Sermons from St. Francis
March 30, 2008
Text: John 20:19-31
Pr. Robert Goldstein
“Beyond Fear”
How patient Jesus is with the first disciples!
They are all locked up inside a house, but it is not
only the house that is locked up. They are locked up inside themselves –locked
up with fear. And, frankly, I would be too. For they have become identified as
a threat to the powerful.
Now they were revolutionaries, followers of this
Jesus with his revolutionary vision of proposing a new way of human existence:
no longer the grubbing insecurity of greed, but a deeper human community. With
their leader gone, the disciples ought to feel afraid. If the powerful killed
Jesus, they will surely kill them! No wonder they are locked up in their hearts
and in that house!
That’s why Jesus appears and greets them with
calming words, “Peace be with you.” Jesus shows great patience and
understanding of human weaknesses such as fear, a powerful emotion that
distorts how we see the world and paralyzes us from ever changing it.
When I was at Yale in 1969, Yale became an antiwar
battleground on New Haven Green. This giant open park, surrounded on one side
by
It became very tense indeed. In 1784 the founding
Puritans had designed New Haven Green to hold the 144,000 faithful whom God
would take at Christ’s Second Coming. Well an Armageddon was approaching
instead: resentful high school soldiers meet the privileged college students.
There was a flashpoint. Rioting broke out and the
National Guard went into action. I was trained to gather as many youth as I
could and take them to the relative safety of the basement of one of the
churches on the Green.
Choking on teargas, I herded a flock to the closest
church basement, trying to answer their anxious ejaculations with calm
assurances. Then one cried out, “The Supreme Court is on fire! The Supreme
Court is on fire!” which means roughly, “The sky is falling! The sky is
falling!” Things were beginning to really fall apart.
I took a hard look at the Supreme Court building far
across the Green. Nothing is happening there at all! But a melee of students,
cops, the National Guard, and all manner of the politically disturbed were
running hither and yon across the Green through smoke and struggle. Nothing was
happening to the Court building. But the young man cried out again, “The court
is on fire!”
I grabbed and held him and said, “It’s OK. We are
safe here,” which translated is, “Peace be with you.” And we were –relatively
to the mayhem all around us.
Fear, real living fear, distorts our perceptions
both of the world and of our problems and then locks us up. Fear leads those
first disciples to lock up the house. But once again, Jesus patiently comes a
second time and frees them with words of peace and patience: “Peace be with
you.”
But there is deeper level to the disciples’
behavior. Since Jesus hasn’t been stopped by death, then his vision is not dead
either. But, oh my God! –Jesus wants us to put it into practice! We are Jesus’
hands and feet and lips! But where do
we start? How do we start? It’s so
impossible a task!
The impulse is now to another level of fear –panic!
Let’s run away from this! There’s nowhere to run, so let’s lock up the house
again! Let’s do anything. But let’s stay in denial because the vision is so
great and we are so ill-equipped.
And that is where to locate brother Thomas’ famous
doubts –his clever device to hold off what’s gloriously scary. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in
Jesus’ hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his
side, I will not believe.” Clever form of denial, don’t you agree? It’ll
never happen so I am scot free.
But Jesus loves him. Christ appears in that locked
up house again with those locked up disciples. Why? Because he has great
confidence in them –that’s why he chose them! And once again he greets their
subtler forms of fear ever so patiently with, “Peace be with you!” --responding
then to Thomas’ doubts on Thomas’ terms. Touch my wounds! And once again they
are freed from the traps in which they have ensnared themselves. Freed to
breathe. Freed to live. Freed to lead.
Jesus has chosen you too. OK, we may not be Peter,
Paul or John, but Jesus has chosen us because he loves us and is so patient with
us. For Jesus knows that patience and grace bring out the best in people,
eventually. It really does.
We are faced with a bit of lockdown at our church
too. We are addressing the extremely difficult issue of the homeless in this
post-Reagan society of selfishness and greed. While I don’t have any ready
solutions to this complex problem, I meet homeless persons not things or “them.” Let us bring the patience of Christ,
the peace of Christ, to our meeting today as well as to our candor and openness
to one another.
We must not become locked up in our hearts with fear
and with the understandable frustrations related to the homeless that feed on
our fear. We are to be Christ’s face in this huge challenge and to bring
Christ’s peace into the thorny issues. May peace be with us!
St. Francis has been faced with lockups of fear
before. As the AIDS epidemic thrashed the Castro community, St. Francis
chose Christ over fear. And as homosexuality itself became more understood
through the modern sciences, we have not followed the fearful path of the wider
Lutheran church. God’s Spirit gave us the courage over our fears to speak
prophetic words.
The ELCA, that wider
You have shown the way outside that house of fear
and its paralysis. Your extraordinary vision has brought the peace of Christ
and the courage of Christ to others encouraging them to join in the struggle
for justice. It is far from over and like the first disciples we are so small
against so great odds. But let faith in God’s justice, not fear, take hold of
us, and then the equation changes. May the peace of Christ keep us free from
fear, free from panic and from ourselves. Peace be unto you too. Amen
St. Francis
Lutheran Church
Phone: (415)
621-2635; Fax: (415) 621-8819
E-mail: StFrancisSF@sbcglobal.net
www.st-francis-lutheran.org