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Thursday in the Second Week of Easter

Today’s readings

Once again, the disciples are overjoyed that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the Name.  That seems rather counter-intuitive, but when you stop to think about it, given all the possible reasons to suffer dishonor and to be beaten, the best reason is “for the sake of the Name.”  We know that those who suffer in that way are treasures for our God, and they are given their just reward.

What I think is interesting in today’s first reading though, is the unintentional prophecy of Gamaliel.  His words are a combination of a brush-off, since he obviously thinks the early Christian community is a bunch of kooks, and a bit of rear-end covering, since if it does turn out that these kooks are right, then at least they don’t get to be guilty of putting them to death.  At least not yet.

But the courage of the apostles is inspiring, isn’t it?  They have been warned twice and put in prison, and now beaten, and still we are told that “all day long, both at the temple and in their homes, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Christ, Jesus.”  We are grateful for their new-found courage today, or we wouldn’t be here worshipping right now.

We are called to display that same courage and to speak non-stop of our Lord Jesus Christ in all that we say and do.  The psalmist today reminds us that the only thing worth seeking is to dwell in the house of the Lord, and the only way to do that is to follow our Risen Lord.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!

Reliable Witness [Sermon]

Thomas.

Who was called Didymus.
Which means Twin.

Thomas comes from the Aramaic ta’oma, which also means twin.

Twin of… whom?

There’s a thought that Thomas Didymus looked like Jesus, or was spiritually similar to Jesus.

And now we don’t think of Thomas the Twin. We think of Doubting Thomas.

Let’s go to God in prayer.

God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.

Amen.

Eyewitness testimony is highly valued in court cases, because someone SAW It.

Unfortunately, eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate. Studies have shown that every time we remember something, we risk having that memory altered.

It is like when you open that letter in your word processor to review it, and then close it. Sometimes your word processor asks “do you want to save your document?” And in that moment, you think “well I don’t want to lose it” and say “Yes.”

But that means anything that changed got saved. Maybe you accidentally clicked something, or pressed a key. Now that letter is changed.

So just remembering something can change the memory. And sometimes the eyewitness is not considered reliable.

Like…

The women who, in our readings last Sunday, told the disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead.

You thought I was going to say the Disciples.

Well, the women were disciples too, so you could be excused. But the men disciples dismissed the testimony of the women disciples, perhaps because they were women, or maybe just because it sounded… implausible.

Whatever the reason, after Jesus appears to the disciples, saying “Shalom” (that’s peace be with you, or hello, or goodbye) they tell the Twin, Didymus, Ta’oma, Thomas, that Jesus appeared to them, and he’s not accepting their testimony.

He’s called “Doubting Thomas” for doubting the men disciples who doubted the women disciples.

If anything, I would think the disciples behind locked doors might have doubted Jesus at first, at least before “he showed them his hands and his side.” – John 20:20 NRSVue

After all, if Thomas looked like Jesus, it might have been Thomas.

“Since the crucifixion, has anyone seen Jesus and Thomas together?” they might have asked.

But they tell Thomas what they saw.

We don’t know how many disciples there were in the room. There were more than one, because the word is plural. There may have been ten of the twelve closest disciples: everyone but Thomas and Judas. There may have been more: there were disciples who followed Jesus who were not in his inner circle of twelve.

But Thomas had more than one witness, and he needed more proof.

We are two thousand years after these events. We have no eyewitnesses. And we have over two and a half billion Christians in many different communities of faith, with many different ideas about what actually happened.

For some, the Bible is the Holy Word of God and is inerrant. So whatever it says is true.

For some, the Bible we have is not the original writings, and we try to get as accurate translations as we can from the earliest texts we can find.

For some, we try to understand the writings in the culture they were written.

And we come to different places with how the resurrection happened, what it means to us, and how it affects our faith.

Some of us simply think we need to believe that Jesus existed.

Some of us think we need to believe in the resurrection in a specific way.

Some of us think we need to believe that the crucifixion and resurrection is what brings us grace.

Some of us think the crucifixion and resurrection are what demonstrates that the grace was already there.

But what we all ought to agree on, if we are going to put any faith at all in the four accounts of Jesus’ life that were accepted into the Christian Bible, is that Jesus taught us to love each other, over and over: to love our friends and enemies, to love our countrymen and foreigners, to just love people.

And that’s why I think John 20:23, where it says

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.
John 20:33 NRSVue

Is not a grant of power, but a warning.

If we love one another, even the people we don’t like, how can we decide people need to retain their sins? If Jesus said to the men who were about to stone the woman accused of adultery

“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

John 8:7b

how much more is Jesus’ saying that to us now?

If the Gospels are reliable witnesses to anything, they are reliable witnesses to something on which they all agree, and something we know in our hearts to be true: That we should love one another, as Jesus loves us.

So maybe it’s time to give a little grace to the twin, after two thousand years of retaining his sin of doubt.

My challenge to each of us this week is to think about how we are forgiving or retaining the sins of people we ought to love, that is, the sins of everyone.

Forgiveness is not permission to cause harm again, but recognition that what has been done cannot be changed, even if the heart has changed.

May you believe in grace, and have life in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Let’s sing CH 344 I Have Decided to Follow Jesus

* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue

* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.

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A Community of Souls in Motion

Art Arising Out of Sacred Silence

This piece came about during a recent retreat, in a time of silence before we each shared our faith pilgrimages. In that quiet space, before there were words, there was simply the page, the pen, the stillness, and the inward movement of thought and spirit. As I sat there, these forms began to emerge almost instinctively: spirals, spiral-like enclosures, shapes within shapes, all set against a dark ground.

Looking back, that feels fitting. A retreat often gives us space to notice what is already moving within us beneath the surface. Before any of us spoke aloud about our journeys, this drawing was already expressing something about them. The spirals suggest movement, journey, returning, deepening, an unfolding. They feel like faith pilgrimage itself, which is rarely a straight line. It circles back. It revisits old places at a deeper level. It narrows and widens. It sometimes feels as though we are going inward when we thought we were going forward.

The piece was drawn in the context of community, yet also in a deeply personal moment of reflection. We were preparing to share our stories, and so the drawing seems to have become a visual meditation on that experience. The large central spiral can be seen as the deep center of the self, the soul, or God’s presence at the core, while the surrounding spirals evoke companion journeys, distinct yet sharing a common visual language. In that sense, the piece arose not only from silence but from the shared anticipation of hearing the faith journeys of others.

The dark spaces matter too. Because the forms remain light against a dark background, the image carries the sense of journeys being traced out of mystery, uncertainty, grief, hiddenness, or unknowing. That also belongs to retreat and to pilgrimage. Silence does not erase darkness, but it can help us notice contour, grace, and heldness within it.

So the piece came about very simply: in silence, at retreat, before testimony. But perhaps it also came about more deeply as a response to that holy threshold where inward life begins to take shape before it can yet be spoken. It was something like prayer through pattern, reflection through line, a quiet rendering of a community of souls in motion.