Happy Easter! Yeah, I know you think that was last week, but we’re not done yet. You see, now, we’re just getting started. Actually, it’s OK to think about every Sunday as a “little Easter.” Every Sunday when we gather for worship, we are coming out of hiding, coming out of our fear, coming into the light, to discover in this community that Jesus is alive. Beaten & bruised, afraid & hesitant if need be, we can gather together and care for each other. God’s love and God’s power are available to us. We can be forgiven, fed and healed and we can go back out into the world for another week of trying to make things better for ourselves and for others.
So on the Sunday after Easter we always read one of those stories of those mind-boggling encounters of the disciples with the Risen Christ (Luke 24:36b - 48 for those following along on the web). Somebody asked me this week, “How did that happen? Was Jesus a ghost?” and I tried to answer that question. Looking back on what I said, I realize, I don’t really know, why did I try to answer that question? This was a once for all time sort of event. All I know, is that they saw Jesus and they were empowered to go into the world and live in his way, and we are here today because they did.
Seeing the risen Christ was something powerful. This particular encounter of the Risen Christ, recorded in Luke, is a really good one. In other versions, you get a lot more doubt out of Thomas:
· The Disciples are in a room in Jerusalem hearing about another appearance Jesus made to a couple of them.
· He appears and they ask if he is a ghost (the Disciples asked the same kind of questions we ask today), but he says they can touch him. A ghost does not have flesh and bones, he says. They are still doubting and fearful.
· 41While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”
Can you imagine? Isn’t that funny? They are right there with Jesus and they have trouble believing. Is it any wonder we have problems with that at times 2,000 years later. He asks them if they have anything to eat, really? There are Bible studies about the questions Jesus asked. This one doesn’t come up very often though. And then he ate some fish right there in front of him.
In a reflection on the UCC Daily devotional this week, Pastor Martin B. Copenhaver says, this is kind of an odd question: “What do you make of that? That doesn't sound like the question of a Risen Lord. It sounds more like the question of a teenager arriving home from school.”
Copenhaver offers a couple of reasons: for one, Maybe Jesus is really hungry, and this also shows that he is more than a ghost. But here is the second: Jesus asks them “Do you have anything to eat” because he was always teaching, up to the absolute last minute. He wanted them to look at what they had. Bread just keeps popping up in the stories of Jesus multiplying loaves, and remember in the example of prayer he gave them, he said: give us this day OUR daily bread.
I never quite caught this until I read this reflection this week, Jesus does not have us pray as individuals. We don’t pray “Give me my bread” It’s ‘our bread.” You see for Jesus it was always about the community.
“Who needs bread?” “Do you have anything to eat” Because guess what, because he was about to tell them to go out and witness to all the earth.
“YOU ARE MY WITNESSES” he said. We went over some major points and then He commissioned them to tell the story and to carry on with his life changing ministry: Feed them, Heal Them, Forgive Them, and tell Them how much God loves them. Pass it on.
So on this Sunday after Easter, here we are, followers of Jesus, gathered together in a room, and we might also ask ourselves, How Will We Witness?
Well, that story is from ancient times. Sometimes it’s hard to transfer it to our context today. So let me tell you the story, of another disciple, living today in the San Francisco area.
This is Sara Miles’ story, in her own words:
“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans — except that up until that moment I'd led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.
“Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all, but actual food — indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.
“And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I'd experienced. I started a food pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where I'd first received the body of Christ. I organized new pantries all over my city to provide hundreds and hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week. Without committees or meetings or even an official telephone number, I recruited scores of volunteers and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (http://saramiles.net/books/take_this_bread)
This food pantry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, has an amazing story. Our picture this week is of their sanctuary. The table in the midde is their altar. That’s mounds of food that people are fed during the week. On the weekend, they have communion and feed people’s souls. She tells a story of how the pantry kept growing, from 200 people a week, to 400, 500, ad when the economy collapsed, 800. They did this all with individual donations, no grants.
They used the money to start 18 more pantries at last count. She writes:
“We gave away seed grants and advice to people like the short tough Mexican pastor who came one afternoon and stood speechless in the middle of the chaotic food distribution for forty minutes, then said, “This looks more like Jesus than anything.” (Jesus Freak, p. 23)
The volunteers come from among those who come to the pantry for food. She writes that they don’t have a lot of rules. “You could be drunk or a junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t steal food, call people names or get in fights” (ibid, p. 24)
Anyone is welcome, and if you read one of her books, you will see that EVERYONE comes. It is, after all, San Francisco. She writes: “We were making a bet that what Jesus suggested was true: when you begin to expand your ideas of who the right people are, when you break down boundaries to share food with strangers, God shows up” (ibid.)
Sara Miles and her friends at the food pantry are witnesses to the power of life over death. She inspires me and countless others to ask: How Will We Witness?
We are not a church that lives for ourselves. We understand that we are blessed, and because we are blessed, we are motivated to bless others. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, talked about the process like this. Our good works in the world, to care for others, are a natural expression of our thanksgiving. When we know that we have received the gift of God’s grace and blessing in our own lives, we can’t help but want to share that grace and blessing with others.
It’s like when you fill a glass of water under the faucet and you don’t pay attention, and you let the water start spilling over the top of the glass. That is how I imagine Sara Miles and the food pantry. She was so touched by God in that first act of receiving bread in communion, and knowing that God’s love for her was made real through Jesus, that she had to act. She was so full of love, the love just spilled out.
I want The Village to be that kind of community, and I think you do too. Now, that does not mean we need to start a food pantry. Maybe we will do that, but there are already lots of food pantries. That’s why we just raised some money and collected some food. And now we have a way in the theater lobby of the Maumee Indoor, to collect more food in the next few months, and be a witness. It’s called the HOPE Chest. It’s a chance for people to bring food to the movie theater lobby. You see by collecting food, we are actually helping people share from their abundance. We are giving all the people who come to this movie theater a gift, because they see the hope chest out in the lobby and they can remember that the next time they are here, they can bring food.
But it’s a way to be a witness. A way to suggest maybe I can just bring some food to the movies and change the world. It’s sort of about the food we collect, but it’s also witnessing a way to help that is easy and remind people about the fact that there are hungry people right here in Toledo.
But there may be other ways of sharing that God is calling us to. How will we be witnesses, together?
If you have some idea for a ministry of outreach, I want to hear it. I will meet you anywhere, for lunch, for a cup of coffee, over a diet coke in a fast food restaurant or down the street at the Village Idiot Bar & Pizzeria. You already hear about various opportunities we have, like going to the food bank in May. But this is all it takes to create an outreach project to change the world: come up with an idea, and find 3-4 other people who want to work with you, and go for it. They don’t even have to be from The Village. If we can expand our circle though loving service in the world, that is all the better.
This is the bottom line, we need to look at what we have, and how God can use it to change the world. We are all very different. That’s the wonder of the diversity of our world and our community here. Jesus asked the disciples: “Do you have anything to eat?” In that simple question he reminds us that we all have “our daily bread” and there are ways we can share it.
But we have other resources too, we have time, we have money, we have talents. We have skills which can help others who are in need. And anything we do in the world, as followers of the Risen Christ, Jesus, to get outside of ourselves and care for others, will be blessed by God. We have no idea what God can do through us, until we open ourselves to God, like Sara Miles did, and ask God to set us free to serve.
We have no idea what God can do when we open ourselves up to God. Look at what Sara Miles when she opened herself up to God. Last Sunday was Easter. Today is another Sunday to live out the message that life overcomes death. So Friends, let us be witnesses, let us be witnesses to the Risen Christ.
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