Breathe Peace

sermon by Carrie Eikler

Acts 3:1-19, Luke 24:36-38

Can you recall your first memory? I think I can.

I remember being on a bike ride with my family, latched into the seat on the back of my dad’s bike. I feel like were outside of our little Illinois town, on some country road. And I remember being on the ground because somehow my dad skidded or lost control and we fell. Being in the early 80s, I’m sure I wasn’t wearing a helmet. I don’t remember falling, or the bike being out of control, I don’t remember much about after the accident. I just remembering laying sideways, still strapped in the seat crying.

So can you recall your first memory? Would you say it was a good or bad one? A delightful one or traumatic one? For most of us, memories are like pearls strung on a necklace. Life is one long string of small, forgettable moments, connecting the pearls which are the big memories we can recall. Of course, it’s the pearls, not the strings that get remembered for the most part. That space between the pearls is life as usual, nothing too remarkable.

But can you imagine what it would be like to remember everything that happened to you for the majority of your life. Jill Price can. Price is one of only six people in the world diagnosed with a condition called hyperthymesia. In her book, The Woman Who Can’t Forget, she shares what it is like to remember every single day of her life since she was fourteen.

She describes it as someone following her with a video camera and if you tell her a date, March 30th 1981 for example, she pulls down the video in her mind and can tell you: it was a Monday. I was wearing a red sweater. I was in the high school and a teacher told me President Regan was shot. Give her another date: My family and I were flying to Florida from New York for vacation. It was the one year anniversary of my mother finding out she had a brain tumor. “I remember I wasn’t much fun to be around” that day, she said.

She remembers small days too, those strings for most of that connect the pearls. What she wore. Who she hung out with. What they did. She can tell you the day of the week to the corresponding date. She has instant recall. She remembers everything. Every t.v. show. Every song she’s heard. Every joke that made her laugh.

She remembers every betrayal against her. Every lie she ever told.. Everytime she embarrassed herself or stuck her foot in her mouth. Every bad decision. People tell her she has a real gift. To Jill Price, it feels more like a burden. And the hardest thing, she admits about this gift or burden (depending on how you see it), is that she has a hard time forgiving herself for the things she can’t forget. Even little things she holds onto.

The burden of remembering. We’ve all experienced that to some degree. There are still things that come to my mind that seriously make me blush because I am so embarrassed that I said that or did this or did I actually write that in an email to someone? Memories, those misty water colored memories, as much as they can comfort us, bring us joy and security, can just as easily bring us shame. It can cause us to replay events and assign blame and start thinking of other possible outcomes.

Remember those books some of us read as kids? Those choose your own adventure books? If the hero should go down the tunnel with snakes go to page 80. If she should swing across the moat filled with crocodiles, go to page 93 in his story

We look back on life in retrospect with this sort of wonderment: If we just would have done this rather than that. If we never met so and so. If we went here instead of there, made this decision instead of that one.

This is sort of the biblical adventure story that seems to be playing out in today’s scripture in Acts. The crowds are amazed that Peter healed a crippled beggar, they’re clinging to him in the cool shade of the temple’s portico. And it seems like the sympathetic Peter we just saw, the Peter who healed a man, has a choice. He can continue practicing mercy, or he can choose to start assigning judgment, he could go to page 93 or to page 80.
He chooses judgment.

He reminds them that it is not he, but the power of the risen Christ who does these actions. Remember him? Jesus? The one you handed over, the one you rejected, the one you killed.

My dad likes to practice what he calls “selective memory” or especially “selective hearing”: he remembers or hears what he wants to remember or hear. It sure seems like Peter is doing a little selective memory here. Out of the twelve disciples, there were only two recorded that openly denied or betrayed Christ in his last days: Judas…and Peter. There seems to be a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black here, when he blames these people for the part in Jesus’ death.

Jesus, on the other hand, in the story read today gives a different invitation to remembrance. After appearing before his disciples, literally scaring the be-Jesus out of them, he says relax, don’t be scared, and by the way is there anything to eat in this joint? And he reminds them as he wipes the tasty bit of fish off the sides of his mouth: don’t you remember? I told you this before—many times in fact. It is written that this would happen, and it had to happen (or be fulfilled, as it says). The Messiah had to suffer, and to rise from the dead on the third day. I’m just doing my part of the bargain here.

And with these two scriptures we have one of the few…ok, probably one of the many…quandaries and inconsistencies that arise in Christian theology. I’ll put it to you straight from my own doubting Thomas lips:

if God intended for Jesus to die and rise again (first off, yes there is a problem with a heavenly Father wanting his son to die…sermon for another time), if it was supposed to happen this way, part of the plan that Jesus was to be tried and crucified so he could be resurrected, then weren’t all those implicated in Jesus’ death really just doing what needed to happen?
Weren’t they—from Herod to Pilate to the crowds calling crucify him, to Judas betraying him—weren’t they just unfortunate and grisly players in some cosmic drama? The necessary villains so the hero can save the day.

What do you think? Should we continue blaming the crowds for shouting hosanna on Palm Sunday and turning their backs on him and crying crucify him on Good Friday, and then balk at their audacity to praise Peter when they see the work of Christ being done?

Or should we be applauding them for handing Jesus over, for moving the crucifixion plot along so we could get to the dénouement of the resurrection? Saying, bravo, well done. Because of your violence, it is fulfilled.

I can’t say. It remains for me still a question for which I have no satisfactory answer. I struggle to understand why, and you probably do to and you know what? When we struggle to understand the meaning of these events, we’re doing theology together. Like those first disciples trying to figure out what happened, not believing or not knowing what to do.

But we miss something if the entire theology game is to stand with Peter and assign blame. Was it the Romans, or the masses, or the Jewish authorities responsible for Jesus’ death? We miss something when all our theological imagination spent wondering what sin it was in the beginning that we perpetuate that made Christ’s death necessary, or who gets the salvation because they’ve done or said the right things to make up for all the bad stuff.

And we miss something when we stand in the midst of our daily lives, like Peter, assigning blame: who’s to blame for the economy? Who’s to blame for the environment? Who’s to blame for your sadness? Who’s to blame for my misfortune?

You know what is so interesting about this whole “who did this to Jesus” thing? Is that Jesus never blames anybody. When we blame ourselves for our inner darkness, or blame others for their hurtful actions we can never forget… we are preaching like Peter, instead of claiming the Messiah.

As professor Amy Allen urges, instead of assigning blame, we must recognize that this risen Lord Jesus stands among the disciples, those who betrayed him to the core—who abandoned and denied him—and Jesus treats them neither as innocent or guilty, but as people in need of grace. Instead of looking out and shouting blame, he stands within them and breathes “Peace.”

Peace. The risen Christ stands within us, right next to the Peter within us with all our judgment and blame, and breathes peace.

I don’t know if there’s enough room in me for that Jesus. There are things in my life that I’m angry about, towards people who I think are responsible for all sorts of things. Things that will not let me go, no matter how much I want to forget.

So maybe for me, and maybe for you, this is the resurrection story that needs to find its way into our hearts this year.

[light peace lamp] – “While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”