April 12, 2015 – Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31
Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31
The Jets in the Playoffs? Jesus Raised from the Dead? What Gives??
Second Sunday of Easter – April 12, 2015
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
“Remember when you were scared to hope?”
That’s a quotation, not from some theologian or a biblical commentary.
And it’s not referring to this text from John’s Gospel this morning.
It’s the first line the Free Press’s sports columnist Gary Lawless wrote after
The Winnipeg Jets made the playoffs Thursday night!
Remember when you were scared to hope?
Scared to hope.
The disciples in the locked room are scared, John says.
They’re all locked up in their fear.
They are afraid, of course, that they will meet the same fate as Jesus!
They are afraid that they will be rounded up and crucified just like their ring-leader!
They are scared out of their minds!
Afraid to have faith, afraid to go out, afraid to go out and live the life that Jesus called them to.
So Jesus comes to find them in their fear.
I wonder if at first they are even afraid of Jesus when he appears to them.
I mean they did abandon him en masse at the crucifixion.
None of them were faithful.
Jesus has been named as a king of some kind in John –
And what do kings do to those who betray them?
Right! They exact revenge.
But Jesus has not come to exact revenge.
Jesus has come to forgive – and lead the disciples into a new future –
A future they seem scared to hope for.
Jesus gives them a word of peace not reproach.
And then he gives them another gift – the gift of his Spirit, his life, his energy,
So that they can carry on doing the same things he did in his earthly ministry.
They, now, are his body in the world, saying and doing the things he did in his earthly ministry.
But there is one who is not there to see and experience all this!
Poor Thomas! Where is he!
Thomas has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, and
We have come to call him “doubting” Thomas,
even though that word doesn’t appear in the reading.
One thing we can say about Thomas at least is this:
Thomas isn’t afraid and cowering behind some locked door.
I read the suggestion this week that Thomas maybe isn’t so much a sceptic, or a doubter,
As much as he is a realist.
Good Friday put a nail in the coffin of their hopes, so may as well just get on with life.
Get back to reality and forget about all those fancy shmancy hopes for a new world and
God’s reign of mercy and peace and justice and manna-sharing.
And when the disciples tell Thomas that they had seen Jesus,
He just scoffs, “Oh yeah! I’ll believe it when I see and touch his wounds!”
Cause that Jesus has been raised from the dead is one thing that in itself is hard to believe.
But that the risen Jesus still has wounds and scars is another thing.
How could Jesus – even if he has been raised – still be wounded?
Wouldn’t he be all healed?
Isn’t resurrection life one of being healed from all that harms us?
But somehow, it is Jesus’s visible wounds that elicit Thomas’s faith,
that open him to a whole new reality that he lives into.
But visible wounds are hard for us to think about in the 21st century, right?
We are schooled from an early age to hide our wounds.
To not admit to our vulnerability.
We either put a flesh-coloured band-aid on it pretend we do not have weakenesses and
We do not have fears and we do not have vulnerabilities.
We are schooled to not admit our failures, much less share them,
As if doing so would somehow diminish us.
But here is Jesus, coming and openly sharing his wounds with his disciples.
I’ve had my share of difficulties over the last year and a half.
And most of you know that by nature I am a very private person.
I’m a proud person too, and I don’t easily share my difficulties or what I’m having trouble with.
I have a hard time showing my wounds visibly.
And I have a hard time admitting my failures.
But I have found over the last year and a half something that anyone who
Has any experience with any twelve step program can tell you:
Admitting our woundedness is a step toward healing.
I have found that speaking of and sharing my wounds with others has led to
Deeper relationship.
I have found that speaking of and sharing my wounds with others has led to
A deep acceptance and a trust and a grace I had not known existed.
I have found that speaking of and sharing my wounds with others has led to
Gratitude – a deep gratitude for being bound together in Christ with you.
I have found that speaking of and sharing my wounds with others has led to
A measure of peace – the peace that the risen Christ gave all those years ago
To his disciples on a Sunday a week after Easter when he announced to them:
Peace be with you.
It’s the same peace we share with one another every Sunday, and that we will this Sunday.
When we say those words, “Peace be with you,” and when we take one another by the hand,
Let us remember that the ears we speak those words into have been wounded by
All kinds of other, hurtful words.
And when we take one another by the hand as we say those words,
Let us remember that the hands we take have been wounded,
And bear scars like the hands of Jesus.
Like Thomas, it’s okay to admit that reality.
It’s okay to acknowledge that reality.
We have hurt others with our hands and our words.
And we have been hurt by the words and hands of others.
But the thing with Thomas is just this: yes, Thomas is a realist, I think,
But Jesus opens his eyes to a much larger reality.
Jesus expands his vision as to what reality really is.
That it is larger and includes a God of almost unimaginable grace and compassion.
That it includes a way in which sharing wounds leads to a measure of healing.
We gather on Sunday to have our eyes opened to a grander vision, right?
To have our hope renewed, right?
To have ourselves immersed in a reality higher and deeper and wider than
The one we are conditioned to experience the rest of the week.
Here, we are immersed in a vision defined not by failure but by possibility.
Here, we are immersed in a vision defined not by scarcity but by abundance.
Here, we are immersed in a vision defined not by individualism but by community.
Here we are immersed in a vision defined not by death but by life.
I have written these things down for you, writes John near the end of his Gospel,
So that you may have life.
Yes: so that you may believe, or have faith, or trust in this risen One, but more than that
So that you may have life! So that they might change the way you actually live.
Thomas changed: legend has it that when Jesus sent him he went all the way to southern India to
Start some of the oldest churches in India.
The disciples changed: Luke gives us a wonderful picture in Acts this morning of a community
No longer cowering in fear behind locked doors but an open and inclusive community of
Generosity and sharing and caring for the most vulnerable.
A community filled with the same Spirit that animated Jesus’ ministry.
That was what resurrection looked like in that time and in that place.
That’s what Easter looked like back then.
That’s what the resurrected body of Christ looked like back then.
As New Testament Professor Mitzi Smith observes,
God “resurrects” us not just for ourselves, but for our fellow human beings.
(http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=4/15/2012)
In short, Luke here in Acts signals to us that out of God’s great generosity in
giving us Jesus and raising him from the dead for us,
is born a community of deep, deep gratefulness and generosity.
An Easter community is a community of generosity.
Or it is not an Easter community.
It is not a community within which lives the Spirit of the great generous giver.
Luke describes his own first century community in Acts this morning.
But we don’t celebrate Easter as something that happened 2000 years ago.
We continue to celebrate Easter as something that God does over and over again in
the lives of faithful communities across the ages,
turning us in the power of Jesus’s Spirit to our intended state.
In the second century, the Greek Christian Aristides wrote this to
the Roman emperor Hadrian about his community:
He who has gives to him who has not, without boasting. And when they see a stranger, they take him in to their homes and rejoice over him as a very brother; for they do not call them brethren after the flesh, but brethren after the spirit and in God. . . . And if there is among them any that is poor and needy, and if they have no spare food, they fast two or three days in order to supply to the needy their lack of food. (quoted at http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20120409JJ.shtml)
A couple of hundred years after this, the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate,
who was no friend to Christians, was forced to acknowledge this:
The godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours also. Those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them. (Ibid.)
Since then, communities of financial and social generosity have sprung up repeatedly
among Christians through the ages: from Eastern monks and the first Franciscans to the Shakers, the Catholic Workers and the base communities of Latin America. (Daniel Clendenin, ibid.)
Today the resurrection spirit is still alive and well, even among us.
So let us receive his life-giving spirit again.
Let us share this bread and wine generously made and given to us by some of our members.
Let us – in this sharing – image a community in which gifts are shared for the good of all,
a community in which there is enough,
in which none receive too much and none too little.
In which the spirit of this kind of love is given us again to live lives of generosity and care in
world that is often mean and grasping and which encourages us to hoard.
Let us receive it and live the lives that we were meant to live by our creator.
Lives of generosity and grace.
Lives that set aside time to pray for others.
Lives that give of their time to those in need.
Lives that give of their time to one another for listening.
Lives that give of talents for the common good of this church community and
this neighbourhood.
Lives that are financially generous to the mission of this congregation as it is expressed in
our food banks and kids club and all the rest.
Lives that give testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Lives that witness to the great grace that has been given to us all.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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