Released to become the church
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
April 16, 2023—Easter 2C
John 20:19-31
“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet come to believe.” And there’s the thing about this story… This isn’t really about Thomas, and whether his doubt is a good or a bad thing. It’s about us. It’s OUR story. It’s about everyone who has encountered the living Christ, one way or another, and had it blow the wheels off whatever they were expecting to think or feel or do in this life.
Even if you were raised thinking this was what you were supposed to do—to have a personal connection with Jesus Christ—even then, the actual encounter (of a moment, or a lifetime) should knock you off your pins. Even then, when he actually BREATHES IN YOUR FACE, you should need a second to say, “…Whoa!”
And if, in fact, you have spent a lifetime standing apart … if you pride yourself on your skepticism, your questioning, your refusal to get carried away, then this requires an even bigger “Whoa.” Because… what do you do then? What do you do, when you finally encounter something that calls out to you? Something that is actually, finally, really REAL? Something that matters?
What happens, when Jesus appears before you and breathes his peace into you? What happens when something that you do not fully understand, and certainly did NOT expect or ask for, comes along and takes hold of you? Comes along and claims you?
What happens? Let us not, however rush to “What happens next?” Let us stay in the moment that John clearly thinks is so important that it’s one of the signs he chooses to write down: the moment in which Jesus breaks through.
Because it is not easy for him to break through. The disciples are there in that room, locked in. “For fear of the Jews,” it says, and surely there is reason to fear a crowd who might rise up against you, reason to fear authorities whose power and sense of right and wrong is being threatened. We understand that fear. Fear too, we might guess, of their owned dashed hopes, of their own foolishness for ever having believed. Oh yeah, we understand that fear.
We lock ourselves in too. We put up doors and padlocks and walls and fortresses. Fortresses of cautious self-protection. Fortresses of cynicism and disappointed hopes. Fortresses of disbelief and doubt.
Fortresses, as someone pointed out to me recently, of self-doubt. We are not always ready for the peace that Jesus wishes to breathe into us. Not ready to be released. That’s what he talks about here: his peace is one that means to be released, to be set free from what binds us, set free from what imprisons us, set free from what keeps us locked up inside ourselves.
Let my peace live within you, he says. Be released. Be freed to go forth!
There’s a pun here, that isn’t obvious in the English translation. It plays when you hear the Greek word describing that door: it is kleiso, locked. It is locked, and the disciples are locked. But ekklhsia, the church they are to become, which means “sent out,” also sounds for all the world like ek-kleiso: out from locked … un-locked.[1]
We are sent out … but first, we must be unlocked. We must first be released, before we can offer release (un-binding, forgiveness, liberation) to others. That, apparently, is the peace of Jesus. It is not a peace that means security, or safety, or self-protection. It is a peace that comes from being set free, released from the fear and doubt and anxiety that keep us hidden away from the world.
Anne Lamott describes this as becoming the person you were meant to be; which she argues is a process of stopping being the things you aren’t. And to hearken back to the beginning of this sermon, “the person you were meant to be” pretty much means the person that encounter with the risen Christ calls you to be. In fact, I think one of the hallmarks of that encounter (how you recognize the breath of Jesus on your face), is the sense of those false selves getting loosened.
The Christ-encounter is the first step, I think, towards relieving ourselves of what Lamott calls, “the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained…”[2] We receive life from the Word, from the person of Jesus so filled with astonishing compassion, boundless acceptance, and insistent belief in the worth and acceptability of every single human being. And whatever measures of success or value have badly defined you … whatever shapes you’ve been trying to squeeze into to please yourself or other people’s idea of what you are or what you should be … they might not just blow away (boy that would be nice!), but they shift.
Then, as Lamott admits, there will likely come a long process of trial and error, mess and mistakes, glorious leaps forward and humiliating back-slides in the process of allowing yourself to be. Our self-doubts and fears will continue to try to ensnare us. Heck, sometimes we will wrap them around ourselves like a blanket and ask Jesus to kindly leave us alone please!
But he will continue to keep moving through our locked doors. Will keep breathing his life-giving, fear-dispelling, cage-destroying power into us. So that we can keep trying. So that we can let go of what others want to mold us into, and allow Christ’s image to be born in us instead. Which will be our release. Which will free our marvelous, liberated selves to be sent forth to proclaim that release to others.
The doors were locked, and yet Jesus was standing there in their midst. Our doors might well be locked. But today’s passage suggests that Jesus isn’t outside knocking, waiting for us to let him in. He comes through that locked door, breathes his peace and his powerful, life-giving spirit upon us, and invites us to come out. May it be so. Amen.
[1] From the Revd. Ian McAlister's “Reflections from the Hill.” McAlister is the Ministry Development Officer for the Anglican Diocese of North Queensland, Australia. Posted by Ann Fontaine in Episcopalcafe.com on April 12, 2012
[2] “Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be: Where to Start” Facebook post by Anne Lamott, June 16th, 2011