Faith with Flesh and Bones

A sermon based upon Luke 24: 36-48

Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Easter 2,  April 15^th, 2012

A devout Jew who had just died, named Eleazer Bokar, suddently appeared at the gates of Heaven and knocked for admittance. The great doors slowly swung open and Father Abraham stepped out, blowing his golden trumpet.  When he had finished the welcoming concerto, he turned to Eleazer and said, "Greetings, blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh. God awaits you."

Recovering from the awesome splendor of this type of welcome, Eleazer quickly replied, "Father Abraham, I am ready to meet our God," and stepped forward to enter the celestial portals.

"Wait, my brother," said Abraham, halting Eleazer with an imperiously, upraised palm. "Before entering God's Kingdom, you must first prove that you are worthy of the honor."

"But how can I prove my worthiness," queried Eleazer.

"You must show that, at least once in your mortal life, you displayed outstanding courage. Can you recall one unquestionably brave deed?"

Eleazer's face brightened as he said, "Yes I can! I remember going to the Roman Consul's palace where I met him face to face.  He was surrounded by dozens of legionnaires, all of whom were armed.   Ignoring this fact, I told him that he was a camel's behind, that he was a vulture who fed upon the bones of Jerusalem's oppressed, and that he was a persecutor of humble Jews. I then spat in his face."

"Well," exclaimed Abraham, "I am impressed. I must agree that that was an extremely brave feat to perform - considering the armed guards and the Roman Consul's hatred of Jews.  Yes, my brother, you have certainly earned admittance into Paradise, but please tell me, when did all this happen?"

"Oh," replied Eleazer casually, "right before you welcomed me." (http://www.jokebuddha.com/Flesh#ixzz1rjflIdBd).

In this humorous story, Eleazer practiced his faith one last time with “flesh and bones”, but is raised to a spiritual, heavenly life with Father Abraham.   But in our text today, Jesus, who was also killed for his faithfulness to the truth, now reappears from death with flesh and bones.    Here, we need to see something incredibly important to the Christian faith.   When Jesus was resurrected, he was not resurrected as a ghostly spirit, but as a risen Lord, “with” real flesh and bones; including his scars from his life and his death. 

THE RISEN JESUS STILL HAS SCARS
In this text, as Jesus shows his “hands and feet” to assure his disciples they are not seeing a ghost, we are told that “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering” (Luke 24:41).  The King James translation is even more intriguing when it says, “they still did not believe ‘for joy’.  Don’t miss this unexpected reason for their disbelief.    Because they were so happy, even too happy, they could not believe he was with them “in flesh and bones.”

This connection between “joy” and “disbelief” is the opposite of what we expect.  Normally, we connect “unbelief” with sorrow, sadness, and gloom; not with joy, elation and happiness.  All this commotion over Jesus’ victory begs this question for us today, this first Sunday after Easter: Can our lack of faith and belief still be entangled with too much joy and too much happiness?   Can we, like the disciples, be so “overjoyed” that we lose the ability to trust and believe God in the ‘real’ world to which we must now live our lives?    

Right now, my mind goes back to an unforgettable image I saw this week on national TV news.  You can find on the internet YOUTUBE video of young people flocking to the island of St. Martens, just to get the thrill of standing at the fence and being blown away by the powerful propulsion of jet thrust.   Near the St. Martens airport, there is a Café where on the menu is the airline schedule, so people know exactly when to walk to the nearby airstrip and stand at the only place in the world where the thrust winds from jets are clocked over 100 miles per hour.  Of course, there are warning signs posted about the danger of both high winds and deafening noise, but people come from all over the world just to stand so they can be “blown away”.  If this is “fun”, could people also think faith is about being “blown away” by God---the God who gives a great thrill when you follow close to him?

Another interesting thing happened this past week on Easter Sunday, in a small Texas town.   There was a large, open air worship service where over 15,000 young people flocked to see and hear a very popular, openly Christian, NFL Quarterback, Tim Tebow preach the gospel.  Some say that he is becoming a better preacher, than he is a passer.   Even Tebow himself, witnessed of his faith to the crowd, saying it doesn’t matter whether or not he gets to play football as he wishes, as long as he gets to serve Jesus.  

I can't help but like Tim Tebow’s “open-air” faith, but I’m more than a little worried about Christians who need big-time, famous celebrities, be they sports figures or TV or radio Bible teachers, who will “blow them away” so they can have more faith.   When the disciples encounter Jesus as “ghostly” spectacle, who “blows them away”, they do not have more faith, but were left  wondering.  It took a Jesus of “flesh and bones” and also with scars to bring them back to real life.  

LIFE IN JESUS BEARS SCARS TOO
To tether faith to the matters of faith and real life, Jesus asks: “Do you have anything to eat?”   (24:41). After they gave him “a piece of broiled fish” and he “ate it in their presence”, if this is not enough to get them to focus on what is “real” about faith, we are told he then, “opened their minds to the Scriptures” (vs. 45), where, "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. (Luk 24:46-48 NRS).

We must not miss how the disciples heard that last sentence: “You are witnesses of these things” (v.48).  The word “witness” in the Greek is equivalent to the word martyr.   To be a witness “of these things” is to become suffer and sacrifice for the truth of faith.  In this resurrection moment, the disciples are no longer “learners” or “students” of Jesus, but now they have graduated into being “witnesses” to Jesus through their own suffering and death.  Jesus has shown them his scars, eaten a meal, and reminded them from Scripture, he was the first one to suffer, be killed and then raised for the truth----but now, they are next in line.  Jesus’ sobering point after Easter:  True faith means that we life and die as witnesses to God’s truth, in our own “flesh and bones” which will include both suffering and “scars.”

I find it most interesting in this story of resurrection, that the resurrected Jesus keeps his scars.  His scars are the “trophies” that he does not “lay down”.   The risen Jesus keeps his scars.   Later the apostle Paul declares that he “bears in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Gal 6.17).  Paul’s witness to Jesus is in the scars and “marks” he bears.   In our culture today, many people feel the need to have “marks”, “scars”, called tattoos or body piercing as a type of excessive need to identify who they in our self-centered, pleasure seeking world.  It is indisputable that today, so many people feel a very strange need to carry around “marks” on their body.  Could it be that this behavior, strange to most of us in the church, is closely tied into to the great spiritual truth of what life, faith, pain and hope should be about?  I even wonder if we can, in fact, be people of value and spirit, unless we have some kinds of scars and marks to prove that are alive; even alive in Jesus.  Seeing Jesus as a ghostly phantom is never enough.  Being blown away by Jesus is not enough.  Faith has to get down to the “blood, sweat, and tears” of “flesh and bones” and bearing the scars of being a witness, being spiritual is not real, unless the spiritual gets physical.  

What makes faith “physical” gets complicated and gets hard.   Hard is a part of faith and life.  Think about it.  What makes a body work is not easy either.  It takes a lot of energy and a lot of getting things “just right” every single day, just to get you out of bed and moving.  The older your body gets, the harder it gets to get everything just right every day.  Having a life of flesh and bones is complicated and it’s hard.  Having a faith that becomes real with flesh and bones is also complicated, difficult and demanding.   It will include both “suffering” and “scars”.

I know something about scars.  Most of you do too.   I’ve got scars on my body for all kinds of reasons, and none of them were fun.  My most recent scars come from having 5 surgeries on my leg and foot to correct an injury I had at age seventeen, which came with plenty enough scars of its own.  If you live long enough, and if you live full enough, your flesh will include scars.   Our human body is programed to heal, but it only heals with scars.  Perhaps God could have programed us to have complete healing without scars, but we aren’t made this way.   For a reason known to God and those who suffer much, God has decided his creatures need pain and  need scars for healing.  

God also designs our faith, even the faith of the resurrection, so that we must learn to sacrifice and to suffer for the truth, if our faith is to become real in “flesh and bones”.   With “marks” on his own body and also a bearing a “thorn in the flesh”, Paul came to this reason for the cost of suffering and having scars in flesh and bones: “considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. (2Co 12:7 NRS).  

“To keep me from being too elated” sounds a lot like to keeping us from being too “overjoyed”; keeping us from being “blown away” or to keeping  us grounded in a faith that is real and makes a difference in our living and dying, doesn’t it?   Jesus shows the disciples his “hands and feet” as a way of revealing what kind of “faith” makes resurrection “real” in their own lives.   As my college professors, Van Murrell and John Drayer kept on reminding me in my days of my own youthful jubilation; “Faith must not get so heavenly minded, that it is of no earthly good.”  What earthly good is your faith?  Where are the marks of Jesus in your body?  Where are the scars of faith that has caused you to pay the price of pain as you have suffered for truth?


SCARS ARE SIGNS OF LIFE AND LOVE
Nancy Eiesland wrote about her own pain and scars as a handicapped child born with birth defects, who became a Poster Child for the March of Dimes in the 1960’s (See: Encountering The Disabled God, at   http://www.uccdm.org/2007/05/21/encountering-the-disabled-god/ .   By the time she was only thirteen, she had undergone eleven operations for a congenital bone defect in her hips.  In order to be mobile, Nancy needed crutches or a wheel chair.  That has been the case for her whole life.  She later had to undergo surgeries for scoliosis, curvature of the spine.  

When she was a child, her parents took her to all kinds of faith healers.  Before she got past single digits in age, she had already heard many, many times, all the explanations people make in an attempt to explain why God allowed the disability or didn’t take it away.  Nancy heard it all: people speculated she had hidden sins, or they said God gave her this disability to develop her character.  “But,” Nancy writes, “at age six or seven, I was convinced I already had enough character to last a lifetime.”   The truth was, no matter how many operations she underwent or how many prayers were prayed, she would never be “normal”.   For Nancy, the pain and struggle didn’t last for a few hours, but the struggle and the scars was for life.   Nancy had to go on living with all the ups and downs of what she calls an “un-everyday body.”

Here in Nancy story, and also in ours, if we will come down to see and understand it, is the truth of our resurrection faith that resides in “flesh and bones”.   For human people who live by faith, there are some things that hurt us in life which we never get over, problems we never completely overcome, and situations which will never be the same.   If your child gets killed, abducted or abused, if you are a parent, you will not get over it.   You may be able to forgive, like the Amish did at West Nickel Minds, but you will never forget.   No matter how much healing you might experience, as time goes on, some wounds will never just disappear.  They will never be erased.

No!  God did not erase the wounds of the resurrected Christ.  God does not erase the wounds that go deep into the human flesh or the human heart.   What would it have meant if all the scars of Jesus had been erased, as if nothing had happened?   What if Jesus appeared to the disciples saying, “Whew!  I’m sure glad that’s all behind me!  I’m glad we are all home free!”

We do not worship the real Jesus, when we make up our own Jesus without the pain, blood, sweat and tears, and also the scars.  The risen Jesus forgives, but he does not forget.  He still “bears” scars in this body and he still carries our hurts, wounds and pains in his resurrected body.   Can you imagine what this means for us, and the Christian call to witness through our own scars; even as we bear hurt, shame, and the pain of living the truth of Jesus in our world? 

Walter Wangerin once wrote a story to remind us.   “Ragman” is a story about the narrator, who on an early Friday morning, saw and started to follow a ragman, who symbolized Christ.  The ragman pulled a wagon loaded with beautiful new clothes, and he called out, “New rags for old!”  The narrator watched as the ragman stopped to tend to a brokenhearted woman who was crying her eyes out into a handkerchief.  The ragman took her handkerchief, gave her a brand new one, and touched her handkerchief to his own face.  Then the ragman started to cry.  Further along the ragman came upon an injured child whose head was wrapped in a bandage that was oozing blood.  He took the child’s bandage and put it on his own head, and gave her a new bonnet.  The narrator says, “And I gasped at what I saw, for with the bandage went the wound!”  Then the ragman himself began to bleed.

The ragman went on to give his own arm to a man who was missing an arm, and still later, he found a drunken man asleep under a blanket.  He took the blanket, wrapped it around himself and left new clothes for the man.  Now the ragman was carrying all these wounds.  He climbed on a hill that Friday, lay down, and died.  What a joy when Sunday---and Easter ---arrived for the ragman, too.  He bore in his own body the wounds of the whole world.  (These last two illustrations come and the core idea for this come from a sermon “Emmanuel Forever” by Mary Harris Todd, in Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XXIII, Number 3, p.  23-24, 2012), 

Now, if we have true faith, we also “bear the wounds” of the hurts of the world.  There is no real, genuine, unaffected faith.  The faithful followers of the resurrected Jesus still bear the scars and the true church also bears and carries scars.   Jesus wants us to see and touch his wounds, and he wants us to know he is with us in the wounds we also bear for God in this world of sin, hurt, heartache, and pain.   When we “touch” the wounds of Jesus we look deep into God’s heart that remains wounded as we love and live for him.  Wounds are a true sign of love still being made perfect.   Wounds are a sign that life and faith go on.  Amen.


© 2012 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.