Sometimes, It’s Just Hard to Believe

John 20:19-31

Easter 2A

All three of my children, from the earliest ages, near as I can remember, seem to have some measure of exploration seemingly woven into their DNA. Jameson has, since the first moment he realized that words when brought together formed sentences and when placed on a page made books has possessed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In fact, if you were to take all the books that he has owned from the time of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See and Goodnight, Moon to the Odyssey, Iliad, Tolkien, and the Harry Potter series, the latter of which his mother insisted that we find the European versions of the books—editions in which the language was more challenging, the sentence structure more complex than their American counterparts—if you were to take all those, they would rival a quality children’s section in the public library and continue to be spread out across like 6 bookshelves in our house. Luckily he is of the age now where we can trade off books and I lend him my copies of Hunter S. Thompson or Cormac McCarthy and he lends me books he thinks I need to read. Seamus, as has been mentioned previously from this space, was a climber whose pursuits and conquests could challenge those of Edmund Hillary or Tenzig Norgay adjusted, of course, for his height. Asa, for his part, had a drive to go out into the world in all directions, sometimes simultaneously. We live on, essentially a smallish circle with something like 30 or 40 houses circling a middle area towards which the back of our house is pointed, and if we let him, be it riding his scooter, his big wheel, his Lightning McQueen bicycle that he inherited from his brothers, he would spend all day exploring that circle and checking in at the house every now and then, and only when absolutely necessary, much to his parents’ dismay. All three setting their individual sails onto into unchartered waters. All three with a deep and abiding sense of wanderlust and discovery for whatever is out there. All three in their own way willing to charge out into the unknown with all the fervor and all the gusto of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner, and in most cases content to run off of cliffs knowing and believing that if they don’t acknowledge it, don’t see it, don’t recognize its disappearance, they can continue running long after they have left it (and terra firma, for that matter) behind. And I love them for that. In a world where they have an overly cautious father, (it is said acknowledging one has a problem is the first step to getting past it). In a time in which it is far easier to stay hunkered down in the safety and security of one’s own little domain. In a moment in the story of humankind when the gathering threats can feel daunting and scary, my kids all are still driven beyond themselves and into what that famous theologian Tom Petty called the “Great Wide Open.” In a world, in a time, in a moment in our own history in which the threat of demise feels uncomfortably close, I am always reminded and amazed at the degree to which children, my children, your children, children are able to continue to set their course out into the wilderness of thought, of space, of exploration and go.

The disciples find themselves in a state of total and utter confusion as they arrive to the evening of Easter. The realities of living under imperial authority, the same authority that had just summarily executed their leader, in whom they had placed total trust, had driven them behind locked doors in a nondescript building, house somewhere in Jerusalem. The knowledge of the existence of an empty tomb adding, one has to imagine, a degree of confusion about the world and their place within it but certainly not yet giving them anything that resembled hope. The bleakness and uncertainty of a world that just a week or so prior had seemed so alive, so magical, so bright adding a measure of darkness to their perspective so much so that they know of no other action to take than to lock themselves away in fear and, one assumes, wait until the heat has been turned down on the boiling kettle and they can return to whatever would pass for their normal lives after having had all of these shared experiences. There is little to indicate that at this moment they would (or even could) take up the mantel of Jesus and continue his work of spreading the message of the Realm of God erupting all around the people. They could hardly even see it themselves. And it is at this moment—this precise moment—that Jesus appears to them. And the first thing he says to them in this post-death, new life existence, is, “peace.” “Peace be with you,” he says. And they rejoiced. It was as if whatever clouds had been darkening their worlds since somewhere around 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday had been pierced with a blinding light the way one gets the first time you go outside after a days long rain and your eyes have to adjust to the presence of the light. Except it must have felt even brighter than that. It must have been like the folks in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” in which folks have been down in the darkness, stumbling around, bumping into one another, and certain that the shadows that they themselves cast against the cave wall are the only reality for so long that when they finally get out of the cave the brilliance, the brightness, the sheer power of the light is so bright that they are blinded to the presence of anything else but the light. “Peace be with you,” he says once again. “As the father has sent me, so I send you.” And it feels like we need to take a pause at this moment. We need to take just a moment for clarity’s sake, because, what it sounds like Jesus is saying to them, is saying to us, is that just as God sent me to good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to those who are oppressed, and the proclamation of the year of the God’s favor for all people.” Just as God has sent Jesus to do all those, so, too, does Jesus now send us to do the same thing. I don’t know about you, but for me, for maybe the first time, certainly the first time that I can remember, that passage right there hit me like a ton of bricks as I was preparing to preach this sermon. “As the Most High, the Divine, the Almighty, the Holy One, God has sent me, so I send you, too.” And with that, he breathed on them, the very breath of the Holy Spirit, and offered them, offered us, all the support they, we would ever need in their, in our endeavors. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And of course you know the rest of the story, history has spent the last two-thousand or so years declaring Thomas, the one guy who wasn’t there to see all this as “Doubting Thomas” and for nearly as long poachers have wrestled with their own lack of faith in trying to better explain the presence of Thomas in a story that would come to solidity his role in the Biblical narrative. All this belies that reality that in that moment, just as in every age, every chapter in the story of the church, of the faith, it has been, it continues to be hard to maintain belief. It is not always easy to believe. And yet, believe we must, for we have been sent out by the Messiah to continue on with his mission. Believe we must because someone has to be the bearer of light in a world that seems to be perpetually clouded over. Believe we must because, honestly, the alternative is, at least to me, far scarier, far more threatening, far more dire.

On Monday morning, just a little before 9:00, I crossed the 2nd street bridge, as I do every other week, for a standing meeting in Lexington. I was doing good on time and so I had taken the slightly longer route of second street to avoid the tolls on I-65. As I made my right turn onto Main St. to “circle the Yum” as my wife and I have taken to calling it before looping back onto I-64 and as I did, out of the back of my line of vision, the light of a police car caught my eye. This is not a particularly unusually sight, especially in downtown Louisville, so I didn’t think much of it as I looped around. As I got on 64, I looked into my rearview mirror and what I saw took my breath away. It was more police officers in one place than I had ever seen in my life. What had to be pushing 50 police vehicles all on a single block, roughly a quarter of a mile from where I had just turned, had shut everything down. I immediately jumped onto twitter and began searching for Louisville and police and it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened and before I knew it my phone was blowing up with notifications and text messages from friends. My proximity to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech has left me with what I imagine will be a lifetime’s worth of post-traumatic stress disorder that is triggered invariably every time there is a mass shooting that makes national headlines, which, as it turns out, is at the rate of about one-a-day, and this was no exception. I have always coped with it by diving headlong into a twitter or google search for <insert most recent location> and shooting and before I knew it I was doing the same with my city, my community, and what was, I was coming to figure out, my immediate physical space. To make matters worse, when the original report came out, the shooter had gotten away and was on the run and my wife was scheduled to be a few minutes behind me on the same bridge beading to work because she never likes to pay the tolls. I don’t have to tell you the rest. Maybe you are like me and thirst for all the information you can get as if knowing about it will give you some measure of power over it. Maybe you hear about something like this and just turn it off because it is simply too horrific, too devastating, too sad. Maybe you reassure yourself that it happened an hour and a half from here and there is some magical boundary that prevents the exact same scenario from unfolding in our little community next week. I don’t know. What I do know is that folks cope with this kind of thing the very best way that they know how and I have absolutely no interest in cracking whatever kind of protective shell you put around yourself to give you the strength to get out of bed in the morning and yet. And yet of this I am certain, the reality is that we have created a society, a culture, in which some are perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, and God knows, children in exchange for the perceived security that one has when amassing large arsenals of weapons of war. Maybe in this version of America that just 25 years ago would have seemed dystopian, is the very best that our leaders can envision. Maybe, denuded of a hope that extends beyond our own capabilities, it would seem that there is nothing that can be done to prevent the next tragedy, the next empty chair at the dinner table, the next grieving family, the next death. But, we, in this space are not governed by such limitations, such lack of imagination, such lack of vision. In fact, our scripture tells us the exact opposite is true. It is our calling to dream dreams and have visions of a better day tomorrow. To envision the constant arriving of the Holy Realm of God and then help others to see it as well. To cast our sights to a time in which we will no longer live by sword, while others die by it. To live into a time in which the demand of Jesus to have “No more of this” when they disciples seek to use violence to prevent his arrest on the Mount of Olives becomes our calling as well. And to work for all of this to be the reality for ourselves and all of God’s children. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday, we will get this right. And on this day, in which we celebrate newness all around our little church family. In which we welcome 6 new members into our number. In which we have brought Kieffer James Corder through the waters of baptism and to the other side of the shore where he can take up the cause of the Gospel in his little corner of the world. In which we proclaim the goodness of God, does it not follow that we make those same declarations in the world out there. Do we not owe it to Kieffer, to Lucy, to Olivia, to Lillian, to Jameson, to Seamus, to Asa, to Kylie, to Tanner, to Alice, to Felix, to Claira, to Rye, to Henry, to Hank, to Tim, to Anna Kate, to Kaia, to Alex, to Draven, to Bash, to work for a world where they won’t have to fear going to school, the movie theater, the bank, their church? And just so we are clear, there will come a time when they are in charge and I promise they will get this right. And history will not be kind to those of us who lived through this horrific chapter in the story of our country and sat idly by while this kind of event happened everyday. Let's get to fixing that which is broken today so that our kids can worry about something, anything else.

Friends, when we encounter Jesus, whether in an upper room in first century Palestine or right here, right now, it is ok to be scared, it is ok to be overwhelmed, it is ok to want to look away. Because when Jesus enters ones life, truly enters one’s life, they are never the same, see the old has fallen away, see the new is rising up. And that can be scary because the old is what we know, it is the old order of the world, in which there is no way that all the needs of the world will ever be met, guns will continue to ring out in our places of comfort, peace will never overcome war, and light will eventually be snuffed out by darkness. But we don’t listen to the old order of the world, we don’t follow the old standards, we follow the risen Christ, then one in whom all things can be made right. When we arrive at worship each week, from wherever we are, with our presence we proclaim the power of the story to continue to move people to a radical and transforming knowledge of the power of God in their lives. When we arrive at worship each week we stand up against the old order of the world that states too often that apathy and nihilism should win the day, when we arrive at worship each week we raise our hands and says here I am send me. And it is a story that cuts across all the lines of separation that the old order of the world seeks to place between us. It overcomes all the things that separate us instead making us one under the banner of the risen Christ. In this place, in the name of Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the foundation of the creator, we are united together as one people, one world, one creation. Glory be to God in the highest, and on Earth peace among all God’s people. Alleluia, Amen!

Image: Doubting Thomas by Giovanni Serodine, circa 1620s