Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
May 24, 2026
Pentecost, John 20:19-23
In you, O Lord, have we taken refuge; for the sake of your name, lead us and guide us.1From Psalm 31. Amen.
The record player’s tone arm bumps against the center spindle and plays its regular rhythm of crackle-and-kachunk … crackle-and-kachunk … a soundtrack to the setting. You blink haltingly as the day’s first light shines through the sliding-glass, back door of that house you and your roommates have rented for the summer. You have slept on the pleather recliner, and a night of sweat and drool has adhered your face to its armrest, so that peeling away your cheek now sounds like unrolling a length of Saran Wrap. Lowering the leg-rest crushes several red-plastic cups, and your flip-flopped foot knocks over a mostly empty can of Natural Light someone had used as an ashtray. A rivulet of cigarette butts now runs onto the linoleum squares before you. Rubbing your eyes, you panic pat your pockets to confirm the presence of your wallet … your keys … your phone … before allowing a long exhale. With that relief filed, you survey the rest of the scene, assessing costs and measuring whether it had all been worth it.
Another scene [more sweetly], you watch your five-year-old through the den windows: she runs urgently from one end of your narrow backyard to the other in vain attempts to send into flight the Bluey kite she’d received only hours before. Your dog follows her, both giving each successive pass the same optimism they had given the first. Though you don’t remember falling asleep, you realize now that you are waking up, and so concede a nap must have taken place. Surrounded by paper plates drizzled with melted ice cream and cake crumbs, you orient to the voice of your mother-in-law in the nearby kitchen. She speaks softly on the phone with her new husband: “You know, I’ve always felt like they make a little much of it all: the friends, the gifts … the two-story waterslide rental, for God’s sake … thank goodness I was here, because now they’ve both collapsed.” Making effort to avoid alerting her or the child or the dog to your consciousness, you sit upright and start to take stock of it all.
And though fifty days have passed since our Easter morning, in today’s lesson from the penultimate chapter of John’s Gospel, the disciples gather only hours after the rumors of an empty tomb.2John 20:19a. Outside their apartment building, cascarones’ bits of shell, glitter, and confetti congeal into a muddy paste between blades of dewy grass. One of the twelve leans against the wall and rolls between his fingers a Cadbury egg’s foil wrapper left in the pocket of his suit pants. And in this room stuffy with humans and fear, grief and ambivalence, he searches the week’s events for meaning.
Until a restless companion breaks the silence: “They have done this to him, and we will be next!”
A more optimistic disciple responds, “We have nothing left to fear from the authorities now.”
And a grim one replies incredulously, “Nothing to fear? What if Jesus meant what he said about Resurrection? What will he do with all of us who abandoned him? What if what the women said is true, and he’s coming … coming for us?”
Into these exchanges a man appears and greets the group: “Peace be with you.”3John 20:19b. The text does not tell us if, like Mary, the disciples mistake this man for someone else. Neither does the authoring community record if they see him as a stranger, heightening their anxiety. Perhaps he appears just on the edge of familiar, and their nervous conversation pauses as their minds race to connect a memory with the man’s face, so that in response to their hesitation Jesus finally identifies himself, showing them his hands and his side.4John 20:20.
Following a second offer of Peace, Jesus commissions his friends, saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I [now] send you.”5John 20:21. And Jesus breathes on the disciples saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”6John 20:22-23. This act of breathing connects this resurrected Jesus to the creator God of Genesis, who formed man from the dust of the ground, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”7Genesis 2:7. Now the Risen One breathes again into the flesh of humanity, granting new life … renewed life … everlasting life. And this breath of God will accompany them in their charge to convene a movement of Beloved Community greater than themselves – to build the Church, sent into a broken world, as Christ was sent.
See, these are the moments after the party … the Sundays succeeding the commotion … the weeks that follow all the fuss. Whether birthday afternoons or Easter mornings, we often celebrate with a glad mix of excess and excitement, traditions formed for fleeting and not so much tuned for the constancy required of the longer term. Yet, as meagerly as this hooray!-pattern customarily equips us for the crackle-and-kachunk of day-in, day-out, lifted spirits, look again at Holy Week-Easter story and the Pentecostal appearance of Jesus – recognize the foundation laid for us to become the Church not for only a moment, but for evermore:
See the community that Christ commissions begin in sacrifice and grow with Love.
See Jesus come among our forbearers – who teem with fear and uncertainty, disagreement and division – and offer to them Peace.
See the friends of Jesus lend Mercy to one another and share the Grace they received.
And see the power of their witness, a Good News so remarkable that we inherit it all these generations later, even this very day.
Building an Easter Church upon these foundations extends the horizon of our hopes, equips us to sustain the magic and mystery of the empty tomb by seeing beyond the troubles of any given moment. We the Church, we do not ignore our immediate circumstances [of course not!]; by the length of our vision, that flood of wonder let loose on Easter Sunday flows first, flows into and through all we undertake as the Body of Christ in the world. This river of everlasting life empowers us to refuse the press of fear, to decline desires for fleeting attention and the cheapest forms of relevance. For when we invest ourselves in a community enlivening Hope and Peace, Mercy and Love, we see further into God’s great dream; we can take courage and decline urgency’s bullies, whose demands for “action” may tempt us, but will leave us waking up to little more than spoiled beer and soggy cigs, having ridden agitation instead of aspiration, fervor rather than faith.
This same chapter of John’s Gospel concludes:
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”8John 20:30-31. Perhaps the original ending of the text.
By this promise of “many other signs,” we join Trinity’s seasons of life and love to those of the earliest Church, and we write the Gospels’ next chapters. As a confirming testimony, the five fair souls we today “receive[d] into the household of God” were baptized in the same Holy Spirit Jesus’ closest friends received so long ago, and by our shared Baptismal Covenant, all of us renew our bonds with those peacemaking disciples of mercy who gathered in the upper room. And, day by day, our love for one another in this family of faith becomes a sign and a wonder of the Risen Christ, pulling ever nearer the hopes of God’s furthest, highest horizon.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.