Responding to the Resurrection: "Waiting Till Our Miracle Happens"

Sermon, 4/11/10 (Easter 2). We often hear of Doubting Thomas – the disciple brought around to believe in Jesus as Lord only by seeing the crucifixion wounds in his rabbi’s hands. We hear less of how the earliest Church – the other disciples in this story – took Jesus’ first post-resurrection teachings about peacemaking and forgiveness and applied them directly to their treatment of Thomas. The pastor shares this here … as well as two powerful contemporary stories of radical hospitality …

Scriptures      Psalm 150 (canted)      John 20:19-31

Responding to the Resurrection:

Waiting Till Our Miracle Happens

Prayer: Let us, even in this hour, take you up on your dare, O God. Let us take you up on your dare to hear your story into the speech of our lives. That the miracle of the resurrection experience of Thomas – and especially of that first church – may be ours, as well. Ours, which we are charged to bring to Thomas – to so many we would cast out – to those we make outcast.

And may nothing I share today be what these good folk – your disciples – have heard before, or at least in quite the same way … that your word of light and life resurrected may never find a tomb in its hearing …

The title of today’s Witness may sound to some like fundamentalist boilerplate. Or one of Marianne Williamson’s wildly popular sequels to her New Age volume A Course in Miracles.

Actually, I borrow the phrase from the spiritual path that returned me to my Christian roots: Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s a phrase I’ve heard in AA meetings across the country, shared most often with newcomers who stumble into what we call “the program” with seemingly no hope remaining in their lives. “Stick around,” veteran AAers will say. “Wait till your miracle happens.”

Sometimes the wait can seem long – so very, very long. And, at turns, very suspenseful.

In John’s gospel today, neither was the case for the ten disciples – all male, the first century women being seen but not generally heard, Judas now gone … and just where was Thomas? These ten experience their miracle rather quickly and certainly unexpectedly on the heels of Easter.

In fact, it is the evening of the resurrection, we are told, when Jesus appears to them for the first time. Crisis breeds the spirit of community, and this had been no exception. On the lam from the political authorities, they experience Jesus’ communal huddle among themselves, and in the midst of their turmoil of fear he commissions them to a turmoil of faith. He commissions them to become one thing: Peacemakers. Reconcilers. A sanctuary.

Wherever he was, when he returns, Thomas does not believe what the others had experienced. For Thomas himself had not experienced the communal transformation miracle, from wounded huddle to wounded healers.

Not yet. End Act I. And we all know what happens in Act II.

But wait. What happens during intermission? “A week later (Jesus’) disciples were again in the house,” we are told, “and Thomas was with them.”

Why? Why was Thomas still with them? Why would he stick around? More importantly, perhaps: Why would the rest of the disciples allow him to hang around? He could turn them in. At the very least, Thomas – now an outsider to their Easter experience – could give them away.

Ah, but remember: The commission. Jesus’ commission. To be peacemakers. To be reconcilers. “Peace be with you,” he had said to them. “If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

To whom are they retained? To Thomas? I don’t think so. To themselves? Probably.

In the mid-1980s, the Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force for Central America was infiltrated by a federal government spy. You see, the home and meeting place for the Task Force, Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, had publicly declared itself the first Sanctuary church in the country in March 1982. A Sanctuary church meant it would provide a sanctuary – i.e., a safe place – for the recent flood of thousands of Central American refugees fleeing the U.S.-sponsored dictatorships in their homelands.

I worked for two years at Southside and at the Task Force as a seminary intern a decade later. And so I have heard the story of the federal spy quite often.

Several were suspicious of the man who identified himself as Jesus Cruz. Interesting name, Jesus Cruz: means “Jesus Cross” in English. He showed up at the open meetings – public sanctuaries, after all, have nothing to hide – but he did not seem to fit in. He did not do hands-on work with the refugees, as so many of the others did. He came to the meetings, and he left.

And, as it turned out, he left with numerous tape recordings he had made of the conversations that took place in those meetings. And based on those taped conversations of meetings held in a church, eleven persons – clergy and lay, Protestants and Catholics alike – were indicted. And eighteen months after that, they were all convicted of conspiracy felonies. Thanks to political pressure upon the judge who convicted them, none of the felons received prison time – including the church’s pastor: my eventual internship mentor and, later, a Moderator of our denomination’s national General Assembly. And later, a class action suit filed by numerous Protestant and Catholic bodies on behalf of Central American refugees was settled that vindicated the efforts of these eleven.

“Guilty of the Gospel”, the monthly magazine Sojourners trumpeted on one of their covers, in an issue dedicated to these eleven courageous witnesses. For they and the host of other Sanctuary workers could have kept the church doors shut. They could have kept them shut from refugees knocking on them at all hours of the day, if they hadn’t already died in the desert just a few miles away. They could have kept the church doors shut, and the refugees seeking political asylum could have been rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and returned to their home countries – many of them, too many, to a certain death from the dictatorships there. They could have even kept the church doors shut from Task Force interlopers – fellow travelers, if you will – and turned away suspicious folk such as Jesus Cruz.

Naïve, these Sanctuary workers? Perhaps. Foolish? Maybe. As the Apostle Paul would say: Fools for Christ.

For the Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force for Central America understood its commission to be the same as the first disciples. A commission to be peacemakers always in doing justice, and in doing justice always to be peacemakers. A commission that said the means must be consistent with the ends. Let us not play the government’s shell game, the Task Force said. If we desire open American reconciliation with the Central Americans who have so terribly suffered because of our government’s support of their dictatorships, let’s be as open about the Sanctuary process as possible. To refugees and government spies alike.

And so it was with the very first church. Here we have Thomas – a refugee? a spy? who knew anymore? – with these disciples of a new and open reconciliation. Here he was: “a week later”. A whole week they taken him in, an “unbeliever” in their midst, while they remained on the lam from the powers-that-be. Look at what they risked.

And look at what they – and what Thomas – ultimately gained. Jesus returns – again. His spirit returns – again. Again: “Peace be with you.”

And Thomas’ miracle happens. And the disciples, watching Thomas and his wounded soul be healed by Jesus’ re-incarnational appearance here (note that word!), witness their first peacemaking miracle happen, as well.

A week later. A lengthy, suspenseful, fearful, locked-up week later. Waiting … till their miracle … of faith community … happened.

The miracle of a community receiving the outcast. The refugee who may be a spy. The “unbeliever” who may never believe. Receiving him regardless. No exceptions.

The miracle of hearing, truly hearing, Jesus into speech: “Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

To whom are they retained? Not Jesus Cruz. Not Thomas. To whom are they retained? The inhospitable ones. The faith community.

Us.

Thanks to our glut of visual media – not to mention our constant access to such – we are bombarded with one “miracle”, one sensational event, after another. Extraordinary moments for which we so deeply thirst, in our careful and calculated and well-ordered lives.

But real miracles do not generally proclaim themselves as such. They generally do not scream out to us on reality shows, across our web sites, or our newspapers on our porch steps. They do not enter our lives by our front door.

But, they do happen. In the world. And in us, and to us, and among us. If we but take the biblical story seriously as our story, they occur when wounded souls such as Thomas feel safe enough to hang around a welcoming place long enough to touch the wounds of Jesus in their midst. Wounds they may know as their own.

Safe enough – in a safe place – in a sanctuary – for their miracle, and ours, to happen.

Yet sometimes, that safe place we provide can feel like a hostile place to those who may not understand our hospitality. Who may not understand our commission of peacemaking from the resurrected Jesus. Who may not get it yet …

Allen Knight Chalmers was a professor of preaching at Boston University School of Theology. He was deeply involved in the civil rights movement – activity going back to the 1930s, when he helped to free the Scottsboro boys. While at Boston University, he was president of the NAACP legal defense fund, and hence was involved in civil rights struggles throughout the United States. Often on the weekend, he would go off to some troubled place to see what could be done.

In those years, Chalmers had a black student in one of his classes he was unusually close to. And they loved each other very much.

The black student was from Alabama, and wanted to go home one Christmas for the holidays. His wife was pregnant – well along in the pregnancy – but she checked with her doctor. And the doctor indicated it would be all right for her to go home with him, if they would take it easy on the way down and not rush coming back to Boston.

The trip home to Alabama was fine. They had a wonderful time visiting family and friends. And when they came back, they were somewhere in North Alabama and she was having very sharp contractions. At least that’s what she thought.

They began to rush to find a hospital. The first hospital they went to told them that they did not serve colored people. And so they were then frantically searching trying to find a hospital that would take them.

By the time they found a hospital, they had lost the baby, and the mother very nearly died.

When that student got back to Boston University, he was a cauldron of fury. And he would have absolutely nothing to do with Allen Knight Chalmers, though they had been such warm friends.

When Chalmers would meet him in a hallway, the young man would turn on his heels and walk away. Chalmers had made phone calls, had tried to see him – all to no avail.

One day while Chalmers was in his office, he glanced down the hallway and could see the young man coming up that hallway, toward his office. The young man had not seen him, and so the professor stepped back into his office and waited for him to get immediately in front of his door. When he did, Chalmers – a big man – reached out and grabbed him and yanked him into his office, and just hurled him across the room to the other wall.

And then Chalmers shouted at him, “Listen! You’ve got to talk about this. You’ve got to talk, and you’re going to talk now! You’re not leaving this office unless you go right over me!”

The young man responded at first with something that sounded like a growl – and then it became a shout. He said, “God … damn … you. God … damn … YOU. If it weren’t for you, I could hate every white man on the face of this earth!”¹

I often wonder where the people who are marginal in the world – where the people who are poor – where the people who are outcast – and you may be any one of these yourself -- can find those that they can trust. Is it you? Is it me? Can it be the church?

Wait with them – please. Wait with them, till their miracle – which is our miracle – happens.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

¹As told by Tex Sample in the Living the Questions 2.0 DVD series.

Prayers of the People (partial) …

We lack the strength, O God.

We lack the courage.

We lack the healing.

And yet: You do not.

And because you do not, you come to us with wounds outstretched and say, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

And then you say, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

These lessons, Lord –

All these lessons: of peace, of reconciliation, of forgiveness –

All these lessons, on the very night after that first resurrection occurred –

All these lessons are sealed by your commissioning of us:

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

We are called to incarnate the way of peace – of reconciliation – of forgiveness you have made re-incarnate in your crucified self.

Your crucified self … who waits by our door, watching … wondering … doubting … whether it can find a home here.

Or at least a shelter from its enemies – internal and external.

Or at least a safe place …