Sunday, April 28, 2019 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

An Honest Meeting

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 150
John 20:19–31

The continuing miracle of Easter . . . [is] that you and I may rise from the death in which we now find ourselves and become in our ordinary lives beings of extraordinary witness to Christ so that . . . we may give something that the world needs: power and the love of the risen, living Savior Jesus Christ. That is the vocation of ordinary people, and it happens to people just like ourselves.

Peter Gomes, Sermons

I want you to think about something for a moment. Last Monday morning, when you woke up and got ready for school or for work or to go through your list of daily chores, when you opened up the newspaper or logged on online, did it still feel like Easter to you? Were you still humming Alleluias and proclaiming “The Lord is risen!”?

Or when the alarm went off last Monday morning and you got up to face the world, had the Easter shine already worn thin? Did you catch yourself plunging headfirst back into the reality of a 253-person death toll from the church bombings in Sri Lanka, or the constant commentary about the Mueller report, or, as of last night, the news of yet another act of hate in another synagogue perpetrated by another white man who holds the ideology of white nationalism? Did you feel like Easter, even though it had just been announced on Sunday, happened so long ago? Instead of feeling like an Easter person, did you feel a growing sense of discontinuity between your Sunday worship and your Monday life?

On that first Easter evening, the disciples were certainly stuck in a growing sense of discontinuity, one mixed up with great fear. Things with Jesus had been going so well up until that week. His entrance into Jerusalem had been picture perfect—a wonderful counterprotest to the imperial parade. But by Friday, he was dead. Nailed to a cross. Put into a tomb. And in this Gospel of John, even after Mary Magdalene testified to the other disciples about seeing the risen Jesus face-to-face, they were still not convinced. They were so deep into the pit of despair and chaos that they could not believe her proclamation. So they hid out behind locked doors.

One of Fourth Church’s friends, Walter Brueggemann, penned a phrase for the disciples’ kind of spiritual pit. We have talked about it before. He calls it a place of disorientation (Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, p. 18), a place of chaos and disorder. We move into this place, into this Pit, because of experiences like a job loss or a bad diagnosis or being bullied at school or a relationship failure. Sometimes we are plunged into the pit by something as simple as a cross word, a sharp criticism, or a minor setback. And still other times, we move into it because of what we see in the news about our world or our nation.

In other words, we fall into disorientation whenever we realize the world of Monday morning looks drastically different than the world of Easter Sunday. This is not just an adult phenomenon. As I read through the faith narratives of our confirmation class, I noticed quite a few of them also give voice to a sense of being in their own pits of disorientation, sensing their own Mondays that feel so far away from Easter Sunday.

Perhaps it is helpful to remember that this place of the Pit, this place of disorientation, is not simply a post-modern experience. We find this experience of disorientation all throughout scripture. Job lived in it. The prophet Jeremiah wrestled with it. The psalms of lament are full of it. Even Jesus himself cried out from the Pit on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, “The Importance of Doubting Your Doubts,” A Chorus of Witnesses, ed. Tom Long and Cornelius Plantiga Jr., p. 113).

That night, that Easter evening, the male disciples joined their biblical ancestors in the Pit, that place of disorientation. They were there because they had believed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah but then he died and nothing made sense anymore. Nothing, that is, until they saw him, their risen Lord, just as he promised, just as Mary Magdalene had told them. As John reports, they saw him with their own eyes and with their own hearts. A new way of being, an Easter way of being, was given to them, and they all rejoiced; they all felt whole again.

Almost all. By the time Thomas reenters the story, he realizes the other disciples had already received what they needed from Jesus. They had already received his breath, his commissioning, his peace. Their time of disorientation was over. But Thomas’s wasn’t. He had been out of the room when Jesus appeared to his friends, and he did not experience the risen Jesus for himself. Without that experience, Thomas realized he could not believe the testimony of his friends. He found himself still down in that pit of chaos and disorder.

Yet honestly, on this second Sunday of Eastertide, I am glad that Thomas was still in that Pit. But I am even more appreciative that he talked about it. Thomas was perfectly honest about how he felt and his struggle to keep the faith. The truth is that he did not have to be that honest. He could have pretended that he believed the testimony of his friends. He could have gone through the motions of faith and just acted like everything was OK. He could have put on his good church face, so as to not upset everyone else’s good mood.

But for whatever reason, thank God, Thomas refused. Rather, he looked at everyone’s Easter faces and said in a straight tone, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Thomas laid it all out there, for all to see. He made the brave decision to hide nothing from his friends or from his God.

We have something to learn from Thomas and his unflinching honesty, his refusal to believe without fighting for it. Frankly, I find his witness of struggle wonderfully freeing. I hope our confirmands do too. For on this past Monday morning, after the Easter shine had faded and I realized life continued on, I found myself asking, “What on earth is going on in this world, in our country? Why does it always look like Good Friday is still in charge?”

You must have those moments too, right? Surely every once in a while on a Sunday morning you find yourself walking into worship, gritting your teeth and internally saying, “Here we go. I don’t think I can believe today, but I am just going to smile my way through.” I imagine the great majority of us experience moments like that, which is why I am always glad to spend time with our brother Thomas.

The witness of Thomas and others in our scripture shows us that being completely forthright about our sense of disorientation and deep struggle for faith is OK. Actually, let’s take that a step further: their witness of struggle shows us it is not just OK, it is also faithful. Frankly, I believe their witness shows us that that kind of honesty, that kind of deep struggle, might even be necessary in order to fully live as resurrection people.

Remember what Presbyterian preacher Frederick Buechner has said: He claims that if you do not have doubts, you are either kidding yourself or you are asleep. It is near impossible to go through life with eyes wide open without experiencing moments of disorientation. Life is not whole yet. We live in a world where evil still exists—what happened yesterday in California is yet one more example—and where suffering and pain continue to hold court. So if we find that we never struggle or wrestle for faith, we might wonder if we are kidding ourselves or asleep.

But Buechner also writes something else about doubts. He writes that doubts are ants in the pants of faith. They keep us moving. They keep us awake. They keep us from getting lazy without faith. When we are honest about our painful times of disorientation, when we refuse to spend all of our energy denying that is how we feel, those moments of wrestling and struggle can become, in time, life-giving and faith-defining.

Thomas would testify to that experience. Some of our confirmands would say the same. He laid it all out clearly—without flinching, without hiding, without shame. And look at what happened. Jesus came to him, held out his hands, and met him where he was—right there in that Pit, in that struggle, in that wrestling match. Notice that Jesus did not scold him and say, “How dare you not believe.” Instead, he held out his hands and said, “Peace, Thomas. Touch my wounds. Move from unbelieving into believing.”

Thomas was brutally honest about his struggle to believe and to trust, and our risen Lord met him in that struggle. Though we do not know whether Thomas followed through with touching the wounds, we do know that something happened, because immediately after Jesus met him where he was, Thomas cried out with the strongest faith confession of any of them: “My Lord, and my God.” He moved from being fear-shaped, Good Friday-shaped, into being hope-shaped, Easter-shaped.

That move is part of the biblical promise. We find the same move in the psalms of lament. Near the end of each psalm, you always encounter a sudden move to newness, and you can never explain it. Something happens in the space between the paragraphs of prayer. To the reader, those words come as a complete surprise. How did they get from “My God, why have you forsaken me” to “In the midst of the congregation I will praise you” we might wonder.

Yet I can tell you from my own life, and maybe some of you could say the same, that when we are willing to be honest and up-front with God about where we are struggling or where we are more fear-shaped than not—if we are honest and unflinching about that—then we are always much more ready to receive God when God meets us in that place and breathes on us God’s spirit of peace, renewing our hope, giving us courage to keep on. Though sometimes it takes a long time for that moment of meeting to happen, it always does. Even when we don’t think we will find God, God will always find us.

And when that happens, we will end up standing in a new place, with a new orientation, grounded in Easter hope, practicing resurrection. Like Thomas, we too will be aware that we did not bring ourselves to that place of newness. Rather, we will know that we have been brought to that new place of hope by the Risen One, who is more than willing and more than able to meet us precisely where we are, believing or disbelieving, in order to help us become whom he calls us to be. This is the resurrection relationship to which we are all invited—all invited by the Crucified and Risen One who meets us wherever we are, sees us for all of who we are, and loves us fiercely into our Easter future, never giving up on us, never letting us go. Amen.