I was invited to offer the sermon this morning for the good people of First Christian Church in Fayetteville, NC, who met for worship via conference call. Here is a recording of the message.
I included the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) in the sermon; I keep a more complete list of helplines here on my website.
The text was John 20:19-29, a story, I noted wryly before reading it, which I have probably preached on more than any other single Bible passage in the decade since I first entered seminary, because of a confluence of two factors. First, the Revised Common Lectionary always has this text for the Gospel reading on the Sunday after Easter. Second, the Sunday after Easter is jokingly referred to by some in my line of work as “Associate Pastor Sunday.” Because of the intensity and demands of Holy Week on preachers, pastors will often turn over the next Sunday’s sermon to their associate pastor if they have one, or maybe to a seminary intern, or say to a local chaplain. And having served as a seminary intern, and a pastoral associate, and as a chaplain, I have often been the recipient of “Associate Pastor Sunday” preaching opportunities – which in turn, inevitably, means taking another look at the Gospel of John, the 20th chapter, from the 19th verse onwards.
So I have thought a lot about this passage.
This chapter, and in fact the whole of John’s gospel, is a rich tapestry, made up of seemingly thousands of interwoven threads. Sometimes, we stand back and look at this thing from a distance, seeing the big picture of the gospel message in all of its vibrant colors and rich textures. Other times, we move in close to see the individual threads in intimate detail, to perhaps notice how some of those threads have worn bare with time, how some are oddly clashing up close, others tangled with each other and perhaps needing to be picked apart.
So when I read this passage again with an eye to trying to share some good news, I have a decision to make as your appointed guide to this gospel for the day. Do we step back to marvel at this rich tapestry from a distance? Or do we move in close and pick apart some threads?
Fair warning for your fingers: today, we are going to be pulling at some threads. Let us hear what the Spirit has to say to the Church.
Sermon Text:
So. Some threads of the tapestry.
It starts with that very first clause. It was evening on that day. This is a story about things that have just happened. It has an immediacy to it. And since we have read the story so far, with its heights and depths, its hill of Calvary and its dark empty tomb, we know that this is a story about fresh trauma as much as it is a story about new life.
It was the very first day of the week. The day we now call Sunday. The day after the Jewish sabbath, when the day of rest has come and gone and the cycle of time has begun anew. It was the first day of the week – a new beginning.
And yet, the disciples are locked inside of a house. I won’t belabor the point here. I won’t overemphasize the connection of a group of Disciples of Christ locked in their houses in a time of fear, yet longing for a new beginning. You can feel that link for yourselves, can’t you? You can sense the isolation, and the fatigue that comes with it? Yes, you know this thread. Its feel has become familiar to you over these past few weeks. Our fingers need not dwell on this well-worn piece of the tapestry for overlong.
But of course, a difference – these disciples, the story tells us, are not afraid of a virus. No. We read that they were afraid of “the Jews.” This, and the tendency of John’s gospel to use this phrase throughout its narrative, has caused more than its share of trouble through the years. Do I need to dwell here, on this bloodstained portion of our tapestry, for long? Do I need to list examples of how scapegoating our Jewish neighbors for Christianity’s problems has played out in horrific ways? Do I need to tell of pograms, of expulsions, of the Holocaust? Do I need to tell you that John’s gospel was the favorite of Adolf Hitler for exactly this reason? Do I need to remind us of a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, the shooter’s wounds eventually treated at a nearby hospital by Jewish hospital staff? Do I need to tell you the story of how my wife Leigh and I, just a few years ago, watched Nazi flags being waved at us by young men with swastika tattoos, not so far away in Charlottesville, Virginia, as they chanted at passersby, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” How we saw our Jewish colleagues in ministry remove their kippahs, their traditional head-coverings, before leaving the church where we served food and drinks, fearing for their lives? And people did die there that day. Yes, my friends, the language of John’s gospel, has been spun by many throughout the centuries into an anti-Semitic fabric, with deadly consequences.
So let’s stay on this thread for a moment. We look closer, and see multiple, smaller threads, tightly wound together, too small to see at first. For you see, this blunt-edged translation, “for fear of the Jews,” does not capture the subtleties of our tapestry weaver, the gospel writer. We might better translate it, “for fear of the local religious leaders,” but that still doesn’t capture it. Because Jesus was Jewish. All of the disciples were Jewish. And John’s gospel, despite being perhaps the latest written of all of the four gospels, is profoundly Jewish. In fact, scholars have noted that while written in Greek, John’s grammatical structure is actually much more akin to the Hebrew language. Biblical scholar Sharon Ringe, who I had the pleasure of having as a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, suggests that the language of John’s gospel is much like the language of multi-generational immigrant communities in our own country, in which, for example, a grandmother may only speak Spanish while a grandchild may only speak English, leading to the creation of a bridge language, a mixture of the two, a transplant community’s hybrid Spanglish. John’s church is like that – Jewish, some Aramaic speaking, some Greek speaking, trying to make sense of the fact that they find themselves dispersed, scattered, on the outside, separated from their old ways of doing things and their old symbols and communities and comforts. We must remember: It is this Jewish transplant community that talks about being afraid of ““The Jews.”” I imagine a similar tone to if you were to catch me, for a moment, with my guard down, reacting to recent news of “Christian” pastors continuing to hold massive worship services during this time of pandemic, to try to prove some sort of point at the risk of their parishioners’ lives and the lives of those their parishioners may come into contact with. Imagine me rolling my eyes at the article and saying to myself, “What is the matter with Christians?” It reads differently that way, doesn’t it? It changes the sound.
This matters, not only because of the history of violence that has gone along with these words, but because this passage cannot be made to be about scapegoating the Other, for it is about the opposite of that. It is about the surprising power that is made perfect only in weakness, as the Apostle Paul writes – the opposite of how we in the Christian world have often thought about the power of God. But hold that thread, lightly now. For we will return to it in a moment.
And so the disciples hid in their locked room for fear of the very religious leaders that they ought to feel comforted and cared for by….and somehow, Jesus is in their midst. Jesus, who shares no thundering words of power, no declarations of vengeance upon those who have done him harm…but instead, simply speaks peace to them. And he sends them, and gives them the Spirit, not with the roaring wind and fire of the Pentecost of Acts, but rather with a mere breath. In fact, in the Bible, the words for breath and wind and spirit are the same, life-giving word – just as in English, the word “spirit” and the word “respiration” share a common root and common syllable. Jesus breathes on them. It seems so soft, so intimate, so comparably weak – and yet we are reminded, in these difficult days, of the life-giving power of a mere breath.
And here is where these seemingly disparate threads begin to come together. For the fear of the disciples, and the insistence of this interpreter that this passage is not about scapegoats but about a subversive power made perfect in weakness, and the comparative weakness of a mere breath, all of these threads lead us to Thomas. Thomas who at first does not believe the testimony of his fellow apostles, does not believe their stories. But he comes to believe when he feels the wounds and scars which the Resurrected Christ still carries, still shows even as he offers new life. It is only when Thomas touches the very wounds that Jesus suffers that he cries out: “My Lord and my God.”
Did you notice that? So much ink has been spilled about the supposedly “Doubting Thomas” that has missed this crucial reality. It is the wounds of Jesus, not his ability to walk through walls or any sort of shining celestial aura, that makes Thomas declare, “My Lord and my God.”
A similar thing happens in the Gospel of Mark, when a Roman Centurion sees Jesus breathe his very last breath and only then says out loud, “Truly, this man was God’s Son!” Why is it Jesus’s dying breath which makes the centurion proclaim this truth? Why is it Jesus’s gentle breath which frees the disciples from their hiding-in-locked-rooms fears? Why is it Jesus’s wounds and scars which make Thomas say, “My Lord and my God!”?
And here we are, tracing all of these threads together to find a surprising truth, the same truth that we may perhaps see if we back away, now, to look anew at this whole rich tapestry at once. For the fundamental good news of Christianity is exactly this: that God, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, enters into our human reality, takes on our wounds and our scars, and shows them back to us as proof not only of divinity but exactly of humanity. And in doing so reveals to us both the truth of our divinely-created image and our capacity to be truly human.
Show me a million possible philosophies, a billion beautiful sets of beliefs, and I will always, always find my way back to the one where God has some scars.
You see, I have some scars of my own. And you, too, may have some scars of your own. I won’t go into many details, today – but I did ask Lorenzo to put a phone number in the bulletin insert this morning, as well as a website, for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The number is 1-800-273-TALK. This is a number you can call or that you can share with someone who is going through a very dark time. If you, or someone you know, finds themselves hiding fearfully in the locked room of their souls, this number can be a safe and supportive way out. Again, my friends, I will not share many details this morning, but just know this: I have called this number, in the past. I have needed this way out. But what I have found over the years is that it can feel very hard, and very scary, to reach out when we are hurting. And so it helps to know that our Lord and our God comes to us, comes to us in the very rooms in which we are locked out of fear, and says to us, “Yes. I know. I understand. For I too carry scars.”
Disciples of Christ, this is the God we serve. This is the Christ we follow. Our wounded Lord. Our God with scars. Who meets us exactly in our own fears, our own wounds, our own scars. This is the Christ who bids us “peace.” Who shares the Spirit with us by way of mere breath. Who sends us, in the same way he has been sent: to bring peace, and breath, and Spirit to others. To witness to the reality of our Lord and our God by being willing to show our scars. And so we step back from the tapestry, and marvel that even the smallest of its threads contains the richness of the good news offered to us by the whole. And we say to each other, no matter how far away we are, no matter what rooms we are locked in, no matter what fears we may have, those words which Jesus spoke so long ago: “Peace be with you.”
Amen.