+ In nomine Domini.  Amen.

Today is the Fifth Sunday of Easter, there are two more Sundays to go after today before this 49-day Season ends the night before Pentecost which this year will be celebrated on the 11^th of May.

To review:

On the First Sunday of Easter (Easter Sunday) we read the account of the rising of Jesus witnessed by Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James; and this from the Gospel according to Matthew, where they women are told “Do not be afraid.”

The Second Sunday of Easter brought us to the Gospel according to John and the story of Doubting Thomas, or the two appearances of the risen Jesus to his followers, with the message: “Do not be afraid, Peace be with you, Be filled with God’s Spirit, Tell the Story, Forgive one another.”

When the Third Sunday of Easter came upon us, we changed Gospels to the Gospel according to Luke and read the story of the appearance of Jesus to two people as they were walking on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, who spoke of their “hearts burning inside themselves” as they met the risen-crucified One.

Last week it was the Fourth Sunday of Easter and we returned to the Gospel according to John and turned from a kind of chronological account of the Resurrection to a theological understanding of Jesus.  We read the story of how upon the healing of the man born blind (which story appeared to us in the Fourth Sunday in Lent) Jesus was questioned by a selection of the Pharisee-community (those religious leaders who desired that religious life be pure and full of meaning, but who went about it according to a very strict code and list of rules, so strict that (as John tells the story) they ask Jesus if they too are blind, symbolically speaking.  Jesus answers with the story of sheep who are protected from thieves and robbers by a good shepherd and who come into the sheep-corral through the gate, and then speaking symbolically himself, he tells this small group of religious leaders that he [Jesus] is the gate, in him [Jesus] God has shown what life, abundant life is like.

And all of that was found in the 10^th chapter of the Gospel according to John.  And now this seven-week long Easter-Season-Sermon continues as the Lectionary has us still in the same Gospel, but jumping ahead to the 14^th chapter in the midst of what is called traditionally, the Farewell Discourse, or the Final Words of Jesus Before His Arrest, Trial, and Crucifixion.

It’s interesting that we are reading this particular story this Sunday, because the Gospel Writer John has the story take place during the meal that celebrates the Passover which is found in the 13^th chapter of this Gospel; and we are this year right now in the beginning of the Passover Season for our Jewish brothers and sisters.

So now, what do we have? 

Well, again, the Lectionary gives us only a capsule of a story each week, so that we see it, read it, hear it always ripped out of it’s context within the scripture.  Let me sew it back together.

Chapter 13 has the Passover meal taking place with Jesus and his followers.  During the meal he becomes to them a servant, washes their feet, and then joins them at the table explaining by this symbolic ritual that if they want to follow him, they must become servants of each other, in fact of all people.

Then Judas Iscariot is identified as the one who will turn Jesus into the authorities.  Judas leaves the meal, Jesus continues to talk to his followers about the future, tells them that they must love one another, and that he will be leaving them and where he is going they cannot follow, at least not right away.

Peter is upset at this and announces that he will follow Jesus anywhere, and lay down his own life for Jesus if necessary.  And Jesus answers him by saying that before the rooster crows Peter will have denied that he ever knew Jesus three times.

End of chapter 13.

Immediately then comes the next sentence of Jesus’ words as put forth by the Gospel Writer John.  “Do not let your hearts be troubled …”

As I have said, the chapter and verse numbering system developed in the 15^th and 16^th centuries allows us to disconnect these stories from each other; and what we should have before us is the long reading perhaps with a particular Sunday’s story highlighted so that we would understand its meaning always within the context in which it was written.

In fact, I should have done that for you in the bulletin printed for this morning, and I apologize that I didn’t.  In fact, I may have made things worse … because, and I will explain why in a minute, I printed the first part of the first sentence of today’s Gospel on page 4 of the bulletin and the remainder of it on the last page of the bulletin.

We can put the blame for this on two groups, both which meet every Monday.  The first group is the ecumenical text-study group to which I belong that meets every Monday morning.  We study the readings for the coming week together, share our insights, our translations, our thoughts, our stories and then from the larger group understanding of a text, leave to prepare ourselves for preaching in our own congregations.  I have been part of such a group, in one way or another, since I was ordained in 1972.  

My personal contribution to the conversation last Monday was to try and decide what was really important in this Gospel reading from the 14^th Chapter.  And I kept paring it down until all that was left was that first part of the first verse of the chapter.  And I told the group, “I think that’s all I’m going to put into the bulletin, for our people to read, because it is the distillation of the whole story … or so I believe.”

I say these things because, of course, I think at the time that I understand all things and can interpret them clearly to everyone I meet.

Well, usually, such statements of mine are corrected by common sense later on in the week … but then there is this other group that meets on Monday … and this is the class I teach about Koiné Greek.  Colleagues from other congregations and people from our own congregation gather at noon in our Zaguan to learn how to translate the New Testament from the Greek manuscripts.  

We spent all of the class, 1 ½ hours on one word in this first part of the first sentence of Chapter 14.  And it’s the word (in Greek) ταρασσέσθω and it can have a lot of meanings, but its basic meaning is “stir up” as in agitate something, like stirring a glass of water with a spoon.  But there are other extended meanings: be troubled, worry, be anxious, upset, disturbed … and so on. 

And the assignment I gave the class was to consider how to translate this word in this sentence to different groups of people … e.g. to 3 year olds, or to people at a funeral, or to someone facing trauma, or coming out of a crisis, and so on.

And it was for that reason that I decided also it would be good to put only that portion of the first sentence into the place in the bulletin where it says GOSPEL.

Now having said all that, let us think for a moment through the Sundays of Easter we have celebrated thus far … to see if there is a theme appearing, and I think there is:

Jesus is alive. Do not be afraid.  Peace be with you.  Be filled with Spirit.  Forgive one another.  Our hearts were burning inside us.  Jesus is the gate to God’s presence in the world.  Do not let your hearts be troubled.

These are all words and phrases and stories of comfort, of solace (a word we don’t use very often), of calming, of steadying, of centering, of peacefulness.

And they are directed not just to the individual, in fact not to the individual at all, but to each individual in a community as a community.  You see it is not that my heart is not to be troubled, neither is yours, and all of us together are to be those who follow Jesus in such a way that our hearts (all of them) are not troubled, that we are not afraid, that we are filled with Spirit, that we forgive one another … and so on.

AND, and here comes today’s almost-ending paragraph … AND, all this means that there is another part to this, and that is the part of moving beyond ourselves.   Because the point is not that we are individually comforted, as nice as that is and feels, but that we are individually and communally called to bring this comfort and peace and healing and solace and hope and love to others, in fact to the whole world.

Next Sunday, the Final Words of Jesus carry on right after where they concludes today, so if you want to do a little homework, read from verse 15 onward for a little bit to see what I mean and what we will be talking about next week.

To be continued …