Out of Control (Sermon)

“Out of Control”

John 20:19-29

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

April 3, 2016

Immediately prior to this morning’s text, Mary Magdalene bursts through the the disciples’ grief and announces, “I have seen the Lord!” 

         Just prior to that, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” sees empty grave clothes lying in an empty tomb. Both the disciple and Mary now “believe,” but I bet that if you asked them, both would struggle for adequate words to define what they believe and, more importantly, to describe what believing means.

         Believing does not come easy for any of the disciples. Even Peter, the Rock, has trouble accepting this whole unlikely, untidy mess. He eventually shrugs it off saying, “I am going [back to] fishing.”

         ‘Life before Jesus made more sense, anyway.’

         Then we have Thomas. I think Thomas gets a bad wrap in being called The Doubter. Remember the story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus learns that Lazarus is dying, but he dies before Jesus gets to him. Jesus says that he is glad that Lazarus is undoubtedly dead. He is glad because he can now do what he will do “so you may believe.”

Thomas may be the most spiritually aware and honest of the disciples, because when he realizes what Jesus is about to do to Lazarus, he shakes his head and says, “Well, let’s go, too, so we can die with him.”

         Doubtless, Thomas knows that to raise the dead will do more to threaten than to inspire people. There will be consequences for this. After Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas seems to know that to affirm as trustworthy that which experience has, with one unique exception, proven impossible is not some great victory of the human spirit. It is the total commitment of the believer to a presence and a power at work beyond our control.

When Thomas hears that Jesus is, in some fashion, alive, if he really doubts, I think that what he doubts is his own ability and willingness to travel the open-ended path that believing will demand.

         Fully aware of what he is asking his disciples to believe and do, Jesus must empower them to enter the out-of-control reality which is the here-and-now mystery of Resurrection. In the synoptic gospels, Pentecost comes after some weeks of Jesus popping in and out of the disciples’ lives. In John, however, Pentecost occurs Easter evening, during Jesus’ first appearance to the disciples, as they cower behind a locked door, hiding from Jews, Romans, and anyone else who might target them next. Unexpected and unbidden, Jesus leaks through the closed door and stands among them.

“Peace be with you,” he says. And when he opens his hands to identify himself, the disciples rejoice. Like Mary, they, too, have seen the Lord.

“Peace be with you,” he says, again.

         Put yourself in the disciples’ place. Standing in your midst is an un-dead guy. He urges you to be at peace. How do you respond? Believing that kind of thing happens not by our own strength of faith or character. Believing is itself a gift of grace. So, in order for the disciples, and for us, to begin to believe, Jesus breathes the breath of life upon us, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He offers that which is uncontrollably alive and free, that which which empowers us to carry on the work that Jesus begins.¹

In the formless void of a locked room, filled with hearts tossed about by chaos, Jesus broods and breathes over us. He calls forth new life so that we might not merely believe, but trust, and follow, and grow into Christ-imaged disciples. Easter is the first day of the New Creation.

I want all of us to feel caught up in what I will call the feralizing power of the Holy Spirit who calls and leads us to places and relationships we have not imagined. I want all of us to know the terrifying joy of being swept up into the work of Resurrection, a work that breaks through the closed doors of committee meetings where many disciples hide not for fear of Jews or Romans, but for fear of being called to live like Jesus in the world. A Jesus life – a Resurrection life – is a life of gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and bold justice. These virtues are what Love looks like when enfleshed in a life of discipleship.² This is what it means to “believe.”

         The grave cannot hold Jesus, so why would anyone think that conspicuous piety and stone-sealed doctrines do? But danged if we don’t try to put a rheostat on the Light of the World. Danged if we don’t try to domesticate Jesus in the church by busying ourselves with meetings, programs, and possessions, by fussing over inevitable differences in who believes what and how they express it.

Of course, meetings are important to intentional communities like the church. But when meetings become the substance of ministry, when institutional process becomes the habit of discipleship, the church becomes a place to hide, a place where we intentionally avoid face-to-face encounters with the dis-orienting and re-orienting life of a newly- and differently-alive Jesus.

Here is the rub: Doubt does not lock the doors of our hearts and churches. Fear does – the fear of being carried away in the uncontrollable aliveness of Resurrection. In many ways our doors are rusted shut. We need Jesus to walk through them. We need him to breath his re-creating peace on us.

         The film “Mass Appeal” memorably illustrates what facing the resurrected Jesus can look like. In the movie, Jack Lemmon plays the charming but vocationally lifeless Father Farley. After falling out of favor with his bishop, Father Farley has to mentor Mark Dolson, a non-conforming young seminary student. At first Mark appears to represent all that is wrong with the church and the world, but the story begins to reveal Mark as a disciple who has “seen the Lord,” a disciple who has no patience for the self-serving capitulations of the church to power, wealth, and convention.

         In time, Father Farley realizes this, as well. And in a scene I consider Farley’s own terrifying Easter evening, we see the elder pleading with the younger not to leave the church. Confessing his own complicity with the entombing fears of a comfortable, entitled institution, Father Farley, at last feels Jesus breathing on him.

You can’t leave, he says to Mark. “You’re one of those crazy, beautiful lunatics who keep the church alive!”

In the concluding scene, a changed and changing Father Farley stands before his congregation preparing to say the Mass. He begins, gets flustered, throws his hands into the air and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Father Farley comes out from behind the altar. He comes out from his hiding place, and makes a courageous and disrupting declaration of faith in a living Christ who calls the church to a work and a hope in which we cannot participate while hiding behind the locked doors of the way we’ve always done it, or what will others think?, or I’m just not comfortable around those people.

To claim to have seen the Lord is to do more than “believe.” It is to commit ourselves to the power of Resurrection at work in the world.

Doubt is welcome. But fear? We must learn to manage our fear and to Love like our lives depend on it. And, in truth, they do.

We are, after all, Easter people.

¹R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of John,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1995. P. 848.

2This reflects an insight from an interview in Sojourners magazine. In the interview, Shane Claiborne quotes Cornel West. “Cornel West is right,” says Claiborne, “when he says that ‘justice is what love looks like in public.’” Sojourners: Faith in Action for Social Justice. “We set out to start a community, and how we have a village.” Interview conducted by Jim Wallis. February 2016, p. 35.