Throw away that “Do Not Touch” sign

a Sermon for Easter 2C
Text: John 20:19-31

GOD of Hope and Wonder, creator of the world we experience and enjoy, come among us this morning, so that we might know and understand and share your love. Amen.

In the gospels, there are individuals with whom many of us naturally sympathize. For many, it’s Martha, the hardworking hostess that is irritated by her indulgent sister Mary. For others, it’s Peter, who responds to Jesus’s questions eagerly, though dimly—sometimes even shouting out “how high?” before Jesus has even asked him to jump. And there are individuals with whom we know we’re supposed to sympathize. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we know that we can tend to be the pious Jews that pass the helpless victim by and that we ought to be that individual that picks him up and carries him to safety. And, of course there are the individuals with whom we would naturally sympathize if we hadn’t been conditioned to condemn. This last case is typified by Thomas.

If we were to think back about these last two weeks in Thomas’s life, and of our life, what becomes readily clear is how the playground of theory and practice that characterized discipleship was turned upside down and replaced by cruel, human forces of betrayal, trial, crucifixion, persecution, and hiding from hunters. As one of the named disciples, he learned theory and its application; he learned about the nature of the world and of GOD; and the world was his laboratory, giving him the chance to apply all that he was learning from Jesus. And then, in a flash, his protector and spiritual guide was gone and the world was transformed. What he thought he knew wasn’t true. Or at least didn’t seem to be true.

And further, there were things that he had observed and knew to be true. He observed the way the Temple authorities treated Jesus, the increasingly edginess of Jesus as the week progressed, he ate and drank and watched the Last Supper, he went with Jesus to the Garden in which he was betrayed. He saw the reflection of the moonlight off of steel blades, witnessing actions and their bloody consequences. And even though he wasn’t at the crucifixion and didn’t remove the body from the cross, he knew what that meant. All of these things were observable and we can be sure that Thomas absorbed them all.

So, as Jesus appears to the disciples as he said he would, we can understand why Thomas would need to experience it, too. Why he would need that empirical data. That he would reserve judgment of what happened until he had all of the facts himself—so that he could make his own decision.

That’s why I think we ought to sympathize with him: because we’re all about empirical data. We want to know about the experience and the moment. It gives us some sense of the rational and the objective. ‘Such and such happened so I know X to be true.’ We do this with our friends and our government and our church. Why should we condemn Thomas for wanting to gather some empirical data? Jesus was dead. We know from science class what is supposed to happen next. That which is dead decays. So, Jesus’s body, unless treated with chemicals and mummified, would start to rot. AND if He were revived magically, as Jesus brought Lazarus from the dead, that body would certainly look a certain way. Even restored to full health, he would still look like Jesus and be bound by physics.

But our brains are complex. We respond to multiple stimuli and integrate them into an experience. A while back, I watched this program on the history of photojournalism and they talked about how different the world became when photographs began to accompany stories. We began to understand stories in a more personal way, because we became exposed to a wider sense of the story. In 1963, a Vietnamese monk named Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the oppressive South Vietnamese government. The iconic image in profile of this man silently burning to death is haunting and captivating. Another photo, taken in 1972 in the height of the Vietnam War, made a similar impact. The picture’s most compelling subject is Phan Thị Kim Phúc, a 9 year-old girl running naked, her flesh burning from napalm dropped by South Vietnamese forces. Many elements of the picture are striking: her nakedness, the way her body is positioned at the moment the photograph was taken, and that horrified expression on her face. Both of these pictures, like countless others, continue to shape the way we experience the events of our life. We learn from them in ways that words cannot express.

We experience by hearing and seeing…and touching…and smelling…and tasting. And all of these elements come to tell us about the world around us. And Thomas, hoping to experience the risen Christ, asks to see and touch him, as the other disciples did. This isn’t doubt—it isn’t even skepticism—in the way we think of it. Maybe it is selfishly pragmatic, but only fair. He didn’t want to hear about Jesus, he wanted to actually hear Jesus. And a week goes by, and it is the one week anniversary of the resurrection, and Jesus shows up again. And if we are being honest to the text, we’ll see what happens: Jesus walks right up to Thomas, who hasn’t said anything, by the way, and says to him “See me and touch me. Believe.” And Thomas exclaims “My Lord and my God!” The gospel never says that Thomas touches him—it clearly suggests the contrary—that Thomas sensed Jesus and was moved by Him. Jesus was there with them and he knew what the others had said was true. And Jesus addresses him personally, directly, looking him square in the eye and offering to share in this humble moment in which his wounds are exposed to this loved one, this disciple to touch, to feel.
And no sooner is this offer made than Thomas declares that he is in the presence of the holy. This is a truly intimate moment of personal relationship and spiritual revelation that occurs in this room full of people! And for us to be privy to it means that we must respect the dignity of this moment.

And perhaps it is to our detriment that we so cast aside the power of Jesus’s final statement:
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Words often used to criticize Thomas for his “non-belief”. But this statement serves a different purpose. Jesus is demonstrating two ways of entering into faith: those that have faith because they have seen GOD’s work themselves and those that have only heard about it. The phrasing (“blessed are those”) is reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount (“blessed are the poor/the peacemakers/the meek”).

This is good news for us because Jesus frees us from a faith that is dependent: dependent on physical or historical proof or dependent on blind or ignorant leaps of faith. In fact, the very idea that he made himself known to all of the disciples, that he appeared to the group twice shows that he wanted to get them all. Perhaps even appearing the second time as a means of going after the lost sheep.

What this gospel says about faith, therefore, is not merely about possessing it, but sharing it. Jesus was heading out and needed to pass on this one piece: The disciples must have faith, but they also must share it; to go out and make disciples as he did. And it seems to me that all of the tools at our disposal are necessary. Our ability to experience faith through all of our senses helps us to not only deepen our own faith, but give us a means to describe it and share it with others. Our senses help us tell better stories and share relevant experiences with others. They help us describe, demonstrate, or depict our own relationships so that GOD might help us forge new ones. They help us better tell The Story.

May the GOD that gives us all of these ways of experiencing the world, and shared in our humanity, to experience the world like we do, grant us heightened senses; and may we use them to better understand GOD in our midst and share GOD's love with others. Amen

Telling Her

a Sermon for Good Friday, Year C
Text: John 18:1-19:42

God of Hope and Wonder, you give us this day that hurts us each year as a reminder and as an opportunity. Be with us now and through the weekend as we mourn the loss of your Son. Amen.

If you have ever had to follow a tough act—you can begin to understand what it is like to stand here at this moment. To follow the reading of the Passion. This gospel humbles and silences us.

Perhaps because it is haunting and frightening that many are moved on Good Friday to talk theologically about sin and forgiveness, using big words like atonement and Christology; using this talk to pull us away from feeling sad and guilty. Even the name Good Friday comes to us with a cruel irony that is certainly unavoidable in this space. The cross, our symbol begins to feel heavy on our chests and burn in our eyes when we think about it. When we hear those words: “There they crucified him,” we can’t help but think about the grim reality of what is going on this story. We can’t help but see in this the earthy, human reality of what took place. Humans put our human-born Messiah on a human-made torture device and killed him.

Sunday, I mentioned a book, The Last Week, which covers the final days of Jesus’s life. When the authors get to Good Friday, they describe the crucifix itself. We might envision it as tall planks of wood, rising high into the air. The cruel truth is that the victims are only a couple of feet off of the ground. The upper body high enough to draw carrion birds to pick at the flesh, while the lower limbs close enough for stray dogs to tear at the feet. The reality of crucifixion is that it is disgusting. It is demoralizing. It is torture. And in Roman occupied territory, as Jerusalem was, it was the most frightening act the state could use against the people.

I’ll tell you today is the hardest day to be a Christian. Not because I have to endure this story, the emotions, the fears; but I have to think of some way to tell my daughter this story. This time around, she’s a week away from 2 and I know she won’t get it. I’ll tell her something about God’s generosity and Rose and I will go about our year feeling thankful that we don’t have to really talk about this. But when do I tell her? When do I tell her that people killed God? When she’s four or five? And when do I try to explain this story that is both sacrifice on Jesus’s part and cruel viciousness on humanity’s part? That we can’t really tell the story without both parts. When will she be mature enough to understand it?

Perhaps in a more basic sense, part of the reason most of us are afraid to talk about the crucifixion is that it isn’t “appropriate subject matter”. This story isn’t G-rated. In our culture, there is no proper place for us to have a conversation that involves talking about torture, mockery, and execution to a general audience. Even the evening news makes close-to-home cases a mixture of scintillating true crime and clinical depictions of tragic events. We can’t talk about the ugliness of humanity in the way it deals with difficult subjects. One memory that is etched in my mind was back in ’96 (I think). It was after the final game of the NBA finals when the Bulls beat the Jazz and the 11:00 News came on and they were covering the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber. He had been given a sentence of execution and they were showing this crowd that was pushing against this chain link fence, apparently there to keep the crowds away from the proceedings and I remember hearing the words screamed with hate; faces distorted in hunger for the kill. They were giddy and joyful and had crazy animal eyes. And I sat down overwhelmed with shock and sadness and shared guilt that maybe I could be part of this. Maybe I could be transformed into a being of pure evil and hate. And I cried…confused and hurt. I shut the TV off and sat in silence and I cried.

Today is the day we confront death. We have to. We confront death in the form of loved ones that we’ve sat with, we’ve cried over, we’ve held in our arms. It’s the day we confront all of the stages: knowledge of impending death, the torture of the coming death, the strange details of death, and finally, loss. Maybe that’s why we feel compelled to skip on to Easter. But don’t. Not this time. Stay for a little longer in this moment. Because its here, in loss, in grief, that we get to experience anew this “Good” day.

So let’s stay away from theology and explanations of why this had to happen, just this once. And let us sit with ourselves in this moment, in all of these emotions.

As I see it, I won’t be able to talk to my daughter about Good Friday with integrity without learning how to feel it. How to feel death and loss. Until I can share with her some of my experiences. And to do that, I have to deal with my own stuff. And I don’t think we’ll ever do that if we simply see Good Friday as the day God balanced the checkbook or the day Jesus rescued prisoners from the Underworld or whatever interpretation you want to throw out. At its root, at its deepest level, Good Friday is about death—and talking about death. It’s about sharing in a story that is hard to tell and hard to hear. But we share it anyway.

May our own experiences of death and loss give us a new sliver of wisdom of God’s sacrifice for us. Amen.