The Reading: 1 Peter 1: 8-12
Although you have never seen Christ, you love Christ; and without seeing, you still believe, and you rejoice with the inexpressible joy touched with glory, because you are achieving faith’s goal—your salvation. This is the salvation the prophets were looking for and searching for so carefully; their prophecies were about the grace which has come to you. The Spirit of Christ which was in them foretold the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that would come after those sufferings. They tried to find out at what time and in what circumstances all this was to happen. However, it was revealed to them that the news they brought—regarding all the things that have now been announced to you by those who proclaimed the Good News, through the Holy Spirit who was sent from heaven—was for you and not for themselves. Even the angels long to catch a glimpse of such things.
THE GOSPEL: John 20: 19-30
In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were locked in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Temple authorities. Jesus came and stood among then and said, “Peace be with you.” Having said, the Savior showed them the marks of crucifixion. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw Jesus; who said to them again, “Peace be with you. As Abba God sent me, so I’m sending you.” After saying this, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
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Great and glorious God, grant us the wisdom to listen to you speak in all the ways you are present in our lives and give us the willingness to follow the leading of your Holy Spirit. May the words I speak today and our thoughts today and throughout the days to come bring you honor and glory. Amen
I want each of you, as you are comfortable, to turn to your neighbor and say, “I am the Good News”. How did that feel? I don’t know about you, but the first time I tried to verbalize that sentence I was not comfortable at all. But we are, all of us, the Good News. As the people of God, we are habitations for the Christ who lived, died and experienced resurrection. Our brief Gospel story is the story of the evening of Easter when the disciples, still unsure of what the women had seen, gathered together in a locked room. They were heart-broken and afraid and they were feeling like anything but Good News.
In walks Jesus and says, “Peace be with you”. He showed them the scars of the crucifixion and they rejoiced. And he said again, “Peace be with you”. And then, he commissioned them just as he had been commissioned by God—he breathed on them and said, “receive the Holy Spirit.” And so they did. And by receiving the Holy Spirit, they became the Good News to all the world. What if, and I want you to think this through carefully, what if we, like the disciples before us, became the Good News in our world, small and large. What if we, at the very least, grew more comfortable saying, “I am the Good News”? I have very few rules about how I “do” ministry, but one of them, which I will not break, is that I will not ask you to do anything that I will not do myself. And so, here goes.
I am the Good News. I am the Good News because, as a child, no one was at all certain that I would actually live to adulthood. The diagnoses were many and no one thought until many years later to wonder if the verbal and physical abuse of my father might not have contributed to why I seemed to fail to thrive. I am the Good News because I, like many of you, was one of those teenagers that came very close to giving in to the powers of darkness that seemed to close in and leave me without hope in a world where I could not seem to fit in at all. I remember the day, not the date, of course, but the day when I felt God say to my repeated question of “what is wrong with me?” ”There is nothing wrong with you, my child. Walk with me a while longer and you will see all that I have in store for you”. I am the Good News because when I could have continued to shield my heart by negativity and fear, God stepped in and called me to a more authentic, hopeful life and said, “Walk a little while longer and see all that I have in store for you.” I am the Good News because when the church I loved rejected me, the God who loved me still, said again, “Walk a little while longer and see all that I have in store for you”. I am the Good News because of all of you, who love me and pray for me, and carry me when I am tired or need a break. And I am the Good News because God is not finished with me yet, and says, “Walk a little while longer and see all that I have in store for you.”
Your story may differ from mine completely, but if you are here today, you are the Good News. In ways similar, and in ways radically different, we come together into a faith community and say, “we are the Good News”. Is that not what God, through the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ calls us to? And, in boldly stepping up and saying, “we are the Good News” in a world that needs the Good News like our grass needs the rain, we make a powerful statement indeed.
We are here to transform the world, our world, our little world and the world far from here. If you read your newsletter week before last, you will know that we are starting a new sermon series called Living the Gospel: Being the Good News. To use a phrase that I probably haven’t used for a while, but it’s a good one, nevertheless, God has laid upon my heart a calling to challenge all of us with what it means to be the Good News in the world.
Sometimes God gives us confirmation of our callings and mine happened on the Friday before we left for vacation. I went to a one-day conference on church planting. Now, this was definitely not a conference endorsed by MCC, but we thought that I might be able to gain some ideas for our new international team. The presenter, a fairly well-known church planter was, shall I say, conservative. He truly believes that the only reason one plants a church or begins a new ministry is to save a new group of people—more than likely folks that might just look a whole lot like you and me—from hell. Now, depending on your belief about hell, this may or may not make sense to you. What got me fired up was his complete inability to see that God calls us to start new churches to bring more people to understand and receive God’s unconditional love, thereby, saving them, if you will, from the hell of living outside the realm of God’s loving arms in this life. Regardless of what you believe about salvation and the afterlife, and nothing that we believe about living in God’s unconditional love in the present makes it impossible to believe in salvation as it relates to life after death, I believe that a full understanding of the love and ministry of Jesus will not allow us to ignore the transformational power of God’s radical acceptance here and now.
And so, we like those to whom Peter is writing in our epistle today are called to minister in the name of Jesus, whom we have never seen, but still love and believe in. So, we, too, are blessed with inexpressible joy touched with glory because, as we live the Gospel and are the Good News to others, we are living out faith’s goal and experiencing God’s saving grace as we share it with others. This joy is birthed by the very same joy that the disciples experienced when, on Easter evening, when all that they had hoped in had turned to sorrow and pain, Jesus appeared, and granted them peace.
How do we begin to live this life of peace? We cannot underestimate the importance of Jesus’ gift of peace to the disciples and to us. When we are praying for folks who have experienced bad times or are nearing their death, or grieving a loved one who has died—we pray that God will send those people peace. And as we live the Gospel and become the Good News we will be bearers of peace—peace that comes from the undeniable knowledge that God loves us and wants us as children of God.
And so, before we can be the Good News we must receive it ourselves. I always learn my greatest theological truths from you—in conversation and discussion, through your emails and questions. One day, week before last, I was having a conversation with Marti. We were talking about some of the folks who may have been turned off to MCC because they believe us to fail in the evangelism arena. She told me of someone who had questioned why we do not give altar calls at Open Circle. For those of you who have no experience with such a thing, let me explain that altar calls are very powerful parts of most mainline traditionally evangelistic services. At the end of the service, after the sermon, the preacher asks for those who have decided to follow Jesus to come forward. Now, this is not a part of the MCC tradition, though there is nothing wrong with altar calls at all as long as they call to grace and freedom and not guilt and shame. Anyway, I started to give this explanation to Marti who was already way ahead of me. She said, “so I told him that you do give an altar call every Sunday, every time you invite us to come forward and receive holy communion—you don’t tell us what we are supposed to feel or do, but you invite us each week to receive the Good News into our hearts”. Thank you, Marti, for opening my eyes to a beautiful way to look at, not only the tradition of the altar call, but also our celebration of communion.
So, this week, when we come to share communion, I invite you to think about how you want to go about being the Good News. What do you need from each other, or from me, your pastor? What, even, do you need from God? And, so together, we receive and together we share. We are the Good News. Amen and amen.
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