April 27, 2014
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA
Year A, Easter 2, John 20:19-31

            As I read and reread our gospel lesson for today, I was drawn back to the summer, and my time at the hospital at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I completed my clinical pastoral education, or CPE, requirement. As many of you know, most dioceses of the Episcopal Church and in fact most denominations require that those seeking ordination complete a unit of CPE, which is most often done as a hospital chaplain.

            So I found myself back South this summer, in Birmingham, spending my weekdays and a good chunk of my weekend at UAB Hospital, which takes up several city blocks and is the third-largest public hospital in the country. As such, we chaplain interns were required to complete a sort of scavenger hunt wherein we were to go to each unit of the hospital and have a staff member there sign that we had indeed found the particular unit. As I was learning my way around the hospital, completing my scavenger hunt during that very first week, I happened upon a code blue in a unit where very few people ever died. One of the nurses on the unit had just in fact paged for a chaplain, and as all the staff chaplains were in a meeting in the main hospital building and as that building was a 15-minute shuttle ride away, I was it for chaplain support for a while.”

            “Can you sit with the patient’s wife?” The nurse asked, gesturing into the room where the code was taking place.

            “Sure. Yes,” I said, praying for God to please help me.

            Codes are violent—the chest compressions often involve breaking ribs—and can be pretty traumatic for family members to watch, and so I entered this small hospital room to find an elderly woman cowering in the corner, her head bowed and crying. I asked her if she would like to leave and let the doctors and nurses work.

            She wanted out of the room, so I led her to a waiting room and prayed silently for the staff chaplain to hurry. As I sat with her, I learned that she was very poor, had some intellectual disability, could barely see, and was utterly terrified of being left alone by the death of her husband, who was all she had in the world and who had come into the hospital for surgery on his hand.

            His death was completely unexpected and she had no idea how she might take care of herself without her husband. The staff chaplain finally showed just after the woman’s husband died, and I said my goodbyes but thoughts of this woman troubled me for days. Where was God in this?

             Again and again, I found myself with people like this woman, poor and alone and scared, people with no support systems to speak of, and so again and again, I found myself asking where God was in all the suffering that I witnessed.

            I realized it was one thing for me to affirm the love and presence of God from the campus of VTS, where I have pretty nice digs—a warm bed, and breakfast, lunch and dinner provided for me—and also have family and friends back in Mississippi who love me. But it was much harder for me be able to affirm the love of God and the presence of God in the face of so very much suffering. Where was God in all this suffering?

            I think it was the image of the terrified disciples feeling abandoned by Jesus that made me think of this woman from CPE. They must also have wondered where God was after Jesus’ death. They had left everything to follow the one they believed to be the Messiah and that one had been shamefully executed. Now they feared for their own lives and so were hiding out in a locked room. (And while our gospel writer tells us the disciples were afraid of “the Jews,” it is good for us not read this anti-Semitically, but to remember that the disciples were themselves Jews, as very likely was the gospel writer and many within the community to whom his gospel account is addressed.)

            And I’m sure you, like I, have heard lots of sermons on this second Sunday of Easter about Thomas and faith and doubt. And let me say quickly about that, that questioning and doubt are not bad, and it is in fact the one who questions—Thomas himself—who ultimately sees most clearly who Jesus is. Jesus is God, Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!” Thomas proclaims as he comes to recognize the risen Jesus, and this is the most clear and straightforward confession of Jesus’s divine identity in all the gospels.

            “My Lord and my God!” says Thomas to the one who bears the wounds of crucifixion. Way back, just after Christmas, we heard the prologue to John’s gospel. You know it: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1), and that Word of course referred to the second person of the Trinity, Christ. And now, here in Easter, as we come to the end of John’s gospel, we have this affirmation from Thomas, that the one he followed around Galilee and into Jerusalem is in fact God.

            Now it’s hard for our post-Enlightenment brains to comprehend how this human born of a woman and raised in some remote backwater of the world, this human who died a criminal’s death, is also fully God. That this human being died and was not just resuscitated but was resurrected, and in a way that he was unrecognizable by those who knew him best and loved him most and able in John’s gospel to walk through walls, is completely beyond comprehension. But something no doubt happened after Jesus’ crucifixion that caused a lot of monotheistic Jews to worship him. For these Jewish men and women to worship Jesus as God was idolatry, unless of course Jesus was God. And so at the risk of being kicked out of the synagogue, at the risk of putting their very lives in danger, they came to worship Jesus, because of these resurrection appearances that the gospel writers and Paul report. And we are here today worshiping God the Son, Jesus Christ, because of the resurrection.

            And while it is completely seemingly unbelievable, trusting in the resurrection, letting ourselves rest in the conviction that Jesus was not just a man, a great teacher or prophet, but is God come down to us allows us to live fully—to live joyfully, to live without fear, and with the peace that passes all understanding. Because if Jesus is God, then God is no longer some distant transcendent being that looks down on us from afar. If Jesus is God, then we worship a God who not only understands but also bears the deep woundedness of the world, who understands and bears our deep woundedness, our deepest fears and anxieties, who understands and bears with us whatever emotional and physical torment each of us goes through on this side of the grave. Whatever it is, from addiction, to cancer, to depression. And for whatever reason, all of us will experience some pain in this life. But we worship a God who knows our deepest pain and whose Holy Spirit is with us.

            This knowledge is the answer to all prayer, I think. This summer as I walked the halls of the hospital and sat with and prayed with people desperate for their loved ones to get better or for their own situations to improve, I came upon a quote by Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar and priest. In a video interview he did for theworkofthepeople.com, he says the answer to all prayer is the influx of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit that Jesus breathes onto the disciples in our gospel lesson, that he gives in fulfillment of a promise he makes to them earlier in John’s gospel. The answer to all prayer is the knowledge that God is with us. Because indeed God is.

            It’s often very, very hard to see this, especially in light of so much suffering in the world. But Jesus says that those who have not seen him, as Thomas has, but believe nonetheless, those who have not seen him but trust that he is God, that he has overcome the grave and is risen, will be blessed.

            I think just this trusting in and of itself is the great blessing of this life. If we can rest in the knowledge that Jesus is God, that we worship a God who comes to us as we are, who comes to us as helpless infant, who grows into a man that loves so radically that it gets him killed, but whose love is so radical and so powerful that it cannot be kept down by death, if we can trust just a little bit in that love, then we will be blessed by the peace that Jesus gives and the joy the disciples feel upon seeing him. And we will be blessed by the power to share this love fearlessly with a hurting world. I pray that we all may have that blessing. I pray that we all may live fully in the knowledge that Christ has died but Christ is risen and the Holy Spirit resides with us, empowering us to live and love as Jesus Christ did, until his coming again.
    Amen.