Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 30, 2008 Sunday worship service.

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It is Easter night. And it is amazing: Jesus does not appear in the temple before thousands, nor does he come laughing at his tormenters and crucifiers in order to rub in the truth that they were dead wrong. Of all places, he makes an appearance in the privacy of a home, behind a locked door, to those who had just two days before abandoned him -- to that band of women and men who have been going through a veritable gauntlet of emotions these last few days.

To think: this is it. Everything hangs now on this small cadre of followers and their response to the wild-eyed testimony of Mary Magdalene. For that is how it was when we left here Easter morning –

Mary running back to announce to the disciples: “I have seen the Lord.”

Imagine with me: It is evening, dark outside, and inside that cramped room a single lamp is burning. The disciples are gathered around the table, speaking in whispers, when one of them looks up and sees someone standing beside the door. There is a sharp intake of breath, then silence, as the figure moves toward the table and into the circle of light. “Shalom,” he says, showing a familiar face, holding up a wounded hand; as he waits for the truth to sink in, the disciples let out their collective breath in one joyful gasp . . . . (James C. Somerville)

“Peace be with you.” Twice he says those words. Perhaps he hoped repetition would bring recognition through vocal familiarity; on the other hand, there has been much hostility towards Jesus, especially in John’s narrative of his ministry, and Jesus now wants to verify that his peaceful presence stands over against the hostility of the world.

The disciples are afraid, and it seems plausible that the reason they don’t recognize him at first is because fear can warp vision. The earliest account we have of Easter is in Mark’s Gospel, and that Gospel ends, not with the appearance of Jesus as he shows his wounds and offers words of assurance and encouragement, but the first Easter in memory of the Church, preserved by the first Gospel, is that the women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (mark 16:8). Fear was literally the last word, and maybe that is closest to the truth of how it actually once was.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself’ (quoted in Leaving Church, Taylor). I feel for the disciples, caught as they are between crucifixion, which they know really happened, and the resurrection which they are still trying to figure out. Think of their guilt; their remorse and self-pity; think of them hiding from the authorities and wondering how widespread was the rumor that one of them had stolen his body; think of them trying to piece together the words he once spoke about rising, words that now, in the shadows of that dimly lit room, suddenly might mean something. . . the human heart in conflict with itself. Is this a ghost? A spirit conjured up by the intensity of their own grief? A test of their faith?

Since John writes so much later than the other evangelists, perhaps he knows the heart’s truth about conflict, the truth that fear and the practice of resurrection cannot long live together. And so John has Jesus stepping right through the locked door and entering right into the quagmire of his followers’ fear, vulnerability, and in the case of Thomas, doubt, which is where disciples always live -- trapped in our shame, paralyzed by our failures, limping along with our doubts.

The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her memoir, Leaving Church about one more church fight that finally led her to seek employment elsewhere. Some people in her congregation and denomination were turning private fears and worries over human sexuality into a painful ecclesiastical debate about ordination standards, and about various other litmus tests to secure orthodox belief. And she had reached her limit.

She writes, “Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church [in the first place] were not the believing parts but the beholding parts . . . Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy . . Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world . . . Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . . Christian faith seemed to depend on beholding things that were clearly beyond belief. [Sadly, she concluded], the poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent” (p.109).

My thesis is that you could dig into any issue that divides or threatens to harm the Church or any congregation, and at root you would find fear. That’s why scripture so often features the visitation of angels, who say at the critical moment: “Fear not.” Fear. It seems to take an almost supernatural intervention to convince us otherwise.

Fear is powerful, and fear of the unknown and unprecedented is perhaps the most powerful fear of all. Yet, Easter asks us to step outside the room of our well-intentioned emphasis on correct belief, stretching ourselves to behold the miracle and powerful dynamic of a robust relationship with the living Lord.

Whatever you make of Easter as historic fact and spiritual metaphor, Jesus comes to deliver his disciples from fear. And once Jesus has freed them from the shackles of fear, the stage is set for something momentous to happen.

These very ones practicing fear by cowering behind a closed door in John’s Gospel are invited, (no that’s too soft of a word) they are commissioned to take on the office and ministry of Jesus himself. They (that is, dare I say, “we”) are to stand in the place, in the stead, of Jesus himself, occupying his position, his role: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Can you imagine the contemporary implications of such a commissioning and how our embrace of this commission might bring a seismic shift to our priorities in the Church?

Send/sent, with its connotations of going out into the world for mission activity, is one of John’s favorite verbs. And what are these “sent ones” to do and to be doing? Jesus announces that they are given the authority to pronounce forgiveness, or to not pronounce it. God and the effectual power of Christ’s cross remain that which produce forgiveness, but Jesus entrusts to his followers this missional obligation to bear the message and to voice the language of God’s mercy and pardon. What we don’t get in this commissioning, notably, are any clear parameters, any rules for guiding us in such a weighty vocational undertaking, but what an incredible gesture: the risen Jesus entrusts us with his own ministry of forgiveness!

Forgiveness – it’s probably not the Christian activity that springs first to mind when we think of missionaries, mission trips, mission giving, mission work. But there it is, and therein lies the purpose for which we go forth as an Easter people. The antidote to fear is forgiveness; forgiveness takes us outside ourselves into new forms of interchange with others; forgiveness lays the foundation for a new beginning and new relationships.

In John’s gospel, Easter coincides with Pentecost. Jesus appears, breathes, sends, commissions -- all in one burst of holy energy. There is no waiting 50 days for the Holy Spirit to come, as in Luke-Acts, but here there is an immediacy of mission activity; commissioned disciples are to fling wide the door of their fear so that pain and hurt, all enmity and desire for revenge, all pride in self can receive the healing word of pardon and reconciliation.

I used to think that the most audacious claims spoken by Jesus were contained in the Sermon on the Mount, with its radical social message about “turning the other cheek,” “giving away your cloak,” “being meek,” “becoming peacemakers.”

But John’s word about the spirit/breath of Jesus and the commission given disciples has me wondering just how this missionary directive of Jesus in John might truly have the power to change the world. I know: there’s been much ecclesiological debate about who gets the authority to pronounce or withhold forgiveness – is it only a priestly prerogative or something more widely enjoyed by all disciples?

But what if it does belong to us all? and what if we could simply say a word of forgiveness to the other in the family, the church, the school, the marketplace, the political arena, in international affairs, breaking clean of all the conflicts and angst we so constantly rehearse and endure, thereby releasing much of our life’s energy for other, more noble purposes? The pastor and theologian Lewis Smedes once wrote, “When you forgive you set a prisoner free. And then you discover that the prisoner was you.” (citation lost). That’s the paradox and the power of this commission given by Jesus to each of us

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you. . . .Receive the Holy Spirit.”– an astounding piece of good news and invitation that we enter into the practice of resurrection.

John says that Jesus breathed on his disciples that first Easter night. It’s a curious image, isn’t it? but it crystallizes the high point of this post-resurrection drama. The very presence, the biological life-force animating Jesus, his breath, is now being preserved through transferral to his followers. There are, in fact, instances in the early church that the breath of saints and other holy persons was sometimes captured in leather bags, preserved for its supernatural healing powers. How much more numinous and powerful would be the breath of one who had come back from the dead!

John’s use of breath and spirit takes us back to the original creative act in Genesis when the first human was formed from dust and then experienced the Lord God filling his nostrils with the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The Jesus community, filled now with his breath, is hereby being created anew, just as our first parents received that primal breath from God in the Garden. With his breath, his life-spirit within them, Jesus sought to ensure that his disciples would embody an essential part of him even after his ascension.

What will this Jesus community look like is the question that John leaves us to ponder. Thomas, the so-called doubter, has routinely gotten our theological and devotional attention, maybe even reproof, but who could blame him for wishing to have a personal experience of the risen Lord, as the others had?

The inclusion of Thomas in the story is a good reminder that Jesus doesn’t forget someone just because they don’t happen to be at home when Jesus makes an appearance. Jesus goes out of his way and comes back for this one person. There are multiple ways of beholding Jesus and coming to faith, and the Jesus community, at its best, will seek to honor the various paths and choices people will make as they seek Jesus and as he seeks them.

Moreover, Thomas’s search for a tangible faith reminds us that his questioning, probing demeanor did not prevent him from enjoying full fellowship in the Church, for obviously, John could have omitted this little vignette about the desire of Thomas to see and touch, with its suggestive perspective that doubters have a place, too, in the Church. Faith is not, for all, the same experience, neither is it generated, for all, with the same kind and degree of evidence.

Because of the incarnation of Jesus, because he appears and appears again with his wounds fully exposed, for all to see and for all to touch, we, like Thomas and all the rest, can rise to new life and new faith, for God keeps coming among us, experiencing and loving our humanity.

We only need practice resurrection ourselves, and realize the good news that, by believing and by beholding, we may have life in the name of Jesus.

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Let us pray. O God, in Jesus you have shown us that perfect love casts out fear. Renew our confidence in your power to resurrect us, so that by the power of Christ’s rising, we may have life and life eternally. And now, we are bold to pray together the prayer Jesus gave his community, saying, “Our Father . . .

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Let us go forth on this day, this day of the new creation, to live as God’s Easter people. In the face of whatever fear we face, Jesus says: “Peace be with you.” As we wonder what should be our task, we hear the commission of Jesus and receive the breath/spirit of an Easter Pentecost: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you . . .Receive the Holy Spirit.” As we face honest doubts and faith’s probing questions, we remember the wounds of the incarnate Jesus, and we behold the mystery of the Word made flesh, responding in amazement with Thomas and all the rest, “My Lord and my God.”

And now may the grace of Jesus the Christ, the love of God the Father, and the Breath of the Spirit, be and remain with you, now and always. Amen.