Being You And Being Me

"Meeting Us Right Where We Are At"

Luke 24:36-48
April 26, 2009

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them,
“Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were
seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in
your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see;
for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had
said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were
disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They
gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said
to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that
everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be
fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to
them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the
third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name
to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.

Jerry Zaslow is the writer of a column in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Moving On”
that focuses on life transitions, everything from a child’s first crush to a dying husband’s
last words to his wife, which is an odd thing for a financially orientated newspaper like
the Journal.   Still, you’ve got to give the paper some credit for trying to tend to the
heart and spirit in the midst of a larger focus on the pocket book. A couple of years
ago, Zaslow had just seen his latest column published, one that focused on the power
and resiliency of women’s friendships with each other. He writes: The column focused
on why women, more than men, have great urges to hold on tightly to old friends.
Sociologists now have data showing that women who can maintain friendships through
the decades are healthier and happier, with stronger marriages. Not all women are able
to sustain those friendships, however. It’s true that countless grade-school girls arrange
themselves in pairs, duos, threesomes and foursomes, vowing to be best friends
forever. But as they reach adulthood, everything gets harder. Between ages 25 and 40,
women’s friendships are most at risk, because those are the years when women are
often consumed with marrying, raising children and establishing careers.

For that column, I spoke to women who had nurtured decades-long friendships. They
said they felt like traveling companions, sharing the same point on the timeline, hitting
the same milestones together – 30, 40, 50, 80. They believed their friendships thrived
because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to
expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend
didn’t return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn’t mean she was angry or
backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from her day.
Researchers who study friendship say that if women are still friends at age 40, there’s a
strong likelihood they’ll be lifelong friends. “Female friends show us a mirror of
ourselves,” one researcher told me. (http://www.girlsfromames.com/excerpt/)

It was after writing this column that Zaslow received an email from a woman named
Jenny who shared with the columnist her own story of a forty year friendship she had
with some other women from their hometown of Ames, Iowa.   These young women who
had grown up in the sixties, lived as young women in the eighties, started having
children in the nineties and had forged a life-long friendship with each other through
the good times and the bad, and they had supported each other, cried with each other,
shared happiness and pain with each other, and it had made life more livable, more
meaningful, more rich because of how they had cared for each other. For them,
friendships wasn’t something you picked up and put down—it was something you took
on, and carried with you for the rest of your life, even when the burden of that
friendship was difficult. Well, after receiving this email from Jenny, he simply wrote her
a quick note thanking her and just printed out her email, and filed it away with the
dozens and dozens of other emails from women who written him about their own
friendships with other women. It was only years later that Zaslow picked up those
printed emails again, and decided to re-explore this issue, through Jenny’s group of
friends from Ames, Iowa. On Tuesday, a book about those friendships called The Girls
From Ames: A Story of Women and Friendship was released, and I was lucky enough
to hear an interview with the author and some of those women this past Wednesday.

What fascinated me the most about this story was actually how incarnational it really
was, how profoundly human it was, to hear these women’s stories of deep friendship
and loyalty to each other. There is something about the human self, the human soul,
that craves companionship, friendship, people to go on the journey with, and
connection to other human beings. And it seems to me that the way we humans really
get at a truth, or stumble upon a truth that we come to know in our bones is through
human experience, through the human stories. I always kid about the fact that when I
preach a sermon, I know that people don’t usually remember the central theme I was
trying to get across, but they always remember the stories I told to make that point, the
illustration I used to make my point. I remember once that one Sunday years ago,
when I was working two other jobs, in addition to pastoring a church, I once recycled an
old sermon because I hadn’t had the time to write a new one, and everything was going
just fine, UNTIL I told the story in that sermon, and then people immediately recognized
the sermon again—if I had not used that story again, had cut it out, people probably
would have thought it was a fresh sermon—no one really pays attention to the theme of
a sermon—it’s just the stories they remember, right? You may not realize it, but when I
begin to tell a story, people immediately start paying attention again, even if their eyes
have been glazing over for much of the sermon. I think that is because we learn and
live our lives in the midst of stories that we’re actually living out or that we’re telling and
that is why we pay attention to them when they are being told to us—we recognize them
as the very means by which we have come to learn truths about our own lives and
about God. That is why books like The Girls From Ames, and other moments of human
connection matter so much—they connect us to what really matter, these human
stories, these truths given flesh and bone, given a story by our own experiences or the
experiences of others.

And that is why stories like the one we have before us today from the Bible matter: they
embody truth, they tell us the truth, a truth, that we can recognize, a truth that has flesh
and blood, that we can touch, a truth we can run our hands over and through…and
that is why the incarnation matters, this idea that God came to us, in flesh and blood
through this Christ, that is why the Christian church has tried to articulate, in its own
fumbling way, a way of understanding God that was familiar, not distant, not foreign, but
an understanding that was as real as the person sitting right next to you. Now, for the
most part, it’s been a disaster, because, in reality, how does one really give voice to the
deepest of mysteries, the mystery of a God given flesh and blood, in this Christ? You
spend most of the time arguing over minutiae, over the details, and you forget the big
picture, which is really the story of Christian theology for the last two thousands year,
isn’t it?

But in our text today, you have it all simplified, you have the mystery distilled, though it’s
not found in a creed, or a theology book, but in a simple story about this resurrected
one, who arrives amidst his frightened friends, and shows them how alive, how real he
is, as real as he ever was, or will ever be. Startled and terrified, they find themselves in
his presence again, just as the ones who had told them of their encounter with him on
the road to Emmaus. They fear he is a ghost, a phantom, maybe even a figment of
their imagination, but he presents his nail scarred hands and feet to show them how
real he is—so real that the wreckage the nails had wrought were still imprinted in his
skin. And even then, even in the midst of their joy, they still can’t imagine that its him,
that the One they saw crucified, if from a safe distance, is the same One who is with
them in that room. Just to make a point, he asks for food, something to eat, because it
was a truism in the ancient world that ghosts weren’t able to eat and digest food, and
so he eats a piece of boiled fish with them, to their amazement, their quiet amazement.

But why was it so important for them to see that he wasn’t a ghost? I mean, I don’t
know if Jesus coming back as a ghost wouldn’t have been any less amazing, really?
Well, I think that one of the reasons is found in what I said earlier, that we humans find
our truths, our personal truths, and the truths God graciously gives us, that we find
these truths on this side of eternity, in the world of flesh and blood, in these bodies
made dust and spit, as the Genesis stories tell us. It is on this side of eternity that we’
re going to encounter God, meet God, struggle with God, be supported by God—we will
learn these lessons on this side of eternity, and the lessons we learn—or don’t learn--
are the ones that are likely to stick with us for eternity. So, it was important for Jesus,
as the one who is like us, who is God’s love given flesh and blood, to show his
disciples, then and now, that he was like us, even, even after the resurrection, a
resurrection that the Christian faith says we will all experience at some point in eternity.
What must be learned, and where we are to meet God as well, is on this side of
eternity, at least to begin with, and the way we humans learn, and grow, is through our
interaction with each other, through our journeys in our relationships, our friendships,
maybe even our conflicts with others. Whatever the interaction, it is still a human
interaction, and because of that reality, God has chosen the human, the way of flesh
and blood as the means by which to reach us. Indeed, Jesus, after showing his
humanity to his startled disciples, he sends those particular humans out into the world
to tell the good news that his divine experience in that human body will be the very
thing that sets the entire world free from sin and death.

Some have said that we cannot save what we do not become, that we cannot rescue
others if we cannot imagine ourselves on the other end of that act of rescue. That is
what makes us human, and that sense of empathy, that sense of “being with,” “standing
with,” is what makes us able to care deeply for each other, because we have some
sense of what that other person is going through. That is what makes the friendship
between those women from Ames so powerful—they had deep human connections to
each other, and those connections became the way they learn deep and valuable
lesson that can only come through journeying with another human being. Even the
folks we struggle with, the ones whom wonder whether or not we could see ourselves in
their shoes—even they have something to teach us. For example in an Easter sermon
at Trinity Church in Boston, the Rev. Pamela L. Foster, discusses what it means to be
Easter people: “Mr. Paul Rusesabagina, is the former manager of Hotel Rwanda. In the
midst of the Rwanda genocide, Mr. Rusesabagina, with great risk to himself, was able
to convince Hutu authorities to leave unharmed for longer than anyone would have
imagined possible the Tutsi people who had taken refuge in the hotel. This shaky
agreement made possible some safe passage convoys that otherwise never would have
occurred. In a recent interview, Rusesabagina was asked how he had been able to
convince the authorities to grant that precarious asylum. In his reply, he spoke the
following sentence: ‘Even the hardest heart has a part that is soft.’ He is one man. We
Easter people are many.”

Even the hardest heart has a part that is soft. So true, something learned from his
experience, and that human truth is what makes judgments about people so difficult,
and what a gift it is for us not to be the judge of each other. What Easter people do is
to chose to involve themselves in a world that sometimes seem harder and harder take
a chance on, and they make that choice over and over again because of the choice
that God made in showing us what love looked like, in that Jesus of Nazareth thousands
of years ago. You see, we Easter people incarnate, make flesh God’s love, God’s
care, for each other—we show each other our wounds, we take a chance that our
stories of healing will help others heal as well. In the radio story I heard this past week,
it was told that one of the women from Ames, the one whose story of friendship I just
shared with you, is now struggling with breast cancer—but she wasn’t the first person
from that group of women who has dealt with this disease: indeed, the first person from
that she talked to was the other woman who had just beaten breast cancer in her own
life. We Easter people, like Christ, we show each other our wounds so that when they
become scars, we will be able to recognize the resurrection that we have just
experienced, and we will be able to give hope to each other.

The incarnation of God in Christ, however you want to interpret the wildness, the
craziness of that idea, is simply the attempt by us Christians to name what we already
know: that we love and learn with and through each other, and it should be no surprise,
no surprise at all, that God is willing to reach us right where we are at. Indeed, it is the
most wonderful, wonderful thing in the world, to know that the God we journey with, the
God who is beside us, has loved us so deeply as to meet us in the one place, the one
space, where we know that we can touch the face, the ears, the cheeks, the hands of
God, and that place and space is in each other, in the same space that we find Jesus,
showing his scars to his friends, knowing that these wounds will be the very means by
which they will be healed—indeed, the means by which we will all be healed. Amen.