

                                   ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon,

                                          who is called Peter;

                                          ¹⁴he will give you a message

                                                 by which you 

                                                        and your entire household 

                                                               will be saved.’

                     ¹⁵And as I began to speak,

                            the Holy Spirit fell upon them

                                   just as it had upon us at the beginning.

                                   ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord,

                                   how Jesus had said,

                                          ‘John baptized with water,

                                                 but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’

              ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift

                     that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,                                                                 who was I that I could hinder God?”

¹⁸When the apostles and believers heard this,

       they were silenced.

              And they praised God, saying,

                     “Then God has given even to the Gentiles

                            the repentance that leads to life.”

Word of God, word of life.

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It is good to be back with you all.  The last two weeks of vacation and continuing education were good and yet it is good to be back here.  As my continuing ed while I was gone, I attended the yearly Proclaim Gathering.  Proclaim is a professional community that I am a part of for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Lutheran leaders in the church. 

This community not only proclaims the gospel to me, but also embodies the gospel with me.  As part of our opening Eucharist this year, we took our calling as members of Christ’s body to heart.  We read through the names of those gathered and as each person’s name was called, that person would stand or raise their hand and call out, “this is my body,” echoing Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. 

As people were named into the space, we tossed or passed balls of red yarn—I like to think of it as our Holy Spirit yarn—to each other, making a messy, interwoven mass of red as we sat together.  As LGBTQ people of faith, we claimed the very bodied space—our embodied place—in the body of Christ, a space that has, in recent history, been denied to us.

While there are many ways that we all embody our faith, physically living into and living out our member-ship in the body of Christ, for me as a queer pastor, Proclaim brings my whole self into ministry and faith.  I don’t need to parse out which parts of me belong—to church, to home, to friends.  My whole being belongs and is celebrated as part of the body of Christ.

In today’s reading from Acts, Peter and the apostles and believers in Judea are confronted with a challenge, a new embodiment of their community of faith.  Up until that point, Gentiles—those who were Greek and didn’t identify as Jewish—had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism before they were considered members of the community of faith.  Their own culture and their unique differences didn’t fit within the community’s understanding of themselves and so they were forced to assimilate, to adapt to the dominant culture of the group, leaving part of who they were at the door.

But that is not God’s will for any of us.  Just as it was for the Gentiles in Acts, our own Presbyterian-ness, our Lutheran-ness, our Christian-ness, is not rooted in our cultural heritages, in how much lefse we eat or when bagpipes are present, how we make tamales, organize our congregation, or even how many pies we bake.  What unites us, the thing that roots our faith, is God, made known through Jesus Christ.   And it is God who loves our whole beings, our whole selves, even when we struggle.

As with the early church in Acts, it takes time to figure out as a community what it means for different groups or types of people to truly be a part of us.  We have to wrestle with how our culture and our identities impact the group.  Does the language we speak force others to leave a part of who they are at the door?  Is our grief or loneliness, still present after so many years, out of place here?

We each have unique gifts, identities, and perspectives, some of which clearly fit, no questions asked, in this part of the body of Christ.  And I imagine many of us have passions or interests or parts of our identity that we haven’t shared with others.  We’re unsure if they make us unfit or too different for the community of faith.   

Maybe we keep things on the surface during fellowship so we don’t have to risk the pain and hurt of opening up and being vulnerable only to have our community abandon or denounce us.  Maybe we just ask and share about the weather and the busy-ness of life instead of asking and sharing what we’re most passionate about.  Maybe we’re afraid of the vulnerability in naming our continuing grief over a loved one’s death, or loneliness without them here.

The community of believers in Judea start out unsure of these uncircumcised believers that Peter baptized—unsure if they really belong, since they are so different.  Even Peter was unsure at the beginning!  He thought he knew the rules.  He thought he knew which food and which people were in and which were out—until God came and shook things up.

Peter says, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.” And as the Holy Spirit fell, it turned Peter’s understanding upside down.  His faith remained.  He still trusted in the loving God made known to him in Jesus, but now his understanding of God’s expansive, radical love had to change, because “If then God gave [the Gentiles] the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

Ultimately Peter realized that he couldn’t hinder God, but he could embrace God’s expansive love, and share his experience of transformation with others.

When we come together to worship or serve or learn, we too get to ask “who am I that I could hinder God?”  and we are given the opportunity to embrace God’s expansive love, beginning even with ourselves.  Being with other LGBTQ Lutheran church leaders helps me live into God’s expansive love.  And being able to share stories from that time with you all also helps me live into it.

What helps you embrace God’s expansive love for you? and for others? and for all of creation?  What do you risk in bringing your whole self into this part of the body of Christ?  Do you know—do you trust—God’s expansive, radical love for you?  Do you know that the Holy Spirit falls upon you just as it did upon Peter and the other apostles at the beginning?  I do.  I know it because I see it in each of you.

God is always coming to us in love for our whole flawed and perfectly loved selves. 

Our whole bodies and our whole lived experiences are the body of Christ, together with the great cloud of witnesses, spanning all of time and space.  The things that make us different and the things that can make us question whether we or another person can really bring our whole selves into the body of Christ                        are also the things that make us more truly the body of Christ together.  Our grief and our loneliness, our differences, are all signs of God’s love for us and God’s love at work through us.

God’s home is among mortals.  Jesus declares, “This is my body.”  God comes to you just as you are.  And just as you are, you are a part of the body of Christ.   

Because love wins.   

Because grace triumphs.   

Because Christ is risen!   

Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

Jesus meets us where we're at: Easter 2c

The other reading I reference is Revelation 1:4-8.

The holy gospel according to John (20:19-31)

¹⁹When 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 Judeans,

      Jesus came and stood among them and said,

            “Peace be with you.”

                  ²⁰After he said this,

                        he showed them his hands and his side.

                              Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

      ²¹Jesus said to them again,

            “Peace be with you.

                  As the Father has sent me,

                        so I send you.”

            ²²When he had said this,

                  he breathed on them and said to them,

                        “Receive the Holy Spirit.

                              ²³If you forgive the sins of any,

                                    they are forgiven them;

                              if you retain the sins of any,

                                    they are retained.”

            ²⁴But Thomas

                  (who was called the Twin),

                  one of the twelve,

                        was not with them when Jesus came.

                              ²⁵So 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.”

²⁶A week later Jesus’ 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.”

            ²⁷Then 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.”

            ²⁸Thomas said to Jesus,

                  “My Lord and my God!”

            ²⁹Jesus said to him,

                  “Have you believed because you have seen me?

                        Blessed are those who have not seen

                              and yet have come to believe.”

                  ³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples,

                        which are not written in this book.

                        ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe

                              that Jesus is the Messiah,

                                    the Son of God,

                              and that through believing you may have life in his name.

The gospel of the Lord.

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Thomas is one of my favorite disciples.  One of the things I love about Thomas comes from a paper I wrote in seminary.  I was writing a paper using disability theology, which is theology specifically from the perspective of folks who our dominant culture considers disabled.  I went in looking at Jesus as disabled, with his wounds from the cross as part of the whole resurrected Christ and what I found was that Thomas is blind!  I think that Thomas was blind and that this is a bigger deal for us today than it seemed to be for Thomas and the other disciples back then.

You see, Thomas, who is called the twin—perhaps because he is usually accompanied by someone to help him navigate busy, bustling streets—is the disciple who is: a-braver than all the rest, b-more foolhardy than all the rest, or c-unlucky enough to draw the short stick when the disciples ran out of their supply of food.  Whatever the case, on that first day of the week Thomas was the one disciple not inside the doors, which were “locked for fear of the Judeans.”

In this resurrection account in John, Peter and the Beloved Disciple have already returned from scoping out the tomb that morning when Mary announced the body was missing, and now they believe… without understanding.  Mary has returned again since then to announce that she has “seen the Lord.”  And yet the disciples remain locked up and fearful. 

Except Thomas who, even if he is afraid, goes out into the world anyway.  And while Thomas is out, Jesus comes into the disciples’ locked room, sneaking through the cracks and crevices of their fear-filled, locked up “no” to breathe on them “Peace be with you.” 

The disciples have locked the doors, shut themselves in against a scary and dangerous world out there.  Yet, through the cracks in the walls, under the door, even the cracks in the disciples’ clear “no,” Jesus meets them where they’re at.  Even in their fear and lack of understanding Jesus shows them the wounds that make Jesus whole.  And then the disciples recognize their Lord.

When Thomas returns, it is finally the disciples’ turn to proclaim the resurrection.  “We have seen the Lord” they teasingly announce to the one whose eyes do not see, the one who was not there, the one who faced his own fear outside their safely locked room.  Thomas responds with their language.  Stating his own, similar need, Thomas says “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.”  Thomas also needs to “see”—which is for him, to touch and feel, in order to believe.

So the next week, with the doors still closed, Jesus comes again.  This time Thomas is with the other disciples and it would be easy to believe that Jesus comes just for Thomas.  It would be easy to believe, that is,          if the disciples weren’t still in the same room with the doors shut up against the fearful outside world. Because the truth is: the disciples probably still need this just as much or more than Thomas.  And they need Thomas with them to venture out into the world.

And so Jesus comes again breathing his “Peace be with you” to them.  Jesus comes to Thomas and gives him the woundedness still present in the resurrected Christ, saying “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Because for Thomas who is blind, to touch is to see.  To touch is to know, that this is “the Alpha and the Omega”—this is the everything—from Alpha to Omega, from before the beginning of all time to past the end of it.  Jesus is “the Almighty.”

And from those moments of clarity—of deep, soul-shattering clarity—comes the ultimate confession as Thomas replies “My Lord and my God!”  Jesus comes to the disciples again and again.  Jesus meets Thomas and all the others where they are, meeting them in the struggle for faith, in the struggle with grief.

The resurrection comes with new life and hope, certainly, and it also comes in the midst of grief—over a leader lost and of a leader who is not who they thought—one who leads differently.  They grieve the unmet expectations, of a mighty and powerful overthrow, expectations the disciples hadn’t realized existed until those expectations died on the cross.

The resurrection comes with new life and Jesus breaks in through the cracks and crevices of our fear and our “no”s to breathe Jesus’ “Peace be with you.”  The one who covers all time: present, past, and future comes with the slow quiet breath of “Peace be with you.” 

Jesus meets Mary at the tomb, calling her “Mary!” and naming her into the resurrection. 

                                   

Jesus meets the disbelieving disciples, locked in their fear, breathing “Peace be with you” and forgiveness of sins. 

And Jesus meets them again when nothing seems to have changed except that Thomas is with them this time.  And Jesus again breathes “Peace be with you” and reaches out to Thomas, joining Thomas in physical sight, so that Thomas, feeling Jesus’ broken body—the physical reality of the crucifixion as a part of this whole Resurrected one, Thomas can then make the great confession “My Lord and my God!”

And Jesus comes again and again to us today.  Jesus’ broken body feeds us, Jesus’ blood of the new covenant, the cup of salvation, fills us with joy.  Today Jesus comes to us and we taste and feel the goodness of our Lord and our God.  Again and again Jesus meets us where we are at, in our hunger and thirst, in our doubts and disbeliefs.  Jesus joins us.

Because Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!