Sermon for SMHP, Year B, Easter 2, April 8, 2018
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.
This
is a painting of an event. Want to guess
what?
This
is the fifteenth station of the cross at St. Mary’s Basilica, Minneapolis, MN.
If
you know it’s resurrection, you can see it…maybe…
One
of the things that John’s gospel in particular makes clear is that it can be
difficult to see and comprehend the Risen Christ. If you were here for the Easter Vigil, you
heard the text which precedes this one, in which Mary Magdalene goes to the
tomb. What happens when she sees Jesus?
The
tomb was empty. So she assumed NOT that
he had risen from the dead…but that someone had stolen his body.
Then
she saw two angels…and assumed they
had taken Jesus.
Then she saw Jesus himself…and
assumed he was the…gardener.
Finally
he called her name and she realized who he was—her rabbi…the one who had taught
her with his words and with his body.
Later
that day, Jesus appeared to his disciples.
He appeared in the room with them—a room that was locked, John tells
us. Appeared and greeted them in the way
of Middle Eastern peoples: “Peace be
with you.” “Shalom ala CHEM” “As-Salaam alaykum.” This is still the standard greeting for
speakers of both Hebrew and Arabic.
Jesus
appeared inside a locked room and announced peace. Then he showed them his hands and his
side. And it was then—John tells
us—that they recognized him. When they
told Thomas—the one brave enough to actually leave the room—about it later, he
too demanded to see the marks before he would recognize Jesus.
How
do you think we would do if we were in that room? Would we recognize him?
Do
we believe that he dwells among us today?
Do
you believe there are signs of the risen Christ around us today?
How
do we recognize him? What does our text
teach us about recognizing Christ in our midst?
He
bears wounds.
He
announces peace.
We
don’t always see Christ in our midst, do we?
In fact, sometimes we avoid him.
We careen around the wounded ones in our midst, fearful that they will
want something from us.
We
ignore the ones who announce peace, because they might be asking us to make
changes, to stand up and speak out.
The
risen Christ in our midst is not a neutral being. He comes to announce that the kingdom of God
is in our midst, but it is still being built.
And
maybe we might all want to grab a hammer.
Or some a hammer and some a nail.
Sixty-five
years ago, a black Baptist minister began to preach a gospel of peaceful
resistance to the white supremacy which had governed our nation since its
inception. He stood in the midst of a
troubled nation and demanded that it face its past. He stood in the midst of other folks who were
now called “civil rights leaders” and asked them to risk their own bodies in
order that other bodies might one day be free of racism. He spoke of a wise Indian prophet named
Mohandes Ghandi, and of Henry David Thoreau, and he devised a system of
nonviolent civil disobedience which spoke truth to power in a new way, a
profound and efficient way.
[Slide] Thousands caught his vision, and began to
participate in the freedom rides and the boycotts and the marches.
Many
more did not. The might of the status
quo pushed back against Dr. King with anger.
And with dogs…and fire hoses.
King and his followers were beaten and even killed. And still they marched—bearing their wounds
and announcing peace for all.
Then
came the friendly opposition. The calls
for caution from persons sympathetic to the cause, but captivated by the allure
of the status quo.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks had
refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, sparking a boycott which
lasted nine months and nearly crippled the Montgomery public transit
system.
On June 5, 1956, the federal court in
Montgomery ruled that any law requiring segregated bus seating was a violation
of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed “equal protection under the law”
to all native and naturalized citizens of the United States.
The courts were taking up other
matters of discrimination, but their progress was slow, and Dr. King and other
civil rights leaders continued to stage nonviolent protests in Alabama.
In January of 1963, eight clergymen
in Alabama had issued a bulletin they called “An Appeal for Law and Order and
Common Sense,” which stated that change was being addressed in the courts of Alabama,
and people should wait for that change to take effect. In the meantime, they wrote, “the decisions
of those course should be peacefully obeyed.”
In other words,
progress is imminent. Well, not
imminent. But promising. Well, not promising. But there will be progress.
Someday.
Until then, y’all be patient.
Dr. King
didn’t wait for someday, and the movement for civil rights in Alabama continued,
with marches and actions and civil disobedience. So in April of 1963, the clergymen issued a
letter directly to Martin Luther King.
The courts have been making some progress on civil rights, they wrote,
and “responsible citizens have undertaken to work on various problems
that cause racial friction and unrest.”
[Slide]
However, we are now confronted by a
series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in
part by outsiders. We recognize the
natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being
realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.
They urged all citizens of
Montgomery, which was then the focal point of the civil rights movement, to
refrain from joining in with public actions led by Dr. King and others.
[Slide. Slide.]
In their midst was a vision of
Christ, wounded by years of slavery, segregation, and lynching. Wounds visible to anyone who simply reached
out to touch them.
But like most of the country, they
refused. They got up and locked the
doors, certain that someone else—a federal judge? The Congress?
Jesus? –would solve this problem without the inconvenience and disarray
of public actions.
[Slide] In August of that same year, Dr. King stood
on the National Mall and captivated the nation with the words “I have a dream.”
But before that, he was in a jail in
Birmingham, where he used a borrowed pen and every scrap of paper he could find
to write the finest epistle since St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. In that letter, he spoke with understanding
to the white clergymen, but noted that when people were in pain, caution must
not rule the day. [Slide]
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of
destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The risen Christ stood in our midst
in Birmingham and Montgomery and across this nation, announcing peace and
showing the wounds of years of inequality and inequity. Fifty years ago last week, Dr. King was taken
from us, but his spirit lives on, every time we heed the call to speak of peace
and gaze upon the wounds in our midst.
Poor
people’s campaign.
It
is my hope, people of God, that when they speak of us someday, they say that we
were unwise and untimely. And we preached
the good news of Christ, arisen.
Amen
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