Shalom is reality.

Alleluia Christ is Risen,
the Lord is risen indeed,
alleluia.

We are eight days into the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost.
These days correspond to the Feasts of Passover and Shavuot
commanded by God to Moses.
God redeemed Israel
from slavery in Egypt
and they were saved through the waters of the Red Sea.
Fifty days later,
God took them to the Mountain of the Lord
and they received the Ten Commandments
with fire, wind
and the sound of a trumpet.

Jesus Christ redeemed us through his own blood on the cross,
and was raised to life from death.
He saved us through the waters of Baptism
and on the fiftieth day
the Law of God
was released into our hearts
with Fire, wind,
and the sound of many tongues.

In these fifty days,
seven weeks,
I want to talk about coming into reality.
Actually,
I want to talk about the fake and real,
but that doesn't sound very sophisticated
and a bit judgey.

We are in a world
that seems to be becoming more and more fake.
We are warned that at the end of the age
deception will become so strong
that even the elect will be deceived.
We have to learn what is real.

I began Lent by listening to recordings of 
Leanne Payne from thirty years ago.
Many of the trends 
that she predicted
have now happened.
It was a bit chilling to hear her observations come to pass.

One of the things that she said
stayed with me through Lent.
She said again and again
that she was grateful that she went to a "real church."
And she observed that what was rising around her
was not real.

Ironically,
we have been doing this Sunday church
for over six years now.
Amazingly,
I have been told by other pastors and leaders
that it's too bad I don't have a "real church."
After getting over the insult,
I pressed the person by what they meant.

I have been told
that a real church
has chairs.
Real churches have boards of elders
who can be called to pray for the sick.
Real churches have bands,
screens, and smoke machines.
Real churches have little plastic cups
full of chemicals to imitate grape juice.
Real churches have programs.
And of course,
real churches have buildings.

These conversations
have been pretty depressing,
and reminded me of an Orthodox priest
who was a guest speaker 
at the Emmanual Gospel Center
in Boston.
The folks in the room began to challenge him
about the Blessed Virgin Mary.
He looked at them
and said,
"This is why 
I stopped working with evangelicals.
Ignorance and arrogance
are a deadly combination."

The culture is screaming because many 
have embraced an illusion in the place of reality.

So over the next few weeks
we are going to talk about what is real
and what is not real.
When I was young
I learned a definition of the church
that isn't perfect,
but it was a good place to start.

The Book of Common Prayer
says that a church is 
"wherever the true word of God is preached,
and the sacraments are duly administered."

When you apply this standard,
you start to see a lot of what is happening
in a very different light.

Six years ago
we were reduced to the essentials.
Because of physical distance 
and the limitations
of Zoom
Go removed all the trappings of "ministry."
We have had nothing
but the word of God
the sacraments
and one another.
 
And Jesus reduced
things to their essential elements 
in this episode on the night after the resurrection.
Jesus does five things.
He enters the room.
He says Shalom.
He sends them out,
He imparts to them the Holy Spirit,
and he imparts the ministry of forgiveness.

It is very simple.
Jesus is resetting reality.


First,
he appears
and he shows them the wounds.
The Incarnation
is not over.
It is transformed.
Jesus is the first of those who will have
a glorified body.
And this body
still bears the marks of his death.
The Word became flesh.

So the first point of reality is this.
There is no division 
between flesh and spirit.
God does not reward spiritualizing.
And the Incarnation
exposes every activity 
not based in reality.
Jesus did not appear as a ghost.
A lot of what people call "Christian"
is nothing more than
mental games
designed to make you feel better.
And in the end
this stuff doesn't work.
Jesus Christ went through
death and hell
and came back,
and has the wounds to prove it.
And this is one of the keys to reality.

Reality is always anchored in this:
God became a man,
and anything that God did
can and will be experienced in your real life.

Many Christians 
do not want to walk through the process
that leads to freedom.
They want the pain to go away.
Jesus Christ
endured the pain,
and calls us to walk with him
through it.
And when we do this
we come to the next thing Jesus does.
He says
Shalom.

Your Bible says "peace."
But I know from the pattern throughout 
John's gospel
that John is translating 
Jewish thinking into Greek.

To a Western thinker
Peace is the absence of conflict.
It is a futile thing
based in unreality.
You cannot have real peace
whenever you try to over look evil.

We are sadly seeing this in the news.
The pope wants the bullets to stop flying,
but he does not want to face the moral evil 
that caused forty-seven years of war.
It is a fallacy.

The Jewish mind thinks differently.
Shalom is the presence of order.
When you have shalom,
you have a right relationship with all of creation.
Shalom is not that the hurting stops,
but that the healing is happening.
Shalom is not the absence of death.
Shalom is the presence of life.
Shalom is not the end of chaos,
but the increase of order.
Shalom is not regret over the past,
but rather the transformation into the future.
Shalom is the ability to be in right relationship.
And Shalom
is the feeling that everything is okay.
Shalom is much more profound
than the absence of conflict.

That is why there is such a big difference 
between peacekeeping and peacemaking.
A person who is a peacekeeper
plays all kinds of games to make other people happy.
When someone does this
no one is happy.
Peacekeeping is trying to stay happy
within the old order of sin and death.
Peacekeeping is saying
if we just pretend that bad people aren't very bad
everything will just be okay.
Peacekeeping says that "it's all good"
and "you be you"
and we can all coexist.

A peacemaker is very unpopular
because peace making
demands telling the truth,
doing hard things
and paying a price.
Peace sometimes means
as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said,
killing the man who is driving a car
into a crowd of school children.
This is a hard reality.
Peace making says
that some people are evil,
some religions are false,
and some ideas are bad.
And Jesus did all things 
and he went through the cross and hell.
And when he came out,
he was the Truth.
He was the Life.
He was the way.
He brought Shalom.

The reason Jesus could say
Shalom to the disciples
is that he had faced the madman
in the car
taken the hit in his own body,
and overcame.
When he rose from the dead
he brought shalom with him.
He was saying
you want to go back to Eden,
and pretend that everything is okay,
but we are not going back to the Garden
we are going to build a city 
better than the innocence of the Garden.
There is going to be order 
in the earth.
Your job is to take this Shalom everywhere.

And then Jesus says
The Father Sent me.
So now I send you.
And he breathes on them.

This is essential to everything
in a real church.
The Father never calls us to do something
without giving us the ability to do it.
Right from the beginning
right after the resurrection
Jesus gives them the Holy Spirit.
Yes,
there will be a release at Pentecost,
but Jesus is giving them the ability to hear 
the true word.
He is going to be with them for forty days,
and he is going to instruct them
and he is going to lead them into all truth.
And with this 
Jesus gives them the ministry of reconciliation.
If you forgive the sins of any
they are forgiven.
If you retain the sins of any,
they are retained.

With Shalom
and the Holy Spirit
comes moral clarity.
Jesus is giving us a cure for sin.
Forgiveness.

Before this moment,
there was no forgiveness of sins.
Sin was not forgiven
in the old covenant.
So for Jesus to rise from the tomb
and to say
your sins are forgiven
and that his servants would also forgive sins
was very radical.
And out of the forgiveness of sins
will come Shalom.

So much of what I see and read online
is not reality.
Jesus brings us
into reality and clarity.
In order to receive Shalom,
you have to receive forgiveness.
And if you do not receive forgiveness
your sins are retained.
And with those sins comes all the outworking of sin:
dissension,
strife,
dis-ease,
and that horrible feeling that if you say the wrong thing
at any moment,
all hell is going to break loose again.
It is from this first gift of the resurrection
the forgiveness of sins
that we can finally walk into the thing
we were made for:
Shalom.

It is the physical reality of his body
rising from the grave,
the physical reality of his body in our community,
the physical reality that the Holy Spirit lives in you,
and that you can experience the same power
that raised Jesus from the dead
that makes it possible for you to forgive 
and receive forgiveness.
That is the power of the Resurrection.

So as we end this message
Receive the Holy Spirit.
If there is anyone you need to forgive today,
let's do that.
If you need to receive forgiveness
receive that.
And now
breathe in 
and receive the Holy Spirit.
Amen.