Peace, Presence, and Resurrection

Sunday, April 14 – Luke 24:36b-48 Also Acts 3:12-19, Psalm 4, 1 John 3:1-7

I’ve had a few unusual experiences of God, but one of the most unusual was the time the Holy Spirit rode with me in my car down interstate 85 on my way to Pensacola, Florida.

Let me explain.

This would have been sometime around 1990, when I lived in Marietta, GA and was playing music in the Atlanta area in a duo with my keyboardist friend, Dave. A guy named John used to come to our gigs at the Trackside Tavern and other local watering holes. We were friends, but then our friendship grew into a dating relationship.

We’d both been pretty wounded by past dating experiences and had stayed away from relationships for a while. But we finally decided that we could stick our toes back into the dating pool with each other. We started going out and were enjoying each other’s company, but then we started hitting some snags around those earlier wounds.

Seems his experiences and mine caused us to push each other’s most painful buttons around getting close to other people. Over and over again, we both ended up feeling hurt or rejected, even though that wasn’t anyone’s intention.

Just at the time when we’d planned a trip to see some of my best friends in Pensacola, John told me that he’d met someone else he wanted to date instead of me. I was pretty devastated.

But the night before we’d originally planned to leave for Florida, we got together and were finally able to have a real conversation about what was going on in each other’s hearts and what had happened to us before. We were finally able to be truly vulnerable, even when it was painful and scary.

Although that newfound openness felt very healing for both of us, it ultimately didn’t change our reality, and so we said goodbye. The next day, I got in my car and headed south to see my friends Ingrid and David in Pensacola.

I think I spent the first hour or two weeping as I drove. My heart was completely broken.

But then I began to think about that place of openness we had gotten to, and the grace we had experienced in our vulnerability.

This was long before Brene Brown made “vulnerability” a household word.

My mind jumped to Jesus, and to thinking about how it was when he was at his most vulnerable that he was paradoxically his most powerful. Because it was through his willing vulnerability to pain and brokenness on that cross that the greatest power this planet has ever seen broke through and raised him to new life.

And as soon as that realization arose in my mind and heart, that real power came through vulnerability, I felt the most incredible sense of peace come over me. I truly felt that “peace that passes understanding.”
But peace wasn’t the only thing I experienced. I also felt the power of a presence, almost like a person – right next to me, in the passenger seat of my car. It seemed to me that it was the Holy Spirit. That presence and that peace stayed with me through the whole weekend. One minute I was weeping, and the next I was completely peaceful. I never would have expected that.

Sometimes an unexpected peace can break through in the most frightening or difficult of times.

Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. This is exactly what we read in the gospel of Luke today. Jesus’ disciples have just heard some astonishing things – first, they learn of the discovery by the women that Jesus’ body is no longer in the tomb. Then later that same day, Cleopas and another man are walking to Emmaus when they meet a stranger who is later revealed to be the risen Lord. They immediately ran to share this with the disciples who were all locked in the upper room.

What must they have been feeling? Grief? Confusion? Terror? A glimmer of hope? They must have been in incredible turmoil. But then Jesus suddenly shows up in the midst of their grief and fear saying, “Peace be with you.”

Peace is not the expected state of mind in moments like this. It wasn’t what I expected to experience. But with God it seems we can always expect the unexpected. It seems we can also expect the illogical. In fact, it always cracks me up when philosophers write these intricate logical arguments for the existence of God. I always thought that was like trying to do brain surgery with a guitar. Logic just isn’t the right tool when it comes to talking about God.

Just look at our reading from Acts. We enter the scene right after Peter and John have raised up a man who had been lame since birth to his feet, now able to walk. But they claimed the healing was not accomplished through their own power or piety, but solely through the name of Jesus Christ.

How can a name spoken have so much power? Maybe it’s similar to the way that prayers have power. Or maybe it’s like how tears and insights can open a door to a new awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Stories of a risen Jesus who vanishes and reappears in locked rooms, who then eats fish and shows his crucifixion wounds are completely illogical. Stories of people being healed simply through the name of Jesus make little sense to a scientific world. And just forget about trying to convince a skeptic that the Holy Spirit can show up in a car on I-85. None of this makes sense to our rational minds.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my journey with God, it’s that God is not rational. God is way beyond rational. God doesn’t fit into our neat little boxes about how the world works.

To tell you the truth, even our world doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. Scientists still can’t explain human consciousness. They can’t really explain the craziness they see at the quantum level. They tell us that nothing in our world is actually solid, even though it appears to be.

So when we think we can logically explain all of this, we’re really just kidding ourselves.

There’s something happening here that defies explanation. And it has to do with resurrection life. The power of God’s resurrection life was so present in Jesus that death could not hold him. God couldn’t leave Jesus in the ground because he embodied in his extraordinary life the resurrection power that God brings to everything that has ended or died. This is why we need resurrection stories. They show us what is possible in this crazy, illogical, beautiful and tragic world we live in.

As my friend Bruce Epperly says, our resurrection stories can’t be domesticated.

They go beyond the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the literalism of the fundamentalist. They can’t be confined by our logic and ways of seeing the world and defy any attempt to fully understand or control by believer and skeptic alike.”

Here’s what our stories show us:

God comes to us in the powers of peace, presence, and resurrection.

All we have to ask ourselves is: are we open to God’s resurrection life? Are we open to the peace that passes understanding and to the power of Presence? Or have we closed our minds and our eyes to the risen Christ because of our expectations and assumptions about what is or isn’t possible?

So let us be like Mary Magdalene. Let us be like Cleopas and his friend. Let us be like Thomas. Who knows what we might experience?