The text of the powerful, timely sermon on the work of the Holy Spirit delivered to the General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, Monday, June 2, 2025, in Hamilton, Ontario, based on John 20:19-23.
“That night” (the first p.m. Easter service) in the dark, when it is all dusky, the whole group of disciples gets together behind locked doors. It’s a fellowship of fear. It is Easter. The disciples are still in the dark. The version we read says “the doors were locked for fear of the Jews.”
And I wonder whether their disappointment searches for someone to blame. Things did no go as expected. Failure, lack of main-stream success, investing everything in what does not seem to have a future. Maybe what we have is the archeology of blame rooted in fear. Who is responsible for the mess we are in. Luke says this same group “had hoped” – hope in the past tense. Now they hunker down in fear of what their lives have become. If this meeting is like some I attend, the prize will go to the disciple who can articulate the trouble we are in the best!
We know what’s happening in this text. We get locked down in fear and rather than acknowledge our own fragility and vulnerability, we look for scapegoats. Someone to blame for our sense of exposure and defeat. With our pretense to invulnerability exposed, fear is felt as a gut punch. Disappointment, apparent collapse, times we don’t feel equipped to face — they get us searching for someone to target for our troubles, right? And we all know the familiar candidates.
The doors were locked for fear. Disciples aren’t sure what is happening. They bet their lives on Jesus, the truth and the life. It came to a bloody end. All they’ve got is an empty tomb and odd words of testimony. No joy just fear. They aren’t in control. He promised life – eternal, everlasting, abundant – and death is what they got. Maybe what they really fear is the dead end of death. Life ends. His life ended and they stood by, denied him to save their own skin. Death reigns supreme. Another one bites the dust. Movements come and go. Hunkered down behind locked doors, Mary’s testimony, “I have seen the Lord,” doesn’t make a dent.
We have our fears on this Monday morning at General Assembly – individually, congregationally, denominationally, Christianly. Lots of anxiety is in the air. The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 2024) is a best seller right now. Ours is an age of overwhelming. And we cope by closing down, checking out, turtling behind closed doors. And it’s still about vulnerability and exposure and frail human flesh and uncertainty about what might be next.
I received in my inbox, the management tip of the day from Harvard Business Review (Melody Wilding, October 12, 2021). “During stressful and uncertain times, it’s normal to feel anxious and scared. Chances are most people around you feel it too. It is easy to infect one another with anxiety and fear, but we can take steps to protect ourselves from these emotional contagions.” It goes on to say avoid ‘frenzied’ friends and gives practices to help build resilience through mindfulness.
I suppose. But at the root of some anxiety is real fear about mortality, vulnerability, contingency, the end of the road. And what do we say to that?
Jesus came and stood among them. That phrase is in the same sentence as fear. Jesus is not a stained-glass figure. This is no antiseptic Saviour. Doors are locked for fear and Jesus came and stood among them in the flesh and said “peace be with you.” He makes their trouble his own. He shows them his hands and side – an “it’s really me gesture” if ever there was one. And the disciples rejoiced when they saw him. And Jesus says again, a second time, “peace be with you.” Repetition is often required in the face of fear. “Taxes are due at the end of the April. That’s great, when did you say the due date was? April 30.”
It is striking how Jesus’ words do what they say. He does what he wishes with words. His words effect the thing spoken, like an act of creation. He speaks into the chaos of fear (the tohu wabohu) and creates peace ex nihilo. The Word made flesh who stilled storms with “Peace be still,” now does the same for the fearful disciples cowering in in a fellowship of fear. He comes to deliver on a promise – “peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
They were not looking for him. The range of their imagination for the future retracted to the size of the room. He came to them from outside the world they could imagine. He comes to the fearful and fretful through locked doors and gives life.
And the disciples rejoice when they see and hear Peace incarnate. Cowering fearful disciples gather ever since to hear those words that liberate from fear and for joy. That’s a generated response. It is not looking on the bright side. It is not the power of positive thinking. It is not learning to cope with disappointment. The disciples then and disciples now don’t all-of-a-sudden discover resources for resilience deep inside. We can’t immunize ourselves from the contagion of fear from our frenzied friends. Jesus shows up and in his wake peace, joy, mission, empowerment. Jesus Christ speaks peace as a gift, from outside of them and for them and for the whole world.
Karl Barth says, “For it is the way of Jesus to come to us when our hearts are heavy. When we are at our wits end for an answer, then the Holy Spirit can give us an answer . . . The deeper in we stand, the more Jesus helps us . . . He calls the weary and heavy laden to Himself and pours out his Spirit to those who know it not. He refreshes those who are tired and does not extinguish the flame that burns low.”
[Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Come, Holy Spirit: Sermons, translated by George Richards, et al. (Round Table Press, 1934). Reprint by Wifp and Stock, 2009, 181-182.]
Jesus, the risen Lord, comes to fearful disciples and makes them live again, breathe again. And then immediately, without pause, he says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Peace received is peace to be shared. As the Word become flesh, came to the world, so the followers of Jesus are sent to the world. God’s mission draws in Jesus’ disciples for the love of the world that God loves. Peace received becomes peace offered in the forgiveness of sins.
This is a good word for us just now. We have fearful neighbours all around us. We are afraid as a denomination, as a country, as human beings living in this time and place.
We can settle down in fear, or perhaps worse, settle into personal peace of mind in our own little sofa-centered world. “I’ve looked out for me and my own and we’re good. “I’m centered.” And then we get this from the risen one, “as the Father has sent me so I send you.” Jesus shows up. Forgiveness – hope and possibility – rip through the surface of time.
A friend of mine gave me a book Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial. It is by a Canadian Lawyer and best-selling author Benjamin Perrin.
Ben has undergone a change of heart about the criminal justice system in Canada. He’s moved away from a tough on crime mind set, to one of compassion and mercy, even forgiveness, especially for groups that are overrepresented in prison. And he’s a missionary for it in our country.
Following Jesus is at the root of this transformation. In Jesus’ life and teachings, he has found a major emphasis on mercy, forgiveness, compassion and humility. And hearing Jesus he confesses, “I see myself as no better and no worse before God than someone who is a convicted criminal, even someone guilty of heinous crimes. The Bible says we all fall short, and we are all deeply loved by God and can receive his free gift of mercy through faith in Jesus Christ.”
Ben offers this invitation: “I’d challenge any professing Christian to let God search their hearts and test their minds to see if their actions align with those professed beliefs . . . No one is beyond redemption.” [Benjamin Perrin, Indicted: The Criminal Justice System on Trial [Toronto, 2023,] 326-327).]
“As the Father has sent me, so send I you!”
Jesus does something very strange at this very first Sunday evening church service. He breathes on us (disciples) and says, “receive the Holy Spirit.” Raised from the dead, he gets all close-up and personal with his disciples. A tactile, sensuous, incarnate, this worldly gesture.
The link between the peace Jesus speaks to his followers and their willingness to take that peace to the streets, free from debilitating fear, is found in this spirating, moist, breath of life.
Think Genesis? The story where God takes ordinary dirt and breathes into it and humans live. Here in John’s gospel, Jesus breathes life back into us. It is a new creation. His life’s breath is inhaled by his followers so they can exhale that life into the world God loves. The Spirit comes to settle our hearts and unsettle our cosiness. The Spirit is breathed on Presbyterians to make us missionaries of forgiveness and new life in Christ in the places we live. The first priority of the church is to be a people who under the guidance of the Spirit direct the world to Jesus Christ.
Stephen Pickard (Seeking the Church: An Introduction to Ecclesiology
[SCM Press, 2012]) reflects on the life of the church in North America and says that we tend to respond to our loss of standing in the culture in two ways. The “fast-asleep church,” presumes that religion is a good thing and so we go back to business as usual. We can love mid-century modern, and not just the furniture.
The other option is the “frenetic” church, that invites busy people to join church only to finish them off with more things to do. Have we got a job for you! At this church the liturgical greeting is: “How are you,” And all the people say, “I am so busy” and more recently, “I am so tired.” Amen.
These options fail to rely on the Holy Spirit Jesus breathes into his disciples. They forget that we believe the Church because we believe in the Holy Spirit. Life is breathed into the church from outside itself. And in our time and place, perhaps we need to emphasize that the Spirit rests on our bodies, to make us capable of low-speed friendship in an accelerated culture that uses people. That the Spirit makes us capable of telling the truth about our need for forgiveness in culture of self-sufficiency and lies. We secularize the church, we resist the Spirit, if mission is just unfocused busyness and complementary lying about our own resilience and determination. We need God, Jesus Christ, to breathe on us!
The Spirit gives us a share in the very life of God. God’s life animates the common life of the people of God. Friends, there is peace. There is relief from striving for what can only come as gift. When Jesus said “it is finished,” he also meant our striving is done. Forgiveness and reconciliation mean lay down your fear. Don’t just cope, hope. Inhale the life of God!
“Here is the miracle of the Holy Spirit. For when a person comes to the point, where they understand that, they are God’s child, elevated to the eternal arms . . . so that the grave and judgement do not make them fear anymore . . . they have an unfathomable hope.” (Barth and Thurneysen, Come, Holy Spirit, 177).
This excentric giving of the Spirit, by Jesus Christ, makes the people of God excentric for others, for the world, for the neighbour. And so, friends, in this wild, weird and wounded time, the Risen Lord Jesus Christ says to us: “peace be with you,” PEACE BE WITH YOU,” “as the Father sent me, so I send you,” and “receive the Holy Spirit.”
I leave you with this sobering and Spirited observation by NT scholar James Dunn:
“A Church that seeks to restrict and control the Spirit, as too dangerous and unpredictable, maybe safe, but it has signed its own death warrant. A church that seeks to follow where the Spirit leads will have to expect the unexpected and be prepared to be shaken to its core. But that’s life, the life of the Spirit.”
[“Towards the Spirit of Christ: The Emergence of the Distinctive Features of Christian Pneumatology.” In Michael Welker (ed.), The Work of the Spirit (Grand Rapids, 2006), 25-26.]
Holy Spirit, hover above the chaos and make us and this world new. Rest on us, and change us: give us peace that we may gladly share it; forgive our sins that we may gently forgive; send us out the strength of the Holy Spirit that others may know life in your name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
