Second Sunday of Easter, Year A
Almighty and
everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant
of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the
fellowship of Christ's Body may show forth in their lives what they
profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
I
suspect that we are all well acquainted with the locked room. It’s the place
where we hang out when we’re afraid, when we’re overwhelmed. The doors and
windows are shut tight, barricaded against anything we feel might threaten us. There’s
no streaming sunlight to inspire us, just the dim gloom of a weak lamp. There’s
no breeze to enliven us, just the staleness of our own hot air. Nothing new
ever enters that room. It’s safe from danger and cut off from hope. Doubt
bounces wildly from one stone wall to the other like a racquetball, sometimes
hitting us upside the head and making it hard to focus. Often we lock ourselves
up in this room with other people. But they’re always people who think just
like we do, who look just like we do. They are “safe people,” people who can
share in our feast of fear. Other times, we wander the world, but keep the four
walls of the locked room around us like blinders. Even when we’re out and about,
going through the motions of a journey, our hearts, souls, and minds are still
closed up tight in that little room.
There
are people who would like to keep us behind the walls of the locked room. They’d
like to keep us uncertain and afraid. For political advantage, or for personal
gain, they expertly lob balls of doubt into the room. In the first century, I
can imagine those in power launching all kinds of distressing ideas about
Jesus.
“He
was crazy, you know,” they whispered. “Thought he was the Son of God and the King of Israel!” Whack, goes the ball.
“I
heard that some women claim that his tomb is empty. Well, my cousin’s neighbor’s
friend saw some women sneaking out of the burial garden last night with a body.
You can’t trust what women say, you know. They’re too emotional. They make
stuff up all the time.” Whack goes
another one.
“Can
you believe that his disciples left their jobs and families to follow this
loser? What a shame. Mark my words, they’ll all end up on crosses, too.” Double
whack.
How those threatening balls of doubt must have
echoed around that room in the days following Jesus’ death. They would
have caused such pain and paralysis to his stunned disciples. I’m not at all surprised
that Thomas had trouble believing that Jesus had been there while he was out. In
the locked room, you can’t even trust your friends anymore.
These
days, we might wonder about the implausibility of resurrection. We might fret
over why God lets bad things happen to good people. I’m not sure, though, that
these are the questions that drive us into locked rooms. These aren’t the
questions that throw our very existence into an uproar. I think that we
progressive Christians have done a pretty good job of learning to embrace our religious
doubt as a part of our faith journey. We encourage healthy questioning and
rational thought. We welcome science. We are proud of our slogan that there’s no
need to check your brains at the door in the Episcopal Church!
If
only that meant that we no longer deal with the fear and paralysis of the locked
room. These days, it seems as if the sowers of doubt are attacking not just Christians,
but also our fellow truth-seekers, the scientists. The recent book and
documentary, The Merchants of Doubt, describes
how paid pseudo-scientists kept us in doubt for years about the dangers of things
like cigarette smoking, sugar consumption, and the chemical DDT. While we
huddled in doubt and indecision, companies made millions of dollars.[1]
As the protesters in the world’s streets this weekend know all too well, these
days, the balls of doubt that are being flung deal with climate change, with environmental
protections, with what news is real and what news is fake, even with the truth
itself.
“There’s no consensus,” the doubt-merchants
proclaim. Whack goes that hard rubber
ball.
“There’s
considerable uncertainty about the data,” they whisper. Whack.
“How sure can we be?” they coax. Another whack.
“You’re
not an expert—how do you know who is telling the truth?” Double whack.
Like
Jesus’ disciples, we don’t know. We’re not experts. We don’t want to hang our
lives on a lie. We don’t want to look foolish. We don’t want to upend our world
for no good reason. We don’t want to risk the consequences of change. So we
huddle inside the gray, airless little room, afraid to take any action greater
than clicking around aimlessly on the Internet, wondering who and what to
believe.
It’s
in the room, however, that Jesus appears to his fearful, doubting disciples—not
just once, but as many times as it takes to reach out to us all. Our walls can’t
keep him out. Neither can our despair or our uncertainty discourage him from
coming to us. Jesus himself is truth. To know truth is to be in relationship
with Jesus. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he promises us. Knowing
Jesus isn’t having the right answers. It is opening ourselves to his presence
with us.
In
Jesus’ presence, we feel frenzy give way to peace. “Peace be with you,” Jesus
says first to the disciples. “Peace be with you,” he says to Thomas. For Jesus,
this is more than a greeting, more than a formality. Remember Jesus’ words at the
Last Supper: “Peace
I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do
not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Peace, shalom, is wholeness. It is completeness
and well-being. It is reconciliation. It is oneness with God and neighbor and
world. The peace that the resurrected Jesus brings with him into the upper room
is reflected in those glorious words from the book of Revelation: “Look and see,
the dwelling place of God is with human beings … God will wipe away every tear
from their eyes … Look and see, I make all things new.” The peace of the
resurrected Jesus is the peace of creation the way that God means for it to be. A creation made new. A creation
ripped from the grasping hands of the merchants of doubt.
In Jesus’ presence, we also feel despair
give way to inspiration. Bishop Jake Owensby points out that the root of the
verb “to inspire” means “to fill with breath.”[2]
When Jesus breathes on the disciples, he’s not just doing some strange ancient
magical act. He’s filling them with new life, with new energy, with God’s
energy. He’s blowing the dust from their minds so that they can think in a new
way. He’s blowing open their hearts so that they can love in a new way. He’s
fortifying them against the merchants of doubt. He’s giving them the strength
to go back out into a hostile, self-seeking world and to live lives of
reconciliation and healing.
The merchants of doubt want to paralyze
and divide. They seek to profit from inaction and confusion and obfuscation of
truth. Their effectiveness depends on their remaining hidden and unknown. Their
effectiveness depends on us remaining asleep in the locked room. They are no
match for the risen Christ. In
the words of poet Christian Wiman, the risen Christ comes “letting grace wake
love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.”[3]
He reveals himself in a human gesture, in the bread and wine, in scripture, in music,
in nature, in community, always bearing his wounds and helping us to recognize
our own. To believe, after all, comes from
the Old English root “to love.” In these difficult days, when you don’t know
where to turn, or who to believe, when the merchants of doubt have you in
confusion, remember the peace of Christ, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Breathe
and reach out your hand in love. Bear your wounds. Revel in relationship. Jesus
promises us that through believing, through living in his love, we will indeed “have
life in his name.”
