Thompson's Blog

The Intersection of Life
Luke 7:11-17

I want us all to turn the left sides of our brains off, and let’s run with this story for a while. I don’t want any logical or analytical thinking to be going on for the next few minutes. We’ve got a good story here, and I don’t want anyone to get tangled up in the science of the situation. This is the language of spiritual truth – which is not as accessible as a video on youtube.

Now I’m not one of those people who easily turns off my objective rational sequential thinking mode, but I’ve decided not to get caught up in questioning the details of this story. I’m looking for some of that truth that isn’t easily captured on film, but it is experienced when you rub up against some grace after you’ve had a run-in with the hard facts of surface reality.

This is the story of what happens when the power of life intersects the forces of death. Jesus and his people were walking into town as those who were accompanying a dead man were heading out of town. It’s a simple story about what happens when people who are experiencing the harshness of life encounter people who have the love of God in their hearts.

This is not the kind of exchange that’s easy to capture on youtube. The emergence of life in the midst of death is not an easy thing to document and prove, but the imagery of this story reveals something we can still trust and pursue. I don’t say this because I take everything I read in the Bible to be the scientific truth. I say this because I’ve experienced grace from common people in the midst of trouble, and I can’t believe Jesus would have done anything less for the grieving people he encountered as he went from place to place.

I’ve told you before how much I used to ride a bicycle. I’ve become dependent on engines for the last 25 years, but there was a 10 or 12 year stretch where a bicycle was always my first choice for transportation. And I was not so much a recreational bicycle rider, I used a bicycle to get where I wanted to go. I loved travelling by bicycle and one of my trips was to ride from my hometown of Wynne to Fayetteville (where I was going to school) and back to Wynne. It was my first extended trip, and my mother’s request was to call home each night and let them know where I was.

This was in the summer of 1978, and cell phones were unimaginable to most of us at the time. It generally wasn’t hard to find a public telephone at the time, but you didn’t just call from anywhere.

So I rode from Wynne to Heber Springs the first day, and I stayed at the home of some relatives that first night and I reported in as I had agreed to do. I struck out for Blanchard Springs the next day, and I was somewhere between Drasco and Mountain View when I heard this panting sound just before I looked down and saw this large dog preparing to bite me in the thigh – which he did and then he retreated.

I’ve been bitten by two dogs in my lifetime, and neither one of them barked before they bit me – which makes sense if your intention is to actually attack instead of frighten. So I’m in the middle of nowhere, and my skin has been broken by a dog bite. I didn’t really want to stop in that dog’s neighborhood so I kept riding until I got to Mountain View. I stopped at a store and went in for some food, and I happened to mention to the storekeeper that I had been bitten by a dog a few miles out of town. She suggested I go to the local emergency room, which I did, and they did a nice job of dressing my wound – for free – which is also unimaginable, and they said I would be fine as long as the dog had been vaccinated for rabies.

I didn’t know if the dog had been vaccinated, so they suggested I go to the sheriff and see if he would take me to go find the dog. So I rode to the sheriff’s office and told him my story. I remember very distinctly that he was sitting behind his desk eating popcorn, and you might say he wasn’t anxious to get involved in this situation. It wasn’t obvious to him that I was on course for ordination in the United Methodist Church, and his response to me was that it sounded like I had plenty of time on my hands and I should just ride back down the road and find the dog’s owner myself. He said it probably wasn’t in his county anyway.

I didn’t know what to say, so I walked outside and I leaned up against a tree right outside his window. About five minutes later he walked outside and told me to get in the car. I was about to get in the front seat when he said, back seat. Somebody else got in the car with us and we tore down the road faster than I had ever driven. It was hard for me to tell where we were at that speed, but I identified where I thought the dog had come from and he drove up someone’s driveway. He went and spoke to the homeowner, and I thought I recognized the dog, and it turns out the homeowner said he had vaccinated the dog himself.

He also mentioned that there were some boys nearby who had thrown rocks at the dog from their bicycles, and it all made sense at that point.

So we tore back to town, I thanked him, and I took off for Blanchard Springs State Park. It was actually pretty late in the day as I got to the entrance to the park, and if you’ve ever been there you know that you go down a really long hill to get there. I wasn’t looking forward to the ride out, but it was a really nice long downhill cruise, and when I got to the bottom of the hill and made my way to the bathhouse where the one payphone was located I found it to be out of order.

Now not only was I wanting to tell my parents about my day’s adventure, I also knew that if my mother didn’t hear from me that sheriff was probably going to get a phone call from an anxious woman about a boy on a bicycle, and I didn’t want to put any of us through that. I also dreaded the thought of riding my bicycle back up that hill with all my stuff and my dog-bit leg and all.

I’m not sure how I was expressing my despair, but a man was nearby, he noticed my distress and he asked me if there was something he could do. I gave him the abridged version of what was going on, and he offered to give me a ride up the hill to find a phone, which we did, and then he let me pitch my tent on the edge of his family’s camping area because every campsite had been taken.

The events of that day happened over thirty years ago, but it’s not hard for me to remember those details. Now I’ve told that story on several occasions, so I’ve sort of embedded it in my mind, but the main reason it sticks with me is the drama I experienced on that day. I don’t think I had ever felt as vulnerable on many different levels. I don’t think I had ever been as dependent on the goodwill of other people as I had been on that day, and I was treated with compassion. Clearly nothing supernatural had happened that day, but it felt like I had experienced a miracle on some level.

And the truth is we don’t have to be capable of doing supernatural acts to have profound impacts on the lives of other people. I don’t doubt that Jesus had the capacity to do things that would seem impossible to most of us, but I also believe that Jesus reached out to people with some ordinary means that had extra-ordinary impacts. Resurrection doesn’t have to involve the revival of a pulse. There are people who’s lives need to be restored who’s hearts have never stopped. Resurrection is what occurs when people who are compassionate brush up against people who are suffering.

I was having a conversation with a friend on the phone the other day who is also in the United Methodist ministry business. We’re always trying to figure out what our jobs are and how to best do our jobs, and he used a line that meant a lot to me. He said he believed ministry happens at the intersections of life.

What that meant to me was that there are these moments in our lives when we become needy and vulnerable, and if there is someone there to provide some care and concern those moments of misery become opportunities for God’s grace to abound in significant and seemingly miraculous ways. This is what happened when Jesus and his life giving entourage encountered that grieving mother, and this is what continues to happen when we join with Jesus in noticing who is hurting and we seek to see how we can help.

This business of Christianity really isn’t about having superior understanding or supernatural capabilities – it’s about noticing who’s hurting and offering to do what we can. This is the formula for the miracle of resurrection. People who are feeling overwhelmed by death can experience the life-giving grace of God when other people pause to notice and do what they can to make it better. We don’t have to understand how it happens or calculate if it will happen, we just need to remember that a remarkable thing happened when Jesus exercised some compassion as he was entering an out of the way place, and we are invited to do the same.

The lawnmower story that I used in the beginning of my last sermon was a weaving together of a joke that my friend Karl told and an actual conversation I had with him.

The joke he told was about a young boy and a preacher who traded a bicycle for a lawnmower. When the preacher had trouble starting the mower he was told by the boy that he needed to cuss the mower if he wanted to get it started. When the preacher explained to the boy how long he had been preaching and how foreign cussing was to him the boy responded with the line, “Just keep pulling that rope — it’ll come back to you.”

I also had an actual phone conversation with Karl one day while I was trying to start the church lawnmower. I can testify that our lawnmower had not responded to harsh language, but with Karl’s advice I eventually did get it started.

There wasn’t a clear Pentecostal point to that somewhat fictional tale, but it was an irresistible opening. My attitude is that people who generously give a preacher several minutes of valuable attention deserve to hear a good line if you can find one. And if a preacher has the good fortune to hear a good line there’s bound to be a connection between that and something Jesus said or did.

Blown Away – Again
Acts 2:1-21

I called Karl the other day and told him I was having trouble starting the church lawn mower. I’m sorry if you don’t know Karl because Karl not only knows how everything of a mechanical nature works he’ll also have something to say that you usually want to hear – not always, but usually. So when I told him I was having trouble starting the mower he told me I needed to give it a good cussing. I said, Karl, I’ve been a preacher for 25 years now, I don’t even remember how to cuss. And with that Karl said, Well just keep pulling that rope, it’ll come back to you.

So this isn’t exactly true, but there’s some fact involved – I’ll leave it up to you to decide what’s what.

I like a good surprise – whether it be a good line from someone or a remarkable turn of events of some sort. The interesting thing is that you never quite know what to make of a surprise when it first happens. I’ve had surprises that I thought were nice take a turn for the worse.

Like the time I got called by the secretary of the Dean of the Divinity School to see if I would come by for a visit. I was honestly excited about going to see him and I remember wondering what he wanted to know about me. I went in with no anxiety what-so-ever only to discover that I was on the list of people who needed to improve their grades. He was kind and I assured him I would, and I did, but it really wasn’t the conversation I had anticipated. Hey, it was the 70’s, I didn’t think I was supposed to be concerned about grades. The whole thing sort of blew me away so to speak.

So there are surprises that seem good but turn bad, and there are surprises that are bad from the start. You’ll get the full story of my head-wound in the next edition of The View, but the short version of the story is that I was surprised to find a tree growing in my front yard – right there where I was intending to walk the other night. That sort of blew me away as well in a really bad way.

But what I like is for a surprising situation to turn out better than I expect. I’m guessing we all like those kinds of surprises – at least most of the time. I’m reminded of when I was working for Camp Aldersgate as the coordinator of the Camp Aldersgate Mission Experience. Youth groups would come stay at the camp and we would go out and work on homes here in Little Rock. Actually I brought a group to this church one time to do some cleaning around here. I think Anne helped me find some things for some unskilled laborers to do.

It was one of those interesting summer occupations that nearly did me in. We got involved in a lot of different projects, and I got overly-ambitious in a few cases. We took on some painting and roofing projects that stretched our capabilities, and I was the one who got stretched the most. By the end of most workdays I was worn out, and it was always such a relief to be headed back to camp at the end of a day.

So I was heading down I-630 near the Baptist Hospital exit around 4:30 in the afternoon when I heard a terrible rumble on the roof of the small bus I was driving, which jarred me out of my complacent driving zone, and I was terrified to see an airborne ladder in the rear view mirror.

Miraculously the ladder hit and slid on to the shoulder of the interstate where it was run over by a car who also pulled over to the shoulder. The ladder was made of fiberglass, and it was destroyed by the car that ran over it, but there was no damage to the man’s car nor to anyone else.

In my defense, I was not the one who had tied the ladder to the rack, but I was the one who was in charge of the operation. I was also the one driving the van, and I must say that this was one of the most nightmarish moments of my adult life, but as one of my co-workers pointed out to me in one of my many debriefing sessions – I had experienced a profound blessing. You can call something like this fate when it happens to someone other than yourself, but it felt like the grace of God to me.

Now barely escaping from a horrible disaster isn’t my favorite kind of surprise, but it’s not a bad thing to have experiences that generate absolute gratitude.

And I’m thinking this is how the disciples felt when they realized that the violent wind that swept through their house was not a natural or man-made disaster of some sort, but the very presence of God sweeping into their lives and bringing them into connection with people they had no idea they would ever love or understand.

Of course sometimes the sound of a violent wind turns out to actually be a natural or man-made disaster, and nightmarish situations do occur, but this isn’t due to a lack of attention from God. It’s important for us to remember that these disciples who had gathered for worship on this first day of the week had recently experienced the cosmic level tragedy of Christ’s crucifixion, and it was in the wake of that experience that this profound experience with the Holy Spirit occurred.

I like my surprises to come in comfortable packages, and I’m grateful when they do, but I also know that God works in ways that are outside of our comfort zones. It’s probably an overused phrase to say that we need to get out of our comfort zones, but it’s an under-utilized exercise. The truth is that most of us don’t choose to get far off the paths that we are most comfortable walking until something happens that blows us off our intended courses and we end up in a place we would never have chosen or expected to be – and it turns out to be a blessing. This is what we are celebrating on this Day of Pentecost.

It’s easy for us to keep our minds shut off from new possibilities, but God isn’t content to leave us alone, so God sent this wild and world changing entity that we call the Holy Spirit to stir things up and move us to see ourselves, our neighbors, and our God in a whole new way. The Holy Spirit is not a calm breeze that makes things a little nicer for us. It comes blowing in like a violent wind to blow us out of the spiritual ruts we find ourselves occupying.

The original disciples had no idea they would become as liberated from their conventional thinking as they found themselves experiencing. They couldn’t think of associating with people who were so far outside of the Jewish community until the Holy Spirit arrived and moved them to recognize the validity of other people’s experience with God and other people’s hunger to know God.

I can’t help but think we still suffer from really limited thinking about the way God is present in our midst and to whom God would have us find and serve. While the church is not oppressed in our nation it is depressed to some extent. In some ways the church hardly gets out of bed in the morning. I’m not wanting to be overly critical of us, but I have this sense that we don’t even realize the extent of our opportunity to be messengers of hope to people who have little sense of God’s love for them.

We can’t re-conjure up the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in our private and corporate lives, but we can do a better job of letting go of the things that keep us distracted from God’s moving presence in our midst. I have no doubt that God’s Holy Spirit continues to break into people’s lives in remarkable ways, but as people who profess openness to this life giving presence, we can also be the ones who function as an unbounded source of life in world that is killing people in so many different ways.

I don’t know about you, but I have been blown away by the grace of God often enough to know that there is a better way to live than in pursuit of self-serving accumulation. It’s tempting to wait for God to blow into the room in an obvious manner before we boldly go where Jesus would have us be, but there’s some chance God will find others to work with while we are waiting for more direction.

It isn’t clear to me exactly what we need to be doing, but I do believe that we have all the evidence we need to know that God is near and God desires for us to extend the kind of grace that we have experienced. It’s a powerful thing that has touched us. Let’s not water it down and put it to rest. Let’s be a community that is on the move in that same wild way that the Holy Spirit originally rushed into the room of the gathered disciples.

It would not be such a bad thing for us to become so generous of spirit & material that others suspect us to be drunk.

This is the word of God – thanks be to God!

A Godly Mess
Acts 16:16-34

There’s a strange shift in this story in regard to the person of the narrator. At first the story is told from the perspective of “we”. That “we” actually begins in the previous paragraph, but this particular story begins with the line, “One day, as we were going to the place of prayer we met a slave-girl. And verse 17 talks about how she kept following Paul and us. Verse 18 is where we’re told that Paul got annoyed and proceded to heal the poor girl, and when we get to verse 19 that “we” disappears and it becomes Paul and Silas who got seized and drug into the marketplace. Things deteriorated for them from there – they ended up getting charged, sentenced, stripped, beaten and put in stocks deep in prison, and we don’t know what happened to the “we” that was walking along with them at the beginning of the story.

It’s a strange shift that happens every now and then throughout the Book of Acts. I guess the author, who was the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke, wanted to be considered a reliable witness to all that went on, but he has a pretty mysterious presence in my opinion, and not necessarily a heroic one. He seems to disappear whenever things get dicey. I understand this behavior, but I’m a bit surprised that a person would write himself in and out of a scene like that.

The author of Acts is a Clark Kent sort of character who seems to disappear at critical moments, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t go off to become a superhero and save the day. I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s not the kind of thing that will earn you an A in Comp. I. I trust that the author had good perspective on who Paul was and what he did, but it sure left me wondering who we was.

There is a considerable amount of saving that goes on in this story, and Paul sort of functions as a superheroic disciple, but unlike most superheroes, he doesn’t save the day without getting hurt. He seems to have a super-power of sorts, and many people’s lives get turned around through him, but as I say, it comes at considerable cost to him.

Of course this is not unlike Christ, and clearly Paul does what he does and responds to situations in the manner that he does through his relationship with and understanding of Christ. Paul doesn’t display superpower as much as supertrust – which is in itself a remarkable characteristic. Of course this is why we have stories like this – to remind us of what is possible when we exercise radical trust.

Now Paul was a special case (in many ways) and while I consider Paul to have been a person who was struggling (like the rest of us) to understand how best to follow Christ and serve God – I’m moved by his capacity to face hardship in order to spread the message of Christ’s saving grace. And I don’t use this phrase “saving grace” with the assumption we all have a common understanding of what this means, but I think there’s something of great value behind the idea that Christ offers salvation. There’s a lot to unpack in this phrase, saving grace, and while many people have been abused by people who were trying impose their version of saving grace on other people, I still think it’s a rich concept. In fact I feel in need of some.

It’s come to my attention that on some level we are in trouble. We aren’t exactly in a crisis, but frankly we will be in about six months if we don’t find ways to reach some new people and to better nurture those of us who are already here. I don’t like saying this, but I feel compelled to say that the way we are really isn’t good enough. There are a number of ways in which we need to grow.

There are gaps in our community. Not everyone wants to be a part of something outside of our Sunday morning worship, but we need to find better ways for people to connect with one another. I like the fact that people don’t come here out of generational obligation, but the down side of this is that people leave here pretty easily because they don’t feel very deeply connected.

And we aren’t just an economic enterprise, but we can become a former enterprise if our economic trend doesn’t start moving in another direction. And I’m not saying this to try to get those of you who are here to dig deeper. Maybe some of you can, but the truth is we need to find more people to join with us, and we need to make sure everyone who is currently involved knows how important they are.

We have some tremendous challenges, and if you want to know more about this feel free to attend our Trustees Meeting on Tuesday at 5:30 where we’ll be talking about the renovation of our elevator and other daunting essentials. I don’t want to get into the details of our challenges, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that we will be in trouble if we don’t have a revival of sorts before Christmas.

Now what I don’t want you to hear is that everything is bad, because it’s not. We are blessed in many considerable ways. Nor do I want to get lots of advice on what we need to do to get a few more people or a few more dollars. It’s not that I don’t feel in need of good ideas, I feel a deep sense of need for guidance and inspiration right now, but this isn’t an easy fix, and it’s not that we’ve been doing things all wrong.

OK, maybe my strategic plan has some gaps. I now understand that we’ve got to have more than outstanding music, a reasonably sound sermon, and honest people keeping track of things if we want to grow, but right now I’m about as receptive to quick advice as Job was to his friends who came to tell him what he needed to do to get God off his back.

I have no doubt that we need to change in some ways, and I know there are some ways I personally need to change, but I really don’t think the solution to our problem is on the level of tweaking the font in our bulletin. What we need is for a bunch of us is to put ourselves in the vulnerable position of loving Christ, loving each other, and searching for ways to be in ministry to people who are outside of our church. And when I say this I’m not just talking about the people who come to eat breakfast and then leave. Yes, we need to love them and include them in our ministry and community, but we also need to reach out to the people we live near and go out to dinner with.

If you feel good about this place please tell people about it. Tell them the music is always good and the preacher has a good sermon about once a month but you never know what Sunday it will be so you have to come all the time.

I know I’m in need of advice. I know there are things we need to do differently in worship and in our programming, but our revival depends on the extent of our trust in God. I assure you I’m going to try to hear what I need to hear, but I’m convinced our salvation depends on the grace of God, and our corporate exercise of trusting in God.

The bad news is we are in a bit of a mess. We need more people, more money, and more opportunities for people to get involved in spiritually enriching work and play. The good news is that God responds well to people who find themselves in messy situations. Difficult circumstances are opportunities for God’s love to become manifest in dramatic ways.

The thing about our situation is that we don’t have Paul and Silas around to take the beating and to emerge victoriously from the shambles. We don’t have the option of disappearing until the coast is clear and the next scene begins. We are the Pauls and Silases we are in our own spiritual drama. We are facing an opportunity to exercise an extra-ordinary amount of faith in face of a costly undertaking. Like the author of Acts, some people have written themselves out of our scene, and others may well be feeling compelled to serve Christ elsewhere, but I don’t want anyone to leave this morning feeling like there’s nothing going on around here.

There’s something going on and it’s a trial. We are being challenged, and I’m trusting that this is going to bring out the best in us and we are going to witness the brick wall of stagnation to fall down around us. There may be people who will feel suicidal if Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church becomes the rising star of the Arkansas Conference, and that will be another opportunity for God’s saving grace to abound.

I don’t mean to be overly dramatic about our problem or our possibility, but I didn’t come here in hope of presiding over the decline of the most compelling congregation in our conference, and I’m not going to let that happen without making a lot of noise. Overly dramatic is what you’ll be getting in October if nothing has changed.

Yes, we’re in a bit of a mess, but it’s a Godly mess, and thanks be to God, that’s not a bad place to be.

The Texture of Christ

John 20:19-31

I can’t read this passage of scripture without being reminded of my first experience of going before the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry in hope of being found fit for ordination. There were four of five of us huddled in a small room in the old Madkin Building at Camp Aldersgate, and while we weren’t experiencing fear of the Jews — we were experiencing fear of the Christians. We were being called out one by one to go before this austere gathering of Elders who would do some final questioning and then they would vote on us. It was a terribly intimidating situation.

The first guy they called out never returned. We didn’t know what came of him. The second guy returned while they were voting on him and gave us just enough of a report of what they had asked him to raise our already spiking anxiety levels. I remember one guy pulled out his wallet and started showing us pictures of his family. It was as if he was saying, “These are the people who will miss me when I’m gone”.

I don’t know how the process of reviewing people for ordination should be done, and I know it doesn’t need to be an easy process, but what I experienced was actually harrowing. When the guy came to call me before the board he actually made the joke of saying that it was time for fresh meat, and it was probably more prophetic than he intended because I actually got chewed up and spit out. They didn’t like the way I had answered some questions regarding Baptism, and they voted not to ordain me that year.

There may have been other issues that played into their decision not to proceed with my ordination, and they did ask me to come back the next year, but it was a profound experience on some level. It actually made my friends and family feel worse than it felt to me. I’m enough of a renegade to feel a little proud of being officially rejected by church officials, but I also understood their need to maintain proper order, and I could see why they wanted me to do some additional homework and soul searching. I came to understand what they needed to hear from me and what I wanted to hear from them, and two years later I returned and was allowed to become a frightening church official.

I’m honestly quite unsettled by my role as an official Christian. This business of being Christian is fraught with dangers. There is the danger of being actually threatened by powerful people who don’t want the love of God to be set loose in the world. And there is the danger of distorting the message of Christ and actually becoming complicit with those same people. There is the danger of being like the religious people Jesus warned his followers not to imitate, and there is the danger of watering down the calling so much that it comes to mean nothing.

I think these are very interesting issues for us to ponder. They are particularly interesting to me because I do function as one who is charged with maintaining “Word and Order”. I feel a sense of responsibility to at least point people in the right direction – even if I’m not inclined to actually go there. I’m not exactly anxious to go up against those who actually hate Jesus – not that those people are easy to find and go up against. It’s hard to find actual Jesus hating people.

It’s not hard to find people who profess atheism, and it’s easy to find people who label non-Christian professing people as enemies of God, but such non-believers are not the kind of people that were hostile to the life and message of Jesus. It wasn’t the people who were outside of the religious body that were most opposed to Jesus. As we read at the beginning of this passage, the disciples were gathered in fear of the Jews – not the Romans or anyone else who was outside of the faith community.

And this isn’t an indictment of the entire Jewish community. I think it’s always worth remembering that Jesus was a Jew – he was a perfectly faithful Jew, and he embraced Jewish teaching. His primary followers were Jews, but so were his primary adversaries, and that is what we need to remember. It wasn’t easy being Jesus, nor was it easy for his early followers, and much of the threat of being an early follower of Jesus came from the community Jesus came out of.

The fact that Jesus was crucified in a very violent manner was not lost on the early disciples, and this passage doesn’t gloss over this detail. Jesus calls attention to his wounds, but he combines the revealing of his wounds with the words, “Peace be with you”. He didn’t want them to be unaware of what may happen, but he didn’t want them to be unconscious of the opportunity they had to experience true peace.

As I pondered this story, I found myself thinking of the various textures that Jesus presented to those gathered disciples. He was clearly identifying that there was roughness involved in being his follower. He didn’t want them to be unaware of the way his body had been torn, but following him wasn’t going to be without the experience of comfort.

And he issued this invitation to be in touch with the power of the Holy Spirit. He breathed on them and in doing so he filled them with the Holy Spirit.

You know, when people breathe on us we go running for antibiotics. Actually we don’t let people breathe on us – and I’m talking about myself. I don’t like to experience other people’s breath. You don’t have to worry about this with most people, we Americans know how to keep our distance from each other. Germs are remarkably agile, and we pick them up regardless of the precautions we take, but we don’t casually breathe on each other. Kids aren’t so careful, so I’m especially careful when I’m around kids, but we generally keep our distance from each other.

And there aren’t many of us who would be asking to put our hands in other people’s wounds — certainly not without disposable gloves and lots of hand-sanitizer. And I’m not saying we’re foolish for being germ-conscious, but I think we are probably much more careful than we are anything else.

Following Jesus is a risky community experience, and if it’s done properly – people get killed. This sounds terrible, but I think it’s true. Jesus didn’t just want his disciples to stay safe, he wanted us to be empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue his work. He didn’t give us false hope about what might happen to us, but he did give us the means to experience peace in the midst of frightening circumstances.

I don’t think this means we need to go looking for trouble, but I do believe it is a call to be involved in the lives of other people. It’s a call to be engaged in this world – as opposed to just maintaining some kind of proper set of beliefs.

This story of Thomas having doubt about the risen Christ seems to be an opportunity for the reality of Jesus’ resurrection to be reiterated, and the message is that it is more of a blessing to trust in the resurrection of Jesus without physical proof, but it seems to me that Thomas was blessed for wanting such a graphic experience with Jesus. That’s not a terrible thing to want. We’re told not to be doubting Thomas’, but the truth is that Thomas benefitted from being honest about his perspective. Jesus isn’t threatened by people who have suspicious minds. I dare say Jesus is more ambivalent about people who don’t want to get their hands dirty.

We’re gathered here on the first day of the week, but we’re not behind locked doors. We aren’t threatened by our association with Jesus, but we need to be careful so that we don’t become threatening to the message of Christ. We need to be mindful of the importance of maintaining the proper texture of Christian discipleship. The point of Jesus standing in the midst of his disciples, showing his wounds, breathing on them, and commissioning them to offer forgiveness and judgment is an indication of how important it is for us to be involved in the lives of other people.

This isn’t an invitation to be busy-bodies who try to get involved in other people’s business, but Christianity is a corporate experience – it’s not just an exercise of the mind. None of us have a perfect understanding of Christ or capacity to do the work of Christ, but we are stronger together than we are alone. We have more access to the truth when we share our thoughts together than when we act on our own.

Our challenge and our opportunity is maintain the proper texture of Christ in our day and in our community. We are to be strong without being harassing. We are to be compassionate, but we need to expose injustice, and we need to fear being unfaithful to God more than we fear the judgment of others.

The danger for us in not to share the skepticism of Thomas, but to live without passion for the calling and commission we’ve been presented. This is a world in need of fully engaged disciples who don’t live in fear of bad breath and wounded bodies. Our work is hard, but our calling is high, and we can’t ask for better company.