John 20:19-31 (with a
smattering of Acts 4)
Sunday, April 12, 2015
First Congregational United
Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
I’ve always been a sucker for utopian communities…or at least
the idea of them. When I was a little girl, my mom would often take me to the
mall with her and I’d sit on this big leather couch in Banana Republic and look
at this amazing coffee-table book that was all about the Shakers. I loved the
idea of a group of people so fervent in their beliefs, so dedicated, so
completely bonkers that they were willing to live in this odd, utopian
community together.
When we lived in Indiana, we were a couple of hours away from
New Harmony, which was home to a failed utopian experiment. David and I had the
chance to visit there a few years ago. We walked the grounds, heard the
stories, saw the places where the Owenites had lived and worked. We spent some
time at dusk in the Roofless Church and as I sat there looking out over a big
green field, the very presence of God was palpable in the breeze and the clouds
overhead and the sounds of the birds around me.
I bring all of this up not just as a way of self-disclosing
myself as an impassioned dreamer, but because I think we sometimes forget that
we, as the Church, are actually a failed utopian experiment, too.
Listen again to the text from Acts 4:
“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.
With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the
Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned
lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to
each as any had need.”
Sounds like a hippie commune,
right? Whenever I start to wonder, “What REALLY happened at Easter? Did Jesus
really get up and walk around after he died?” I think about this chapter from
Acts. I am somehow convinced that something really unusual, surprising,
incredible, and unbelievable must have happened after Jesus’s death…because
only something really major and 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 just give up
everything you own and join a commune if you’re a reasonable person. You don’t
move across the country to Indiana to a utopian community 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.
Which is part of what
fascinates me about Christianity. Because I look around the room today and I
think, “Well, this looks like a pretty reasonable group of folks.”
But I know that 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 every Sunday 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? When was the last time YOU volunteered to die with a
friend?
And then in chapter 14 Jesus
is waxing eloquent about how, “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 his friends come to tell him
that they’ve seen the Risen Christ. He scoffs, “Yeah, right. You saw Jesus.
Dead Jesus. Sure you did. 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 so 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 things don’t get up and walk around. “You saw Jesus? Sure
you did. Suuuuure you did.” It’s a perfectly reasonable response.
David Lose says that Thomas
wasn’t a doubter as much as he was a realist.[1]
When Thomas demands to see Christ’s bloody hands and put his own hand in
Christ’s side, he’s not so much making a request, says Lose, 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.
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 for his disbelief, but he
does nothing of the sort. Instead, he simply invites Thomas to do 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.
If that ain’t faithful, I don’t know what is.
David Lose writes that what
really happens in this moment is that Thomas’s very understanding of reality is
shifted. His world is expanded and what he believes might be possible grows and
grows. Lose says, “And 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.”[2]
Hoo boy. I am right there
with him. Because I, too, am confronted by the reality that my vision is often
too small. Limited. Finite. I find myself saying things like, “Well, the best
we can hope for is probably…” or “I’m not expecting much here…” or “You know,
things aren’t likely to change much. We’ve kind of just got to deal with what
we’ve been given.”
I’ve been thinking a lot
lately about how our faith can sustain us as we continue to work for justice in
our world. I don’t have to give you the whole laundry list of things we wish we
could change in this world – to make things more equitable, more just, more
kind – you have your own laundry list, I’m sure. And I know that many of you,
like me, often turn on the news and wonder, “Well, how on earth will it ever
get any better? Just when we take one step forward then it’s two steps back.
And the corporations own the politicians. And the lobbyists control Washington.
And the voters seem to be downright stupid. And it seems that we’ll have racism
and sexism and bigotry with us always. And the problems are so big and so
complex and so scary and so overwhelming….”
Wait. Just me?
Earlier this week I had a
chance to watch the two-hour PBS special on The Abolitionists. It was a balm
for my soul. One of the things that struck me about it was just how futile
abolition seemed when they began dreaming of it.
When William Lloyd Garrison
began to publish The Liberator in 1831, he wasn’t part of a movement. He was
just one crazy twenty-something with some paper and a printing press who was
spouting off his own wild ideas – hoping against hope that if he continued to
shout his dream of a nation without slavery someone might listen to him. 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. As Lose said, they were governed by a
vision “not defined by failure but possibility, not governed by scarcity but by
abundance.”
And if they were able to
live into those unrealistic 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, wrongs may be made right, 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.
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