“Easter Dreams”

John 20:19-31

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

April 19, 2026

Whenever I start to wonder, “What REALLY happened at Easter?” I think about how the early church was described in the Book of Acts: Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. (Acts 4)

Sounds like a hippie commune, right? Something really unusual, surprising, and incredible must have happened after Jesus’s death…because only something life-altering and earth-shattering would convince a bunch of rational, everyday people to pool all of their possessions and live in a commune together. 

You don’t give up everything you own and join a commune if you’re a reasonable person. You don’t join a religious sect that is counter-cultural and frowned-upon if you’re a reasonable person. 

This is a fascinating thing about Christianity. Because you might look around this room today and think, “Well, this looks like a pretty reasonable group of folks.” 

But if you’re here, there has to be at least one small part of you that isn’t reasonable at all. Because there’s nothing reasonable about the Resurrection; nothing reasonable about following a guy who tells us that we have to lose our own lives to find them; nothing reasonable about continuing to read a book that’s thousands of years old and claim that our lives have been utterly transformed by a person we’ve never heard or seen. There’s nothing reasonable about that at all. 

Thomas – dear old Thomas. John tells us he’s known as “the Twin” which is what the name Thomas means. But we know him better as what? Doubting Thomas, that’s right. 

Thomas has been held up as a cautionary tale (“Don’t be like this guy!”) or lauded as a hero (“Thank God there was at least ONE reasonable person there to ask the sensible questions!)…but, as usual, I think it’s more complicated, right?

First of all, let’s give Thomas the benefit of a little bit of context. This is the third time in John’s gospel that Thomas speaks. He first comes on the scene in chapter 11. Jesus has just learned that his dear friend Lazarus has died. He wants to leave immediately for Judea so he can help his friend. The other disciples urge him to use caution – they worry that if they go back to Judea he will get hurt or killed. When it becomes apparent that Jesus is going, whether or not his friends decide to tag along, Thomas speaks up and says to the others, “Let’s go, too, so that we can die with Jesus.”

Wow. “Let’s go, too, so that we can die with Jesus.” Kinda makes you feel bad for thinking Thomas didn’t have enough faith, right? 

And then in chapter 14 Jesus says, “In my father’s house there are many rooms and I am going there to prepare a place for you.” This is a beautiful text – I read it at almost every funeral. Jesus is trying to comfort his friends, telling them “do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Thomas speaks up, saying, “Jesus, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Thomas. Faithful, strong, passionate, struggling, beloved Thomas. He is always following Jesus. He’s willing to follow him to death in Judea. He’s willing to follow him to this big house with many rooms, wherever-the-heck-it-is. He loves his friend and he’s willing to follow him wherever he leads. 

So it’s actually somewhat surprising that Thomas reacts the way he does when the others come to tell him that they’ve seen the Risen Christ. He scoffs, “Yeah, right. You saw Jesus. I’ll believe that when I see it with my own eyes.”

I wonder if Thomas felt a little hurt and left out. Here he is, the one who has been willing to follow Jesus wherever he leads and he missed the big show. Why did Jesus come to the others when Thomas wasn’t there? It hardly seems fair. 

And then there is, of course, the elephant in the room: these are perfectly reasonable questions to ask, right? I mean, dead people don’t get up and walk around. It’s a perfectly reasonable response. 

Bible scholar David Lose says that Thomas wasn’t a doubter as much as he was a realist. When Thomas demands to see Christ’s wounds, he’s not so much making a request as he is mocking his friends. He doesn’t actually expect these things to ever HAPPEN, mind, he’s just trying to point out how ridiculous their story is. [1] 

So when Christ shows up and turns his own words back on him and actually invites him to do the impossible….well, it’s one of those moments where the whole world just kind of falls away. Here we see it: two dear friends reunited in this strange and unbelievable way. Jesus could have scolded Thomas, but he doesn’t do that. Instead, he simply invites Thomas to experience the incredible – to see the wounds, to step into a new world where the impossible is the new normal. 

And Thomas, upon seeing Christ with his own eyes, says, quite simply, “My Lord and my God.”

Of all of the statements of faith that various people say when confronted with Jesus, there’s none more faithful than these astonished words breathed from Thomas’s lips. Thomas, the one we’ve labeled as a doubter, confesses that Christ is his Lord and his God.

Lose writes that what really happens in this moment is that Thomas’s very understanding of reality is shifted. His world expands and what he believes might be possible grows. Lose says, “This issue of having too small a vision of reality is what I find interesting. Because I also fall into a worldview governed by limitations and am tempted to call that ‘realism.’ Which is when I need to have the community remind me of a grander vision. A vision not defined by failure but possibility, not governed by scarcity but by abundance, not ruled by remembered offenses but set free by forgiveness and reconciliation.” [1] 

Like Thomas, we are often confronted by the reality that our vision is too small. Limited. Finite. 

Many of us look at the news and wonder, “How do things ever get any better? We seem to take one step forward and then forty five steps back.” Movement towards God’s vision of a Beloved Community certainly isn’t linear. And when we’re in the hard parts of the journey, it can feel downright impossible to imagine anything beyond what’s right in front of our faces. Like Thomas, we need to see it with our own eyes. Unlike Thomas, we aren’t typically visited by Jesus in the flesh walking among us. 

As many of you know, this church was founded by abolitionists who traveled west seeking liberation for enslaved Americans. Our church constitution was signed in 1856 - the ink barely dried before the Sacking of Lawrence and the Battle of Osawatomie. That same year, the popular anthem Ho for the Kansas Plains idealized the fight for freedom (and ignored the impact on the Native people who had already lived here for centuries):

Huzza for the prairies wide and free;

Ho! for the Kansas plains;

Where men shall live in liberty,

Free from a tyrant's chains. [2] 

This isn’t a song sung by reasonable people. Deeply faithful perhaps, but not reasonable. 

It can be easy to forget just how futile abolition seemed when our ancestors began dreaming of it. Case in point: when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began to publish The Liberator in 1831, he wasn’t even part of a movement. He was just a 25 year old with a printing press who insisted on being heard – hoping against hope that if he continued to shout his dream of a nation without slavery someone might listen to him.[3]  It was 32 long years before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. 32 years. That is a long time to stay the course. But people like Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke, and Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth dedicated their entire lives to this dream. They believed it was possible and they were undeterred by the voices of reason. They were governed by a vision “not defined by failure but possibility, not governed by scarcity but by abundance.” [1] 

And if they were able to dream those unreasonable dreams, then so are we. 

Because Easter is a time for dreaming. It is a time for putting away reason and flow-charts and models and statistical analysis and projections and data….not forever, but just for a time. 

Easter is a time to say to those reasonable voices inside our head, “Shhh. Quiet down for just a minute.” Easter is a time for dreaming. 

Easter is a time for opening ourselves to the possibility that things may go better than we had hoped, love may finally triumph over evil, rights may be made wrong, justice may finally roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. 

And Easter is a time for each of us to hear Christ’s invitation to be a part of the impossible. To reach out and touch his hands, his side. To know that the Spirit of the Living Christ is alive among us – even here – even now – and that we are still called to dream along with God. 

NOTES:

[1]  http://www.davidlose.net/2015/04/easter-2-b/

[2] http://www.calonsong.org/KansasSongs/HoForKansas.htm

[3] https://ffrf.org/publications/day/william-lloyd-garrison/