Pentecost, Year A 2026: John 20:19-23

As a priest, when you move from a parish you’re not really supposed to have contact with laypeople from that parish for a year. The point is to help the priest move on to their next call and the people transition to whoever the new pastoral leader is in their parish. This is a rule I followed when leaving Grace and St. Stephen’s to come to St. Matthew’s with one exception: Dan. He’s the exception not only because we’re in a fantasy baseball league together, but because Dan is a postulant for holy orders. In three years he will be a priest, and we will officially be colleagues. So he and I text from time to time, and this past week we were texting about preaching. The next Sunday Dan is scheduled to preach contains the story of Jesus feeding the 5000. And Dan texted me - after bemoaning a bad add/drop in fantasy baseball - “I’m trying really hard to resist the first-semester-seminarian impulse to say something “new” about (the feeding of the 5000)”. But to be fair to Dan, and to all first-semester-seminarians, it can be a really hard impulse to resist. And for all clergy, to be honest, when the text is a really well-known story, or it’s a holiday like Christmas or Easter - or Pentecost - there is a tendency to feel like it’s all been said before and that it is therefore the responsibility of the preacher to come up with something unique, clever, or profound that hasn’t been said in 2000 years of Christmas homilies.

One of my favorite Episcopal priests to follow online is Father Tim Schenck, a priest in Florida (and the originator of Lent Madness). In 2024, he posted a list of unsolicited Christmas sermon advice, which I eagerly read, as that was my first Christmas Eve preaching. My favorites were: “Preach the Gospel. In the end, that’s all that really matters.” and “Please don’t forget to tell people Jesus loves them. Because it’s true. And also because people — especially those who don’t attend church regularly — don’t hear this nearly enough.” (https://www.clergyconfidential.com/2024/12/unsolicited-christmas-sermon-advice.html) We are not called to brand new messages, but mostly brand new lenses, or a new prescription, through which to see our sacred stories.

Every so often, Father Steve will drop by the church office during the week while out on a walk in the neighborhood. Sometimes we’ll just shoot the breeze and sometimes we’ll actually talk about church stuff and scripture. This week we had a very mature discussion about this question: What did Jesus’ breath smell like? Because the word used by John in today’s Gospel was truly “breathed”, nothing more ethereal. Furthermore, Jesus breathing on them was a one-time thing. It’s an aorist word, which means we can’t turn it into a “and Jesus is still breathing on us” in the same way as he is still with us every time we celebrate the Eucharist and be true to John’s text at the same time. This is a singular event that kicked off other events and the spreading of the spirit - Peter in Acts is talking about the same Spirit that hovered over the waters at creation, but John is not. So what did Jesus’ breath smell like? Any parent has had a small child breathe in their face, sometimes in bed first thing in the morning, and that’s where my thoughts went. Steve’s idea was more informed by the times than mine: he thought it would smell like garlic and fish, since there would've been a lot of garlic and fish in Jesus’ diet. But then we checked the scripture, and Jesus hasn’t eaten fish yet - he’ll do that in chapter 21. Today’s text from John happens between Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene outside of the tomb and Jesus’ appearance to Thomas where Thomas wants to see the marks of the crucifixion. So Jesus’ breath might have smelled like…death. But I think our church administrator, Lori, had the best answer when we took the discussion into the church office and asked her “what do you think Jesus’ breath smelled like?” She simply said, “Oh, for goodness sake!”

The question might seem like it’s beside the point. But I would argue that we don’t ask enough fun questions about our texts. Or when we think of those kinds of questions, we don’t give them voice. We think that we’re being irreverent or disrespectful. We don’t let things be silly, even when it’s pretty clear it is. Jesus was funny. He was engaging - he had to be in order to attract so many followers. He wasn’t just saying boring church words, he was reinterpreting thousands of years worth of commentary on his own people’s sacred texts and doing so in a way that spoke to the people around him. And we are called to do the same.

A few months ago we had a reading where the chief priests were questioning a man Jesus healed and the guy said to them, “Oh! Would you like to become (Jesus’) disciples too!” and I heard giggles from the choir and I thought, “Yes! They get it! This guy is messing with the priests and putting them in their place! It’s funny!” Or, one of my favorites, when Moses is up the mountain getting the Law from the Lord and Aaron makes the golden calf for the people to worship, the way he justifies it to Moses when he was just like, “I took all their gold and threw it in the fire and out came this calf! Crazy, right?!” It’s. So. Funny. It’s like my friend’s sons who definitely broke the coffee table but there were no witnesses and so the official story in their house is, “nobody knows how the table got broken”.

What I’m trying to do is to give you permission to find your voice in seeing God wherever you might notice Him. I tend to find God in funny things. There are a plethora of books about spiritual themes in, well, you name it. No Avatars Allowed is a book of theological reflections surrounding video games. Catching Hope is a book about the spiritual wisdom of fishing. The book we’ll be reading this summer, Scared by the Bible, is about the roots of the horror genre in scripture. Wherever you are, whatever you are into, you can find God there because we are not bringing God into the secular world. None of these books are doing that either. Because God is already there. We are merely calling attention to that reality, pointing out where we see God working in the world. When we think about Evangelism in that way, it gets easier, with far less pressure to think that we need to bring God somewhere. What we are actually doing is proclaiming the Gospel, saying, “I see God here.”

As evangelists, we don’t need to have, nor should we try to create a brand new message. In the same way as Dan and Father Steve and Deacon Christine and I aren’t called to come up with a brand new interpretation of scripture that no one has ever heard before, you also are not called to be a groundbreaking theologian. What we are called to do is to proclaim the Gospel in the way that only we can. I can’t tell your story, the story of how the Spirit is working in your life, of how Jesus affects the way you live and see the world, in a way that is anywhere near as compelling as you can. We promise, in our baptismal covenants, to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ”. As Paul reminds us today in his first letter to the church in Corinth, we are all called to do so in our own unique ways. We have particular skills, particular voices, particular stories, all of which are important and can only be told by us.

We renew our baptismal covenants several times throughout the year, every year. We do so to remind ourselves of the promises made, or made on our behalf, at our baptisms. And on today, the “birthday” of the church, I am reminded particularly of those promises to show up, to proclaim the Gospel, and seek and serve Christ in all persons. I invite you to join me in reflecting on how we can live out our call to live like those tongues of fire have fallen on us, proclaiming the Gospel using our own particular gifts. Amen.