Still Easter

Sermon

Last Sunday, in the afterglow of a still Easter morning, after the hot crossed buns and egg hunting, the coffee and the blisters from shoes we hadn’t worn in a long time, at home, on my couch, I saw the Lord. I wasn’t trying to see him. I was very tired from the eggs and the shoes, but there was Jesus. I was trying to watch some video someone had sent me, and some algorithm just skipped that one and moved to this one about a life-size Jesus doll. He was too white and too stuffed to be the real Jesus, but he looked nice, like a big Raggedy Andy doll, not a scary doll. My grandparents had a doll that I was/am afraid of, Buddy Lee; he was the mascot for Lee jeans, and my great-grandparents had him in their general store. Buddy looked so real that he seemed fake, if that makes sense, and my little sister used to hide behind the doors at our grandparents’ house and jump out with Buddy Lee to scare me.

But this Jesus doll was not scary Buddy Lee. And though I wouldn’t pay the $70 to purchase him, I totally get why 97% of people who purchased doll-Jesus on Amazon gave him a five-star rating; he seems nice. But please, in all seriousness, do NOT purchase me this doll. I absolutely would rather run into this doll than Buddy Lee or perhaps even the actual risen Christ, but don’t purchase this doll for me. I don’t have anywhere to put him; he’s six feet tall—and he costs $17 to return. I love Jesus, but I don’t know that I love the idea of a life-size Jesus doll. I would return him. Still, I get why he exists. And I know I’d be less afraid of this doll than if I saw Jesus the way several people did in the weeks of what we now call Eastertide.

There are fewer questions that come up with a five-star-rated doll than with our resurrected Lord. I can wrap my mind and even my arms around a doll, but I have trouble with even the most basic of resurrection ideas, like how the risen Christ got through a shut and perhaps even locked door, and not once but twice? Jesus is not a ghost. He has a body; some of the disciples seem to have touched it. Bodies don’t go through doors.

The scriptures we have describing Easter and Holy Week are so specific like this that in some ways it seems impossible that they’re made up (there’s the note about Jesus’ head cloth we read last week and the even more specific notes about a colt that Jesus rides on Palm Sunday—who makes this stuff up?), but then the scriptures are so dream-like in other ways that it’s hard not to be amazed, perplexed, afraid, and occasionally and oddly at peace. It’s not unlike being a resident of Portland and seeing someone walk their goat. It makes sense. You gotta walk your dog. Why wouldn’t you walk your goat?

In the children’s book What is God like?, Rachel Held Evans wrote: “God is like the wind… God is both here, and, mysteriously, also over there.” This type of prose gives me a sense of peace, but then makes me frustrated if I think about it too much. Well, which is it then?!? Is God here or over there? This book for children continues, “God is everywhere… rustling through trees, and pressing against your cheeks on a breezy day.”

The Gospel of John in particular strikes these mysterious notes. And Saint Thomas is the person asking the practical questions I’m sure a lot of other folks are thinking. Earlier in John’s Gospel, it’s Thomas who asks Jesus to be real when Jesus says, “you know where I am going and you know the way,” like he’s a big hot puff of air on a blustery day—Thomas says, “No, Lord, we don’t actually know the way, because we don’t know where you’re going.” Jesus responds, “I am the way,” which is a super-famous Jesus line that I don’t think we give SAINT THOMAS credit for, and to which I can only imagine Thomas said: okay. Because “okay” must be the average of the emotions of anger, peace, frustration, and amazement. Right? How else could one process and respond to Jesus, the way?

And where was Thomas on that first Easter day? I imagine if he was hiding out somewhere else, we would have an account because of how specific these texts can get with memorable details—remember the note about Jesus’ face cloths and the donkey on Palm Sunday? So, I imagine him not as hiding out in an even more secure place, somehow more afraid than the rest of the disciples, but somewhere being the very practical person Thomas seems to be; he’s away doing some real-life stuff that you don’t write down, the stuff we all have to do to keep living: laundry, dinner, doing our taxes… Thomas was also certainly grieving, probably even doing real-life stuff while grieving, as many of us must multitask this way. Thomas is the Saint of Everyone Needing a Minute.

Who was Thomas’ twin? We don’t know that either. One of the better explanations I read and heard from multiple sources this week is that “Twin” was a common nickname, a cultural phenomenon that we just don’t get now. Some years ago, I read a scholarly article that made an argument that Thomas is Jesus’ twin. But that was so scholarly that it didn’t give me a sense of peace, or reality, so much as it gave me a sense of a too-real Buddy Lee doll or Tom Hanks in all the DaVinci Code movies. They tried too hard.

One of my favorite and even less plausible explanations I’ve heard, I think from Frederick Buechner originally, is that we, me and you, we are Thomas’ twin. We need to ask questions and get answers for real life, and until we’re in awe, at peace, and can’t ask anymore. We can’t even tell here if Thomas actually touched Jesus, did he even take what he asked for? We don’t know, we can’t tell, we can only tell he doesn’t have more questions, only the exclamation: “My Lord and My God.” He’s in some sort of awe not caused by logical explanations about how Jesus got here, or there, or even through the door! And I imagine at some other points in his life, even in the next hour, Thomas had more questions, but in that moment, he seems to receive that peace that the risen Christ breathes.

Jesus breathes peace, the Holy Spirit, and it seems like Thomas finally exhales in these moments. Michael Joseph Brown, a New Testament scholar and president of Payne Theological Seminary, says Thomas “serves as a bridge between the past of experiencing the presence of Jesus and the future of living with the presence of the Holy Spirit.” Why doesn’t Jesus appear to all of us? In some ways it seems like that would be way simpler. Much of the world has a phone now; Jesus could just appear there, like I saw him last week on my couch while trying to see something else. I suspect the reason we don’t see Jesus, for real, is bigger than I can understand, bigger than even a six-foot doll that I could wrap my mind and arms around. I also wonder if it isn’t so that we can experience the Holy Spirit. This Spirit that is close as breathing, ever moving, but everlasting peace.

Jesus says to Thomas, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet continue to believe.” The word blessed can be complicated for American Christianity, so I like to use another interpretation for the word in Greek—happy. Happy are those who haven’t seen and yet believe. Happiness, like peace, and belief, is something that I must practice. I can recognize happiness and be grateful in brief moments, breaths. And in the last three years or so I’ve practiced more breathing meditations than I ever have before.

Because I had a kid at the start of the pandemic; because a lot of apps, like Peloton, came out and made it easier for me to not ignore the possibilities of meditating. There are lots of good reasons to try meditation, and I’m happy to chat with you about it.

But I continue to have similar feelings about meditation as I do around resurrection. I think it’s real and that it somehow works—I also think it sounds truly ridiculous. A lot of meditations focus on your breathing—that’s all. And if I imagine myself meditating, I think it’s so silly that I’m going to do nothing and just breathe… and breathe. And I’m only going to think about this breath, and then this one, only this one, not the next one.

One of my meditations this week was that we can’t breathe in the future or the past; you have to be present here. Maybe that’s why Jesus had to breathe and repeat “peace be with you” a few times. You get this breath, just this one, and you let go of the past and all the things there are to be afraid of in the future, and then you take the next breath… and you remember that breath when you were at peace for a second, when in the following breath all the anxieties are back. And breathe again and let Christ call you to peace.

It’s such an incredible phrase we have carried through traditions, “Peace be with you.” It’s not Pax Romana. It’s not Roman Peace or the peace of any empire. That’s a forced peace; a peace that comes through oppression. The peace of Christ will go through locked doors somehow, but it’s not for invading. The peace of Christ is for cookie decorating and relationship making, for justice, for laughter, for creation and recreation.

In the middle of the disciples’ fear, in all their questions, Jesus breathes peace…

We should breathe, too. Amen.