David Orendorff · John 20:19-23

The disciples, the students of Jesus, are in hiding. They are lost not knowing what they will do now that Jesus is dead. They left everything; their farms, fisheries, jobs and families. They committed their lives to Jesus and his message of healing from the ravages of poverty, illness, insanity, oppressive religion and the Roman army. But things didn’t turn out the way they thought they would. And now, far from their homes in Galilee, the promise has been killed and they are afraid that their deaths are next.

What could they do but hide behind closed and locked doors? What would now become of them? What will their lives, should they be so lucky as to live, be now?

Then on the first day of the Jewish week a ghost came through the shut doors. Who would have thought that it could get any worse? Now even the spirit world hunted them. How could they even hope to survive when they were hunted by the priests, the Roman army and ghosts? Then the ghost spoke. The word was not of destruction but of the one thing they needed. The ghost said, “Peace be with you.”

In Aramaic the ghost said to them, “Shalom be with you.” Shalom is the exact opposite of fear. Shalom is quietness for the soul, healing for wounds, full stomachs and full hearts, confidence for the day and all days that God was still, in spite of it all, with them and for them.

Then the Spirit offers his hands where the wounds of nails show clearly. And the Spirit offers his side where the lance of a Roman soldier drained his final blood. In the wounds they recognized that this was the Spirit of Jesus. Their rabbi had come back to them. Their teacher, the one who spoke love, who acted love, who promised love, who died love had returned with the wounds of his love. It defied all reason, all thought, all previous experience. When they thought all was lost, Jesus found them, came to them and said a second time, “Shalom be with you.”

The seeing of Jesus and the hearing of shalom brought rest to their weary souls and an end to their fear. Though nothing outside the closed doors had changed, they were changed and there was shalom in their house and in their hearts. To trust that no matter what, God is with and for us, is shalom, is peace, and is the way of a disciple of Jesus.

In 1999 Parade[1] Parade, The Sunday Newspaper Magazine, Sunday, April 4, 1999, www.parade.com magazine ran an interview with the actor Ving Rhames. Ving Rhames is the actor who upon winning a Golden Globe Award, called his co-nominee, Jack Lemmon forward, and gave the award to him. Rhames had never met Lemmon and says of this moment of extraordinary grace, “I can’t take credit for that, trust me. It was something God laid on my heart.”

The side notes on the cover of Parade read, “Whether because of divine intervention, as he maintains, or his own determination and talent, the actor Ving Rhames says his life has been shaped by a powerful belief that Faith Is Strength In All Things.”

Ving believes that God is always with him, guiding and shaping his life. He says of himself, “Growing up poor, you can’t put your faith in the landlord when you don’t have heat and hot water, because he’s a slumlord. You feel you don’t have the power to change your predicament, and that forced me and a lot of other people to look to a higher source.”
He describes how he escaped life on the streets to find a career in acting, “My friend and I were trying to talk to these girls,” he recalled, “and we followed them for a block or two. They went to this poetry class at the 126th Street youth center. We went in too. That’s where I learned about Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and all the great black poets. We started doing poetry readings for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and it was fun.”

God comes through locked doors in just this way, following two girls, not for the poetry, but for the hustle, and leads us to the High School of the Performing Arts, the Fame school, and then to Julliard, and then to a role as Don King and the Golden Globe Awards.

We too are sometimes lost and afraid of stuff and people. We too sometimes find ourselves helpless and even hopeless in the exigencies of life. We too sometimes close the doors and hide against the evil of the world, hoping to be spared.
But we are also the ones who are found by the spirit of Jesus, who feel the power of Jesus’ “Shalom be with you.” In those words God unfolds life in the lure of the beautiful, in wonderful poetry and in chances to act. Those of us who are disciples of Jesus are continually learning to trust that God is with us and on our side, unfolding before us just what we need when we need it.

But coming to stand with us and offer us shalom is not the end of the story. Jesus tells those first students, “As Abba has sent me, even so I send you.” God sent Jesus as a messenger to tell of God’s unfolding love and to serve all of God’s children with that very same love. Jesus sends his students to do the same thing.

We are tempted to deny that we are to be Jesus to the world. It seems to big for us to be sent by God to promise the world healing in body and soul from the ravages of poverty, illness, insanity, oppressive religion and the all the armies of hate. We are too small, too insignificant, too weak, too ignorant, and too afraid. And besides, it might be inconvenient and interfere with our own desires.

It is Saturday morning. Mom has made pancakes and her two young sons, 6 and 4, are in heaven until there are only two pancakes left, one of them obviously larger than the other. The boys begin to argue who gets the big pancake. Mom intervenes and tells them that Jesus gave his only coat to the cold man, and that Jesus took his lunch and fed the hungry. Then she suggested to them that they do what Jesus did. The boys look at her in silence and then the older child says, “Let’s let Mikey be Jesus.”

The chance to be Jesus over pancakes and life belongs to all of us. And the chance to be Jesus in our relationships, in our actions, in what we say and do in the world, belongs to all of us.

And so that we know the power of God is in us when we are sent from our hiding places, the scripture says, “He (Jesus) blows upon them.” Now take time to picture this. There is a ghost walking about the locked and closed room blowing upon the folks there. It is a strange image that begs to be explained.

I was with Rody Rowe for a meeting this week and he told the story of a friend who was on a plane, returning from her mother’s funeral and still grieving when she inadvertently overhead a conversation between two women, who were apparently friends, sitting next to her. One woman had recently lost her husband at a young age. She confided that she was depressed and lost. She missed her lover, she didn’t know what the future held financially and she was afraid. She said that her grief and fear went on for weeks and months. Then one day “God breathed.”

Her friend responded, “God breathed? What do you mean?”

And she said, “God breathed.”

And her friend again tried, “What do you mean, God breathed?”

“I can’t say what I mean. God breathed and I knew things would eventually be OK.”

Hearing this conversation, Rody says his friend silently wept her own grief but knew that God would breathe.
John Wesley speaks of God breathing when he writes:

God is continually breathing, as it were, upon the soul; and (the) soul of (the one who trusts God) is breathing unto God. Grace is descending into (that one’s) heart; and prayer and praise ascending to heaven: and by this intercourse between God and (the child of God), this fellowship with the Father and the son, as by a kind of spiritual respiration, the life of God in the soul is sustained; and the child of God grows up, till he comes to the ‘full measure of the stature of Christ.[2] John Wesley, Fifty Three Sermons, The New Birth, (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1983), 573

In the midst of their fear and hiding the spirit of Jesus comes to the disciples, speaks peace to them, charges them to take God’s loving shalom to the world and breathes on them. It is the breath of creation from Genesis; it is the spirit of life and the spirit of God. It is the Holy Spirit that gives courage, wisdom, and joy. The disciples and the woman know things will be OK.

Even now we are breathing the breath of Jesus, of Moses, of Sarah, of Ruth, of Buddha and Gandhi. Every breath we take has in it a molecule or two of those great in spirit who have gone before us. We take life from their breath. We share in holy respiration.

Life is full of good reasons to close the doors and hide in fear. But God always finds us, enters through the locked doors, always stands with us, loves us, offers us shalom, sends us out to love as we have been loved and breathes into us the power necessary for the healing salvation of a much wounded and very frightened world. Such is the faith and the life of a student of Jesus. May it be our lives as we worship, study and serve in discipleship.

Amen and Shalom.

[1] Parade, The Sunday Newspaper Magazine, Sunday, April 4, 1999, www.parade.com

[2] John Wesley, Fifty Three Sermons, The New Birth, (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1983), 573