April 19, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Sermon

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 4
Luke 24:36–53

Faith says, “yes” in spite of the anxiety of “no.” It does not remove the “no” of doubt and the anxiety of doubt; it does not build a castle of doubt-free security—only a neurotically distorted faith does that—but it takes the “no” of doubt and the anxiety of insecurity into itself. Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself.

Paul Tillich
Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality

Last Sunday, when I arrived at church, I was struck by the realization that Easter had been just one week earlier. To me it seemed as though Easter had been weeks before. And today the feeling is even more so. Easter was just two weeks ago. I once wrote a sermon for the Sunday after Easter that I titled “What Was That About?” because Easter seems to come and go faster than I want it to.

So I was glad that the scriptures this week took me back to the events of Easter—not this past Easter but to that first Easter. Today’s story takes place that first Easter evening, and so we have some time to slow down, to go back and stay in the events of that one day. That first Easter was a jam-packed day. It didn’t end with the events of Easter morning and the women at the tomb. There was so much more that happened. In the morning, after those women had excitedly told what they had seen, Peter ran in and peeked and left the tomb as fast as he had entered, amazed, according to Luke. Just a few hours later, perhaps in the middle of that Easter afternoon (maybe after Easter brunch), Cleopas and another disciple were walking and discussing their puzzlement at what had happened. Their confusion was over the fact that they had so fully believed this Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel. They had no idea what the empty tomb meant and why on earth Jesus’ body wasn’t there. Maybe they were wondering if they had been deceived or had been naïve in believing that this Jesus would redeem Israel or make anything better. Certainly, it didn’t look to them as though any of that had been accomplished.

In John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, the main character, Owen, is small for his age, unusual-looking and unusual-sounding. He is curious and precocious about the Christian faith. One December, he was cast as the baby Jesus in the Christmas pageant. Because he’s so little for his age, he can get away with the part, even though he’s not an infant. And so Owen, as the baby Jesus, can talk while he’s being costumed for the part. During the costuming and preparation for the pageant, he makes a statement about Jesus’ death that leads to a conversation with the rector’s wife, who is costuming him, and with the rector.

Owen says, “I WOULD SAY HE (Jesus) COULD HAVE USED A LITTLE MORE LUCK THAN HE HAD. I WOULD SAY HE RAN OUT OF LUCK AT THE END.”

“But Owen,” Rector Wiggin said, “he was crucified, yet he rose from the dead—he was resurrected. Isn’t the point that he was saved?”

“HE WAS USED,” said Owen Meany, who was in a contrary mood.

(John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, chapter 5)

I’m wondering if those disciples, on their way to Emmaus, wondered if Jesus had been used. Or if the eleven that evening had the same thought. Or perhaps they wondered, What was that all about?
Just a few hours later on that same intense day, after Cleopas and the other disciple found their eleven companions huddled together somewhere and after they had told the story of the resurrected Christ becoming known to them when he broke bread with them, lo and behold the resurrected Christ appears again, this time to all of them.

And it’s still Easter Day. So much had been happening all day long.

The resurrected Christ appears to them, and they think they are seeing a ghost at first. And they are frightened. I imagine them jumping back in alarm. And he says to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?”

“Why are you frightened and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” How about you? Why are you frightened? Why do doubts arise in our hearts?

I don’t know about you, but I periodically find myself doubting. That may upset some of you, because you rely on your pastors for assurance and for proclamation. It might upset others of you, because I know there are some in every congregation who never doubt and the lack of doubt is real for them. But I’m not one of those. There are some days when I wonder about Jesus and wonder about the resurrection and wonder about the story.

David Lose, in his blog, says, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Doubt, in fact, is probably a necessary ingredient to faith. Faith, by definition, is trust in spite of a lack of evidence. Faith is not knowledge. Faith is more tension-filled. It is acting as if something is true even when you have no proof that it is.”

The disciples thought at first that Jesus’ resurrected body was a ghost. Their reaction has made me think about what we do when we try to figure out the meaning of the crucifixion and the meaning of the resurrection. We like to go from the story of the death on the cross, all of the pain and agony, and jump right to the eternal Christ—the God in the heavens. And sometimes I think we imagine this God as a ghost, maybe a friendly ghost, but a ghost nonetheless. We don’t know how to imagine this resurrected Christ, this one who made appearances, this one who is able to stand with the disciples and invite them to see and touch his wounds, this one who can even ask for a piece of fish and eat it right in front of them. We know he is not alive like he once was, but we know this resurrected Christ is not a corpse either. The reports are strange.

Fred Craddock writes that it is important for us to find some kind of identification between Jesus’ lived life and the eternal spiritual Christ. He says if the Jesus who died belongs only to the historical past and if the Jesus the disciples now follow is only the eternal Christ, then something is missed and the Christian life can take on forms of spirituality that are without suffering for others, without a cross, without any engagement in issues of life in this world, all the while expressing devotion to the eternal Christ only. He says that the resurrected Christ in these appearances bears witness to a way of being for others.

His wounds still show. He invites the disciples to touch them and look at them and engage with him. To dispel any notion that this is some ghost, Jesus asks for some fish to eat.

His pierced body shown to them again bears witness to the kind of discipleship that endures scars on behalf of others.

Marjorie Suchocki, a process theologian, writes about the resurrection and points out that the scriptures speak about the results of the resurrection but not the resurrection itself. She likens the event of the resurrection to looking at the sun. If we were to have seen the event of the resurrection itself, we would have been blinded, just the same as if we had looked directly into the sun. But like the sun, the resurrection, according to Suchocki, illumines everything else. The resurrection is the confirmation of all that Jesus revealed in his life and death. The scars, those wounds, are visible when the resurrected Christ appears. The scars still show. They haven’t been sanitized or all cleaned up, even in the resurrection. The evidence of the scars had not been taken away. Instead those scars had been transformed into a new reality. She says, “The resurrection power of God does not annihilate the past, it transforms the past” (Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church, chapter 11).

For those times when any of us wishes that the world would just be cleaned up now, or the relationships in our lives would be wiped away and the struggles would be healed in a moment’s time, or when we yearn for those magic fixes—wishes that Jesus’ death and resurrection would have cured all of the world’s problems at once—it’s good to remember that the resurrected Christ appeared with scars that were still visible, not lost to memory, but instead transformed by the resurrection power of God. That’s the encouragement for all of us in whatever struggles we endure, that the resurrection power of God can transform those struggles into a new reality.

Augustine once preached a sermon that addressed the doubt of the disciples on that first Easter Day and that addresses our doubt, too. He says that we have trouble believing all there is to believe about Jesus. He refers to this as believing in the head, using the metaphor of the body. While we have trouble in believing all there is about Jesus, the head, the disciples had trouble believing the promises of the future—believing all there was to believe about “the body,” Christ’s body going forward., the church. They could see him. They had been able to touch him. They had walked with him. And at the end of that day, he appeared again to them again, and even then invited them to engage with him and touch his scars and put their fingers in his wounds. To top it off, he revealed the entirety of the scriptures to them directly. The disciples could believe in Jesus as the “head,” but they had trouble seeing the future, the body, the church that would be born and played out and lived out over the centuries. Augustine said,

We can see something which was not visible to them while they could see something not visible to us. We can see the church extending through the world today, something that was withheld from them, but Christ, who in his human body was perceptible to them, cannot be seen by us. The sign of the risen Christ helped the disciples to believe in the church that was to follow. The spectacle of the same church helps to confirm our faith in the resurrection of Christ. (St. Augustine, Sermon 116)

We can see the church, the body of Christ extended through the world, and it helps us confirm our faith in the resurrection of Christ. This is what I’ve seen and heard this week. A care team who has functioned since Katrina as support and care for a family we adopted after they had lost everything in that hurricane, arriving in Chicago with absolutely nothing. A young man in his twenties whose father died unexpectedly and who heard about Stephen Ministry, and our ability to assign him a Stephen Minister so he could talk about his loss and grief. There was another meeting with a care team that has provided all sorts of hands-on help for a person with disabilities. But that’s not the best part of their story, because when those care team members spoke, they spoke about the deep love that had grown between each one of them for the person for whom they cared and how much they had received.

I’ve heard about guests at Sunday Night Supper coming each week not only to be fed but to be able to share their prayer concerns with one of our Deacons. And I’ve heard about Presbyterian Disaster Assistance being deployed instantly to the places devastated by tornadoes.

But it’s not just our church and denominational programs and ministries, is it? The body of Christ shows itself in the world whenever the power of love overcomes the power of death. Those events, the power of love overcoming the power of death, transforming wounds into a new reality, are what I consider to be resurrection appearances. And when I connect the dots, my doubts lose their power. Thanks be to God. Amen.