Third Sunday of Easter

April 26, 2009

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 24:36b‑48)

Jesus himself stood among the disciples 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.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

The question that I want to address this morning is: What is salvation? What is salvation, really? What is salvation in the real world?

Christians often speak of salvation in triumphant terms. Salvation as the triumph of life over death, good over evil. Salvation as a triumphant passage from the shadow side of life into the light. Salvation as victory both now in our daily lives and forever. But here we have a picture of salvation from the Gospel of Luke, and it does not paint so simplistic and triumphant a picture. This is not just any old salvation story, this is THE salvation story. Jesus has been raised from the dead and is now appearing to his disciples, speaking with them, having them touch his body, and even demonstrating he can eat fish again. But look what he tells them to touch.

He tells them: “Touch my hands and my feet.” “My hands and my feet.” Why the hands and feet? Because that is where the wounds still are. Even in resurrected form, Jesus still has the wounds that were inflicted upon him. Salvation does not erase wounds.

The word “salvation” itself comes from the Latin, from which we also get the word “salve.” It is the base word for “healing.” Salve. Salve. Salvation is like salve to the wounds.

Listen, then, to what Jesus says to his disciples: “He opened their minds to understand the scriptures,” and he said to them, “It is written, the Messiah is to suffer and rise.” Suffer and rise. Suffer and rise. Salvation is suffering and rising. There is no rising without suffering and no suffering without rising.

Let’s notice response of the disciples when Jesus appears to them: Jesus says, “Peace be with you.” And look at their emotional response. They are startled, they are terrified, they are frightened, they have doubt, there is joy; but there is also disbelief and finally wondering. It’s not an unambiguously triumphant picture. The disciples are afraid, have doubts and disbelief. In the real world of experience, salvation is not unambiguous triumph. It is salve to the wounds.

I was told not too long ago a story from a pastor friend of mine who was called upon to visit an old man who was dying of cancer. This old man had not set foot in a church in many, many, many years. But because he had some relationship with this pastor friend of mine, he asked him to come. My pastor friend went and met with this man, and the man began to tell him a story. It was a story about his involvement in the European Theater of World War II.

He told of being in a forward unit during the final push on Berlin, when they came upon a camp. Under a white flag German soldiers surrendered. They were taken prisoner, and then the Americans proceeded into the camp. What they found was scarcely believable to them. They found emaciated people, skin and bones, and corpses. Gradually it began to dawn on them exactly what it was that they were beholding. In their outrage they rounded up the German soldiers into a Quonset hut, and opened fire on them and killed them all.

He had taken pictures, and he showed them to my friend. He had not shared this story with others.

My pastor friend, hoping to facilitate both repentance and forgiveness for this dying old man, asked whether he felt sorry and if he wanted to repent. And the old man said, “No, I’d shoot the bastards again.”

It troubled my friend. In a sense it was a confession, and the man knew he bore guilt for what constituted a crime. But he did not have remorse. Is this a salvation story? There is salvation in it. Prisoners were freed from that camp, but others, many more others, died there. Perpetrators were punished, but in the court of revenge. The American soldiers had the satisfaction of killing those who had done evil, but it became a lifelong guilty secret. Salvation in the real world is salve on wounds, it is wounds that are salved

.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day—it’s a new one as far as I know, I haven’t seen it before—it said, “Until we win, support our troops.” I thought to myself, well, certainly we must support our troops. But I wondered how somebody could think that this war is something we can win! How does the word “win” apply at all? 87,000 Iraqi civilians, at least, are dead; we know that our young men and women are coming home to broken families, lost jobs, lost farms; and, according to one Pentagon official, an alarming rate of suicides. What does winning mean in the light of that reality? How could someone regard it a triumph? Let us pray instead for salvation, healing applied to wounds.

Leo Dangel is a poet who lives in Marshall, Minnesota; an older gentleman, a friend of Bill Holm, a wonderful poet. I recommend him and his homespun poetry from ordinary farming life. He wrote this poem about someone he knew who went off to war. It’s called “The One Who Died In War.”

“I was only seven, and he was one of the older boys who went to the country school three miles west of ours. I can’t remember his face, but once, at a Sunday softball game, he crawled on the grass, with me riding on his back. Playing the horse to perfection, he snorted, tossing his long hair, and reared up, pawing the air, the bend in his wrist exactly horse-like, in a performance all for me, playing the rider, but not too well because I was laughing. I gripped his tee shirt collar and waved a stick for a sword and shouted, ‘Charge! Charge!’”

“The One Who Died In War.” You can hear in Leo Dangel’s words, can’t you, the sense of gratitude, the sense of grief, and a sense of guilt all at once?

What is salvation in the real world of woundedness in which we live? It’s salve for the wounds. “Thus it is written,” Jesus says to those bewildered disciples, those confused and hurting disciples, those doubting and startled disciples, “the Messiah suffers and rises.” The one who saves suffers and rises. So it is with us, too, by the grace of God, because suffering is a profound and pervasive mystery.

In the face of our wounded world, in the face of our wounded lives, what is the response? Jesus goes on to say to those uncertain disciples, “Go and proclaim repentance and forgiveness.” Repent and forgive, repent and forgive. Are we moved by the wounds in our world? Are we moved by hungry children? Let us repent our gluttony. Are we moved by the innocent dying in war? Let us repent the violence in our hearts. Are we perplexed by economic disparities in our country? Let us repent our own greed.

And let us forgive, just as we have been forgiven. This is truly spiritual salve for our wounds.

Amen.