4/27
Two brown shoes. And a
half-full iced coffee.
Start my Sunday with a serious sweeping of the steps and sidewalk.
This exercise always takes me back to when I first started to reclaim the
steps. The folks from last night left things in pretty good shape. Set up comes next. Deacon James arrives in
tie to help me with the chairs.
Our friends Carman and
Lotte are here this morning. She’s back from Denmark for another performance of
her 14 song cycle about child sexual abuse, The
Girl from Diamond Mountain. She has another Danish friend with her. And
there’s Debra, a woman from the neighborhood.
This is one of my favorite Sundays of the Easter season. Today’s
gospel reading is doubting Thomas. (John 20: 19-31). It’s starts with the
disciples behind locked doors. For fear
of the Jews.(19) Though of course, they were all Jews. Even though they have already had an experience of the
Risen Christ, even though we’re in post-resurrection time, they are still afraid. It is as if they are dead, still in their own spiritual grave.
After Jesus gives them some visual I.D., like the marks on his
hands and side, they rejoice. But it’s not enough. To bring them back to life,
Jesus must breathe into them, must breathe into the them the Holy Spirit. Ruach
in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek. Breath, spirit, all the same. Like God’s spirit
blowing across the water separated the dry land from the sea, brought the first
human to life, breathed life back into Ezekiel’s dry bones, Jesus breathes into
his disciples to bring them back to life. When he says, As the Father has
sent me, so I send you. (21) he’s saying
it’s time to come out from behind those closed doors.
As John R points out, this is John’s Pentecost story.
Sometime later, our friend Thomas enters the scene. He will not
believe unless he sees, touches the
wounds. Hence, doubting Thomas. And
someone says, so that’s where that came from. (It’s also true that since the gospels of John
and Thomas were in some respects rivals, this may have been John dissing Thomas.
John made it in. The Gospel of Thomas
did not.) Jesus is ready to show him the marks and Thomas answers, My Lord and my God!
So here’s what interests me. Jesus is resurrected. You would
think in resurrection, he would be perfect. Made whole and new. And yet the
wounds remain. It is the wounds that identify him as who he is. His experience
on the cross integral to his identity, even in a new life.
Likewise for us. It is our wounds that make us who we are. Even
as we come out from behind the doors we have locked, we need our wounds. Not to
ignore them, cover them over or hope they go away. But to own them and allow
them to be transformed both for the healing of ourselves and others. I look and
see heads nodding around the room.
Debra says that this brings to mind two songs
for her, one is Gillian Welch’s By the
Mark. The other is
Spirit, which just happens to be in our hymnbook, so we open up our books and
sing. John R tells her, you need to come here
every week.
When it’s time for the offering, Andre sings He looked beyond my fault, not
remembering immediately how high that Danny boy tune goes. I wait breathless
and his fine baritone voice reaches up and hits it. And we all say Amen and applaud.
The Midnight Run people left a box of sandwiches
and other food and another with clothing here last night, so we see that they
are distributed.
As I’m leaving, I see the shoes are gone.
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