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"Resurrection Territory" John 20:19-31 A Sermon Preached By Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle
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Easter Sunday (2), April 11, 2004 |
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PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY 13214 Phone: 315-446-0960 |
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Our family has been engaged in the last several months in the "college search process." Those of you who have been through it, as a student or as a parent, know that it’s far from an exact science. You gather all the information you can, make your visits, talk it through, make your lists of positives and negatives for each school under consideration - and then, when crunch time comes (right now), you go with your gut (heart). It’s the same with almost every big decision we make in our lives. We can never be completely sure that the decisions we make will turn out to be the right ones. There will always be unforeseen things that happen, many of them beyond our control. The most we can do is to trust the decisions that we make, and do our best to make the most of them. The decisions we make will be tested by the experiences of living them out. It’s the same way with our faith. Faith has been called a "leap" - "the leap of faith." I think it is. We tend to want to reason our way into it, looking, perhaps, for the evidence before we’re really able to recognize it, before we’re able to see it. Thomas said he wouldn’t believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead unless and until he could not only see, but touch him, for himself. Jesus, when he did appear to Thomas, invited him to do just that. It doesn’t say whether Thomas did or didn’t; we only have his confession of faith, "My Lord and my God." And then Jesus said, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." This wasn’t a slam against Thomas so much as it was a pronouncement of blessing upon all of those since who have come to believe. It doesn’t matter that we haven’t seen him. The very first readers of the gospel hadn’t either, and yet the writer of the gospel affirms, that "through believing (we)... have life in his name." I love how Peter Marty approaches this story, through the world of equestrian competition. I know nothing about that world, but Marty says that the most seasoned teachers of the sport will tell you that even the greatest riders face a common obstacle - their own perception. Unless a rider manages to approach the barriers with a certain confidence, anticipating the hurdles, he or she will never become adept at jumping. He shares what one author of a study guide for the sport advises to overcome hesitation: "Take your heart and throw it over the fence. Then jump after it." This is how we are invited to believe, how we are to discover life in the name of our risen Lord - to take our hearts and throw them over the threshold of death into resurrection territory - and then leap after them. We cannot entirely trust our own perceptions in these matters. Or, to put it another way, our own perceptions can only take us so far. We can gather all the information available - the traditions we’ve grown up with, our own experiences, what we’ve read or heard or seen for ourselves - form our own opinions and our own judgments, even decide what we are willing to believe intellectually, and what we aren’t (creeds, doctrines, etc.) - but resurrection life eludes us if we trust more in our own judgments, in our own perceptions, than we do in what lay on the other side. For that you need to throw your heart, and jump. Just as there are many decisions in life that call for us to trust and go with our gut, so there are many hurdles to our faith that call for the same response. Faith isn’t a decision once and for all, but a decision made anew in every situation. For some, faith seems to come easily, while for others it is a continual wrestling with doubt. But faith is always a possibility. It may not be the easiest way; it seldom is - but it is always possible. We don’t always take up that possibility, but it is always there for us. We can all think of occasions or situations where we have refused the decision of faith, refused to make the leap - when we could have said something when we didn’t, when we could have been more brave, when we’ve harbored resentments, or avoided an obvious evil so as to keep ourselves untainted - when we could have jumped, but decided to play it safe. Why are we so reluctant to leap into resurrection territory? What kept the disciples of Jesus that first Easter night behind locked doors? Fear, John tells us, but fear not just that those who killed Jesus would kill them as well. Likely it was also a deeper fear. Maybe they didn’t want to deal with the scorn of others at having failed - failed in their mission, failed even to protect Jesus, despite all their bravado that they’d never let him down. There was likely shame there intermingled with their fear. When we come to know the truth about ourselves, it isn’t always a pretty picture. And so we keep our hearts locked up tight. We’re not what we want to be, not what we often pretend to be. We work to hide it, locking more and more doors to our own heart to try to prevent our true selves from being discovered. We think we’re keeping the world out, when in fact we are keeping ourselves locked in. Jesus came looking for them. He’s no elusive ghost, but the present, living and loving power of God. He walks right through the locked doors of our own hearts to find us. He shows us his wounds from the cross, which are the marks of our forgiveness, and his first word is "Peace be with you." You are forgiven, peace is restored to your troubled soul. You are free. The gospel is always a freedom story. You don’t need to hide, to be afraid, to be ashamed. God is more gracious with us than we are with ourselves. We don’t need to hide behind the reluctance in our hearts. He has freed us to leap after our hearts into new life. And so, he says to all of us, "Stop hiding." Resurrection living is not something you can be convinced is true until you give yourself to it. A minister named Elice Higginbotham has a plaque sitting near her computer that says, "Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching." For her this is a motto for Easter life. In our daily life we always need money. We’re always afraid of getting hurt. Somebody is always watching. We see the evidence all around us, maybe even within us, the tendency to pull back and draw in, to protect ourselves, to remain invisible, to have what is needed. But it can never be enough, because true life, new life, can’t be lived behind locked doors. It is too confining. We live in resurrection time, which calls us to live differently than we have ever lived before. "Work because the work matters," she says, "not the reward you get for it. Love because caring for others is the only way we will survive, and because hope is stronger than death, or rejection, or loss. Dance because you are beautiful, no matter what you look like, and no matter what anyone else says that you are." Friends, we don’t need to have it all "together" for faith to take hold of us. We don’t need some kind of special perception, or have reached a certain level of knowledge that makes us ready for it. It is not we who find our way to the Lord of Life, but the risen Lord who comes looking for us. He comes to bring peace to our troubled souls, but more than that, He gives us his presence and the loving power of God to free us from the tangled mess that keeps us tied and bound, locked behind the doors of our own reluctance, frees us to forgive, to serve, and to love. Jesus did not condemn Thomas for his doubts. Doubt, as Fredrick Buechner describes it, is "the ants in the pants of faith." Faith will not answer all our questions, as if to "believe" is to somehow settle all confusion, stifle all doubt, make us certain of the way we should go. Faith is to leap in trust into resurrection life, into resurrection territory - where great adventures await us, where the only certainty is that the love the world tries so hard to kill has won its victory, so that life will never be the same again - so that we will never be the same again. To the glory of God. Amen.
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| Copyright, Rev. Dr.
Peter W. Shidemantle. All rights reserved. Permission granted for
non-commercial use.
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