The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
April 19, 2009
The Second Sunday of Easter
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 26: 2-19¹

²Open the gates, so that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. ³Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace— in peace because they trust in you. ⁴Trust in the Lord forever, for in the Lord God you have an everlasting rock. ⁵For he has brought low the inhabitants of the height; the lofty city he lays low. He lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. ⁶The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy. ⁷The way of the righteous is level; O Just One, you make smooth the path of the righteous. ⁸In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and your renown are the soul’s desire. ⁹My soul yearns for you in the night, my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. ¹⁰If favor is shown to the wicked, they do not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness they deal perversely and do not see the majesty of the Lord. ¹¹O Lord, your hand is lifted up, but they do not see it. Let them see your zeal for your people, and be ashamed. Let the fire for your adversaries consume them.

¹²O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for indeed, all that we have done, you have done for us. ¹³O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we acknowledge your name alone. ¹⁴The dead do not live; shades do not rise—because you have punished and destroyed them, and wiped out all memory of them. ¹⁵But you have increased the nation, O Lord, you have increased the nation; you are glorified; you have enlarged all the borders of the land. ¹⁶O Lord, in distress they sought you, they poured out a prayer when your chastening was on them. ¹⁷Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near her time, so were we because of you, O Lord; ¹⁸we were with child, we writhed, but we gave birth only to wind. We have won no victories on earth, and no one is born to inhabit the world. ¹⁹Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

Gospel Lesson – John 20: 19-31²

¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

“Who…me?”

It’s the evening of the first day of the week, and the doors are closed. Locked. The anxious disciples are shut tightly inside – out of fear for their very lives, presumably. The suspicious world is shut tightly outside. Then, all of a sudden, defying locked doors, locked hearts, locked vision...a dead faith is resurrected.  A dead hope is given birth again.

More than doubt, fear is a very powerful thing in our lives. On the other hand, it seems like an important thing to have at times – it prompts us to seek protection in times of very real danger. It motivates us into needed changes and leads us on some surprising adventures. It serves as a constant reminder that we are fragile, limited, human. On the other side of these impulses, fear also prompts us to “lock the doors” of our lives away from the mystery and wonder of the unknown, and makes us run away into places of isolation and hiding.

Very few emotions are stronger than fear. Remember the collection of traditional Easter stories: an empty tomb, grave clothes, a voice in the garden, and doors barred and bolted out of fear. I can’t help wondering whether Jesus’ followers were afraid of death or just terrified of life – at least of what their lives had become.

Oddly enough, I’m reminded of those powerful and poignant lines sung by a dockyard worker in a world not his own:

Ah, gits weary
An' sick of tryin'
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',
But ol' man river,
He jes' keeps rollin' along!³

Why is it that resurrection life is the wonderful and yet terrifying thing that it is? Maybe because wherever goodness triumphs over the instincts of hatred, wherever the heart of one human being opens to another, wherever an attitude of compassion is offered and room is created for God, that’s where the Resurrection happens. In this season of Easter, may we find ways to say “Yes!” to life, “Yes!” to a new beginning, “Yes!” to that presence of the Sacred come among us that gives us the courage to face whatever is ahead of us! And yet I also can’t help wondering sometimes whether those of us who would name ourselves as followers of Jesus, now, might also be afraid of death or terrified of life.

I can identify with Thomas; can’t you? At times like this I’m reminded of a Peanuts cartoon that I saw once in which Linus approaches his older sister, pencil and paper in hand, and asks, “Lucy, how much is six from four?” Lucy looking up from her book, appears both irritated and incredulous and responds, “Six from four?! You can’t subtract six from four….” Returning to her reading she mumbles, scornfully, “You can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller number.” Linus, who’s been standing by patiently, then loudly exclaims with obvious frustration, “You can if you’re stupid!” The ultimate self-putdown.

Maybe Charles Schulz eventually had both of these cartoon characters learn about negative numbers, or somehow observe that just as we can take two steps forward, we can take three steps backward and wind up behind our original starting point. In either case something that seemed impossible in the first place, might finally be understood – we come to an awareness of something real that, at first, seemed unreal.

I wonder if Linus really thinks he’s stupid or that he just refuses to accept a pat answer until he finally learns something of the truth in the face of what before was a thoroughly perplexing situation. Like Thomas in his world and Linus in his, you and I are faced with a thoroughly perplexing situation. If we subtract the mystery of the resurrection, we only wind up with an empty tomb. At such a moment as this the renowned Roman Catholic contemplative, Thomas Merton, was quoted as having said,

Looking for God is like seeking a path in a field of snow; if there is no path and you are looking for one, walk across it and there is your path.⁴

As signs, negative numbers can indicate either an absence of something or a location. And a sign of absence does indicate that something or somebody has been there. The tomb may be empty but the wounds are still there – in the sick, the poor, the mentally ill, in everything and everyone that suffers. So I am entranced by something that the Zen poet, Basho, has written:

The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

That, to me, too, reveals the meaning and essence of the Resurrection. What’s more, the presence of God is most palpably present when we need it the most.

Like Thomas, though, we hunger for tangible proof of the divine presence. Sometimes we might even be overwhelmed by a sense of the nearness of divinity – the Comforter who embraces the grieving, a vision of the compassionate Christ, a striking encounter with nature, a fleeting perception of the Sacred. And yet if our faith were on trial, we’d have nothing to offer that would hold up in court. That’s not our fault. It’s built into the mystical path along which God draws us and from which we all too often stray. As the author of The Letter to the Hebrews wrote: “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”⁵

It seems to me, then, that Resurrection begins when we accept the call to open our locked and closed doors and leave behind our places of hiding – our places of doubt and fear. This came to me in a very striking way as I was contemplating (along with the rest of our Lenten group) Joyce Rupp’s invitation to journey through an open door. She writes:

There will never be an end to closing doors and leaving some things behind, just as there will never be an end to moving through the open doorways to [places of ] greater freedom.⁶

She also quotes Robert Wicks, who acknowledges the value of our closing a door behind us and saying goodbye to certain parts of our past. He says:

We must be willing to constantly sit on the edge of mystery and unlearn what has helped guide us in the past but is no longer as useful now. To do this we must be willing to ask the questions that will open us up to hear the quiet, powerful voice of freedom.⁷

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” says John’s Jesus. Maybe it’s easier, too, because you and I haven’t actually faced the evidence firsthand to have it confuse us. Seeing is not believing. Seeing is seeing. Believing is letting God lift the veil of our senses to help us get behind what we see or were told by witnesses – witnesses who believed in what they saw.

In the end, and into all of these fears and doubts of our troubled times, comes the simple message, “Peace be with you. As I have been sent, now I send you.” Why is it, then, that our first response always seems to be, “Who…me?”? Over the crowds who first followed him, and the religious leaders who came to speak those same words over others in his name, we hear the same benediction. You’d think, finally, we might listen.

Which, I guess, brings us back to what seems to be the central focus of all of John’s writings:  Life. Hopeful and abundant life! John’s celebration of the Easter message simply points to life as its message. Before and after Easter it is still life.

In fact, as John’s story continues, Easter it seems, coincides with Pentecost. The post-Easter Jesus appears before, breathes into, and then commissions and sends out his disciples all in one burst of spectacular holy energy!⁸ What’s changed is that now they are the new bearers of that life. The Spirit given without measure to Jesus (to use traditional language), now operates without measure among his followers and makes Jesus’ presence as real to them as we are to each other at this very moment.

The good news of Easter (according to storyteller John) is not just the final scene – like it is in fairy tales, you know, that say “everyone lived happily ever after”. Easter is the beginning of an open-ended future. The Resurrection only begins when you and I accept the call to open closed doors and leave our places of hiding.

“Who…me?” Yes, you…and me.

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