Scripture: John 20:19-31
04/28/2019
A few years ago, I banned Easter grass from our house. Easter grass, you know, the thin strips of plastic or paper that you put in the basket for the bunny to fill. Yeah, I had had my fill of that stuff. And while there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this decision it was not without merit. What I am quickly learning as the father of now three boys (and something to which I imagine my father will attest, as well) is that there is a chaotic nature to the energy that surrounds the annual arrival of Easter morning, the excitement around the baskets, the charging out into the yard to find and retrieve eggs left hidden by the aforementioned bunny, the bubbling vibrations that surround trying to get now three boys into seersucker and bow ties, their hair brushed, their faces washed of any remnant of chocolate. And all of this is of course worth it, in the end. There is beauty and might and holiness that arises the moment the whole of one’s church family begins to lift up the familiar strains of “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.” But then one returns home to a house that has been enveloped by the chaotic energy that had exploded earlier in the morning, one attempts to put everything back into place—to pick up loose candy wrappers, and halves of plastic eggs that will never be reunited with their other halves and are way more likely to be stepped on in the middle of the night and come with a pain that on the scale of say coin to lego is way closer to the lego side of the continuum, and to sweep up the grass that has no doubt been spread far and wide throughout the house. And on this particular year, we did all we could do transition back to normalcy, and much seemed to return to a more pedestrian, non-holiday routine, but something strange happened in the weeks that followed. Every time I went to sweep up the floor of our great room where the Easter festivities were held, I would find a few more strands of pastel colored paper strips and, y’all, this went on for months. I’d lift rugs and there would be grass. I’d look under couch cushions and there would be grass. I’d go into rooms that should never have been touched by anything Easter related and there would be grass and somewhere months after the actual morning, I came to my wife and I just can’t do it anymore and from that moment forward, we have steadfastly refused to use grass in our Easter basket. And I have thought a lot about that decision, that Easter, and really every Easter since the boys have each become mobile on their own, and I’ve thought about the chaotic and uncontrollable energy that overwhelms the souls of little boys (and, I would imagine, girls) on that Sunday morning each year. It is an energy, powered largely by Jesus and chocolate bunnies, that flings children out in every direction into yard, that dishevels houses in a manner from which it takes a long time to recover, and spreads the cheer of Easter and the grass that accompanies it in every room over the house. And it is the same exuberant, chaotic, uncontrollable, unlimited energy, I think, that we encounter as a people who experience the resurrection of our savior, an experience that we intentionally mark each year, but that is available to us every moment of our lives—a power and might that emboldens us to believe in the impossible, to have visions and dream dreams, to see the world in a starkly different manner than it is today and then get up tomorrow morning and work to make it a reality. It is the power to believe that anything is possible.
Easter Sunday and the Eastertide season that follows always seems to come upon us when we need it the most. When the dreary days of winter have long overstayed their welcome, when the death found in the Lenten season is on the edge of shrouding the whole world in suffocating and luminous darkness, when we are tempted to believe that God might not have as much power as we had previously believed, the Easter season arrives with explosions of brilliant streams of light and love and reassurance that in the end, we are God’s and God will not let us fall, that we are God's and are forever held in a web of love and grace, a love and grace that can swallow even death, that we are God’s and God is good, all the time. Growing up, Easter Sunday was always filled with a magical and wonder. Magic and wonder that both stemmed from the mystery of a bunny moving from house to house bringing baskets of goodies and hiding eggs throughout my yard, magic and wonder at the transformation of the rough-hewn wooden cross that sat in front of my home church, into a bright and beautiful flowering piece of magnificent art, magic and wonder at the vision of the one who just recently had been tortured and executed walking around in the peaceful setting of a garden before offering comfort to the grieving Mary. And we, too, can experience comfort from encountering the risen Christ. We, too, can be bathed in the light and love of the creator. We, too, can see the empty tomb. And yet, Easter also comes with a challenge. A challenge to our complacency as every year we are reminded that even though we have plumbed the depths of the sea of tranquility and split the atom there is still much that we as a species do not know and cannot predict about the world and our lives within it. A challenge to hold fast even where there is still much that can still bring about consternation and struggle, and that can cause us to cast our vision up into the firmament and scream out, "Why, God!" So it is in our comfort and our challenge that we are reminded time and time and time again, that ours is a God of mystery and to believe in that God, to worship that God, to serve that God is to accept a great deal of unknowing about the world and our place within it. Moreover, each year and Easter season arrives and demands that we give up any and all pretense that we are either omniscient or omnipotent, and it requires that in faith we are willing to cast ourselves headlong into that mystery, into that unknown, into our own struggles and doubt hoping and believing that God can and does still act in the world and will catch and hold even us. In this, the resurrection of Christ becomes a singular moment in time that points to the ever changing, never ending cycle of reconciliation and redemptions that plays out over the whole of the cosmos, the brokenness of creation and the fallenness of humanity having careened into the love and grace of God and discovered that that love is indeed more boundless, more wild and untamed, more chaotic than the power of death over people. And emboldened by that love we can stand our ground when the mighty and powerful of this world seek to draw all people together, attempting to place all the world into a single lock-step of folks speaking the same and seeing the world the same and acting the same, as in response, we as people of the resurrection, as a post-Easter people, get to say, “no.” Because at the foundations of our faith is an unshakable commitment to the tumultuous and turbulent and unpredictable nature of a God who would bring someone back to life in order that we might know of God’s love not just for us but for all people.
And that is not always an easy place to be, in fact it rarely is. To constantly dwell in a place and believe that God’s love for the executioner is equally as strong as God’s love of the executed. God’s love for the criminals hanging on bother sides of Jesus is as strong as it is for God’s child dying in between them, God’s love for those who had power in the Empire is as strong as God’s love for the rag tag bunch of Jewish misfits who saw in Jesus a new way to live their lives, who saw the old Torah be brought to life in their midst through the one who would save the world to constantly dwell in that place makes it incredibly difficult to live one’s life as if everything changes in the shadow of the resurrection. Because it is easy to cast our vision across the expanse of the world and point at other people and declare that God’s love for them is fundamentally different from God’s love for us. It is easy to believe that the plight of people who are not us, do not concern us. It is easy to think that those who don’t look like me, act like me, speak like me, worship like me, or love like me, are somehow deficient, defective, not the beloved of God. To say that these are my brothers and sisters in Christ and the others are not. These are the people I have to care about and the others can fall by the wayside and it’s simple to do all that because that is the way that every community, every society, every culture for the whole of human history has functioned and then Easter happens and the spirit of God takes humankind’s whole deck of cards and throws them up in the air to land wherever they land and says, “now, pick them up, and start over again.” And we live in the midst of that time of picking up, of putting back together, of reuniting and that effort is never truly done until all God’s children live in harmony with one another and all people are afforded the dignity that comes with just being made in God’s image.
If the gospel of John is, as I have thought for some time, a long form dramatic telling of the gospel story, a play with scenes and acts and people moving on and off the stage at different times and long and moving soliloquies by the protagonist, then the story we have read for this morning is the scene that immediately follows the resurrection accounts within the text. Last week's scene focused primarily on the moment shared between Mary of Magdala and the risen Jesus, the dramatic nature of the simple exchange of her name and his title. But immediately proceeding that moment is the episode of the two disciples racing to the tomb and finding it empty and returning to tell the others. So today we get this next scene in the play with the disciples huddled up together in a locked room fearing for their lives at the hands of the ones who had just had Jesus executed when Jesus appears to them and offers them peace. And at his appearance, at his words, we are told that the disciples rejoiced at seeing him in their midst. But Jesus is not done. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says, “As God has sent me, so I now send you as well.” That is, you are now my hands and feet in the world, to do and act as I have and would do in the future. To seek to change the world one act of kindness, one act of grace, one act of love at a time. To seek to put this splintered, fractured, broken creation back together again. As I have started, you must now continue. And maybe the enormity of that sort of a directive washed over the disciples and their countenance because Jesus immediately seeks to reassure them that everything is going to be ok. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says to them, “and get to work.” Of course, we soon learn that one of the Twelve, Thomas, Didymus, twin, is missing from their number. And when he does return, he cannot fathom that what the rest of the disciples are saying to him could possibly be true. And perhaps it is my own skepticism, my own doubts but I have never felt like Thomas was wholly out of line in the manner that he responds following the other disciples insistence that Jesus has appeared to them in the flesh, that he had walked around and shown his hands, his feet, his side, that he had breathed on them and they had all experienced a deep and abiding peace that seemingly surpassed all understanding. I get that he would have walked in that room and been doubtful of the validity of their story. But more than that, maybe it was in Thomas the struggle that goes on in each of us, as well. Maybe it is his way of pulled in two different directions at once with the the old order of the world and the new order, of the first age and the second, in which the old order still locates the center of importance within the individual person, still says that it doesn’t matter what all these other folks have seen and heard, unless I hear it for myself, unless I see it, unless I touch it, I’m not going to be moved. The old order always causes people to look behind them, to find security in the past. The new order only ever thrusts the faithful forward. The old order of the world says that the time following Good Friday is a time to cower away in a locked room, with the disciples unsure if they will see another day. The new order says that there is too much work to be done to shut yourselves off in any single room. The old order says that here in this place, at this time, are the beloved of God, and out there are the sinful and depraved. The new order screams out across the light years that God’s love will not ever be limited to the scope of peoples imaginations, it is so much bigger than that. The old order says that tombs are places to lay dead people. The new order says that Jesus gives us life and life in abundance. That life emerges from death. That light can never be truly overcome by darkness. That love abides now and forever.
So its good that Jesus returns a second time to the room. That Thomas is offered the chance to touch the holes in Jesus’s hands and feet, pass his hand into Jesus side though we don’t know if he ever does. It’s good because Jesus’s return a second time declares that even those who are by nature skeptical, doubtful, maybe a little cynical still have a place in God’s plan, still can experience the love and presence and resurrection of Jesus in their midst. Jesus still returns for them, returns for us, comes again and again into our midst until we get it. Until we see it. Until we can declare with Thomas, “My savior and my God.” Because in the end, even the most hardened, even the most cynical, even the most walled off person cannot escape the boundary breaking, grace infusing, love offering movement of the spirit of God across the cosmos. In the end, it is God’s love that gets the final word and not our fallenness, not our brokenness, not our sin.
Sisters and brothers, We can't, in this place, touch the wounds of Jesus. We can't press our hands into his side. We can't pass our fingers through the holes in his arms and legs. That was for another time and in another place. That was for those who dwelt with Jesus in the physical, in the temporal. We encounter Jesus in the here and now, in the ethereal connection between Christ and creation. We encounter Jesus in the present when we cast our vision across the expanse of a world that is hurting and struggling. When we, with eyes to see and ears to hear, notice the plight of the ones who are not us and yet need us. When we are aware of the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed, the sad, and the lonely. It is then that we encounter the face of the risen Christ in our midst. And blessed are we who not being able to touch Christ’s hands and feet are called to be the hands and feet of Christ in a broken world. Blessed are we who, while not in the room with the disciples, have been called to take our place in the long line of the faithful that emerged from that room in Jerusalem, a line that emerged from a timid and scared bunch of Galilean fishermen, to become a singular force in the course of human events, to stand with the oppressed and the downtrodden of every time and place against the powers of the Caesar, against the powers of the powerful, against the violent and bloodthirsty throughout the world, blessed are we, the hopeful, the grace-filled, the loving, the peacemakers, the faithful everywhere. We are the ones that we have been waiting for, the ones that called by God to a new mission, to bind the broken and call out to the lost, and to call all of God’s children to come home. We are the ones. Now let’s get to work. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.
Image: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1601-1602