John 20:19023

Pentecost – the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of Life, for the Spirit is God. What we have in our Gospel reading this morning is a reminder that the Spirit is also a Spirit of mission, a mission of Peace. Let’s turn to our Gospel reading this morning.

1. The passage begins with the appearance of the resurrected Jesus. The Risen Jesus blesses his disciples with a command: Peace be with you.

The context of Jesus’ words is interesting. Of course, the disciples are huddled away in fear, fear that they will be next. But there’s more. Right after Jesus states, “Peace be with you,” he shows his hands and sides, the wounds of his crucifixion. Here the resurrected body of Jesus bears the marks of the violence of the world. He orders peace and then displays the atrocities of torture absorbed into his body without retaliation. Make no mistake. The world, in rebellion against God, shows its rebellion in bodies inscribed by violence. The world’s violence appears in the gaping, grotesque holes in Jesus body.
"Peace be with you." Jesus grants the disciples a blessing, but it also is a command. Yes, Jesus appears to his frightened followers and states a blessing – but in his statement about peace, the line between blessing and command is quite small. “Peace be with you.” The disciples aren’t peaceful – they are afraid. They are afraid because of broken social relations – they are afraid of the Jews. Jesus himself bears marks of the violence of the world. Yes, peace is a blessing. But what Jesus utters is a command – in light of what you are experiencing, peace be with you. Of course, with Jesus his command is a blessing, and his blessing is a command. But maybe we see it most here in his bodily bringing peace to his disciples.
Peace be with you. Jesus speaks to his disciple’s fear – peace, an inward state that allows bodies to function outside the realm of stress, outside the realm of panic, outside the realm of constant dissatisfaction with life. Peace be with you – Jesus speaks a response to the disciples in broken relationships with the Jews, their own people, maybe even their own families, because of their following Jesus. Peace be with you – Jesus speaks to a world where powers believe that the can justly inscribe the marks of their power by bringing violence into the world in order to bring peace through violence, freedom through war. Jesus states differently – to the inner life, to the social life, to the world – peace be with you. Jesus speaks to the disciples a blessing that God wants from all creation.
Jesus’ blessing is a command - "Peace be with you."

2. Yet Jesus does not just command the disciples; he empowers them to fulfill his command. Jesus breathes on them: Receive the Holy Spirit.
The order of Jesus’ words is so significant. Peace doesn’t just happen, not in our world. Jesus’ appearance before the disciples comes precisely in the lack of peace. The lack of peace draws forth the body of Jesus. But Jesus’ body has ascended – Jesus has gone to the right hand of the Father. How can the disciples sustain peace with Jesus gone from them?
"Receive the Holy Spirit" and he breathed on them. The Holy Spirit is the breathe of Jesus, the breathe of life. The Holy Spirit is that which animates human life from the dust that we are. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter, because the Spirit continues the presence of God with us in the absence of Jesus. The peace of Jesus’ bodily presence to the disciples is now given to them in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not an ecstatic power that emboldens for violence in the world, matching violence for violence. The Holy Spirit is the breathe of Jesus, the One who absorbed the violence of the world into his own body in faithfulness to the Father. The giving of the Holy Spirit is to continue the mission of Jesus, to be enfolded into the very peaceful Life that is God, in the world.
"Peace be with you; receive the Holy Spirit." Jesus gives the Spirit to empower the disciples for mission in their world: peace. Peace does not just happen; peace will not just happen. Peace results from creation being enfolded back into its true end which is God. As Jesus came to reveal the Father to us, the Spirit comes to enfold us into the Life that is the Triune God – to empower creation to live in peace. This is what we see at Pentecost. Babel is cured; the Spirit blows into the crowd and unity, harmony, peace emerges as the kingdom of God is proclaimed not to have ended with Jesus’ crucifixion, but continues because God has raised him from the dead. This is what we read in Galatians about the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Jesus breathes the Spirit upon his disciples to empower them to fulfill the blessing, the command that he has given them in their fear, their isolation, their removal from witness.
Jesus breathes on his disciples: for peace, receive the Holy Spirit.

3. Friends, hear the words of Jesus addressed to you: "Peace be with you; receive the Holy Spirit."
How often do we find ourselves huddled away in a room in fear? Let’s be honest. We don’t live in a different world than the disciples. As a matter of fact, just looking around us suggests that the violence of the world, the absence of peace, has reached new depths of nothingness and death. And we have to understand that how we’ve been taught to cut and divide “peace” just will not do. The violence of the world finds itself inscribed on the bodies of human beings; it is deeply embedded within me, I know. Once we’re taught that we are fundamentally consumers, not human beings, we will always live unpeaceful, dissatisfied with life, with persons, with conditions, with constant disruption in our passions because all has to meet certain subjective standards that only we set. The more unpeaceful with are in our own lives, the easier it is to develop the "gift" of finding faults in others. We can always justify our dis-ease, our lack of peace, in the conditions of relations around us. And we’re right. But rather than open ourselves to the Spirit’s cleansing, we instead can move in for the kill, continue cycles of disruption, develop habits of grumbling, and slowly the social networks of which we are a part, family, friends, church, slowly take on the passive-aggressive violence of the world around us. The more we are occupied by these conflicts, but trying to find peace within while dealing the conflicts in our social relations, the more we just let the violence conducted in the world go. Last night we had another shooting in the neighborhood here off of Polk Avenue. The paper this morning proclaims “Iraq desert offensive a success, U.S. says” and we don’t have energy to ask, what do they mean by success? Peace through violence? Closer to setting up military bases? The more life is consumed by little dramas created from disquiet within, the more the violence of the world is enabled to rage, and we can forget that we live in a country where torture has been condoned at the highest levels, a country that started a war on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and that seems to believe firmly that peace can be established with violence. We have to recognize that Jesus’ blessing of peace is very, very personal; it’s very, very social; and it is for the sake of the powers of the world which rule by continuing the lack of peace. We have to see that peace is not three different things here, but unfolded into each other. And therefore we have our mission in the world: "Receive the Holy Spirit", the breath of Jesus
As the breath of Jesus, the Spirit brings the Kingdom of God, the Gospel of peace that Jesus proclaimed, and lived, revealed by taking the violence of the world into his own body without retaliation into the depths of our lives so that our bodies might live in this peace. The Spirit comes, and cleanses the inward sin within, the sources of disquiet, of greed, of living as if we are consumers, and fills us with the Love that is God. To receive the Holy Spirit, opening our self continually to the Spirit’s presence, the breath of Jesus, comes in us in any way but passive, burning the dross within, sanctifying us holy so that we might live peaceably in the world. Being formed within by the breathe of Jesus, we are pulled into his Body, the Church, which itself becomes a witness of peace, unity, love in the world. Together we together become the dwelling of the Spirit, as we live as the body of Christ throughout the world, that there are other ways to live than that done by guns and depleted uranium tipped weapons. "Receive the Holy Spirit." Jesus’ command/blessing “Peace be with you” is anything by passive, but a call to receive the Holy Spirit for witness in the world. And the world needs the witness of the church today. We can condone no violence, especially not the violence, the lack, the disruption, within ourselves. We have to understand that this violence within comes from mis-shaped desires that are deeply formed within us by the fallenness of the world around. It is to these desires that the Breathe of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, comes to re-form. In little but profound ways, the Spirit empowers us for our mission of peace in the world.
This week I saw on Uruknet.info pictures of children born without eyes recently in Iraq. Genetic mutations and birth defects have risen greatly since the 1991 war and the latest invasion of Iraq. Experts are pretty sure that such mutations come from the depleted uranium weapons that have permeated the area. I thought of Jesus’ saying, “Those who have eyes, let them see.” Our mission of peace, friends, the mission of the kingdom of God, is anything but passive. But to try to short-circuit, and not hear Jesus’ call, “Receive the Holy Spirit” is only to get sucked back into the cycles of violence of the world. We must be made a people of peace in order to be a peaceful people in the world.
"Peace be with you; receive the Holy Spirit."

Conclusion: In our Eucharistic Prayer of consecration, the closing of the prayer has what is called the epiclesis, the calling upon the Spirit. The past and future Kingdom of God becomes present here in the mystical body of Christ at the Table. Here at this Table we have the embodiment of the peace that God wants to bring into our lives, and through our lives to the whole world. Come to the Body and Blood of Jesus this morning. Come and be thankful. Receive the Holy Spirit.