John 20:19-31

In my first year of college, a couple of friends and I decided to drive from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a concert. None of us had ever been to Chicago on our own before, but my roommate had an aunt in Winnetka, who was going to let us stay with overnight. Bruce had visited his aunt many times and he was sure he knew the way there.

So we took off without a care in the world. But somewhere along the line, my roommate took a wrong turn and the next thing we knew, we were driving through what appeared to be a neighborhood suffering the aftermath of a shock-and-awe sort of bombardment.

We gradually became aware that all of the parked cars we passed were chained to the light posts using massive chains, the links of which were the size of large grapefruits. None of us had ever even seen chains that large before - not to mention never having seen any chained cars before.

The whole thing made us very nervous and our imaginations ran wild, thinking about the kinds of danger that could make such massive chains seem like a reasonable response. So we all scootched down as low as we could get in our seats and tried not to call attention to ourselves as we searched the map feverishly to find the quickest way back to the highway.

Several years later, I told that story to a friend of mine who had moved to inner city Chicago to work at a Catholic shelter for the homeless. His perspective was a little different than ours had been, because at that time he was living in a small apartment one block from Cabrini-Green and he could hear gunfire from his front step literally every night.

He laughed at my story and told me about a guy he knew who had an extremely expensive sports car, which he sometimes had to park in a rough neighborhood. This man bought one of those huge chains to lock his car to a street light and, to be doubly sure, he put a Club - one of those locking metal bars - on his steering wheel. Then he went off to wherever he was going.

When he returned to his car, something seemed different. So he looked closer and discovered that the chain he had simply looped around the light pole was now in the form of a figure eight. And the Club on the steering wheel was now upside down. Then he noticed a note on the driver's seat that said, "If we want your car, we'll get it."

That note caused an icy dagger of fear to stab the man's already- paranoid heart. He had protected his car with the best security he had available and it turned out to be laughably inadequate. The level of helplessness and fear he felt at that moment is a fair approximation of the feelings the disciples were experiencing after the crucifixion of Jesus.

The major difference, of course, was that the disciples cowered behind locked doors, not because they were worried about their property, but because they were in fear for their lives. They were the known followers of a man who had been convicted of treason and executed.

And their association with Jesus was enough to earn them the same penalty of crucifixion. So they did essentially what my friends and I did in that dicey Chicago neighborhood - the disciples hunkered down behind closed and locked doors and hoped that no one would notice them.

They probably would have been more safe if they would have somehow been able to sneak out of town and put some distance between themselves and Pilate's crack troops. But the fear of capture kept them hidden away behind locked shutters and bolted doors - perhaps a little like the fear that led Saddam Hussein from a palace to a hole in the ground.

And that's where they were when the resurrection burst in on them in the form of the risen Christ who suddenly appeared in their midst - in spite of all their security precautions and secrecy. A lot of people take that as a sign that Jesus' resurrected body could walk through walls. That may or may not be. But for my purposes today, the only thing I'm interested in is the fact that no matter how hard they tried, the disciples were unable to keep out the joy of the resurrection.

Even Thomas - who had the misfortunate to not be with the rest of the group for that initial appearance by Jesus - couldn't avoid the thrill of having the resurrected Christ come to him and allay his doubts. By the way, even though Thomas' name has come to be synonymous with doubting, he really only did the same thing the others had done before him. If you read the gospels carefully, every one of the disciples - male and female - initially expressed the same sort of doubts when faced with the resurrection.

All of them had the opportunity to believe based on the someone's eyewitness account - whether that eyewitness was a human or an angel - and yet none of them believed in the truth of the resurrection until they had some first-hand evidence of their own.

The only difference with Thomas was that he was the last one to experience the reality of the resurrection. And so the timing of his encounter enabled Jesus to pronounce a blessing on all those who didn't have the chance to have a physical encounter with the risen Christ and yet still believed. That is, on all of us. And yet, how often have we expressed our intellectual belief in the resurrection, only to throw shadows of doubt on it in our hearts and deny it by our actions?

John Henry Fabre was a French naturalist who did an experiment with some Processionary Caterpillars. They are called "Processionary" because they tend to play follow the leader, each caterpillar blindly going wherever the one in front of it happens to be going.

Fabre's experiment was both intriguing and perhaps even a little sadistic. What he did was to arrange a bunch of the little caterpillars into a neat circle, each one touching the one immediately ahead of it. The result was that there was no clear leader for the group.

Therefore, each caterpillar faithfully obeyed its DNA and followed the caterpillar ahead of it. Round and round and round the circle they went. Then Fabre put some of the caterpillars' favorite food in the middle of the circle.

He wanted to see if they would break formation, even if it were only to grab a quick snack. The answer was a decided no. The food was available inches away from all of them, but they just kept on following each other in circles until they collapsed and died from starvation.

That experiment seems like such a sad and pathetic waste to me. But, rather than condemning the mindless lock-step nature of the caterpillars' actions, it makes me marvel at their dogged determination to sacrificially do their part for the community. And it certainly makes me wonder if Fabre didn't have a bit of a cruel streak in him to continue the experiment to their deaths.

But that mournful little story also reminds me of the way we church goers can some times be.

We gather in droves on Easter Sunday to hear about the glories of the resurrection and God's ability to bring new life into the most tragic of circumstances. Then we nod our heads and say, "What a beautiful service that was!" and we fold our bulletins and place our hymnbooks - and our spiritual lives - back into the rack until we need them the following Sunday. And we go out into the world, locking our sacred nourishment into the church building for safe-keeping.

And so we circle round and round the church as if that were the center of our spiritual lives. But Thomas and the other disciples show us a different reaction. When they were confronted with the reality of the resurrection, their fears completely evaporated and they were driven out into the world to share their joy - transformed into laughing, loving, spare-no-expense world changers.

Isn't that what we're called to do, too? Jenny Williams tells of a youth choir from Texas that was touring Illinois in 1999. While they were rehearsing in a sanctuary in Peoria, a homeless person ransacked their belongings and stole their money.

The Peoria church members were horrified and responded by taking up a collection to replace the stolen money. The youth choir, however, decided to use the incident to make a statement. So they chose to donate the money the church members had given them to a ministry that serves the homeless in Peoria. That is resurrection thinking - that is, instead of deflecting a blow, they absorbed it and transformed it into something life-affirming and powerful.

In a similar vein Norm Story tells of a friend of his in Washington state who has what he considers "one of the most difficult and demanding jobs on the planet. She is an elementary school teacher who specializes in teaching troubled children; the truly incorrigible ones who have been expelled from other classrooms and schools. She deals with unbelievable violence, fighting and issues of abuse.

"And she says that she manages such a classroom of little monsters year after year, student by student, because she loves them, and her heart breaks for them; and sometimes she actually manages to turn one of their young lives around."

She explains that "whatever violence and abuse these kids inflict upon others, it is still far less than the pain, scars and fear that they themselves are feeling inside... [because of the] suffering that they have already had to endure during their own short lifetimes."

Of course, the teacher doesn't condone their violence. However, "God has called and equipped this remarkable woman [...with] an amazing and insightful perspective on grace and mercy. She sees beyond their awful and extreme misbehavior and loves the wounded and frightened child deep inside. And somehow, she brings healing and hope where there was none before."

That, too is resurrection thinking. For that's exactly how God treats each of us. God looks beyond our various sins to love the broken and fallen human being inside. Can we afford to do any less?

Jesus gave us the power to forgive sins or retain them. Can we really afford to retain anyone's sins? Aren't we, as scarred and forgiven people, called to pass on the healing power of God's forgiveness?

We are the wounded body of Christ in the world. Let us breathe Christ's Spirit of peace upon its broken places. Let us live our resurrections. Amen.