This sermon was preached at Glenwood Lutheran Church, Decorah, Iowa, on April 15, 2018. It’s based on Luke 24:36b-48. If you’d prefer to listen to it, find it at https://soundcloud.com/stacey-nalean-carlson.
Have you anything here to eat?
This ranks right up there with my all-time favorite Jesus quotes. He sounds like every boy I’ve ever known. Has he worked up an appetite? Or is this some kind of growth spurt?
I recognize that this detail is here as part of Luke’s determination to convince his readers that Jesus rose from the grave truly, bodily, fully intact, with flesh and bones and mouth and stomach. But I love that it also invites us to wonder about our own appetites, our own hungering, as we grow as witnesses to the resurrection.
Each week, we confess our faith using the words of the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.
What did that time in the land of the dead look like? What was Jesus accomplishing? What was he doing to work up such an appetite?
There was a remarkable article in the The Christian Century recently, written by John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan, in which they reflect on the Eastern church’s visual depictions of the resurrection. The authors note that the West celebrates the individual resurrection. Christ rises triumphantly and magnificently—but utterly alone. The East, on the other hand, celebrates the universal resurrection. Here Christ also rises triumphantly and magnificently—but he takes all of humanity with him.
The one particular Eastern painting that the authors describe in detail depicts the crucified Christ breaking forcibly into Hades [the prison house of Death], tossing aside its bolts and locks, forming its gates into a cross, chaining the Hades persona [the custodian of the dead], and liberating all of humanity—as personified in Adam and Eve—from the prison of death.1
Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus is hungry? He has just liberated all humanity from the prison of death. And now it’s time for a growth spurt. Now it’s time for his disciples to live as witnesses, to spread this good news, to grow God’s reign of justice, and mercy, and peace.
Jesus tells his disciples that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations. You, he tells them, are witnesses of these things.
Jesus has just defeated death itself. There is nothing, anymore, to stand in the way of forgiveness, to stand in the way of healing, to stand in the way of freedom from shame and guilt and regret. There is nothing, anymore, to stand in the way of reconciliation with God and with neighbor. All creation has been set free through the resurrection of Christ. You are witnesses of these things.
As witnesses, we work up an appetite. We hunger for community, where we can encourage one another in this work of growing God’s reign. We hunger for worship, in which we are strengthened through word and sacrament and sent out to a world in need. We hunger for Jesus, who feeds us with his very self, in order that we might be his risen body—greeting all those who fear with a word of peace, assuring all those who doubt simply by way of our presence.
We hunger for community, and for worship, and for Jesus himself, because the work of witnessing is hard. It’s easy to forget our testimony.
We see every day the worst of humanity’s brokenness. We see it in situations we can keep at arm’s length and in tragedies that hit close to home. We see it in the failings of our leaders and in our very own faults and frailties. We see it in the stories that make the nightly news—horrific attacks and escalating threats—and in the stories known only to us, the stories we keep secret out of fear or shame.
We see these things, but we are witnesses to something greater. So that even in the very midst of the most hopeless situations, we witness God at work. In the midst of the mundane and the expected, we witness unexpected beauty and joy.
I stumbled across a thread on Twitter this morning that I think illustrates this so well. A man in Kent, England, surveying a map, saw a symbol for a place of worship. It was, in his words, in the middle of bloody nowhere on the edge of a wood. So he set out to reach it, preoccupied by what he would find at his destination: A church? A chapel? A mere stony suggestion of a ruined sacred place? He says he was leaning toward the latter, given the odd and remote location.
It was a foggy day, and he began to think perhaps he was lost. He wondered if he should begin to backtrack. Finally, he writes, to the left of the path, the wood gave way to an open field that stared blankly back at me through the fog. Reality was starting to converge with the cartography again. If I kept the field to my left and the woodland to my right, something sacred should emerge. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—but suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up and I realized I was already looking at it. Just the suggestion of a gable, an echo of a spire, materializing surely with each step forward. It wasn’t the heap of stones I’d half expected, but a tiny, living church.
I am not a Christian, he writes, but so much about this gorgeous, humble, magical little church spoke to me. It’s part of the Green Christian movement, and manages its churchyard for wildlife. ‘Caring for God’s acre.’ This place is deeply, deeply old—its list of rectors goes back to the 13th century, and the building itself is older still. It fell into disuse (it’s next to no village and never has been throughout its history) but, bucking the trend of isolated rural churches, it’s reviving. While deeply old and rather magical, it’s also humble, functional, inclusive and grounded in nature, and I wonder if that partly explains its resurrection.
Twitter user “gawanmac” anticipated finding a ruin. He found, instead, a living, breathing, colorful place.2 We are witnesses of these things.
We are witnesses of resurrection.
We proclaim repentance and forgiveness. We proclaim freedom. We proclaim peace. We proclaim life. We proclaim love. To all nations. To all people. To all creation.
The risen Christ liberates all humanity—all creation—from the prison of death. We are witnesses of these things. Amen.
1 See https://www.christiancentury.org
2 See https://twitter.com