Second Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 8, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Acts 4:32-35 There was not a needy person among them.
1 John 1:1-2:2 If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves.
John 20:19-31 Peace be with you.
O God of our wildest dreams, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Today is the eighth day of Easter. Eight out of fifty of Easter – so it’s still early. The puppets from our grand first-day procession last week have been returned to their storage places, but the flowers are still pretty fresh, and there are still good Easter hymns left to be sung. We have a baptism to celebrate today. Emilia Julu Hudson Houge has brought together family and friends from near and far to join her Emmanuel Church peeps for a ceremony of Christian belonging. Thank you all for being here today. Almost any day in the church year is a good day for a baptism, as far as I’m concerned, and today is especially rich because the theological message for the second Sunday in Easter is always: “you should believe it whether or not you’ve seen it.” Because of Emi’s baptism, I’m reminded of what one of my seminary professors was fond of saying: “I believe in infant baptism, heck, I’ve seen it!” I want to make sure you know that you don’t have to have a baptism ceremony to belong here at Emmanuel Church, but why not give the community another reason to rejoice?
While every other Sunday in a three-year lectionary cycle calls for a different Gospel passage, the Sunday after Easter’s Gospel lesson never varies. There are five written accounts of Jesus resurrection that make it into our canon of scripture – accounts that have significant “factual” discrepancies – and within those narratives, about a dozen appearance-of-the-Risen-Lord stories. Yet, this Gospel of John story gets read every year on the Sunday after Easter, no matter what. Then this same passage gets listed as the first choice for the Gospel reading on Pentecost – only six weeks from now. The effect is that this appearance story becomes THE appearance story – and too often, the heavy-handed moral of the story, seems like a faithful Christian does not have doubts. Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels believes that this passage was one of the Gospel of John’s community’s attempt to discredit the Gospel of Thomas, and it seems to have worked.
If I asked you to tell me what you know about Thomas in the Bible, you’d likely say “doubting Thomas” – because that’s what any of us who have grown up in the church have been taught to call this story – the story of doubting Thomas. And “doubting Thomas” is never flattering. It’s meant as an indictment. But doubt is not the opposite of faith, rather it is essential to faith. It’s a sign of real engagement – of commitment. The opposite of faith is certainty, not doubt. So think of it this way: those of us with a lot of uncertainty are the most faithful!
Our English translation of this passage in which Jesus says, “do not doubt but believe,” uses the word “doubt,” for the Greek word apistos. Apistos is the opposite of pistos. (Like asymmetry and symmetry.) The primary meaning of pistos is trust, so apistos is “without trust.” The Greek verb in the sentence is “become.” Jesus says, “do not become untrusting, but trusting.” Become trusting, Jesus commands. Think of the English word credit, which comes from Latin via Middle French, belief or trust about something loaned to another who is worthy or honorable. It’s primarily an exercise of gut feeling or a matter of the heart, and not about intellectual assent. And it’s about the gut feeling or the heart of community, not of individuals. As church, we are to become trusting in, or give credit to, what I suggested last week is the uprising of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the whole people of God for the whole people of God.
Trusting in resurrection is faith (not certainty, but faith) that God vindicated Jesus after his humiliating crucifixion – giving Jesus credit that his life work was not for naught, and it did not end with his death. Trusting in resurrection is an assertion that Jesus lives in spite of what the Roman soldiers did and that Jesus is Lord in spite of what Caesar claims; that the Love and Life of God is bigger than death, even the most brutal execution. That’s the message that all the resurrection accounts have in common. The “evidence” of trusting the resurrection of Jesus is the coming – the continual coming into being of the Church, which also keeps on rising from the dead!
We can imagine ourselves as being like Thomas – long on demands and short on trust. That’s not hard. But if we focus on Thomas, we risk losing track of the theological center of this story. The theological core of this story is Jesus, not Thomas. And the message is of emboldening encouragement – not of rebuke or reproach. [1] This is a story about the experience the grace of God in Jesus – without limit and without measure, that moves right through protective barriers. This is a story about Jesus breathing new life into a community of faith in the midst of grief and fear. This is a story of reassurance about Jesus repeatedly making himself available to his followers, those who saw him and those who did not see him. Become trusting. Become trusting that the Love and Life of God are bigger than fear and death and you will be open to a whole new world of possibility. How do we become trusting? How do we give credit to Jesus? We practice loving one another. We practice belonging to one another.
I want you to notice that the most unbelievable scripture lesson for today comes from not from the Gospel of John, but from the Acts of the Apostles. The idea that the whole group of Jesus followers were ever of one heart and soul is some powerful nostalgia and I don’t believe it. Did any of you see David Hayward’s Easter cartoon this past week? There are three women on the left and many men on the other. The caption reads, “So ladies, thanks for being the first to witness and report the resurrection and we’ll take it from here.” [2] Nevertheless, in these verses we are offered a fine vision of the goal of Christian community: the idea that people were coming forward to offer assets and possessions to be held in common and there was not a needy person among them. Emmanuel boldly practices this idea in small and large ways. (We haven’t perfected it, but we are practicing it.) Often our intonation is off, or we miss an entrance, or hold a note too long. Sometimes we forget to breathe. It takes a lot of nerve and a lot of compassion – both of which grow wild at 15 Newbury Street as far as I can tell, but it doesn’t happen by accident. We are practicing this hard and long song, practicing the art of trusting the resurrection, the uprising, of Jesus in the continual coming into being of the Church, showing forth our lives what we profess by our faith, as we asked in our opening prayer for today.
Many of you know that Emmanuel Church is expanding our practice beyond 15 Newbury Street, into Roxbury and Allston (in what we call our Boston-Cambridge Mission Hub). We are deep into our collaboration with four other congregations to establish intentional residential communities to help more people not just “go to church,” but be the church where they live and work. We are establishing household communities of witness to trust in resurrection – household communities which credit Jesus. Methodist Bishop and theologian, Will Willimon once said that “the most eloquent testimony to the reality of the resurrection is not an empty tomb…but rather a group of people whose life together is so radically different, so completely changed from the way the world builds a community, that there can be no explanation other than that something decisive has happened… The tough task of interpreting the reality of a truth like the resurrection is not so much the scientific or historical, ‘how could a thing like that happen?’ but the ecclesiastical and communal, ‘Why don’t you people look more resurrected?’” [3] Resurrection looks like people redistributing their material and temporal and social resources for the benefits of any who experience need (that’s all of us, by the way). It looks like sharing money and food, time and social capital so that nobody has too much and nobody has too little.
That is the practice into which we welcome Emi Houge today. She will need all of us to show her how to become trusting that when the sun goes down at night, it will rise again in the morning; that no matter how often it snows in April, spring will eventually arrive in New England; and that when we practice loving one another, and when we practice belonging to one another, we will experience abundance and grace beyond our wildest dreams.