Good enough for peace

2ND SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year A
May 1, 2011
Ss. Peter & Paul
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Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, two Methodist divines, wrote a book that took the ecumenical community by storm a few years back. Its title is Resident aliens. Hauerwas said that there was a good deal of “atheism” in much of our church life. Too many of our churches, they thought, were a-theistic: that is, they kept cranking along, offering ceramics classes for older adults, yoga classes for busy homemakers, trips to Disney World for youth so that God really didn’t matter. They were successful at being an uplifting moral improvement society for the youth, or a place for retirees to hang out during the week, but they had failed at “being church.”
If you want to see the church stripped of our sacred trappings, our pretenses peeled away, then look here in this 20th chapter of John—a pitiful huddle of timid souls hanging on to one another behind our locked doors. Without he presence, the presence which makes our human gatherings the church of God, this is about all we are.


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And the good news is that it was to this church, which was hardly church, that the living, risen Christ came, saying “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). Into this busy, buzzing void, there was a voice, a presence, a peace not of our devising.
The Risen Christ comes and he says, “Peace be with you,” showing them his pierced hands and his feet. He says again (in case we failed to get the point) “Peace be with you,” telling them that he is sending them out into the world. Then he breathes on them, giving them the Holy Spirit, bestowing upon them the awesome power to forgive sins.
It is what is said at The Peace at Mass. Laurel Dykstra says that she says this before the Peace:
When Jesus appeared to his disciples, they were hiding upstairs in a locked room—the friends who knew him best, who had betrayed him, who had pretended they didn’t know him, who had run away when he was dying, who hid when he was arrested, who were frightened and ashamed. He appeared among them and greeted them. He didn’t say, “What happened?” “Where were you?” “You screwed up.” He greeted them, saying, “Peace.”
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No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done or think you’ve done, whoever you have betrayed or let down, no matter how far you have gone from God, from Jesus, Jesus doesn’t say to you, “:Where were you? You screwed up.” Jesus greets you, saying, “Peace.”
The first time I used these words, a tiny woman who is addicted to heroin and an occasional prostitute whispered, “That was the first time in so many years that I felt like I was good enough to be part of this.” Over and over again, people shyly approach and let me know that I must keep saying this.
Whatever it is that churches are saying, what poor people and people who are marginalized hear from us is: “You are not good enough, you are not welcome, the food bank entrance is around back.”
“Peace be with you. You are not accused, you are invited.”
Church is a gift of a God who refuses to leave us be. He comes to us. His presence makes this Church. To the Church that had nothing, Christ gives everything. Spirit. Mission. Forgiveness.

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We are Church, not because of the building we have here, not because of any program we have here, nor the preaching, nor the teaching, nor the care with which we do the liturgy, nor the sensitive and loving pastoral care rendered by our Rector and our Deacon, nor all our various activities. We are Church because to us, even to us, Christ has come and given us his gifts of Spirit, mission, and forgiveness, commissioning us to gife them to the whole world in his name.
That’s why we’re called Church.
William Willimon, now a United Methodist Bishop, tells of us first church in rural Georgia. He was fresh out of his seminary, eager to be a good pastor. He was in graduate school at the time, commuting out to the hinterland on weekends. Most Sunday mornings at dawn, it was a tough trip out there from Atlanta. He used to say, “This trip only takes 30 minutes, but takes us back 30 centuries.” It was a long way from Atlanta to Suwanee, Georgia.
On Willimon’s first visit, he found a large chain and padlock on the front door, put there, he was told, by the local sheriff. “The sheriff, why?” he asked.
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“Well, things got out of hand at the board meeting last month, folks started ripping up carpet, dragging out the pews they had given in memory of their mothers. It got bad. The Sheriff come out here and put that there lock on the door until our new preacher could come and settle things down.”
That rather typified Willimon’s time at that church. He would drive out there each Sunday, praying for a miraculous snowstorm in October which would save him from another Sunday at that so-called “church.”
He spent a year there that lasted a lifetime. He tried everything. He worked, he planned, he taught, he pled, but the response was always disappointing. The arguments, the pettiness, the fights in the parking lot after the board meeting were more than he could take. It was touch and he was glad to be leaving them behind.
“You call yourself a Church!” he muttered as his tires kicked gravel up in the parking lot on his last Sunday among them.


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A couple of years later, while visiting at Emory University in Atlanta, Willimon ran into a young man who told him that he was now serving that church. Willimon’s heart went out to him. Such a dear young man, and only 23!
“They still remember you out there,” the young man said.
“Yeah,” Willimon said glumly, “I remember them too.”
“Remarkable bunch of people,” the young cleric said.
“Remarkable,” Willimon replied.
“Their ministry to the community has been a wonder,” the younger minister continued. “That little church is now supporting, in one way or another, more than a dozen of the troubled families around the church. The free day care center is going great. Not too many interracial congregations like them in North Georgia.”
Willimon could hardly believe what he was hearing. “What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know. One Sunday, things just sort of came together. It wasn’t anything in particular. It’s just that, when the service was done,
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and we were on our way out, we knew that Jesus loved us and had plans for us. Things fairly much took off after that.”
Willimon says that he thinks he knows what happened. He thinks that church got intruded upon. He thinks someone greater than he knocked the lock off that door, kicked it open and offered them peace, the Holy Spirit, mission and forgiveness. And now, they are called “church.”
Church isn’t my hard work, your earnest effort, our long-range planning or heavy-duty giving. Church is a gift, a visitation, an intrusion of the Living Christ, standing among us and showing us his hands and his side, and saying “Peace be with you!” and bidding us to find power in Him.
[original homily given by W.W. at Duke Chapel, April 7, 1997 and used in his Pulpit Resource, April-June, 1999; I used it April 11, 1999 at Ascension Parish, Portland. Again the sermon was in Synthesis for April 3, 2005, and was used at Christ Church, Southgate, on that Sunday, with some additional notes about Pope John Paul II’s death the day before. The Laurel Dykstra story is in Synthesis for May 1,2011.]

Phil Ayers+