You build a fence to separate you from your neighbor. Or, if you are a rancher or have a wandering dog, to keep your livestock from your neighbor's fields or flowers. When you build a fence, the convention is to keep the good side outside and the bad side inside. That is, your neighbor gets to see all the planks or what-have-you all lined up neat and clean. You get to see the structural skeleton: the posts and bars that keep it all together.

This convention is an interesting mix of aggression and politeness. On the one hand, a blank, seemingly uniform wall looks more formidable: your neighbors don't get to see that it is all just put together out of bits and pieces like anything else in life. On the other hand, you politely show your best face to your neighbor, and you have to confront your imperfections yourself.

Luke, the writer of Acts, names king David as the author of Psalm 16, the one we sang today. According to the psalm, the king's boundaries enclose a pleasant land, and the king, presumably, is in that land. In other translations this verse says more accurately: the lines have fallen for me pleasantly. Maybe for David, the good side is the inside.

That is certainly not true for the disciples. They are holed up in a room, the door locked out of fear for what lies outside. It is has been a pretty weird and scary week. Jesus was tried and executed. They in their panic all left the scene. Mary has told them what she saw at the tomb: two angels and an untouchable Jesus. It doesn't say whether they believed her or not. Presumably not.

It seems unlikely that the disciples were talking about anything except the past week and, I'd guess, a lot about what it might mean for them. As my friend Joe Paul used to always say at the end of every business meeting: What does this mean for me, Joe Paul? What does this mean for me, Peter, or Andrew, or Nathanael?

It seems safer to be inside. Though doors are weak and windows weaker, to be inside a place comforts us. It may not keep us from the harm of tank shells and bullets, but it seems like it might.

But to be inside is to be locked in as much as to lock others out. It is scary to be inside. It is isolating. When Mitri Raheb, the pastor at Christmas Church in Bethlehem was trapped in his office last week by the Israeli soldiers, he said he could hear the men outside his office, searching, smashing, banging. But he couldn't go out. He couldn't see them. He couldn't talk to them. Imagine how it feels to be blind-folded. Maybe that's how the disciples felt. It is not an accident that the first words of Jesus to his followers in that room were “peace be with you.” It was not a time of peace for them.

It is lonely inside. There is no one but you, or just you and your friends. You have only yourself and them to talk to. You thoughts interbreed, like a small island population, with all the dangers of a restricted gene pool. What could the disciples say after they had said everything they knew, which wasn't much. There was no reliable way to separate the reasonable from the ridiculous, the useful from the unhinged. It is not surprising that we use the expression “thinking outside the box.” If we are all in the same box, we are not thinking well.

It is ineffective to be inside. Locked in that room, the disciples were not being apostles. That is, they were not in the world talking about Jesus. They were not talking about anything. They weren't verifying Mary's claim. They weren't out trying to find Jesus. They weren't doing anything.

Except maybe Thomas. When people talk about Thomas, they always speculate: He was out buying groceries. He was getting pizza and beers. Why not speculate that he, unlike the others, was out looking for his Lord, his teacher. That he, not quite believing what was reported, and being a man who needed to see with his own eyes, believed enough to see for himself.

In his ministry, Jesus had a thing about boundaries. And the thing was this: he didn't like them. He didn't like lines that you were not supposed to cross. The line between the righteous and the sinners. The line between the law abider and the law breaker. The line between the powerful and the weak. The line between those who were acceptable and those who were riffraff. The line, in the end, between life and death.

Jesus was not a boundary crosser. He was a boundary eliminator. A boundary ignorer. He didn't teach us to open gates in walls, or even to make more gates where none have existed before. He taught us to knock down the walls. To disestablish them. Jesus ministry was not one of swapping the inside for the outside, to make the rich poor and the poor rich. It was to eradicate the difference between inside and outside. To make those categories seem pointless and worthless.

In the room where the disciples have gathered Jesus appears. The text says, “Jesus came and was in the middle of them.” Not that he entered magically through the wall or the door, but that he was just there, arriving without regard to the boundaries which were so important to the disciples, so powerful.

And he says to them: get out of here! Meaning, at the same time, both “you are free” and “you are sent.” Which are not really very different.

Equipping them with his peace and with the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit, Jesus sends them out to forgive people. To forgive is cross the lines that separate us. Those lines are drawn with anger, regret, and vivid frightening memories. They are drawn with sorrow and long-held grudges. They are drawn, as they are in Palestine and all over, with millennia of history and decades of history. They are drawn with loss and injustice. They are drawn bright and clear, and are powerful boundaries between people and between peoples.

No one says it is easy to forgive another: someone you love or someone you hate. But to live without forgiveness and without forgiving is to be in a locked room, to be lonely and isolated and weakened. It is not easy. But it is life-saving and world-saving. And it is what we have been sent to do and to preach.

One of our neighbors had a young dog who always ran into the street. So the neighbor installed what is called an invisible fence. He planted a wire all around the edge of his yard. The dog wore a special collar. The wire transmitted a signal to the collar. When the dog got near to the wire, the collar would give her a little shock. She learned quickly to stay within the boundaries set out for her.

One day the wire stopped working; it lost power and no longer sent the signal to the collar. The dog, of course, stayed in the yard anyway. She didn't know that that door was open, the fence torn down. She remembered, and she was afraid. But she could have been free. Maybe someone would have led her out.

We don't know that we can cross those invisible boundaries until we do. So we don't. Usually we are too afraid. Jesus comes in the midst of us to free us and to send us out.

Lutherans like to distinguish between the law and the gospel. The law is the Should and the gospel is the May. The law is the obligation and the gospel is the gift. But they are not really different. The sending of the disciples into an admittedly hostile world and the freeing of the disciples from their fearful and crazy-making isolation is one gift. When we forgive others we are both freed and [we are] good.

We are skillful at making fences. We've had a lot of practice. We know all the methods and tricks. We know the inside from the outside, the bad side from the good side. But it makes us sad and it makes us vicious.