Among Easter people, stigmatic pain precedes strategic planning (sermon from Sunday, April 28, 2019)

Reading: John 20:19-31

The story of "doubting Thomas" is one of the more familiar stories of the resurrection of Jesus -- maybe because it helps us be accepting of our own doubts and questions.

When the other disciples tell Thomas they have seen Jesus risen from the dead, what he needs to know is that it's really Jesus they have seen.  Before his death Jesus warned that people would put forward all kinds of false messiahs, and would try to picture and present him as something he really isn't.  So Thomas needs to know this is really Jesus, and he knows what he needs to look for.

No doubt the temptation to picture Jesus the way we want him to be, and to offer that kind of Jesus to the world, is just as common today.

I like to fix things.  I also don’t like to fail at what I do or what I think others expect me to do.  So when something or someone is broken or hurt in a way I can’t fix I often find myself feeling uneasy and hungry for an easy answer.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Last year – especially through the summer and fall, Japhia was very sick.  She suffers a chronic disorder and week by week, month by month it led her into increasing weakness, malnutrition and fragility. 

Through this time I worked really hard to fix it – fix her and make her better.  I took control of things – more than usual, of her care, our routines, her diet, her meds and her every activity.  I got really naggy, even badgering. 

And when nothing changed or got better, out of my own fear of failure and inadequacy and an inability to accept and live creatively with powerlessness, I fell at different times into one of two ways.  One was to be blaming and angry, and impatient with Japhia for being so sick as though discipline and will-power were all that was needed to make her better.  The other was at other times to just back off completely and withdraw because I couldn’t deal with not being able to change things.

Neither of which, as you might imagine, was helpful to either her well-being or our relationship.

Others too did what they knew to try to make things better.  Through that time – especially during the two or three really terrible weeks in the hospital last summer, Jake and Amy on several occasions offered, and came to pray with Japhia for her healing.  In the hospital, at our house, and at their house at different times and for different stages of ill-health they used the tools and the power they were familiar with, that they counted on to make things better.  And when nothing got fixed, there were difficult feelings and conversations – including questions of doubt and disbelief to work through there as well. 

When I read the story of doubting Thomas (and aren’t we and isn’t much of the world these days in Thomas’s place?) I wonder what it really was that the first disciples most valued about Jesus?  Why they followed him as far as they did?  And why exactly they were so glad to have him back, raised up by God from the tomb?

On one hand, we have such firm and fixed and constantly reinforced notions of the power of God – of divine omnipotence, and the power to bend whatever is wanting to God’s good and perfect will. 

But we really do wonder, then, at the evil in the world.  And even if we don’t, the rest of the world does.  The cruelty of humanity and the increasing evil we have seen ourselves falling into over the past century.  The coming apart of social contracts and global community.  The sufferings of children and of women, of the poor and the vulnerable, and the indifference we allow towards it.  And now clearly the degradation of Earth itself – the unravelling of the very fabric of creation as we have known it.

Not to mention the more personal day-by-day and year-by-year crises in our own lives, the lives of our families, and in the homes of neighbours and strangers all around us.  The sad stories of victims often literally down the street from us that appear more days than not on the front page of The Spec.

How can we, how can our neighbours not doubt the presence, the good will and maybe even the continuing existence of God?  Famously Eli Wiesel in his book on the Holocaust called simply Night relates how in a terrible descent of the dark he saw his God murdered along with a child hanging on a gallows in a concentration camp.  For many others, God – the God who has the power to fix things that need fixing, has been killed more slowly but just as surely by the thousand cuts of daily life and the ongoing, seemingly unfixable disaster we call the modern world or even just our own personal lives.

Is there any hope?  Any good news for people around us to hang their hat on?  Any god of true and universal life to follow, other than that of our own individual survival and personal happiness?

Which is why I wonder about the story of doubting Thomas.  Why they were so glad to have Jesus back, raised up by God from the tomb?  How did they know it was him?  And what did they really feel themselves called to, as they recommitted to following him?

Was the resurrection of Jesus all about God being able to fix things?  Make everything good and heal every ill and every weakness of body and spirit?  And is that why they followed Jesus in the first place – because he was able to channel the power of God in heaven to make everything okay on Earth?

Or was it, perhaps, something else about him, and something else he gave and did?  Was it maybe, perhaps, more simply and more powerfully that he walked among them and with them, right where they were?  That he understood and embraced them as they were?  That he cared about them and cared for them even in their brokenness and imperfection.  That he loved them and touched them – and yes, healed some of them.  But that was the effect, the fruit of something even more fundamental, more primary and more deeply life-changing both for them and for Jesus – which is that in love and compassion, he more simply and deeply identified with them, took on their sorrows and brokenness, and made them his own regardless of what might or might not come of it.  Regardless of what might or might not come of it.

“By his wounds are we healed.” 

“In life, in death, and in life beyond death, God is with us.  Thanks be to God.” 

Coming near and walking with us not just and not always to fix, but always to share and to bear the pain of being human and all that that involves, including all the things we wish could be changed.

Has it ever struck you as odd, for instance, that in his resurrected body raised up by God from the tomb, animated with true, divine and eternal life, Jesus still bears the wounds of suffering and dying?  The piercing of his hands and his side by his enemies?  That these are not healed or undone?  Not fixed, even a week or more later.  Maybe never.

I wonder if this is the God the world needs to see?  If this is the image of God the disciples of Jesus are called to live out, and live into?  If this is what really underneath everything is most attractive and meaningful and redemptive in what we do as disciples and as a church?

So often we imagine that we need to operate from strength.  From a place of power.  So we can fix things for people and make them better.  So we can make our plans, organize our assets, and minimize the chances of failing. 

But is there another way that we naturally follow as children of God when we don’t stop to think of it?  And that maybe it would do us good to do more intentionally and consciously?

To see passion, not power as the basis of our mission and our following of Jesus?  To let compassion rather than calculation be the way we decide what to do and where to spend ourselves.  To be attentive not so much all the time to our assets and plans and strategies for doing what we think we can succeed at, but more simply to be open to the pain and sorrow of the world around us, let it speak to us and call us, and then go out to walk as best we can with those who suffer.  Feeling with them what they feel.  Suffering with them what they suffer.  Letting ourselves be wounded as they are wounded.  Regardless of what may or may not come of it.

Japhia and I watched a delightful little movie the other day in which one of the characters at one point realizes that you know you’re really an adult when you allow yourself to fail at something you really care about. 

I wonder if this means as well that we know we are mature children of God – real human beings on the face of the earth, when we allow ourselves to be hurt and wounded by caring about things we can’t entirely fix or make better.  And if that’s the mission, the calling that the resurrected, wounded, redeeming son of God has for us.

We already do it in so many ways as individuals and as a church.  And the more the world sees that in us – the more others see this way of life and of God and of Jesus being lived out through us, the more they may find themselves able to say like Thomas, “My Lord and my God, I believe.”