\u00a0<\/p>\n
March 30, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n Doug Johnson Hatlem<\/strong><\/p>\n Text:<\/strong><\/p>\n John 20:19-31<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Lord IS risen.\u00a0 Risen indeed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jesus has emptied his tomb.\u00a0 His body revivified.\u00a0 Death conquered \u2013 death, that last enemy, which according to Paul, is now, and shall be, abolished. Here we are a week later. Christ is Risen!\u00a0 The regency of Israel\u2019s Messiah is in its infancy.\u00a0 The world does not yet know that it has been conquered. Jesus has been lifted up.\u00a0 The earth is the Lord\u2019s and the fullness thereof. The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord. Hallelujah!\u00a0 Death and the gates of hell have been defeated. Hallelujah!\u00a0 As our reading from Acts 2:24 puts it, God raised Jesus up, having freed him from death because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.<\/p>\n Faith and Seeing.\u00a0 Sight and insight.\u00a0 Perception.\u00a0 Vision\u2026Knowledge.<\/p>\n The text of John begins with the simple affirmation that the world did not recognize Christ.\u00a0 As an Easter people it is perhaps a strange thing that on the week that follows the resurrection, we spend a little time contemplating doubt.\u00a0 A lack of sight\u2026.<\/p>\n The disciples in our passage for this morning are a sight<\/em> for sore eyes.\u00a0 They are not in any position, so it seems, to be sent anywhere, let alone to turn the world upside down.\u00a0 Yet almost immediately upon entering the room, Jesus sends the disciples as the Father has sent Him.\u00a0 We might understand this sending better, and perhaps also Thomas\u2019s doubt, if we spend time peering into three rooms.\u00a0 Let us dwell then on the War Room, the Sending Room, and the Prayer Room.<\/p>\n Sending Room<\/p>\n To begin, let us consider for a moment the room in which the disciples are huddled in John 20.\u00a0 This is the central room for our reflection this morning.\u00a0 I am calling it the sending room.\u00a0 For some strange reason it is a somber room.\u00a0 Mary Magdalene has reportedly seen Jesus, but the room is nevertheless full of fear and faithlessness.\u00a0 It is not just Thomas who doubts in this well known passage, the risen Jesus has to appear miraculously because the doors of the room are locked, closed up tight against the possibility that the other shoe is about to fall.\u00a0 The disciples have shut and barred the doors for fear that the powers that be will find them next.\u00a0 Many of the disciples will in fact be found out, many of them will suffer martyrdom, but they are not ready yet.\u00a0 First they must be sent into the world.<\/p>\n We are used to thinking of the Commissioning of the Disciples and the giving of the Holy Spirit as two separate events.\u00a0 The Gospel of John, however, gives them both to us within the space of a verse and a half.\u00a0 Look with me if you will at verses 21 and 22.\u00a0 \u201c \u2018As the Father has sent me, so send I you.\u2019\u00a0 When he had said this, he breathed<\/em> on them and said to them, \u2018Receive the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately this part of our passage is often overlooked.\u00a0 Far more sermons are preached on Jesus\u2019 miraculous Resurrection body that passes through walls, or on Thomas\u2019s doubts, or even on John\u2019s subsequent explication of his purpose in writing down a gospel account.\u00a0 The story of the giving of the Holy Spirit in Acts is far more time honoured.\u00a0 Indeed, our Liturgical calendar assumes a gap between the Resurrection Commissioning and the Sending of the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 Today, for instance, we are beginning the second week of Easter.\u00a0 Pentecost remains seven weeks ahead.\u00a0 Nevertheless we are considering the giving of the Holy Spirit today, for it is the Spirit by which Jesus sends his disciples from this room into the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n War Room<\/p>\n Perhaps this is the same upper room in which the Last Supper was eaten.\u00a0 Perhaps it had been rented for the entirety of what we now call Holy Week.\u00a0 This is the room for our observation that I would like to call the War Room.\u00a0\u00a0 I am calling it the War Room because we are so used to thinking of this room as the room that is solemn.\u00a0 We too easily associate our habits in commemorating and participating in the Lord\u2019s Supper with those of the disciples.\u00a0 Perhaps the disciples engaged in deep, silent reflection as they celebrated the Passover, but they in fact seem more concerned, in the various Gospel accounts, with an expected revolution.\u00a0 They want to know who the traitor is among them.\u00a0 They want to know who will sit at Jesus\u2019 right hand when they have overthrown the Herodians and the Romans.\u00a0 They want to reassure Jesus that they are willing to go down fighting with him.\u00a0 This is a War Room.\u00a0 This is a seditious room.\u00a0 It is only on this account the Judas\u2019s betrayal makes any sense.\u00a0 In spite of Jesus\u2019 constant teaching on servanthood, the disciples are quite sure that first, they are going to throttle their enemies.<\/p>\n In The Last Supper<\/em> Leonardo da Vinci has tried his utmost to capture the reaction of the disciples to Jesus\u2019 insistence that \u201cone of you will betray me.\u201d\u00a0 The posture of each disciple is drawn from whatever material about their character that da Vinci could lay his hands on.\u00a0 Thomas, palm inward, paints a questioning almost accusatory finger toward the ceiling.\u00a0 James clears the air in front of him and casts a skeptical eye.\u00a0 Across the table, Judas leans back with deep-set eyes, and Peter pushes past him clutching a dagger in one hand while leaning over John and his other hand as he asks Jesus who the traitor is.\u00a0 Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot conference with each other over this strange charge.\u00a0 This is a group by and large bent on following Jesus into battle.\u00a0 When the disciples scatter after Jesus commands Peter to put up his sword, it is because they<\/em>, feel, betrayed.\u00a0 They are ready to die for Jesus\u2019 kingdom.\u00a0 They are devastated when he refuses to lead them into open aggression.\u00a0 The disciples in the Upper War Room are not yet ready to be sent<\/em> because they are determined to take<\/em>.\u00a0 They are ready to take the kingdom of God with Jesus by force.<\/p>\n And so it is that we find them in John 20 \u2013 dejected, fearful, gathered together again because they have no where else to go.\u00a0 Could they blithely return to their jobs as fisherman and tax collectors after three years with a messianic pretender?\u00a0 The disciples of Jesus on this morning are huddled together.\u00a0 Huddled together in fear.\u00a0\u00a0 Huddled together indoors.\u00a0 With the doors locked.\u00a0 Locked against those that the Johannine community takes to be its great enemies, The Jews.\u00a0 Jesus is risen, and some of the women disciples have visited the open and evacuated grave.\u00a0 They have encounte The remainder of the disciples continue as defeated revolutionaries.\u00a0 Revolutionaries on the run and in hiding.\u00a0 The revolution is over.\u00a0 Not even really begun.\u00a0\u00a0 They hung the leader of the pack and everyone else flew the coop, fled the cross.\u00a0 Jesus is dead and the irregular Jesus army is completely demoralized.\u00a0 No one here will change the course of human history.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We are simply unable to experience with these disciples a dead messiah.\u00a0 Try as we may during Holy Week, and especially on Good Friday, our coming to the cross can never hollow out our whole world in the same way it did that of the men gathered here.\u00a0 How did the disciples ever move from such utter disillusionment into the third room \u2013 the room I am calling the Prayer Room?\u00a0 Before we conclude with an answer to that question, let us look for a moment into the Prayer Room.<\/p>\n Prayer Room<\/span><\/p>\n Acts 1 tells us that this room is just a Sabbath day\u2019s journey, approximately a kilometre, from the Mount of Olives.\u00a0 Again, perhaps this is the same room in which the Last Supper was first consumed.\u00a0 We are just a flip of a page or two from John 20, yet the atmosphere in charged rather than sapped.\u00a0 Here the twelve, minus Judas, are gathered together with Jesus\u2019 brother and certain women.\u00a0 Acts 1:14 tells us that \u201call of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.\u201d\u00a0 Ten verses later , after a brief discussion, they \u201cprayed and said, \u2018Lord, you know everyone\u2019s heart.\u00a0 Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the share in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Then they cast lots to determine who would replace Judas.\u00a0<\/p>\n The story that follows is one of the Church taking flight.\u00a0 In spite of persecution, the disciples together with the apostle Paul and others, follow Jesus\u2019 direction in taking the Gospel first to Judaea, then into Samaria, and then, as Acts concludes in open-ended fashion, to the uttermost parts of the world.<\/p>\n You know we hear a lot in our world about cells.\u00a0 Cancer cells.\u00a0 Jail cells.\u00a0 Sleeper al Qaeda cells.\u00a0 Embryonic stem cells.\u00a0 Fifty years ago or so it was communists cells.\u00a0 Cells are not neutral we are told.\u00a0 Or at least if they are initially, they do not remain that way.\u00a0 They have enormous potential for good or for evil.\u00a0 They multiply at an incredible rate.\u00a0 When they begin to grow too large, they divide, then grow some more, then divide again.\u00a0 Cells seem to have a preternatural ability to manoeuvre around potential problems, to repair damaged areas or replace functionally deficient groupings.\u00a0 Their growth or multiplication is almost impossible to contain.\u00a0 They respond quickly and efficiently to changed elements in their environment while maintaining some sort of mysterious line of signal communication or symbiotic relationship with their master cells.\u00a0 A cell\u2019s nucleus is often hard to isolate, and the cell cycle from mitosis until death is often not well understood<\/p>\n In point of fact, these early chapters in Acts finds us near the beginning of what is the most fecund moment in revolutionary political history.\u00a0 This is a time before the Constantinian sell-out of the Church to state violence.\u00a0 This is a time before a deep rift between Jews and Gentile Christians.\u00a0 This is a time when Jesus\u2019 teachings regarding wealth and poverty are taken so seriously that Church members begin holding all things in common.\u00a0 And this is also a time when the disciples sent by Jesus\u2019 are determined to multiply into militant, even if non-violent, cells.\u00a0 In short, from the Resurrection through the first fourteen chapters of Acts, we have record of a time when a group of pacifist radicals who reject the law of the crown in favor of God\u2019s law are recruiting for membership in their communist collective.\u00a0 Can you even imagine the violence of reactions to a similarly constituted collective in North America today?\u00a0 Communism. Pacifism. Radical Missionary Recruitment.\u00a0 A rejection of imperial Law.\u00a0 Now that is a recipe for a political nightmare.<\/p>\n But all of this begins in a room of prayer, a room in which a group of disciples has once again committed to following Jesus even unto death.\u00a0 This room, however, is a room of Prayer rather than of violent revolution.\u00a0 Here the disciples are prepared to be sent because they have seen the risen Jesus and he has breathed the Holy Spirit into them just as God in Genesis two breathed into Adam the breath of life.<\/p>\n So what happened?\u00a0<\/p>\n Raised in the Kerygma?\u00a0 Could even the most outstanding preaching bring about the massive change under consideration here?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Mass hallucination, maybe?\u00a0 It would have to be the only known instance in oral or recorded history.\u00a0<\/p>\n They stole the body?\u00a0 Jesus actually survived the crucifixion?\u00a0 Maybe Thomas isn\u2019t the only twin here.<\/p>\n As modern medical science took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, an interesting phenomenon began to occur with alarming regularity.\u00a0 And apparently this sort of thing is still happening in some developing countries. Medical students require human cadavers in order to rigorously study human anatomy.\u00a0 A whole clandestine profession developed for a time.\u00a0 Those who dug up bodies in cemeteries and sold them to students desperate for study material became known as grave robbers, body-snatchers, or, get this, resurrectionists.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps the disciples huddled together in the Sending Room were about to become the world\u2019s earliest resurrectionists.<\/p>\n While the Gospel of John is rightly regarded as the least historically reliable of the four gospels, there are similar accounts in the synoptics and thus the question persists, what changed the disciples?\u00a0 How did they go from fear to faithfulness, from shame filled deserters to bold and willing martyrs, from defeated revolutionaries to a radical movement which would eventually bring Caesar Almighty to his knees?\u00a0 From day one, and especially with the advent of the enlightenment, there have been piecemeal suggestions.\u00a0 But once you try to cobble them together into a holistic story, naturalistic explanations for what happened at Easter turn out to be far more fanciful, require far more blind and stubborn faith, and invariably fail the test of good history.\u00a0 In fact, even minimally qualified historians have given up.\u00a0 No one of any repute whatsoever tries to explain away what happened at Easter anymore.\u00a0 Even those scholars who don\u2019t profess Christian faith, who don\u2019t attend church, who don\u2019t necessarily attempt to follow the way of Jesus.\u00a0 They avoid naturalistic explanations and simply say such things as \u201cafter Easter, the disciples saw something \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Only the Resurrected Jesus is able to move the disciples from disillusionment to devotion.\u00a0 And so Jesus enters the room and embodies his words: Peace be with you.\u00a0 Jesus shows him his ha But then there\u2019s Thomas.\u00a0 Thomas has not seen Jesus with the other disciples, and so a week later Jesus stands among them again and for a third time speaks the words, \u201cPeace be with you.\u201d\u00a0 Thomas has become something of a patron saint for that class of Christians who doubt the reality of miracles such as the Resurrection.\u00a0 Jodie and I have many friends who fall into this category.\u00a0 We are apt to say to them: belief is overrated.\u00a0 There is in fact no independent word for belief in the New Testament.\u00a0 The Greek word used over and over again in one form or another is pistis \u2013 faith, fidelity, faithfulness.\u00a0 What is essential is the faithfulness of Jesus to his Father.\u00a0 Our faithfulness to Christ, to God\u2019s reign, to kingdom values\u2026 Faith is faithfulness. It is not intellectual assent.\u00a0 Its best expression is embodied obedience not creedal affirmation.\u00a0<\/p>\n And yet, we both believe that the Resurrection happened, that it included, even if it was not limited to, the resuscitation of a corpse, and that it must be at the very centre of the church\u2019s preaching.\u00a0 The empty tomb, as Dave Brubacher said last week, should be the iconic heart of Christian faith.\u00a0 Indeed, the reason that we might give such words of comfort to our friends that have trouble believing in the Resurrection is because we believe that their very lives continue to attest to the truth of the Resurrection.\u00a0 Their lives in fact preach the Resurrection and just are<\/em> the kind of lives that are impossible with out the basic truth of a real historical Resurrection.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is possible to believe in the Resurrection and yet to allow one\u2019s life to practically deny its validity.\u00a0 It is possible to live in this world in the name of Christ and yet like Jesus is not the Lord, to testify that the world is ultimately ruled by money and power, disease and death.\u00a0 By dictators and terrorists. By Lordly Politicians and Weapons of Mass Destruction.\u00a0 To practically shout that the life of Jesus was politically irrelevant and mundane.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But, I say with a great deal of joy that this is not the stance of those of us gathering here today.\u00a0<\/p>\n We do not sing like people who believe that Jesus has not been risen.<\/p>\n We do not teach our children like people who believe that death wins the final victory.<\/p>\n We do not live as if there is no hope for the homeless.\u00a0 For the sexual offender.\u00a0 For the soldier.\u00a0 For the political refugee.\u00a0<\/p>\n We do not preach like people devoid of hope.<\/p>\n We do not study the scripture together like a people lost somewhere between Good Friday and Easter dawn.<\/p>\n What does it matter then if we do not trust the testimony of the disciples; indeed, the testimony of Thomas, who apparently did not continue in doubting?\u00a0 It is good and well to continue \u201cLooking Into Jesus,\u201d but when all other explanations for the movement from the War Room to the Sending Room and from the Sending Room to the Prayer Room have been tested and tried, those who are overtaken by the overwhelming potency of the Resurrection are sent into the world uttering the earth shattering declaration of Thomas, \u201cMy Lord and my God!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 My Lord and My God March 30, 2008 Doug Johnson Hatlem Text: John 20:19-31 \u00a0 The Lord IS risen.\u00a0 Risen indeed.\u00a0 Jesus has emptied his tomb.\u00a0 His body revivified.\u00a0 Death conquered \u2013 death, that last enemy, which according to Paul, is now, and shall be, abolished. Here we are a week later. Christ is Risen!\u00a0 The regency of Israel\u2019s Messiah is in its infancy.\u00a0 The world does not yet know that it has been conquered. Jesus has been lifted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nred Jesus in his resuscitated and transformed Flesh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nnds and his side and says to them again, \u201cPeace be with you.\u00a0 As the Father has sent me, so I send you.\u201d\u00a0 Just as Jesus has been sent as a Peacemaker, so now the disciples have been sent as peacemakers.\u00a0 Then Jesus breathes into his disciples the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life.\u00a0 What\u2019s more Jesus gives to his disciples an incredibly potent, even dangerous weapon:\u00a0 \u201cif you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any they are retained.\u201d\u00a0 A whole other sermon or series of sermons would be required to come to grips with this power of granting or withholding forgiveness.\u00a0 It is enough for now to notice that immediately the text returns to the change wrought in the disciples by Jesus\u2019 Resurrection appearance.\u00a0<\/p>\n