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A Sermon by Tom Hunter
A Sermon by Tom Hunter
Wait a
Minute
John 20:19-29
- Easter 2 - April 18, 2004 Editorial note: I always
hesitate to make sermons available in written form because they are first of all
oral and spoken, prepared more for the ear than the eye, more for sound than
sight. One way to recover some of that sense is to read this out loud, to put
the sound of your own voice into these words. I wonder if you have people like Thomas in your life too.
They’re the kind of people who come along and say “wait a minute, wait just one
minute.” People like John, for example, my roommate our first year at Union
Seminary. He was there on a Rockefeller Grant for the Undecided, one of the 10
free rides for a year in seminary the Rockefeller Foundation gave to people who
wanted to explore the possibilities of a career in the church or religion. The
irony was that John was not undecided at all. He was decidedly not interested
in theology or the Bible, and only moderately interested in faith and the
church. He was very interested in not being drafted and not going to Vietnam,
and seminary was his way out because seminary students were deferred. He was a big part of my
seminary education, a valuable part for which I will always be grateful. Over
and over, he’d say “wait a minute, you mean you actually believe this stuff?”
You couldn’t assume anything with John. It was an ongoing, always lively,
sometimes maddening, sometimes satisfying exercise in accounting for faith,
articulating what you believed. I learned to love him for it – “wait a minute,”
he’d say, just like Thomas. Or like what happens so often in working with children, the
way it happened one day at the Orcas Island Elementary School 2 years ago. I
was with kindergartners singing a song about rainbows. It’s an interactive song
with blanks where you ask about a color and then what thing outside is that
color. The children suggest what to sing. So I asked “what color do you want
to sing about?” A boy said “blue.” “What’s blue outside?” “The sky,” so we
sang, “The sky outside my window is as blue as blue can be/ Fiddle dee dee,
outside my window/ As blue as blue can be.” Right about there, just before
going on to the chorus, I heard a little voice on the other side of the room
say, “No, it’s not.” Having worked with children enough to know that if you
don’t stop and get their ideas right now, the idea is gone (which, by the way,
is true for a lot of adults too…), I stopped the song and said, “It’s not?”
The voice said, “No, look,” and he pointed out the window. Sure enough, not a
speck of blue – it was a cloudy day, and raining hard. “What color is it?” I
asked. “White,” someone said, “gray,” and now all 20 kids are over at the
window looking and talking and pointing at the sky. “That looks like a rock.”
“That’s like my daddy’s car.” It was a much more educationally significant
moment than if we had simply sung the song through, and all because that little
voice spoke up. I love kids for moments like that. “Wait a minute,” he said,
just like Thomas. Thomas shows up after Easter, and to hear him clearly, we
have to remember back to Easter morning. For most churches, ours included,
there’s not much room for uncertainty on Easter morning. The hymns are big and
loud. The flowers are beautiful, the colors bright. The Hallelujah Chorus ends
the service, and a butterfly hovers huge overhead. It is proclaimed boldly and
confidently “Christ is risen,” and we all echo back “Christ is risen indeed,” 3
times to get it right. Easter has exclamation points and it’s glorious. “Happy
Easter” we say, and it is happy. On the first Easter morning, there were surprises and fear
and mistaken identities and worlds turned upside down and a lot of uncertainty,
but not for us. We still read the story but the years have smoothed it out, and
I must say I like it that way – I really do. After all the intensity of holy
week, the betrayal and denial and trial and pain, after that tortuous death and
the grieving, it’s reassuring to know that in the end, all of that doesn’t win.
Not even death wins. I don’t know about you, but I need my happy endings. I get
in certain moods when so many of the world’s issues seem overwhelming – budget
cuts so education and families in need are hurting, the environment, population,
zoning, and issues around Lake Whatcom, and there’s a war going on with bombings
and death and much pain and anguish. The list could go on and on, and in the
midst of it all, I want to know that at least sometimes things work out. Easter
has a happy ending and I like it. And then… and then come these verses of what happened
following Easter, and if Easter has to do with the door of a tomb now opened up,
with God’s love opening even in the face of death, with new life cut loose and
opened up for all of us, it sure didn’t last long. In these verses from John,
the disciples are scared and the doors are not only closed but locked. There
were political reasons for that – maybe with Jesus gone there would be more
repercussions for his followers. There were also psychological reasons for that
– so much had just happened they were exhausted and needed a breather, time to
get away, time to sort things out, to heal. Listen closely to these verses and I think you’ll hear it
again – “wait a minute.” Let’s think about this open tomb thing again. Maybe
Easter isn’t only happiness. Yes, the tomb is open. Yes, God has opened life
up for us again. Openness is a good thing. It’s right, but these verses also
seem to be saying don’t romanticize it. Openness is not easy. Just ask the Israelites freed from slavery and moving
toward the Promised Land. The Psalms say God is leading them to “an open place”
and what a welcome promise that must have been for people used to being closed
up in slavery. But as they wandered in the wilderness, remember how hard it
was, how they started whining and grumbling and many said they wanted to go
back, back to Egypt? Sure slavery was terrible but it was familiar. This
freedom, this openness, it’s hard. Or just ask a professor of mine at Union who
was sick for a long time, almost died, and I visited him as he was getting
better. We had a long talk and he said yes, I’m a lot healthier, I’m a lot
stronger, but it’s hard. I got used to being sick. It’s familiar. He told me
that getting healthy was going to mean finding parts of himself opened up, and
he wasn’t at all sure he liked it. Or just ask a young 16-year-old woman,
pregnant against her family’s wishes, and needing a place to live for a while
away from the struggles of that family, a cool-down period. We offered her a
room. She came with some belongings to move in, ate dinner, helped with dishes,
did some homework. We had a wonderful conversation. She woke up, had
breakfast, we took her to school, and that afternoon she called Gwen to say she
wasn’t coming back. “It’s too hard,” she said, “I don’t know what to do with
all that love.” Hold the allelujahs a minute. Hold the Happy Easters.
We’ve been invited into a new kind of openness and it’s not easy. We’re going
to need some time to get used to it, to live it. It’s interesting that the other disciples had a head start
on Thomas, a head start on getting used to it. What we read in John this
morning comes in two parts. The first part is when Jesus appears to the
disciples and breathes on them. It’s my favorite post-Easter appearance story –
Jesus wanting to convince them he’s alive again and what better way than to
breathe on them. And apparently it worked. But Thomas wasn’t there. We don’t know why. Were you
there when they crucified my Lord? Probably. Were you there when Christ rose
up from the tomb? No, but I sure heard about it. Were you there when he
appeared to them again? No, I missed it altogether. Thomas wasn’t there. So
when the disciples tell him Jesus is alive again, Thomas says “wait a minute.
How can you be so sure?” They’re sure because Jesus breathed on them. And now
Thomas needs a parallel kind of assurance. It doesn’t seem unreasonable. Let
me see the marks. Let me put my hand in his side and then I’ll know. So a week
later when Jesus visits again, that’s what happens. It’s tangible, physical.
It’s not religion as a good idea or some spiritually ephemeral wispy
phenomenon. It’s physical, and I think you and I need physical assurance now
and then too, like when we take communion. God’s love isn’t just words. It’s
elements, something tangible to eat and drink, to physically take into our
bodies. And baptism isn’t just words of commitment. It’s water and getting
wet, physically. When Jews gather for Seder, they don’t just tell their history
of slavery and Passover and exodus and freedom. They eat it, symbolic food to
chew and swallow and digest. We need the assurance of physical religion now and
then to help us know. So Thomas puts his fingers where Jesus tells him to and he
reaches out his hand to touch Jesus’ side – and now he too is sure. And there’s
a detail here I’ve never noticed before (which of course is the reason to keep
coming back to these stories again and again…). Easter apparently doesn’t make
Jesus body whole again. Easter apparently is not some kind of extreme make-over
with cosmetic surgeons making things pretty again. The holes are still there.
The physical evidence of his wounds is still visible. Jesus is up and around
again, very much alive, but he brings his wounds with him, and it makes me
wonder if part of the strength we have as the body of Christ, part of the new
life we’ve been given is to touch back into those wounds now and then, not for
any morbid fascination with pain, not to wallow or get stuck there but because
that’s where the new life has come from. (Today is Holocaust Remembrance Sunday, and it is a
powerful thing to hear Jews tell stories of imprisonment and death in the
Holocaust. They touch the pain both to commit themselves to never allowing it
to happen again and to find new life and vitality in the memory.) A group of parents was talking about our memories of songs
from our childhoods, and one mother told about how she loved to visit her
grandfather when she was a little girl. He directed a funeral home and she
remembers watching him work. She said she knows others find that weird and
eerie but to her it wasn’t. He was my grandpa, she said, and he was good at
what he did, very respected in the community, and she loved him. She also
remembers him singing as he worked, and the songs he sang were lullabies, as he
prepared the bodies for burial. She stopped talking for a minute. Those of us listening
agreed it was an amazing little story. “But wait a minute,” she said, “there’s
more.” And she told us that she and her husband are licensed in Arizona for
specialized foster care. The state called one afternoon to say they needed a
place for a 5 year old girl who had some strange disease, probably had 5 or 6
weeks to live and her family was a mess and couldn’t take care of her. The
woman and her husband agreed they couldn’t say no, so the little girl moved in,
not in very good shape, not very articulate, and one night after being there
about a week, she started crying out in obvious pain. The woman said she didn’t
know the disease very well, didn’t know the girl very well, but she said I could
rock her, so in the middle of the night she picked this girl up, sat in her
favorite rocking chair and rocked. She also sang, and as she sang, it suddenly
hit her that she was singing the lullaby songs she had learned as a little girl
visiting her grandpa as he worked. And I wondered, she said, if in some way I
was preparing this little girl as my grandpa did. She paused, and again, we all agreed, what a powerful and
emotional story. “But wait a minute,” she said, “there’s more.” That little 5
year old girl who was supposed to die in 5 or 6 weeks? The woman said she’s 12
now. She has some problems but she’s basically okay. And the woman looked
around the group listening and said, “I sang her back to life with my grandpa’s
songs. And every now and then I go sit by myself in that same chair where there
was so much pain that night and I remember that night because I believe new life
came out of the pain of that night for her and for my husband and me. I
remember and I say allelujah, allelujah.” It’s an Easter story. It has a happy ending. It’s also a
Thomas story. Wait a minute. Stop with the happy ending and you’ve missed it.
There’s more beyond the happy ending, much more. The love of God is more alive
than any of us can imagine. Easter says so, and Thomas does too. The tomb is open – allelujah! |