Second Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2009
Sermon by Pastor
The Holy Gospel according to
When 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.” After he said this, he
showed them his hands and his side. Then
the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send
you.” When he had said this, he breathed
on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are
forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.
But Thomas (who was called the twin), one
of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have
seen the Lord.” But Thomas 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.”
A 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.” Then 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.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because
you have seen me? Blessed are those who
have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the
presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But 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.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
It is April, but it still seems much too cold for Easter
to be over…. Not too many tulips or daffodils have made an appearance this
year….although, as I said, it is the middle of April and Easter was already
over a week ago. The friends and
relatives who came for dinner have all gone home…and the last egg has been
found in the drain pipe or under the bird feeder in the back yard. So here we are. Waiting in the rain. In the cold.
But not quite sure of what we are waiting for……
Perhaps we are waiting for Spring to come,
well yes, just about everyone I came across on my daily walks with the dog over
the past several weeks wondered when on earth Spring was going to come…so each
of us could actually begin to imagine
that the flowers we are ordering for the Immanuel Springfest and Flower Sale on
the Black Top (with the Barbary Coast Dixieland Band) might actually be of some
use. (The deadline for orders has been
extended to April 25th, by the way. That is April 25th. J)
Perhaps we are waiting to see if Easter
made any difference to us or to anyone we know. Or to the world around us. This annual observance that Christians
celebrate. We have hung the Easter dress
and the hat back in the closet and set the lily out on the back patio. We have closed the door and now, we wait.
It wasn’t so different in
We of course already know the next part of
the story in the Gospel of John. But the
disciples who gathered in that room on Easter Eve had not yet heard it, and so
we have to go back to where they were in John’s story. Their world had been shattered! Dreams
dashed to the ground. They couldn’t
believe what had happened any more than Minnesotans could believe this week
that Spring might come, if only for a day at a time…it might come soon, at
last. The disciples’ world was
shattered, in pieces all over the ground around their feet. And so they closed the door and locked it. And they waited. Some no doubt wondered if perhaps it
wasn’t time to go home, to get back to whatever they had been doing before all
of this happened. To pick up the pieces
and start over. But for now, they
waited. Not quite sure what they were waiting
for.
And then something hard to believe
happens. Without even knocking, Jesus
walks right through closed doors and appears in their midst and says, “Peace be
with you.” He doesn’t say, “I am back, everything will be all right
now.” He doesn’t tell them that
“everything will be the same.” Or
“everything will return to normal.” He
says, “Peace be with you.”
And then something even more unexpected
happens. Jesus shows the disciples his
scarred hands and wounded side. And
then, in just a few verses, the story jumps to eight days later, again with the
door closed, Jesus comes in without knocking and shows his scars this time,
especially to Thomas who wasn’t there the first time. “Here put your fingers in the print of the
nails. Touch the wound on my side.”
Now this is also very strange. When I was a little girl, every year when we
would come to this part of the story I thought it was very strange…this part
about the scars. “Why,” I wondered, “if we had just come through Holy Week and
now it was Easter….why were the scars still there?” “Why if God had raised Jesus from the dead,
why didn’t God just fix him all up?”
It’s a good question that a child would ask. Easter meant that Holy Week was over didn’t
it? All of the sadness and tears. Why the print of nails that you can feel
with your fingers? Why didn’t God take
those all away and make everything all better again?
But the scars were exactly what Thomas
asked to see. The scars were just what
Jesus knew the disciples needed to see.
The very same scars that I always wished would have gone away. Thomas wanted to see those scars. For some reason Thomas knew that there was
something special about the scars.
Thomas must have known that the world wasn’t ever going to be perfect again, not really. And he wasn’t looking for proof. The scars couldn’t prove anything. There is no proof in these scars any more
than there is proof in the Shroud of Turin.
Not proof…….so much……as Truth. Like so many of the best of the Gospel
stories…if you just stay with the story….you do not find proof….you find some
hint, even if only the tiniest bit of Revelation…of not proof….but Truth. The scars remain witness to the truth. Even the child who asks the question…. if she
stays with her question long enough knows that there is something special about
the scars. There is some truth in the
scars.
The artist knows this. If you look very closely at Torvaldson’s
Sculpture of Jesus in our own Chancel here at Immanuel you will see a faint
mark of the scars. You have to really
look hard, but you can see them. This
Jesus is a pre-crucifixion Jesus. Yet,
the artist knew that there was something special about the scars. Torvaldson in creating his sculpture did not
omit the detail of the scars.
Could it be that following Jesus is not
about following a Savior who is “all fixed up and perfect again?” Could it be that God is saying to us in our
waiting after Easter, (So now what do we do? So now where do we go?) That we will not really see Jesus again in
our midst unless we see the wounds? That
to follow even a Risen Savior is not to walk off into the sunset of a perfect
world…..but to walk where Jesus walked….into the places where the wounded live?
…..Into the lives of people
who this Easter need a word of comfort.
Into the lives of people who need a word of encouragement. Into the neighborhoods where people are
struggling. Into the wounded places of
our world where people are hurting because of loss or heartache or missed
opportunities or shattered dreams lying in pieces around their feet on the
floor.
Into the lives of people who are hurting
because of this recession that goes on and on and on.
This past week I visited the 3rd
of Lutheran Social Services’ shelters for Homeless Youth in
She said, over the long haul, our job is
to plant seeds. To plant seeds. And we don’t often get to see the flowers
that bloom. But sometimes we do! I
learned from her something that I did not know before…..that 30%! 30%! of the staff that now work for Rezek House, Safe House, and Life Haven, a
full 30% were once homeless youth themselves who were served by Rezek, Safe
House, or Life Haven and went on to finish school, and maybe then college, and
now in turn….they are now the ones who walk into those wounded places where
kids are and where kids live to be advocates for them.
The resurrected Jesus is forever the
wounded Jesus. Even after Easter.
Living, but never all fixed up. Not
bound by death, yet scarred for eternity.
That even when our lives and the lives of those around us are in pieces,
when our dreams or their dreams are shattered, when life seems hopeless….that
the living yet wounded Christ meets us there.
The wounded Jesus does not wait until we and the rest of the world are
all fixed up, or our lives are all fixed up, but meets us there where we live,
where they live. It is not “cure of the
soul,” in Thomas More’s famous phrase, but “care of the soul.” Indeed, it is not even cure of the
world, a world all fixed up… but “care”
for the world, the wounded world….as it is.
Last month, the Church lost a remarkable
theologian and internationally known advocate for the disabled. Dr. Nancy Eiesland was only 44 years old when
she died on March 10, but her tender concern and extraordinary accomplishments
on behalf of her friends and colleagues with disabilities will live on, just as
sure as Easter continues on, so they will live on.
By the time Ms. Eiesland was 13 years old,
she had had 11 operations for a
congenital bone defect that resigned her to a full leg brace and then to a
wheel chair for the rest of her life.
In high school she won a national contest
with an essay on the inaccessibility of rural courthouses in
But the accomplishment that transformed
much of our thinking in the Church was the groundbreaking publication of her
1994 book, “The disabled God: Toward a
Liberatory Theology of Disability.” In
this book, she points to the moment where the risen Jesus invites his disciples
to touch his wounds. “In presenting his
impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the
disabled God,” she wrote. The metaphor
is a Savior who the disabled can identify with….not cured and made whole…but
wounded. In fact…”the injury” she
insists, “remains a part of the divine presence with us.”
So why did she say that she hoped that
when she went to heaven that she would still be disabled? Because her identity and character had been
formed by the challenges of her disability? Yes. But most importantly because she felt that
without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to herself and perhaps
even to a disabled God.”
Touch my hands, my side. Touch these wounds, Jesus says. The wounded Jesus does not wait until we are
all fixed up but meets us as we are and where we live. In a world where we indeed are wounded and
not all fixed up. In our own lives with
hopes and dreams shattered in pieces all over the floor. In a world where betrayal, disappointment and
fear abound even after the Easter hat has been put away and the last egg found
under the woodpile in the back yard. In
the very wounds and within the very places that we must live.
Not proof.
But Truth. Touch the wounds in my
hands and my side, Jesus says. It is
this Jesus who appeared to the disciples and to Thomas and meets us now this
Easter season in the places of our lives where the marks of life remain.
……And says, of all things, Peace be with
you. Oh yes, the disciples recall and we
remember too. He said that once before. Peace I Leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world
gives. But as I give. My peace I give to you. My Peace I leave with you.
That must have been what we
were waiting for.
That must be what it means
to follow.
Not all fixed up. Not in a world all fixed up.
But believing. We
follow.…and, in Peace. Amen.