April 19, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Touching Place

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
1 John 1:1–5
John 20:19–29

“Reach out your hand.”

John 20:27 (NRSV)

Goodness is stronger than evil;
Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness;
Life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours through the One who loved us.

Desmond Tutu

Well, there is certainly a different feel about church this Sunday compared to last Sunday, Easter Sunday, when there were crowds lining up outside waiting to get in the sanctuary, full to overflow for each of the services. John Buchanan reflected last week that it’s quite common for preachers to take the Sunday after Easter off, perhaps to live into the belief that the church is just as full this Sunday, but they don’t need to see it. He, of course, has taken his own advice and is away. That’s why I’m in front of you this morning, but I must say what a pleasure it is to be here and to be with the faithful gathered on this Second Sunday of Easter. Fleming Rutledge, Episcopal priest and noted preacher, is known to congratulate people for coming to church on this Sunday, Low Sunday. It’s a good reminder to us that Easter is not a day in the Christian calendar, but a season. This is not the first Sunday after Easter, but the second Sunday of Easter, and so we continue to gather and to hear the gospel, to encounter again the resurrection appearances, to sing alleluias and give thanks. So while it doesn’t really feel right that I would congratulate you on coming to church this morning, let us just say, in Mayor Daley’s words, “We’re glad you’re here!”

I was struck this week by the notion of the concept of celebrity and of the celebrity culture in which we live. I’m sure many, if not all, of you have come across the now-ubiquitous Susan Boyle, the Scottish singer on the talent show in Britain who has taken the world by storm. There are rumors of her appearing on Oprah’s couch, I understand, and we are witnessing the power of YouTube and viral electronic media getting into the mainstream media and creating celebrities.

I personally feel rather sorry for this woman. The narrative, it would seem, is that here is someone who’s, in the words of the media, “frumpy or plain,” who goes to church and volunteers there, and yet has a beautiful singing voice. I don’t see where the disconnect is. But there’s Susan now appearing all over the media and tipped to win the talent show that she entered. She, of course, appears to be quite enjoying the celebrity, and I don’t want to take that away from her, but there is, it seems, something in our culture, in our makeup perhaps, or something that is manufactured in which there is some kind of need for stories of ordinary people who seem to do extraordinary things. That seems to be an aspect of this celebrity makeup and culture. I’m struck by another instant celebrity, the sea captain, Captain Phillips, who was rescued from the pirates off the coast of Africa. He arrives home having been rescued and immediately makes it onto the front page of People magazine.

Perhaps my reflections on celebrity are because we have our own celebrity this morning, a celebrity from scripture, an ordinary person who, throughout the tradition of Christianity, has been lifted up as, in some sense, extraordinary. Our celebrity this morning is Thomas, the disciple. He is known as “he twin,” according to John. Christian tradition has dubbed him Doubting Thomas. One of the reasons for Thomas’s celebrity throughout Christian history is that he is a kind of everyman with whom people can identify. Serene Jones, the president of Union Seminary in New York and a noted theologian, writes this about Thomas: “Thomas is the incredulous, nonbeliever who hides inside every believing Christian.” The poet Denise Levertov picks up on this sense of identification in her poem “St. Thomas Didymus” (which means twin). Levertov says he is a twin because he is “my twin.”

When we look at the text, however, we might read against the tradition a little bit and decide that the story that we heard from John’s Gospel is not really about doubt. In some sense it’s not really about Thomas; in a very real sense, it’s about Jesus and about those who will come to believe in Jesus.

The story is set over two Sundays, Easter Sunday and this, the Second Sunday of Easter. On Easter Sunday, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene after she arrives at the tomb and sees that the stone has been removed from the front of it. Before seeing Jesus, she tells Peter and the other disciple, John, who run and find the tomb empty, but they have not yet encountered the risen Christ. Later on that evening, the disciples meet in secret; we are told that they are behind locked doors, that fear is present among them.

Some people have wondered what were they scared about, and others have suggested that they were scared that they might be accused of having stolen the body. Into this place of secrecy and confusion and fear, Jesus comes to them in his risen presence, offers them the blessing of peace, and then by breathing on them, gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, the holy breath. This is John’s account of what we know as Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, who now are not just disciples, followers, but are apostles, messengers of the gospel, commissioned, sent forth to take the gospel out into the world.

However, Thomas is not there with them to experience this, and perhaps not surprisingly, Thomas wants the same experience as they had. There’s almost a sense here not of doubting Thomas, but of jealous Thomas, Thomas being jealous of not having shared the disciples’ experience. And so we get the second installment of our story. We are told that it is one week later. The disciples are still behind closed doors. It is can be rather disappointing for us to think that the disciples who had experienced and rejoiced in the glory of the risen Christ are yet still fearful, still meeting behind doors that are shut to the outside world. But Jesus comes again into their presence and again offers them the peace blessing. Then in this extraordinary encounter with Thomas, Jesus says to him, “Put your finger here,” showing him the wounds in his hands. “Reach out your hand, Thomas,” he says, showing him the wound in his side.

Jesus invites Thomas to touch the wounds of the crucifixion.

Thomas’s response is one of outright belief. Thomas believes, declares, “My Lord and my God.” We should remember that in this, Thomas is not different from the other disciples. He has now had the same experience as the others and has come to the same place as them. This leads Jesus to give the blessing on those “who have not yet seen, but come to believe.”

One of the interesting things for me about the text is that it doesn’t actually tell us whether Thomas touched Jesus. We’re told of Thomas’s response, spoken response, but we don’t know if he actually went forward and touched Jesus. I like to think that he might have, but that invitation to touch is, in itself, so powerful. Touch is an important theme in Jesus’ healing ministry: Jesus often touches the person who is to be healed, or in the example of the bleeding woman, she reaches out to touch the bottom of Jesus’ garment and receives healing from her ailment.

Denise Levertov, in her poem “St. Thomas,” imagines that Thomas touches Jesus. These are Thomas’s words from Levertov:

when my hand entered the unhealed wound
what I felt was not scalding pain,
or shame for my obstinate need,
but light, light streaming into me, over me, filling the room.

There are such echoes of the reading from First John that we heard earlier, an Easter reading: “God is light, in God there is no darkness at all.” I so often think that the meaning of Easter is captured with such power and simplicity in Desmond’s Tutu’s famous words that you have on the front of the bulletin: “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.” It is this light that Thomas experiences in the touch. Some of you may know the famous Isenheim Altarpiece, Grunewald’s masterpiece in which the resurrection panel is a riot of light. You might say indeed that Thomas is “enlightened” by Christ’s touching presence. The room, the secret room, the hidden-away place, the place of fear has become a “touching place.”

Easter, I believe, is a “touching time.”

Peter Miller is a Church of Scotland minister and writer who wrote a reflection on his experience of moving away from Easter being about his own individual salvation and relationship with God to being about something wider. He writes, “I realize that what happened on that first Easter morning was that God and love had transformed all powers of death and darkness into the powers of light and life for all time and for eternity.” He goes on, “Easter is God’s way of telling us that God is not distant, remote, but a God of love and power working in every situation of human experience.” And then he says, and here’s the challenge, “We can never celebrate Easter in isolation from the cries of our world.” We can never celebrate Easter in isolation from the cries our world. We are called to reach out. There’s a beautiful modern hymn written by John Bell titled “A Touching Place” and the refrain goes like this,

To the lost Christ shows his face,
to the unloved he gives his embrace,
to those who cry in pain or disgrace
Christ makes with his friends a touching place.

I believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that the season of Easter, calls us not to be like the disciples and go behind locked doors. We do not come here to gather to get away from the world but to be more deeply engaged in the life of the world, more deeply engaged in the reconciliation of the world.

I have two little personal Easter vignettes to share.

I received an email from a young Muslim woman whom I had met called Hind. Hind, who works for the organization Interfaith Youth Core, had traveled extensively in the UK last year. I asked her if she would share her experiences with me by email, and she did. She sent me the report during our Holy Week. At the end of the message she wrote, “I hope it’s not too early to wish you a very blessed Easter, Calum.” It’s an Easter moment when a faithful believing Muslim can, out of love and sharing, offer that blessing. It was a most extraordinary blessing to receive at Easter.

And then another Easter story by email—a photograph from my friend Bill Shaw in Northern Ireland. Bill was here among us just a few weeks ago. He runs a community organization working for reconciliation in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He sent an Easter photo. It was a photo of a bunch of rough-looking Northern Irish teenage boys standing outside a minivan. They are covered in dirt, having just completed a soccer tournament. The point, Bill said, was that they were from the two different and opposing communities in Belfast but had played not against each other but with each other. Touching places.

Kate McIlhagga, a poet, challenges Thomas and us to come in to the touching place in her poem “Thomas”:

Put your hand, Thomas, on the crawling head of a child
imprisoned in a cot in Romania.
Place your finger, Thomas, on the list of those who have disappeared in Chile.
Stroke the cheek, Thomas, of the little girl sold in prostitution in Thailand.
Touch, Thomas, the gaping wounds of my world.

If we do this, when we do this, we affirm that goodness is stronger than evil, that life is stronger than death, and that in this we are all indeed Thomas’s twin. Amen.