The most memorable sermon I have ever heard was given by Bishop Lamb on Easter about six years ago. He didn’t use a catchy story. He didn’t use particularly dramatic delivery. He just had a very clear point that still clings to my heart. He said that if we accept the occurrence of the Resurrection, it should make our lives different. The occurrence of the Resurrection means that the force for good we call God has power over death. AND it means that by nature God is bent on using that power in this world, not just in some world “hereafter;” that God is bent on drawing life forth from everything that looks like death to us. If this is so, and the testimony of the Apostles says that it is so, then no travail of this life is of any moment. All suffering is a doorway to new life. Knowing that should transform our approach to everything. We don’t need to be fearful. We don’t need to worry about what we have and what we don’t have. We don’t have to mourn setbacks or disappointments. We don’t have to scramble over each other to be accomplished or acclaimed by the standards of this life. A greater life awaits.
We celebrated all this last week. So, has your life been different this past week? Let me broaden the question. Does your life look different than the person who works next to you, or lives next to you, or exercises next to you at the health club who gives no thought to the Resurrection? Some of you can firmly say, “Yes,” and you are the ones we need to learn from. For most of us, when we try to form the word, “Yes,” in response to these questions, we choke on it a bit, because we know it is not fully true. And Thomas is our best friend. Thomas is our best friend because he spoke up for us. He said for all the world to hear, “This story of the Resurrection is hard for me. It’s hard to swallow. It’s hard to ingest. It’s hard to make a part of my reality.” And because he spoke up, we have a warranty in this Gospel, that when Jesus is beckoned, Jesus shows up. Jesus will show off his wounds; Jesus will show off his living presence to those who plead for a personal experience of the Resurrection.
How do we access this truth? We have something very momentous to learn from Thomas. When we doubt, we tend to hide out, to isolate. We don’t like to come to church at stages when we feel least enthusiastic about the faith of the church, because we feel out of place. Now notice something about what carried Thomas to a personal experience of the Resurrection. He bucked that human tendency. Even though he felt out of place, he still came to the upper room. He stuck with his faith community, and he boldly told them exactly what he was feeling. Do you remember last week when Dean Baker said church is the place where we should be able to take off our masks and be ourselves? Somehow, almost 2,000 years ago, Thomas heard that sermon in his heart. He followed it, and it led him to a personal experience of the Resurrection.
Prayer is the way we ask, like Thomas, to let our own hand feel that God has borne our wounds and our own heart feel God’s living and loving presence in the face of those wounds. Prayer can be very frustrating, primarily because God does not appear to operate on Eastern Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Savings Time, or any known human timetable. When we come together as church and share these frustrations, when we engage one another in Thursday night classes or other settings where conversation can happen, we find that we are not alone. We find that others have encountered the same frustrations, and we also find encouragement from those who can testify that God is still bearing our wounds and still lovingly present to us.
Just yesterday, I received a banquet of encouragement from such testimony. Many of you know that Mary Jo Howes is dealing with the effects of MS. It is a very debilitating condition, and she has not been able to get to church but rarely in recent weeks. She has a chair that she has designated as her holy space, and she sits in it to pray at least four times a day. She told me yesterday, when she demanded her body carry her here to celebrate Harry Katzakian’s birthday, that on one recent morning, her pain was so bad, she didn’t even think she could make it to her prayer chair. She had sharp pains in her side, because her liver is affected. Where she didn’t have pain in her body, she had numbness. These sensations prompted a sense of fear and dread as she felt just how wounded her body is. But almost immediately, the fear was washed away by a much more powerful sensation, a sensation of God’s love surrounding and enfolding her. The sense of God’s love was so powerful that it made her pain seem meaningless. Do you know what that was? That was Jesus showing up, just like he showed up for Thomas. That was a today experience of the Resurrection. Figuratively, Jesus came to Mary Jo just as he came to Thomas and said, “place your hand in my side and know that I have born your wounds. Look me in the eye and know that my love is yet alive.”
You have probably encountered the fact that we can sometimes learn the values of other cultures through language. Asian cultures may have many words for rice, to distinguish different kinds of rice. Heaven does not have two distinct words for “death” and “birth.” It does not, because from the vantage point of heaven, they are the same event. Everything we call death, is for heaven, simply an opening for the creation of new life. And so, instead of speaking about “death” and “birth” as two separate things, heaven just uses one term—“Resurrection.”
May we be drawn ever more fully into the knowledge that “Resurrection” is the truest reality of our existence. May we know this ever more deeply until we are all fully resurrected.