Composting Doubt                                                                                                    Sermon, Easter 2 Year A  

I am in awe of people who grow things.  With Earth Day in mind, and inspired by our community garden, I have been thinking about gardening. My gardening friends tell me it is healing to have their hands in the dirt, to nurture life from the ground, as a co-Creator with God. As for me, I am a danger to all plant life. When friends bring plants to my house, it is inviting them into hospice care. I try to make their last days gentle and pain-free, but there is no doubt that death will be the outcome. 

It turns out that right around now in Northern Indiana, farmers are getting ready to plant corn and soybeans. I know this from Brian Scott, who blogs about farming on thefarmerslife.com.  He may start earlier in the Spring, if the weather’s been warm, or wait longer if it’s been cool and wet. But this very day, his seeds went into the ground in 2014, and again in 2012. How does he know when it’s time to plant?  Brian says, “we don’t have a system of numbers or charts to tell us when the soil moisture is right for planting. This is a boots-in-the- field and hands-touching-soil type of operation.” He goes out into the field and looks at the dirt. He’s looking for it to be a bit dry on top, but with no deep cracks. Then he pokes it, feeling for moisture about 2 inches deep—but not wet soil, and definitely not muddy. My brother-in-law Dale, a farmer in Iowa, used to actually taste his soil from time to time--he said he was tasting for acidity. “You want it to taste like good dirt,” he said to me, in all seriousness. He also hung around with farmers at the feed store to find out when they were planting. But Dale never liked to give away too much himself. He wasn’t superstitious, but he had great respect for what was at stake—his entire year’s livelihood--and he approached his work thoughtfully and with a certain reserve.

Doubting Thomas, Mark Tansey

So I was wondering why Thomas wasn’t with the other eleven disciples when they first saw the risen Jesus.  We don’t really know why, but I like to think he was out in his tractor, planting—because the soil told him it was time. Or maybe he was feeding his likestock. These are the kinds of things that don’t pause, even for a resurrection. In any case, when the disciples come to Thomas breathless, and excited and full of the Spirit, I envision him listening with a face like Henry Fonda in the Grapes of Wrath, just taking it in. He pauses for a moment and bites down on his piece of straw and says, “now that’s something I’d like to see for myself.”

And for this, Thomas has been cast as one lacking faith. But I say he is like that farmer. Imagine if the farmer came home from the feed store one day and said, well everybody’s planting, so I guess I will too.  His wife would look at him and say, have you looked at the ground yet? You know he would go put his hands in the dirt. He would see for himself.

Even more than our farmer, Thomas is in uncharted territory. He’s heard the other disciples say they have seen Jesus, but he hasn’t.  Furthermore, the disciples are not really acting any different. They’re sitting with him in a locked room, virtually in the dark. In fear. Even more than they, Thomas must have been wondering—What. Is. Going. On.

And the story continues, that in some mysterious manner, Jesus is now in the room. How did he get there? It’s not clear. That must have been weird. And so, Thomas practices a well-known and evidence-based technique for managing stress, and that is, checking in with this senses.

I follow the poignant blog of a man struggling with mental illness, and he writes, “One thing that can rescue me when I’m adrift and starting to feel separated from reality is confirming my physical reality. That I’m grounded in my body and that my five senses are with me.” It was appropriate for the disciples to question the relationship of this apparition of Jesus to reality, and if it was real, to wonder what it meant. If these doubts threatened to overwhelm Thomas, he responded by seeking to ground himself with the help of his senses.  

Now while John assigns the doubts about the resurrection to Thomas, other Gospels incorporate elements of doubt. In Matthew the disciples went to the mountain in Galilee as Jesus has told them, and “when they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” In Luke, Mary has told the disciples what she has seen at the tomb. “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” And the disciples are full of doubt about what it all means. In Luke, they are startled and frightened. In Mark, the women at the tomb said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Here in John, the others have seen Jesus for a week, but they’ve locked themselves in a room together in fear. It’s not just Thomas who is in doubt.  

So I don’t think John is punishing doubt, in Thomas or his readers. All Gospel writers seem to acknowledge that what the disciples are being asked to take in is mind-blowing. And it has really, really high stakes.

Thomas understands this.  Because once he has seen, Thomas is the one who knows immediately what it means. He says something that none of the disciples said the week before, or say in the other Gospels.  He says, “My Lord and My God!”  He understands Jesus as not just his rabbi, but the crucified God, the Messiah. He is now the believing Thomas, voicing what has been called “the last and best declaration of full-blown faith” in all of the Gospels. 

“My Lord and My God.” This is not an exclamation, like OMG!! Thomas has received the revelation that is the culmination of the entire Fourth Gospel. He has put together the theological puzzle—Jesus is the Word made Flesh.

And did you notice that Thomas does not tell Jesus to show him his body? It is Jesus who offers him that opportunity, without any judgment.  It’s also significant that Jesus has returned to his disciples for this brief time, raised from the dead, but with his hands and feet and side unhealed. The wounds of death remain, like a signature. How was it that Thomas knew that it was those wounds he needed to see to believe that the crucified one was the Lord? He could have said, I need to see his face, or get a look at his halo. 

By demonstration, Jesus says, “behold my body, that of the wounded healer. But now you are my body.” We are his body. We are the community that confesses the risen Christ. Richard Hays wrote that the world says to us, “unless I thrust my hand into the church and find real wounds, no way will I believe.” So we must show to the world what Jesus offered. We must show our own wounds, our own vulnerability, to those who are unswayed by the fake news of cheap salvation, those who have become deadened to simplistic platitudes and easy answers, black and white certainty, the hypocrisy and inconsistency between the words and the example of the church, and its hostility to people who ask questions in their doubt. We who confess Jesus are no better, no more holy, and no different from those who do not. We must embrace and engage our own doubts, for faith and doubt are dynamic things. Frederick Buechner once said, “if there is no room for doubt, there is no room for me.” Amen to that.

Jesus knows we doubt. It's how we're made. When Jesus said, “Bless-ed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”—he is not rebuking Thomas, for he could show Thomas what he needed. He was talking about us—we who could not see what Thomas saw--who did not walk with Jesus as the first apostles did.

Liturgy is beautiful. Scripture is engaging. Words can illuminate—I hope my words do. Knowledge is helpful--doctrine, maybe less so. But faith is nurtured by experience, especially in community, experience we feel, and touch, and taste, and hear. Faith is a knowing in the heart, assurance of what it is hoped for, as it says in the letter to Hebrews. Jesus showed up for Thomas where he needed this assurance. For Thomas it was seeing the wounds. For the farmer it is feeling the dirt. How do we now show up for others and meet their doubts?  Seeds of faith need water and nourishment, and protection. There is nothing gained in standing over them and demanding them to grow. 

The Gospel is no ghost story--no science fiction about a visitor from another planet. No, it is a personal invitation to come close—and to experience the love of Christ as love and radical hospitality in the world. There is no need to apologize for engaging our bodies and our senses in this walk, for Jesus was the incarnate God, and his ministry was in the world. Now we are given this ministry to the world’s Thomases--to the Thomas in each of us. And so we go forward in love as Christ did, as cultivators of faith. We show up for others in tangible ways-- feeding, hugging, healing, and listening to them; giving furnishings to a refugee family, knitting them a shawl interwoven with prayers; digging our hands into God’s green earth in our garden. We show up with the bodies we are given and with all our wounds, and we meet people where they are--as Jesus did for Thomas in that locked room. As God showed up for humanity in Christ.  

I’ll see you in the garden.

St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR, Apr 23, 2017 

Good Friday 2017 Sermon - St Gabriel, Portland

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Matthew’s Gospel, these are Jesus’ last words on the cross. That we hear them tonight in this psalm reminds us that they were a prayer, for the psalms are the Book of Common Prayer for the Jewish people.  If the Jesus in today’s Gospel story is more accepting—“it is finished,” he says—this anguished, confused feeling of forsakenness must have been the inward cry of Jesus’ mother as she watched her son die a tortuous death.

This son of hers, who had shown such promise that the temple elders remarked upon his learnedness even when he was a boy. This son, who healed, and taught, and prayed for others so selflessly. This son who, Mary, like any Jewish mother, probably wished had stayed home more, so that she might have kept him safe and warm, and he could have been a comfort to her in her old age.     

 Do you remember when Gabriel came to Mary about this extraordinary life she was carrying?  Do you suppose she called out to Gabriel:   “Did you forget what you told me?  That he was to have the throne of David? That he was to reign over the house of Jacob forever?  Why did you take him? How will I go on without him?  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?!” 

There is no getting around the grief at the heart of the crucifixion. There is no getting around the fact that it is a story of death.  And so when we hear that cry, it is our cry too. Why did Jesus have to die this way? Why did his disciples betray and deny him?  Why did his own people abandon him?  Why. Why. Why.  

 Christ and Artist, Marc Chagall

For that matter, why do we need a holy day to focus on his death?  What is so good about Good Friday?  It is certainly not uncommon in the church to jump directly from Palm Sunday to Easter.  We are Easter people, the argument goes.  Even our burial rite is essentially an Easter liturgy.  And yet a small but mighty band of Christ-followers faithfully revisit the scene of the crime every year. We listen again to the jeers, the insults, the humiliations heaped upon Jesus; we watch the disciples sleeping through his final hours; we envision the flogging, the brutal crucifixion of our savior, and we feel it. We FEEL it.

And it’s not like we don’t know how the story ends. The joke at the time of the movie Titanic was to ask your friends if they had seen it, and if they said no, you would say, “the boat sinks--ha ha, spoiled the ending.” No. We know the ending--we know we are present today at a service in commemoration of the one who rose again, the one who is among us even now, on this Good Friday, in spirit.  We have not forgotten we are Easter people. And yet, we are here.

Thomas Lynch, a poet and undertaker, wrote, “The defining truth of Christianity—an empty tomb—proceeds from the defining truth of our humanity:  we fill tombs. We need a ritual wheel,” he says, “that works the space between the living and the dead—where we must deal with our humanity and our Christianity, our spiritual and natural realities, our flesh, our fears, our faith and hopes, our bodies and our souls.”

This is what Good Friday is about—it is a day of “good grief.” It is the wheel with which we turn over this beautiful paradox of Christ in his divinity and his humanity, in his resurrection, and yet one who died.  And so, even though he rose again, we take the time to work through again the grim truth of his death, remembering that people woke up the next morning and remembered that the one they loved was gone from them.  And they cried out in pain:  “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

One of the great outcomes of the council that produced the Nicene Creed was that it established as doctrine that Jesus was both fully human, and fully divine. That Jesus’ body was not merely a shell—but an actual body—is essential to God’s promise.  He walked as one of us. He experienced mortality and the pangs of death. And yet he also rose again and came to us in Spirit, proof for us, we mere mortals, that he had destroyed death’s power to separate us from the God of love.  And so he gave us something to hope for, and something productive to do with our grief—not to deny the sorrow, but to move through it, allowing the pain of loss to be transformed into gratitude for life of the one we have lost.  This is an enduring love—and it does not die—it is with us forever.  

Two years ago, on Good Friday, I went to a service of prayer and song and reflections on the last words of Jesus at St. David’s. Mother LouAnn was there and offered one of the reflections. It so happens at that time I was working on a class paper. The assignment was to write on reconciliation of the self, and for my topic, I chose the loss of my parents and brother in an accident when I was 14. I have had many years to contemplate this loss. I was not bound up in it. I am a strong person. I have thrived. In fact, I have written and spoken so many words on it, I wondered if there was anything new to say.  But one of the things I brought to that service was the question, why, after all these years, do I still cling to my identity as an orphan?  Even if my parents had not died, I would be long past the time I depended on them. My friends were starting to lose their parents. There is nothing unusual about a woman of my age with no parents. So why do I carry my orphanhood with me?

And as I meditated on the cross that day, I considered also the questions I asked earlier. Why do we sit and stare at the cross? Is it because we haven’t moved beyond Jesus’ death? Why do we still need it, if we believe Jesus has transformed death?  

Through the hours of listening and praying, I realized we need to contemplate the cross, first, because we cannot and must not deny death. There is no doubt that Jesus died—in fact, he was executed—he gave himself over to his executioners. This human death is essential to our faith and to our understanding of the incarnation. But the second is that in his resurrection, Jesus confronted the evil of the world and conquered it by his love. The whole story of Jesus must include both the death AND the resurrection. To take on only Easter is to forget that, where there is resurrection, three days earlier, there had only been death and sorrow.  

The cross is the location of that transformation. In Jesus’ day, crucifixion was the most violent death the state could impose—a symbol only of pain, and terror, and suffering.  But no longer for us-- for us, the cross holds up death transformed.

One of the words which came from the Latin word for cross—crux, the root of the word crucifixion—is the word crucible. Crucible. I have meditated on the meanings of this word. One is, “a ceramic or metal container in which metals or other substances may be melted or subjected to very high temperatures.” Early scientists believed that a kind of alchemy could happen out of the crucible. I thought of the image of the refiner’s fire.  Another definition for crucible is, “a place or occasion of severe test or trial.”  

I think this is where the idea for the word crucible, out of cross, came from:  The shape of the cross is a meeting point, where two things come together and out of their meeting, something new is possible: Death and life, order and chaos, good and evil, all existing in tension with each other.  Richard Rohr talks about the cross holding the middle, where death, or loss, or pain, or violence is not denied, but does not take over.  The cross holds through the test and holds the tension so that growth and life are possible.  At this cross, this crucible, we are tested, and it is strong enough to hold us.

On that Good Friday two years ago, I came to see that orphanhood was my cross.  I did not choose to ascend to it, for it contained my suffering, confusion, loneliness, fear, and sadness. But it was also where I met my strength, and resilience, and memories gathered up of the good gifts my parents had given me, and of my sweet brother; and it was where Christ met me. So I rose again. I rose as someone different, a more whole person, who could love in a deeper and greater way, who could be with people in grief. I now view my orphanhood as a kind of holy privilege. It is a badge of honor I wear for the lives of my parents and brother, a badge of love, tested, and enduring.  It was a crucible forged equally by tears, courage, despair, and strength—forged by that refiner’s fire—and made into love. 

What is your cross?  What is your crucible?  Perhaps it is not the pain of loss by death. Perhaps it is the pain and loss of innocence, or security, safety, of your idealism, or youth. As you approach the cross tonight, bring that with you, and lay it on the cross before God, a God strong enough to hold your pain, and to meet it with God’s transforming love.

Yes, we know how the story ends, for we live in hope of the resurrection. That is why we are here tonight, even in our grief, because we know it is a good grief. For God has not abandoned us, and will never forsake us. Christ is gazing down at us from the cross, and we can hear him through the words of this ancient prayer: 

“I order you, O Sleeper, to awake.
I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell.
Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.
Rise up, work of my hands, you were created in my image.
Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you.
Together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.”