By Tanya Marcovna Barnett, preached at United Churches of Olympia in April, 2000.
Text: John 20:19-31
Good morning! Thank you for having me in your community on this beautiful spring day to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and Earth Day! Still reeling off of Easter, on a day like today Lent and winter seem like distant memories. I especially enjoy taking in deep breaths of the flower-sweetened air – it’s like eating honey! I can pretty much convince myself that more wintry and difficult periods really never happened at all. But if I pause and I reflect back on the past few months, I remember the days I yearned for warmth and for making sense out of difficult times. I remember the death of a dear friend and the wave of pain it sent through our family and friends. I think back to the devastating news of the weakening of environmental safeguards in our country and the impacts of ever-increasing environmental degradation on the village that I lived with for years in West Africa. And, although it seems so distant, I can also remember observing Good Friday and Jesus’ crucifixion just a little over a week ago. And, if I really allow myself to think deeply, I remember conversations this past winter with friends around the spiritual gift of hope – or the lack there of. These were conversations where friends posed the question: where in this world of such pervasive pain – pain within ourselves and our communities and broader ecosystems – can hope be found? Where can hope be found? This question, in my heart, feels akin to the question “where can God be found?” In winter, in Lent, in times of unpredictable suffering and doubt – these questions can be staples to just about anyone’s spiritual diet.
I think that these questions were particularly part of the spiritual diet of the Jesus’ beloved friends after his death. In today’s passage from John, Jesus’ followers gathered behind locked doors, because they were afraid. Not only did this tiny group experience deep grief over the loss of their friend – their source of HOPE for redemption — but, they also probably experienced the sleep-robbing, terrifying fear that they might be treated as Jesus was treated: brutalized and left alone to die. They, perhaps, truly felt they had lost hope and the sense of God’s presence that Jesus gave them. Just prior to this account in John at Jesus’ empty tomb, Mary Magdalene cried out to two angels to express a similar sort of grief and fear. She cried, “They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have put him!” And later to the person she thought was a gardener, she begged, “if you took Jesus away, sir, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him!” Again, the questions ring: where is hope and who has taken it away? Where is the God that Jesus helped us to see? Just tell me where I can find a seed of hope, a remnant of who God is, and I’ll go unearth it myself – Mary might have screamed.
In the midst of all of this despair and in these important questions – Jesus responds. At first, with Mary, Jesus appears in the form of a disembodied spirit and tells her not to touch him yet – not until he has a more fleshy form again. This glimpse of the Jesus to come sets her heart racing and brave feet flying back to the place where the disciples huddled together. Then, following on Mary’s heels, the embodied Jesus “came and stood among” his friends to give them a balm of peace for their despondent hearts and terrified minds. And here is one of the biggest miracles of the Bible for me: this returned Jesus, this embodiment of hope, stands with his friends, breathes the Holy Spirit on them, and speaks with them. This is not the same sort of disembodied spirit that Mary saw in the garden – not a ghostly, half-dead Jesus. This risen Jesus is embodied in scared, real flesh! He’s completely tangible – especially to the demanding, yet courageous, Thomas. In a very real sense, we know that Jesus becomes flesh at least twice: once at his birth in Bethlehem and again after his death. So often, as Christians, we can worship only a “sky God” – a transcendent God who only hovers over us and the rest of creation – a heavenly ghost. Jesus’ incarnations (a word that literally means to become meat or flesh) show us that God not only transcends earthy and fleshy life – but that God also permeates the very stuff of life just as God radically did in the person of Jesus.
I’d like to read a verse from the book of Job to you — one that comes out of the center of Job’s time of severe suffering and, at times, deep hopelessness.
He says: “But ask the animals and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”
Even at the height of his questions: where is God? And where is hope? Job is bold to pronounce that in God’s hand is the life of every living thing. God is not absent and hope is not dead – how could this be so when God holds, permeates, and vivifies everything that lives? The animals, plants, and even the scared flesh of Jesus testify to God’s ongoing presence even in the midst of pain and despair. Along these lines, I greatly appreciate the confession in your congregation’s “Wellspring Covenant”: “we have lived as if God were not incarnate in Christ”… and the response to this confession: “we believe that … God is with us in this world.” It’s through the fleshy, earthy stuff that we come to see, touch, and know the body of God. [I love the verse in Psalms 34:8 – “oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!”]
Part of Earth Ministry’s mission is to “engage individuals and congregations in knowing God more fully through deepening relationships with all of God’s creation.” I think that Job’s witness speaks to this part of our mission. I think that the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky (the author of Brothers Karamotzof) also speak of this experience, he wrote: “Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love.”
Such a radical, expansive type of loving would surely evoke an almost ecstatic sense of hope and joy. But part of such a radical loving, again, involves touching the scars of the beloved. The word com-passion, literally means “suffering with.” We love in sickness and health, in hope and in despair.
Not too long ago, some great Earth Ministry volunteers and I were blessed to witness the migratory return of four Chinook salmon. The fish were struggling toward their spawning ground that was situated in the most industrial part of Seattle. The sight of their rock-leaping, labored triumphs filled my heart with an ecstatic sense of hope. In Job-like language “the fish of the sea [and Sound, rivers, and streams] declared to me:” that our God’s tenacious, life-sustaining presence is with us. But, simultaneously, I also felt deep concern. My companions and I stood on land that was in immediate proximity of 12 Superfund sites. I couldn’t help but to feel a deep sadness that the toxic, industrial chemicals that had seeped into the groundwater of the neighboring human residents, had also seeped into the bodies of these amazing creatures of God. I felt despair in knowing the numerous ways in which the habitat of these miracle creatures had been under assault for over a century — and only small remnants of their species and their needed habitat remained. These are the scars. As providence would have it, we just happened to be engaging in stream restoration work when the salmon returned. We had the blessed, perhaps rare opportunity to drink in the hope of the moment and simultaneously touch and lend our strengths to helping heal the scars on God’s creation.
So, back to some of my original questions “where is hope?” and “where is God?” – part of the answer can come from looking at and touching a very fleshy and scared Jesus, as Thomas did, and maybe from even using our senses to experience God’s very tangible, yet often scared, world. Once we touch it, and are touched by it, we must respond to both hope and despair. And so often, our responses become the bread of hope for others.
Finally, I want to go back to Jesus’ familiar words to Thomas. Jesus said, “do you believe because you see me? How happy are those who believe without seeing me!” I’ve always understood these as chastising words directed toward Thomas. I’m beginning to see them very differently now. Of course Thomas was one of the rare people to be in the immediate presence of Jesus after the crucifixion – Jesus knew that this, and I believe he didn’t begrudge this blessing to Thomas or the other disciples. I really think that Jesus had a sense of just how very happy people would actually be if they had the sense that God held and permeated all of life. What could be more joy and hope-producing than “perceiving the divine mystery in all things,” to use Dostoevsky’s words, or “loving the whole world with an abiding, universal love”? This seems very Christ-like. Jesus came to point us God-ward – how happy he was, how happy we can all be knowing that we can witness the presence of God in all that lives, moves, and has being in God. How happy we can all be in responding to this presence with hope-inspiring acts of healing. How truly happy indeed.