It was still the first day of the week. That evening, while the disciples were behind closed doors because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.” 22 Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.”
24 Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.” 26 After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” 28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” (Common English Bible)
“Reconnecting with a
Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Two
One
of the best storytellers the church has is the author and novelist Karen Spears
Zacharias, who, in her 2006 book Where’s
Your Jesus Now: Examining How Fear Erodes Our Faith, conveys this story
(truncated here for time) about growing up in the church and attending a Bible
study on Revelation:
I was preparing for my
freshman year at high school…Like most girls that age, I was anxious about my
future…That anxiety reached a fever pitch when I was invited to join a youth
Bible study group, sponsored by Grace Baptist Church. I’d been attending the
church on my own most of the summer…For two weeks in late summer, the youth of
Grace met at a picnic table under sap-scabbed pines at a state park as our
youth pastor led us in a chapter-by-chapter study of Revelation. It wasn’t long
after that study ended that the nagging nightmares began.
Insomnia set in. I was
plagued by an overpowering sense of imminent doom. I grew scared of my own
shadow…For the rest of that summer and throughout much of the next few years, I
was on locust alert. All owing to my own diligent study of the Word…
No doubt, I’d still be
cowering under an umbrella on sunny days if I hadn’t come face-to-face with God
under the hood. Cautiously, at first, then with more daring, I pressed in,
demanding to know, c’mon, God, who are you really? Thankfully, he was nothing
like what I had envisioned him to be.
The
things we are told as children about God can make or break our connection to
God and our relationship with the church. Treat such a sacred and profound
responsibility with the care and love it demands, and it makes the walking in
Christ’s footsteps for a lifetime immeasurably easier. For it is not as though
the church being derelict with that responsibility makes it impossible for a
child to love God, but it can take a far more conscious effort, and that is an
effort we must be ready to give.
This
is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes
us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the
pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it
from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or
otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers
permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church
hurts.
If
that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a
sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a
better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet
so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to
us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can
actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have
before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on
being better and doing church together.
We
began this series last week with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree
Grows in My Bedroom,” and this, then, is an excerpt from her second chapter, “Finding
Shalom:”
I’ve been tempted to
abandon God altogether; yet, I stayed.
Why didn’t I leave the
spiritual life? Why didn’t I flee and embrace atheism? Was I like an assaulted
spouse who remained inexplicably bound in a relationship that caused brutal
pain?
I wasn’t afraid to ask
the questions or deal with the consequences if I eventually found religion
unbearable. It’s just that when someone complains of religious wounds, we’re
often told to quit going to church and disconnect from spiritual practices. No
doubt this works for some people, but others see the world through an
irremovable religious lens. Asking us to stop believing and practicing would be
so unnatural that it would cause certain blindness. It would be like
demolishing a musician’s piano, breaking an artist’s brushes, or denying an
engineer’s numbers. Some of us have a spiritual or theological orientation, and
to eschew that would make us incomplete. Like the wise man at that party, we’ve
found that we need to make amends with our past rather than severing it.
Making
amends with the past involves making peace with our present, for it is by our
past that we arrive at our present. It is hardly ever easy—amends for deep and
lasting wounds seldom are, which is why it is so deliberately approached in the Twelve Steps—but it is so very necessary to the process of finding
shalom, a Hebrew word that literally means ‘peace.’
Consider,
then, the greeting that Jesus gives to His disciples in this post-resurrection
appearance of His in John 20: “Peace—shalom—be with you!” These are followers
of His who have just endured horrific spiritual and emotional anguish at the
death of their teacher and Messiah, and even though Jesus has no amends to make
to them, He still wishes peace for them.
Peace
in the wake of trauma is not a covering-up, whitewashing, or a sweeping under
the proverbial rug of that trauma—that almost always compounds the pain over
time and is a sin in its own right.
No,
for peace to occur, a reckoning must often take place. Much like ripping the
band-aid off of a cut, the initial jolt of pain may be a deterrent to doing so,
but in the long run, it is the better course.
That
reckoning for one disciple, Thomas, is just beginning. So dispirited was he by
the crucifixion that even the report back to him from the disciples present
here in this passage does nothing for him; he must see Jesus for himself and
place his hands upon Jesus’s wounds in order to believe.
Thomas,
then, is exactly who we should be emulating from this passage. He is honest
about what he needs and that he is unable in the moment to take the disciples’
word alone. Thomas often gets fitted for a black hat, but if there were more of
Thomas’s honesty in the church, the world would, I imagine, be a better place
for it. I think this is at least a little bit of why Jesus entertains this need
of Thomas’s, and peace is made for the doubting Apostle as well.
Jesus
has that patience with each of us as we each bind ourselves from the cuts,
abrasions, and lacerations that have been inflicted upon us, both within and
outside of the church. But precisely because Jesus does this for us, we must be
honest in the church about how we wound when we should heal, and cut when we
should bind.
There
are so many ways in which we do that, but fundamentally, the common thread
among them tends to be, I think, when we prioritize doctrine and belief over
right relationship. Think of Karen’s story: the need to push a particular (and
misguided, but that’s another can of tuna—again, relationship over doctrine)
Bible study of Revelation in particular, for children who may not have been
ready for its imagery and actual message, stayed with her and impacted her
profoundly, just as the knowledge that his Lord had just been crucified stayed
with and impacted the apostle Thomas.
Carol’s
story of enduring abuse both within her church and within her family is a story
of how the former can enable the latter, how unhealthy religion can enable an
unhealthy home. Yet she so vividly writes of her need to stay within religion,
within a right relationship with God, as well.
And
as Carol describes, for many, most, or even nearly all of us here, that right
relationship with God is irresistible. We are drawn to God like a fish to
water, magnets to metal, and the Mariners to losing (I don’t feel good about
that joke…way too easy).
Can
we get out of our own way, then, in that relationship with God, instead of
complicating it with doctrine that we insist is essential but is anything but,
and in point of fact often does real and lasting harm to people? The church’s
attitude towards women dissuaded Lord only knows how many generations of female
preachers and teachers, and it still silences the voices of women who must face
down abuse and are told by the churches they trust and love to simply grin and bear
it.
The
church’s use of doctrine, and maladapting it to say that God caused the
HIV/AIDS crisis as a divine punishment, did and continues to do lasting damage
to our LGBTQ neighbors.
And
even when we insist on things as small as what we’d like you to wear, or not
wear, to church, or whether or not we sit down with you in a pew or at the
table, we send a strong message of who we include and exclude. It is why so
many churches, including ours, have at one point or another pushed away
millennial (the generation, not the theological end-times belief) Jesus
followers.
None
of that communicates Jesus’s “Peace be with you” greeting to His disciples. Yet
we still call ourselves Disciples of Christ. Can we find shalom, this divine
peace, together? Are we even capable of so dramatic and life-changing an
undertaking?
I
have to believe that we are. But it sometimes involves that ripping off of an
emotional or spiritual band-aid.
The
Good News is, though, that reconciliation can still happen despite our woundedness.
Such was the case for Jesus and Thomas. Such could have been the case even for
Judas if he, like Thomas, fell before Jesus calling out to Him, “My Lord and my
God” in repentance.
And
such might still be the case for the church and the world.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
17, 2017
Original image from Shutterstock
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