Peace Be With You
Peace Be With You
John 20:19-23
So, years ago, a couple who had been long-term friends were going through a painful divorce. I cared about both of them and tried to walk the line on staying connected to them both. At one point, the husband’s birthday and what would have been his anniversary were both coming up. I gathered up all my pastoral wisdom…and asked him to go golfing with me. (No, that wasn’t a class in seminary!)
As we came to the ninth green, we were halfway through an excruciating round. He was playing terribly. Everything was off. Finally, my friend, who had always been a man of few words, looked at me and threw his putter down on the green. (This was perhaps the biggest outburst I had ever seen from him!) Then, staring me down, he said, “I knew when I met you ten years ago that sooner or later I was going to have to talk about my (bleep, bleep) feelings. So, what am I supposed to do with these (bleep) things?” We went and had a hot dog or two in the clubhouse and started trying to sort this whole feelings thing out.
The truth is that as an American male of a certain age, the whole “feelings thing” was not a class that we signed up for. In fact, I have to say that I spent an awful lot of my life up to the point of graduate school in psychology far more focused on the intellectual side of life than anything that had to do with feelings. What took me to seminary was an interest in the elegance of something like systematic theology, where the theological concepts were like Lincoln Logs and the question was, “What happens if I put them together this way?”
I think that I had always felt things powerfully and had always been an empathic person. However, those skills were not really honed and focussed until two things happened. I had an amazing supervisor for years in my counseling work who absolutely helped me hone that sense of empathy, to the point one day when I asked her if there was an “off” switch to this empathy thing she had turned on. (She just laughed.) The other thing that happened was that I became a pastor and found myself immersed in real people’s lives. It turned out that helping people sort out what they were feeling and listening to those feelings had far more to do with ministry than inviting them to come to my office and play with my theological Lincoln Logs.
Don’t get me wrong here. I love to think! I love theology and philosophy and literature. My life would be impoverished in unimaginable ways without those conversation partners. However, faith is not about consenting to a set of ideas. Faith is an experience of lived relationship, relationship with a community, relationship with the people in need around us, and relationship with God. Feelings are crucial tools for staying in those relationships. The fact that my friend who really didn’t want to talk about feelings was going through a divorce may not have been a coincidence.
So, like it or not, I’m going to make you think about feelings for a few minutes. However, I want to invite you to think about them in a really concrete way. Most of us learned to ride a bike. Maybe you started out with a tricycle that you couldn’t knock over if you tried. Perhaps you advanced to training wheels. Mine, for some reason, would never have both training wheels on the ground at the same time. The bike would rock back and forth but still—no falling. At some point, your older siblings or some neighborhood kid or some voice inside yourself said, “Dude…you know you’re not really riding a bike, right?” You went and got a parent or you just got a wrench and you pulled those training wheels off.
Now, let’s parallel this to feelings as a child. Chances are that as a young child you had far more feelings than you had words for feelings. So, your parents or siblings or friends were like those training wheels. Your mother or your father would watch what you were going through as you struggled with some project and they would say, “It looks like you’re frustrated.” You’d think to yourself, at some level, “That’s what that’s called!” They helped you name things. They helped you sort things out. Things might get rocky but they were there to keep you from “falling.” (Or, they put you in time out to think things over if you did!)
Then, the big day on your bike comes when the training wheels are off and it’s time to ride. Your parent or older sibling holds the bike for you as you get on. They keep you balanced. You put your feet on the pedals. You think to yourself, “This is it!” You begin pedaling. The person with you holds on and runs alongside you. Then, they let go. You are on your own! This is awesome, until you start feeling strange things. You feel the bike wobble. That feeling is there to tell you is that you need a bit more speed. However, you respond by pedaling as fast as you can! You feel the bike lean to the left so you turn the bike completely over to the right. One way or another, you feel something but have no sense of what to do. So, one way or another, you crash.
Eventually, you pick yourself back up and begin the long process of learning how to take those feelings that happen when you ride a bike and make “micro” instead of “macro” adjustments. These feelings are here to tell you really important things. However, you have to learn the subtleties of what they are telling you. You have to learn to make adjustments on the fly. And, the whole time you are doing that, you will continue to crash occasionally. Sometimes, it won’t even be your fault because there was a stick in the road or because some car did something stupid or because the chain just feel off my bike and what do you do then?
Of course, on the other side of learning how to listen to the feelings that are there when you ride a bike, there are a deeper set of feelings that you begin to have access to, as well. Some people talk about these deeper feelings as affect. Once you begin to master the everyday feelings of riding a bike and make the micro adjustments almost unconsciously, you begin to feel great stuff. You feel freedom. You feel joy. You feel ecstatic (at least until that time I ran into a parked car because I was trying to impress some girl!) The gigantic reward to listening to the feelings of riding and really learning how to ride are magnificent! Of course, you may crash spectacularly. Knees will get scraped. However, riding a bike as a kid is the best!
If you’re with me, this is the whole point of feelings in our larger life. Every day feelings are feedback. They point out adjustments that we need to make or choices that we are overlooking or things that matter to us. They tell us when our power is being taken away. Currently, feelings like anxiety and sadness and grief keep popping up to tell us over and over again that in the midst of this global pandemic, we are not in control and that this whole thing is weird. (To which an appropriate answer may well be, “Duh, feelings, I know!’) In this sense, we can’t always make the adjustments that feelings are there to ask us to make. So, sometimes, we have to make little adjustments that ease things a bit, like, “Well, I can’t control the global pandemic but I can learn to make banana bread!” And the feelings might even respond, “Okay, we’ll settle for that!”
If you learn to listen to feelings, the promise is this same access to the deeper feelings. Because I learned to listen to feelings and figured out what to do with them, I learned what it is like to really love a friend or I learned how to be a better parent or spouse, or I gained access to a kind of joy or I discovered a fleeting sense of wholeness that I otherwise might never have known.
The problem with feelings, though, is that sometimes, we can get horribly stuck. Most of the time, this is because there are feelings that we just flat out refuse to feel or explore. It turns out that feelings are pretty stubborn and when ignored, settle in and get louder and louder. Other times, though, precisely because we are not in control of things, we get overwhelmed and shut down or we get overwhelmed and do things we never thought we would do because we just want to run from the feelings or make them go away. This is that moment in life when we realize, “Something is just not working here!” This is the moment when we can no longer tell the story of who we’ve been and who we are going to be next.
This is precisely where we find the disciples in our text. Think about it…Last week, Mary Magdalene encountered the risen Christ. She didn’t know this was going to happen ahead of time. It just happened. Even when it did happen, the only reason she realized what was going on was that she was willing to stand and stare into that empty tomb, even as she sobbed. Mary Magdalene was not afraid to feel. She just came to the wrong conclusion. The angels asked her to take another look at what she is feeling: “Woman, why are you weeping?” The risen Jesus asks her to take another look at what she is feeling: “Woman, why are you weeping?” She’s convinced that the reason she’s so sad is because Jesus’ body has been stolen. Really, though, she’s weeping because she loved Jesus and had watched one terrible thing happen after another happen to him. She couldn’t stop the terror. She couldn’t stop loving him either. Feeling what she felt and exploring what she felt led her to remember the man she loved and recognize his voice when he spoke her name; “Mary” In an instant, she knows she is in his presence. Then, she runs to tell the disciples!
Have you ever shared good news with someone and they were not thrilled at all? This had to be the disciples’ reaction. In another Gospel’s account, the disciples hear the women’s report of the risen Christ and dismiss them as nuts! John doesn’t fill in those blanks but think about it. Mary didn’t have the power to stop what was happening to Jesus but she remained loyal and loving. The disciples are a totally different story. Jesus asked them to stay awake with him. They fell asleep. One of them betrayed him with a kiss into the hands of the authorities. The one who considered himself Jesus’ best friend and closest follower, denied ever having known the man within hours of telling him that he would defend him to the death. Every one of them had seen what was unfolding and ran for their lives. So, Mary rolls in and announces, “Good news, guys, Jesus is back!” And I’m pretty sure the disciples thought to themselves, “Oh my God!” I think they must have been terrified!
They are locked away in a room. John tells us that this is out of fear of the Jews, at which point I remember that the writer of this Gospel always seems more than a little anti-Semitic. The disciples may be afraid of those in power, some of whom happened to be Jewish leaders, but those leaders worshiped Rome more than they lived out the heart of Judaism. In any event, the disciples are locked away in a room flooded with regrets and anguish and despair and real fear: “What if Jesus comes knocking?”
It turns out Jesus doesn’t knock. He just shows up. And then he tells them all what a bunch of losers they are. No? And then he says, “Next time, I’m going to pick better disciples!” No! Before they can even choke out an apology, he says to them, “Peace be with you!” Then, after showing them his wounds and showing them that this whole thing was real, he still doesn’t “tee them up.” Again, he says to them, “Peace be with you!” Then, in the very instant that they have experienced how totally life giving that real forgiveness can be, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on them and gives them the power to forgive others. Jesus might as well have told them, “Boys…now you can set others free or allow them to stay stuck. Do you get it now? How about if you give it a shot!”
Jesus came to show us how to live. The risen Jesus is trying to show a handful of folks that they have the power to show others how to live, too. Part of that power depends on looking and listening to what’s going on around them and what’s going on inside them. Part of knowing we’re on the right path is having access to the deepest feeling of all: God’s peace, which passes all understanding, even in the craziest of days. “Peace be with you.”