“Jesus Risen and Alive-But Not All Cleaned Up”

As sermon by Lanny Peters

Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia

Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006

Luke 24: 36-43

I love the ending of Mark’s gospel. Tom Long calls it the “Dangling Gospel” and says, “Not only does this verse fail to provide proper narrative closure, it also lurches to an awkward grammatical stop. A more literal translation would read, ‘To no one anything they said; afraid they were for…” (Pause here) It is almost as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in mid-sentence.” (“The Christian Century,” April 4, 2006, P. 19.)

As I noted on several occasions during Lent in regard to stories about Jesus as well as parables he told, it leaves us wondering, “Well, what happened next?” That is exactly Mark’s question to us, “What happens next?” What happened to Jesus? Is he alive? You tell me. We are invited to enter into the story and share our stories of when and where we have met the Resurrected Christ.

The first person to tell me that Jesus was alive and well was my Momma. Every Easter Sunday, Momma would gather the family, dress us in our finest and we would start walking. It was about the only time I remember my Dad wearing a white shirt and tie. We would walk about three miles to a country cemetery. There in the far corner that I can picture so vividly, we would come to the gravesite of Franklin Eugene Peters, Momma and Daddy’s first-born son.

He was the brother I never knew, having died at the age of eight months of spinal meningitis, about a year before I was born. This annual Easter walk was not a somber affair, for we laughed and talked and played as we journeyed. When we arrived, Momma would place flowers on the grave and tell a story or two about Frankie, sometimes one remembered at that very moment. Then she would talk about Jesus, and how Jesus helped her get through the death of her child, and how Jesus assured her that Frankie was with God. She talked about Jesus as you would talk about a neighbor who came and sat on the porch with you.

This annual Easter ritual infused me with a feeling of the sacredness of life, every life. It was where I first experienced the mystery of the resurrection. I would be hard pressed to find many places where my mother’s theology and mine now match, except perhaps where it matters most, in the belief that Jesus is alive and well. I also learned from this experience that Jesus being alive and well did not shield us from life’s pain and scars. Frankie would be joined by Timothy Mark Peters, who died at birth when I was around nine years old, and then I would place my Father’s ashes in the ground alongside them.

As much as I like Mark’s ending to his gospel, I am just as grateful for the other gospels and their resurrection stories. One that does not get noticed as much is in Luke 24, beginning with verse 36. The disciples are still hidden away in fear after the crucifixion when Jesus suddenly appears among them and says, “Peace be with you.” But instead of being filled with peace, “They were startled and terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost.” Jesus sees them shaking in their sandals, and wondering if they are having a group hallucination, and says, “Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

Barbara Brown Taylor says of this text,

“It is the wounds Jesus wants them to see, but isn’t it a peculiar way to identify yourself? Why not say, ‘Listen to my voice” or, ‘Look at my face?’ ‘Look at my hands and my feet,’ Jesus said, and when they did they saw everything he had ever been to them. They saw the hands that had broken bread and blessed broiled fish, holding it out to them over and over again. They saw the hands that had pressed pads of mud against a blind man’s eye and taken a dead girl by the hand so that she rose and walked. They saw the hands that danced through the air when he taught, the same hands that reached out to touch a leper without pausing or holding back….

They were wounded now—all of them—the hands that had joined him to other people and the feet that had joined him to the earth. They had holes in them, sore angry-looking bruises that hurt to look at, only it was important for the disciples to look, because they had never done it before.

Earlier, when they had figured out what was coming to those beloved hands and feet, they had fled, hiding themselves away where they could not see the bleeding nor hear the pounding of the hammers.

Look, he said to them afterwards, when the danger was past, You can look at them now. He wanted them to know he had gone through the danger and not around it, so he told them to look—not at his face, not into his eyes—but at his hands and feet, which told the truth about what had happened to him, which were the only proof he had that he was who he said he was. Some of us wish he had come back all cleaned up, but he did not.”  Barbara Brown Taylor; Home by Another Way, (Cowley Publications, 1999) Pp. 119, 122-23.)

Why did Jesus not come back all cleaned up and clean everything else up when he came? The apostle Paul must have wondered himself, once saying that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is wiser than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1: 25) It is a mystery why God keeps clinging to the hope that we will help clean it up and somehow help bring in the kingdom.

Instead of Jesus telling the disciples, “Okay I spent three years with you guys and when push came to shove, you just didn’t get it. You’ve blown it now. I’ll do the rest by myself.” But no, he was going to keep working with this bunch of failures.

After Jesus shows them that he is no ghost but flesh and blood with the scars to show for it, I love the next line in Luke. I bet it describes where a lot of us are today. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering….” They were in the presence of the living Christ and felt incredible joy but at the same time they were disbelieving and still wondering. You think that might have bothered Jesus, but all he said was, “You got anything here to eat?”

 I went to a party recently that I thought of as I was writing this. It was a birthday party for one of our fairly new members, Kimberly Willis Starbuck. It was a wonderful collection of folks, black, white, Hispanic, young and old, with a delightful variety of backgrounds. It was a joyous occasion with great food, stimulating conversation and laughter. Kimberly’s young niece at one point walked in, took her finger and went right across the birthday cake getting a great glob of icing, which she then put into her mouth with a look of pleasure. Someone said, “I’ve always wanted to do that,” and everyone roared.

But the party was not pure joy. As we arrived, we entered a room, which has been maintained in memory of Kimberly and John’s daughter, Zack’s sister, Meleia. Meleia died on July 17, 2005, at age 19 in her hometown of Berkeley, California, the victim of a senseless shooting near a dormitory at the University of California at Berkeley.

She was spending the summer volunteering at Berkeley's Women's Daytime Drop-in Center through the Dartmouth Partners in Community Service program, an alliance she had fostered.

This year she posthumously received Dartmouth’s 2006 Social Justice Award, where their website has a photograph of her and the reason she was given the award. “A sociology and “African and African American studies “double major, Willis-Starbuck had a profound concern for others' needs and for social justice at Dartmouth, in her home community, and throughout the world. As a high school sophomore, she traveled to Cuba to study its health care and education systems, and to deliver donated medicine, books, and clothes.

Willis-Starbuck also traveled to Vietnam, where she cultivated strong beliefs regarding the need for tolerance and diversity. In high school, she volunteered at a meal program for the homeless and worked at Berkeley Youth Alternatives, where she led a nutrition class for low income youth.”

What do we make of the senseless death of one with such promise to help make the world a better place? God must have wondered the same thing when She lost her child to a senseless death on the cross. But Jesus’ resurrection was a sure sign that death does not have the last word; life does. Yet Jesus did not come back all cleaned up but with scars. Jesus wanted them to know that he was alive and well, but he had not forgotten what it is like to be wounded and die.

Shortly after Meleia’s death, the City of Berkeley initiated a scholarship fund, to be given to Berkeley students who best exemplify Meleia’s commitment to social justice and who have demonstrated need for the award. It has now taken on a life of its own, run by a board of seven people who were close to Meleia, including Kimberly as chair, and who are determined to find students who will make a difference. The name of the fund is ‘The Meleia Willis-Starbuck Social Justice Scholarship.” It has an initial budget of $21,000 and hopes to expand.” Kimberly is the chair and it is just one of many ways her family and others are determined to assure that Meleia lives on.

During Kimberly’s party, when folks realized I was Kimberly’s pastor, the subject of church came up. As she expressed honestly during the Membership classes last fall,

Kimberly talked openly about how her faith in God had been shaken by Meleia’s death. I recalled when the new members had shared their faith stories, John said he was at the point where he was like a figure hidden in one of those Waldo books, with the question , “Where is John?” 

Yet they had found comfort and community in being at Oakhurst. When I called John and Kimberly yesterday to ask if I might share some of their story for my Easter sermon, I could tell they were surprised. I told them that what came to me this year as I reflected on the resurrection was Kimberly’s birthday party.

Looking back, I know the spirit of Jesus was in that room. For one, wonderful diverse gatherings like that are glimpses of the kingdom of God that Jesus described and modeled. And, second,  the occasion fit perfectly the description of those disciples to whom Jesus appeared after the resurrection. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering….”

If Jesus had suddenly appeared in flesh and bone, he would have been right at home. He would have stopped in the room to look at all the memories of his beloved Meleia. I imagine him looking up and instead of trying to explain that he understood, he would just hold up his scarred hands for us to see. And then ask, “Do you folks have anything that I might could eat. And we would laugh, and he would come and join the party.

As Ann Lamott says, “The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the human death. He came back with a body—not like Caspar or Topper; he didn’t come back as the vague idea of a spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, he had died; and then you could touch him, and he could eat; and these four things are as bodily as life gets.” (Ann Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, (Riverhead Books,2005) p. 272)

When he finished eating and talking with them, before he left, Jesus said, “You are witnesses of these things.” Indeed we are for we are the body of Christ, entrusted with Jesus’ message of repentance and forgiveness, reconciliation and hope, broken and scarred as we are.

As Janet Morley says in a poem,  

When we are all despairing;

When the world is full of grief;

When we see no way ahead,

            and hope has gone away:

Roll back the stone

Although we fear change;

Although we are not ready;

Although we’d rather weep

and run away:

Roll back the stone.

Because we’re coming with the women;

Because we hope where hope is vain;

Because you call us from the grave

            and show the way:

Roll back the stone.