A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

April 7, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Locked Doors

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
John 20:19–31

“Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

John 20:26 (NRSV)

The most characteristic initial word on Easter is not “Be of good cheer,” but, “Be not afraid.” For the one who returns, who brings it all back to life again, who permits no escape into death, who allows no burial, no forgetting, is the one we know. And with recognition, the fear, the embarrassment, turns into joy: “Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.” For now despite the judgment, the bringing alive of all that had been, they know they could trust that the judgment he brought was the judgment of love. So Easter becomes a commentary on John’s words, “There is no fear in love, for perfect love casteth out fear.”

Edmund A. Steimle, Disturbed by Joy

Almighty God, in rising from the dead, your only Son overcame death and opened to us the gates of life everlasting. Returning to his disheartened disciples, he blessed them and empowered them to be his people in the world. As the scriptures are read and proclaimed and his body is shared in the community of faith, may we ourselves become his Spirit-filled people, alive and dedicated to Christ’s great work in the world. We offer our prayer in his name. (1) Amen.

Given the shift to Daylight Savings Time today, I am impressed that you and I both are here on time. Al and I set three clocks last night just to be sure I would not be late for the 8:00 a.m. service.

Yesterday I came across a story from the Smithsonian magazine that I have saved for years about a travel writer earlier in the century who loved to tell strange kinds of stories. One he was most noted for was a story about a man who, while traveling far from home, fell into a cataleptic state and was assumed by everyone to be dead. He was taken to the undertaker, who fitted him with a coffin, put the lid loosely on top, and then went home to have his dinner. In the middle of the night, the man, supposedly dead, woke up from his trance. He sat up, looked around, and tried to figure out where on earth he was. He discovered, of course, that he was in a room filled with a great quantity of coffins. He pushed the lid off the one next to him. Finding nothing in it, he tried another, and another. All the coffins were empty. After a while, he said to himself, “My goodness! I have been late all my life, and now it turns out that I have missed the resurrection.” (2)

The first Easter story John the Gospel writer tells about the disciples makes you wonder whether or not they completely missed the resurrection. Earlier, Mary Magdalene had gladly shared the tidings that she had seen the risen Lord and the empty tomb. She had passed along to the disciples his specific message for them. “Tell my brothers,” he had said to Mary, “that I am going to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God” (John 20:17). And yet there they were, on the first day of the week, the same afternoon as the resurrection, locked in a room. How strange. Jesus had promised them everything they would need. He had told them what would happen, how he would lose his life and then God would give him new life. He had promised them the Holy Spirit and everything else that they would need to fulfill their mission of being agents of his love and reconciliation in the world. But there they were, in the house behind locked doors. Of what were they fearful? That the religious authorities might persecute them as they had persecuted Jesus? Perhaps they would be accused of having stolen his body. (3) Or perhaps they were fearful that now their Lord had ascended, gone wherever he had gone, they themselves really had nothing of value to offer to anyone.

William James, the American philosopher, has words that are helpful here, I think. He wrote, “Faith is the force of life, and when it is absent, life collapses.” What we see in the Gospel of John is a circle of collapsed disciples. Their faith had vanished. They had nothing to offer.

One insightful commentator has maintained that when we look at this less-than-inspiring picture, what we see “is the snapshot of the early church” on which the entire testimony to the resurrection would depend. Yet we see

a church with nothing. No plan, no promise, no program, nothing. A terrified little band huddled in the corner of the room with the chair braced against the door. This is a church that will turn out to have only one thing going for it. It will have the risen Christ. . . . This is a story of how the risen Christ pushes open bolted doors of a church with nothing. How a risen Christ enters the fearful chambers of every faith community [and of every human heart] to fill them with his own peace, his own life, and his own spirit. (4)

Jesus came among them and said, “Peace be with you.” This was no ordinary greeting. It was a statement of fact—a reality, a spiritual reality the apostles had completely forgotten. How often these kinds of things happen to us in our lives. We become locked in a prison of fear and anxiety, sometimes due to real danger, but often conjured up by our own imagination. And there we are, locked in, assuming that the only resources we have to get by on are our own. How wrong we are.

Dominus Vobiscum. The Lord is here. No matter where we are, the Lord is here. From the earliest days, Christian worship has included words that acknowledge this presence of God and the life-giving peace of Christ. (5) We say to one another, “Peace be with you,” and the answer, “and also with you.” Said not in the sense of our giving to one another the peace of Christ, but as a glad acknowledgment of the reality that undergirds all of life. The peace of Christ is here. There is no place we can go where Christ is not.

After he had spoken of his peace to the disciples, he showed them his hands and his feet. So it is that Christian worship has always included the Lord’s Supper. (6) His body broken for us, represented in the bread. In the cup, the risen Christ is present, too. And then he commissions the disciples, giving them good work to do. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then, bestowing the gift that makes the whole mission possible, he breathes on them and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is the Spirit of the living God. With this Spirit you will be able to offer God’s own forgiveness and bear witness to God’s reconciling love. You have power that comes from above.

Now you might think it odd that the lectionary would drag us into a story like this on the second Sunday of the shining season of Easter. What an incongruous story to tell in a church like Fourth Presbyterian Church. I mean, I have only been here a few weeks, but this congregation seems to have just about everything going for it—well, maybe not parking, but we will talk about that another day. This magnificent sanctuary, a world-quality choir, a rich variety of programs for people of all ages, a bold plan for mission and building in the twenty-first century, and yet here is the crucial idea we must always remember: what we do, what we have to offer is not what makes Fourth Church a church. We are a church here on the corner of Delaware and Michigan Avenue because someone who is greater than ourselves keeps breaking in on us, pushing through our timidity and our reservations, giving us gifts galore. Jesus invites us to share them with the whole world in his name. (7)

To me one of the most disturbing trends in modern American Christianity is the intensifying focus on what congregations have to offer. They advertise themselves on the basis of their friendliness, their accessibility, or their exercise classes. Now, I am not opposed to friendliness, exercise, or accessibility, but I will tell you the church has little to offer on its own merits and everything to offer as witness to the presence and power of the risen Christ loose in the world.

Not long before I left Atlanta, I had the occasion to visit one of the South’s largest mega-churches. The sanctuary is not called a sanctuary; it is called an auditorium. The seats are of the latest movie-theatre quality, cushioned, contoured, comfortable. The people were friendly, the sermon entertaining, the music upbeat, but there was no sign of the power of the crucified and risen Christ. No baptismal font to acknowledge our being claimed by the Holy Spirit in our baptism. No communion table, the body of Christ broken for the sake of the world. No sense of the holy presence of God. Let us entertain you—we have the best entertainment in town.

Perhaps I am wrong, but one of the primary reasons so many people are drawn to Fourth Church on a Sunday morning is the majesty of the worship and its reminder that we and our needs are not the center of the universe. We so desperately need to have a sense of the sacred in our midst. Otherwise, we completely lose our grounding. We are dependent on the sovereignty and goodness of God. And if we ever forget that personally or institutionally, then we become nothing more than the sum of our own ideas, our own energy, and our own activities. The truth is the church is only a means to an end, the end of glorifying God. That’s what the world needs. The world needs the witness of the church, that against all the powers of cruelty and loss, even death itself, the power of God has prevailed.

I hope you noticed the trees out in front of the church today covered with more than 10,000 blue ribbons. Each ribbon represents a reported case of child abuse. I misspoke earlier this morning. I said these were throughout the State of Illinois, but I was wrong. More than 10,000 cases of child abuse in Cook County alone were reported in 2001. On a very cold morning last week, women from Fourth Church and other people of goodwill gathered to pray and tie those bows on the trees. It took hours, but in the end, the message became apparent for all the world to see. God cares about vulnerable, suffering children. The people of God care. We are getting the message out. We are going into every home where children must cringe in fear in the face of abuse with a message of hope. You are not alone. The peace of Christ to you, my precious little one. The peace of Christ is with you always.

Somewhere in his writings, poet T. S. Elliot refers to the risen Lord with the striking figure of speech, “Christ the tiger.” Think of how the apostles were locked away in fear, mired in hopelessness, and suddenly, surprisingly, the Lord appeared. Alive. Free. Strong. Invincible. Christ the tiger.

He is coming toward them, toward you, and toward the world with great gifts of newness. Clarence Jordan was the founder of the Koininia Community in Americus, Georgia, out of which the great Habitat for Humanity movement emerged. He once wrote, “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, it is not a rolled-away stone; it is a carried away church.” The taproot of all that we do around here is the power of God to overcome death, to conquer fear, and to answer doubt with love.

For it was in love that Jesus, who had given the other disciples the spiritual resources they needed to minister in his name, gave Thomas the apostle what he needed. Jesus accepted his doubt and gave him the gift of faith. It was Thomas who had said, “Unless I can see it, and unless I can touch it, I cannot accept it.”

I am getting to know you, and you are coming to know me. We have much yet to learn about one another, but I pray to God that Fourth Presbyterian is a place where doubting Thomases are always welcome. Our times cry out for churches that foster honest questioning and theological debate, as well as congregations that do not try to capture the great mystery of God in a net, as a hunter might try to catch a tiger.

There was a time in my early 20s when I was a full card-carrying member in the circle of Doubting Thomases. My doubt simply got the best of my faith, and I left the church completely, thinking it was for good. I had such a difficult time making sense of it all. I stayed away until my longing for God became too much for me. I sought the council of a minister at a Presbyterian church near our home. I walked into his office and sat down, saying, “I am not exactly sure why I am here. I do not know what I believe about the virgin birth, the resurrection, the lordship of Christ.”

The minister answered, “I accept that. I wonder if you would like to try to figure these things out with people who are on a similar journey.”

“O yes,” I said, “I would like that very much.”

And he answered, “Well then, you are welcome here.”

Those words, “Well then, you are welcome here,” have been the pivot on which my entire life has turned. I was welcomed in love and invited to grow in my knowledge and understanding of the revelation of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

“Put your fingers here,” Jesus said to Thomas. From that little church I joined that day, a week later I had been called by the director of Christian Education saying, “We need you to volunteer at our day care center.” There I went into a housing project for the first time in my life.

Touch the hurting places. Go where there is deep need, and there faith will grow.

Locate your prayers in the darkest and most hopeless situations. Mine this week have been in Bethlehem of Judea, upon whose streets the everlasting light once shone but now are full of darkness and death.

“Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” Jesus said to Thomas, and he did, and his life was forever changed.

At its Greek root, the word believe means “to give one’s heart to.” I have discovered that to believe in Christ is to give my heart to his great purposes. I have discovered that in doing so, I have grown larger, been able to step out in faith without fear. One of the great tragedies of close-mindedness and fear is that it keeps us from growing and changing. Fear draws lines and builds cages for God, but faith makes us bigger and braver than we ever could have imagined. Harry Emerson Fosdick put it so well:

Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable; and most of all fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith rejoices in its God.

I have mentioned so many gifts today I cannot count them. The gift of faith, the gift of good work to do, the gift of the Spirit of the living God, the presence of the risen Christ and his peace in every moment in time of our lives. These are the gifts of Easter. Receive them today with grateful hearts, as did the disciples long ago. It is with these gifts that God keeps turning the broken, hurting world in which we live into an Easter world where everything is fresh and new.

And so to God be the glory, in the church of Jesus Christ now and throughout the ages, world without end. Amen.

Endnotes

1. Based on a prayer by William H. Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Easter 1999.
2. Smithsonian, October 1995.
3. Brown, Raymond C. The Gospel According to John XIII-XX. (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 90.
4. Long, Thomas G. “The Church with Nothing,” Whispering the Lyrics. (Lima, Ohio: CCS Publishing, 1995), 90.
5. Ibid, 92.
6. Ibid.
7. Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Easter 1999.