Repetition is the key to success.

Whether it’s learning a new soccer move, or a tennis swing, memorizing a poem, or learning a new language, we have to do it over and over again. We have to get the golf swing or the yoga move into our muscle memory. We have to learn just the right touch for sanding wood or kneading bread dough. We have to remember how to edit a video or play a song. It works with music, manners and art.

Repetition is part of building faith, too.

In this Easter season, one sighting of the resurrected Jesus isn’t enough.

One conversation between him and the disciples won’t work.

He kept showing up and showing up so the disciples could — and we can really understand this new reality. It takes a while for this to sink in.

Luke’s gospel story finds us on Sunday evening, the day of resurrection, with Jesus busy continuing to make appearances to the people he loves. All four gospels have appearances outside the now- empty tomb, and then Jesus moved out into the wider world. Matthew and Mark remember these appearances happening in the Galilee, where the story began, but Luke left the disciples in Jerusalem. He left them fearful, hiding, and locked in, but still where it all happened.

Our faith is all about the tangible, the real, and what we can see and hold onto. That comes from Jesus himself, the giver of bread and cup, the hands-on healer, the foot washer. He went to a lot of trouble  to show up in person, after his resurrection. He wanted his friends to know, without a doubt that he was real and alive in the physical body.

The stories go out of their way to tell us that this was not a ghost or a hallucination. The body of Christ is central to the stories — to Thomas believing when he touched Jesus, to the others who needed to feel and see him, even Jesus eating the fish to show us how real he was.

That particular body of Christ is gone, but there is a body of Christ still in the world. We — the church, community of faith, the people gathered now in Jesus’ name — are the enduring body of Christ. These stories have something to tell us, the church, the living body of Christ, about our life of faith.

The body of Christ is persistent.

Jesus kept showing up to show his friends this new truth. One appearance wouldn’t do it. This is the second story set on Easter night in Luke, and the other gospels have other stories. Until the job is done and the good news revealed, the living body of Christ keeps showing up.

The body of Christ meets needs.

The people who need to see Jesus to make it all real get that. Once, when I served as a hospice chaplain, a young man was extremely distraught about the upcoming death of his mother. Wanting to find something to hold onto, he asked me if he would see his mother again. He wondered if she would come to him in a dream or if he would feel her presence. I was stumped for a minute. I couldn’t guarantee anything to him, and I didn’t want to leave him with nothing. Running over past experiences in my mind, it struck me that there was a pattern.

In my experience, I said, each of us gets what we need. Whatever assurances people need will come to them, somehow. If you need that, I told him, you’ll receive it. The same happened when Jesus showed up. The people who needed a reminder about the scriptures, and Jesus’ part in God’s plan, got that. The people who need a second chance got that. The people who needed to touch him get that. How many times, in the gospel of John, did Jesus tell Peter to feed his sheep? Three, as if to redeem each denial. Peter needed healing, and he got that.

The body of Christ points outside itself.

Jesus came with work to do for his friends. He was going to give them a share in God’s power and he sent them out with a task. They were not meant to sit around reminiscing, but to go out and share what they knew. The body of Christ, looking outside itself.

The body of Christ resists locked doors.

Like those disciples, we, too, lock ourselves away. We close up part of our lives, forget to take chances, see people with suspicion, and think nothing better is possible. We close off places inside us or lock away our future plans. If we can just seal things up tightly enough, maybe we can fend off any future disasters and more grief, plus any other big pain.

As a congregation, we can lock our spiritual doors too, if our vision is too small… our prayers too limited... our hope too tiny. We forget that Jesus is the one who opens doors.

Just like some people can’t resist a challenge, Jesus can’t resist a closed-up place, something walled off, or a locked door. That’s the place where he loves to come in and ask us what he asked those first disciples: “Why are you so afraid?”

In that way, the body of Christ is an antidote to fear. When we feel afraid, anxious, worried, out of strength, the body of Christ is medicine for that. “Be not afraid,” Jesus says over and over in his ministry, and the risen Christ says it again here. “Peace be with you,” is not just a greeting, it’s a remedy for fear. “Peace be with you,” we say, and we can catch encouragement and hope and strength from each other for this work of being the body of Christ in the world. What we can’t do alone, we can do together — as a body of faith.

We may be wounded and frightened, scarred and scared, trying to lock ourselves away from pain and fear, and yet we are also called to resurrection living. We have been touched by the body of Christ, and now it’s our turn to be that living body in the world.

We are the only body of Christ there is in this world, and God has work for us to do. “Peace be with you.” Amen.