John 20: 19-31 (links validated 4/10/25a)

The girl in the wheelchair couldn’t walk. The doctors didn’t believe her. Her own body had betrayed her, and now the medical establishment was doing the same. “You’re making this up,” they said, their words cutting deeper than any physical pain. Julia Burzzese was just twelve. One day she was playing softball and singing in the choir; the next, she was watching her world collapse. Her hair fell out in clumps. Her fingernails turned brittle. Her legs – once strong enough to sprint across soccer fields – now lay useless. And then came that day at Kennedy Airport. As we mourn Pope Francis who passed away this past Monday, I keep thinking about what happened next. Picture this: desperate parents bringing their daughter to see the Pope – not for a photo op, not for a blessing, but for a miracle. They had tried everything else. And Pope Francis, in that way that defined his papacy, did what Jesus so often did in the Gospels: he stopped. In a moment that now feels almost prophetic, he paused his procession, walked over to Julia, and blessed her. And yes, a miracle did unfold – just not the one anyone expected. Julia didn’t leap from her wheelchair. Instead, something more profound happened – the kind of miracle Pope Francis always taught us to look for. Her story, captured by news cameras, caught the attention of a new set of doctors who actually listened. A blood test finally revealed Lyme Disease. A community rallied. A hospital donated services. Strangers offered help. And just like that, sensation began returning to her feet. “If you believe and pray, everything can happen,” Julia said afterward...

In a sermon on Thomas, Malcolm Guite expresses gratitude for the witness this story provides to the church when it comes to diverse belief. When Peter tells Thomas what they’ve experienced, he doesn’t demand Thomas agree to believe the same thing in order to join them again. No, instead, Thomas is included and is able to be brought to belief by God in that setting. As we seem to be demanding more and more conformity of thought to one another, how are we leaving space for people to be discipled by God in the community of faith? There’s also this song from Gillian Welch, “By the Mark.” By the mark of Jesus’s suffering, she sings, is the way we will know him in heaven—just as Thomas and the disciples knew him in the locked room.

A TIME magazine issue in 1984 presented a startling cover. It pictured a prison cell where two men sat on metal folding chairs. The young man wore a blue turtleneck sweater, blue jeans and white running shoes. The older man was dressed in a white robe and had a white skullcap on his head. They sat facing one another, up-close and personal. They spoke quietly so as to keep others from hearing the conversation. The young man was Mehmet Ali Agca, the pope’s would-be assassin (he shot and wounded the Pope on May 13, 1981); the other man was Pope St. John Paul II, the intended victim. The Pope held the hand that had held the gun whose bullet had torn into the Pope’s body. This was a living icon of mercy. John Paul’s forgiveness was deeply Christian. His deed with Ali Agca spoke a thousand words. He embraced his enemy and pardoned him. At the end of their 20-minute meeting, Ali Agca raised the Pope’s hand to his forehead as a sign of respect. John Paul shook Ali Agca’s hand tenderly. When the Pope left the cell he said, “What we talked about must remain a secret between us. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.”...

It is a video from April 1, 2023, Palm Sunday. Pope Francis is leaving Gemelli Hospital, where caregivers have done what God gave them to do: restore someone to health. Like any other patient, Francis must be delighted to leave. Once inside the car sent for him, perhaps he thinks, as many others have: “Let me out of here! I want to go home.” But there is nothing private about the papacy, and Francis exits the vehicle to greet a circle of well-wishers. Leaning on a cane, he signs the arm cast of another patient, a young boy. Someone then identifies a grieving couple to him. They have just lost their 5-year-old daughter. We cannot hear what Pope Francis says to them, but we can see Francis the pastor take the crying woman to his breast. She remains there, weeping, even as Francis extends his hand to the grieving father. The embrace ends with Francis blessing the couple. He then thumbs the sign of the cross onto their foreheads...

There is a story about St. Christopher, probably more legend than truth, which runs this way: As a youth, Christopher was gifted in every way, except faith. He was a big man physically, powerful, strong, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked by all. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others. His one fault was that he found it hard to believe in God. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal. However, he yearned to believe in God and deeply respected those who did believe. And so he lived his life in a certain honest agnosticism, unable to really believe in anything beyond what he could physically see, feel, and touch. Faith is never certainty. Neither it is the sure feeling that God exists. This, however, did not prevent him from using his gifts, especially his physical strength, to serve others. This became his refuge, generosity and service. He became a ferryboat operator, spending his life helping to carry people across a dangerous river. One night, so the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that he believed, for he had seen the face of Christ. The very name, Christopher, contains the legend. Christopher means Christ-Bearer...

Not long ago, I arrived home from a visit to my local library with a book I’d discovered in the “new books” section. Green and light blue on the cover, the book caught my attention with its title: Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. These are all words and phrases that I love. And though I knew nothing at the time about its author, Kohei Saito, I had to check the book out. When my wife Emily saw it in my stack as I arrived home, she commented “you always love a manifesto.” And its true. They have an rousing, radical energy to their words, a clear claim to what is wrong, and a stirring vision for how to fix it. For most of my twenties I carried a printed copy of Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Madfarmer Liberation Front” in my pocket. And as an adult, I count writings like “The Dark Mountain Manifesto” by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine as among my favorite pieces of writing. Of course history is littered with manifestos whose visions came to nothing, or worse, wrought terrible misery in the world. Still, there is something important about the call join in a new reality rather than being doomed to acquiesce to the way things are...

(Includes lots of Greek exegesis!!)

(includes lots of Greek exegesis)

(includes lots of Greek exegesis)

("It was as I made my way down the street towards those promised crocuses that I came upon another surprise this time. Yesterday was Easter after all and apparently some youngsters had gotten sidewalk chalk in their Easter Baskets this year ans so for anyone passing by we were treated with a whole length of sidewalk drawings. First there was a hopscotch pattern traced in purple chalk...")

("A letter written to a man on death row by the Father of the man whom the man on death row had killed: You are probably surprised that I, of all people, am writing a letter to you, but I ask you to read it in its entirety and consider its request seriously. As the Father of the man whom you took part in murdering, I have something very important to say to you...")

(always good insights!)

always good insights!

(always good insights!)

("Fred Craddock tells this story: I was out visiting in a home a few years ago where they'd adopted one of those dogs that had been a racer. It was a big old greyhound lying there in the den. One of the kids in the family - just a toddler - was pulling on its tail, and a little older kid had his head on the dog's stomach, sort of using it like a pillow. The dog seemed to have a smile on his face, and looked real happy. So I said to the dog, 'Are you still racing at all?'..." and other illustrations)

(excellent exegesis)

("When Eddie Wiggin showed up, none of us knew he was coming. Eddie is the son of a parishioner who was, until the time of his death, a very active and beloved member of the congregation. Their son Eddie was born with Down syndrome and when he first was born he was sheltered, hidden from the congregation, until a former priest of the church said, "Bring him to church." He learned to serve at the altar, skills that I was impressed he hadn't forgotten....")

They came by ship, after a long and perilous ocean journey. Setting out from their home country of Portugal in the year of our Lord 1497, Captain Vasco da Gama and his crew sailed to the Cape Verde Islands, then boldly ventured out into the open ocean, heading west – as Christopher Columbus had, five years earlier. They had nearly reached the coast of Brazil before they found the prevailing winds they’d been searching for. The winds blew their ships eastward, to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. From there, they worked their way up the east coast of Africa, as far as present-day Kenya. Then, taking on an Arab pilot, they struck out eastward, into the open ocean. At last they reached their goal: the west coast of India – the very place Columbus had been headed, before bumping into the American continent. Like all the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of discovery, Da Gama’s had been designed with two goals in mind. The first – probably the most important, in his own mind – was commercial. He wanted to corner the market on the spice trade, breaking the monopoly of the Arab traders with their caravans. He wanted to be able to transport costly Indian spices directly to Europe by sea. If Da Gama could succeed in doing this, he would make himself – and his financial backers, back in Lisbon – a fortune. We’re talking a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs sort of fortune, here. The second purpose of his journey was religious in nature. Da Gama carried on his ships Roman Catholic priests, men of missionary zeal. They wanted to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to the Indian subcontinent. Yet, when they finally did reach the coast of India, those Portuguese missionaries were in for a big surprise. They found Christians already there: whole communities of them, with churches and priests, and a tradition of the faith going back longer, even, than in their own nation of Portugal...

("Shalom, I'm Thomas! My story? It seems to be the story of my life that I am always a step behind everyone else. For instance, somebody tells a joke. Can you guess you always seems to be the last person in a group to get it? ... Me...")

What’s strange, though, is that when a famous person becomes Catholic, it kind of receives different reactions. The tone accompanying these stories from many in the media seems shocked or skeptical, which isn’t just a modern experience. The press wasn’t too excited when, at the end of the 19th Century, famed Irish poet and writer Oscar Wilde became Catholic; they were taken aback when Tennessee Williams, the American playwright did in the 1960’s; they were shocked when American actor and Hollywood Icon John Wayne did in the 1970’s. When actor Shia LeBeouf did a few years ago, it was seen as another dramatic episode in this guy’s personal life as they quickly recounted all the struggles and scandals that had resulted in many setbacks for the man. So, on the part of many mass-media reporters, there must be something wrong, some angle to explain why a famous person would become a part of something that many have rejected (and many of those reporting have rejected)...

How do you see yourself? That’s always been a question that people have at some point in their lives had to focus on. Or perhaps more accurately it’s a question multiple times in their lives everyone has had to answer. Sometimes we keep it on a surface level where we just offer factual biographical details about ourselves; what we’re studying; what we do for a living. Having experienced being bullied growing up, or times when I struggled with health and weight issues, it was easy to believe lies that others told me about myself as I called myself a loser… Having made mistakes, and experienced setbacks- it was easy to get stuck there and exclusively focus on those things as I called myself a failure. When I think back to some of those challenging times, it is amazing to recognize how powerful a thing like how you see yourself can be. How it can be so distorted, manipulated… the potential, and the effect it can have on someone. A few weeks ago, the social media site TikTok, acknowledging this reality came up with an approach to how to deal with it. They had this trend that went viral called “blur your insecurities.” They invited people to select an area on themselves that causes them to feel bad and the app pixilated that area of the person. If there were good intentions that went into that campaign, to me it seemed destined to fail from the outset. Because the shallowness that social media often promotes can cause people to do nothing but look at themselves – compare themselves to others which can result in narcissistic, envious thoughts. And “Blur your insecurities” sure went off in some disturbing directions. Especially since they picked a song with their filter called “Stressed out” with the words “my names blurryface and I care what you think” it practically invited people to negative places...

Fr. Cantalamessa in his book “The Mystery of Pentecost” tells us this breathing of the Holy Spirit upon them is the catalyst for an interior conversion. The work of the Spirit creating within them a desire to become who they were created to be. To become bold witnesses of God’s mercy, to minister God’s grace to those who have lost hope. To allow the Spirit to prepare them to grasp all the teachings of Jesus and to begin to advance the Kingdom of God. To grasp the meanings of the prophesies and promises of God and to proclaim the good news. To grasp the reality of God’s love and His plan for everyone to become bold witnesses and disciples. That initial work of the Spirit is available to us. To create within us a desire to encounter Jesus. To touch Him, feel Him, and more importantly to realize how our own doubt can be overcome...

My colleague Scott talked about “the fourth wall” in his commentary on this text a few years ago. It’s a helpful way to make sure you catch the narrative technique in verses 30 and 31: the gospel writer steps back and “looks” directly at his readers: these stories are for YOU! (In his commentary, Dale Bruner likens them to those World War II posters with Uncle Sam…)...

John Lennon would like this passage. In his classic song “Imagine” the ex-Beatle conjured a future and asked us to “Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. No greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people Sharing all the world.”[i] Great song. It fits nicely with the First Lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary for Easter 2, Year B (Acts 4:32-35). The text describes the first experiment in Christian Socialism...

And so it is this week that we meet up with Thomas as we do every year on the Sunday after Easter. It strikes me this time through how while we need one another in the community of faith, we each come to know and recognize Jesus one at a time. We can’t do it for one another. As much as we might want to, we simply can’t. And this is true of so many things, isn’t it? Indeed, it came home to me yesterday as I stood with a young friend who lost his mother too soon. I have served as her executor, so my contact with the boys has been frequent, although there have not been that many times I have been alone with either one of them. I had stopped by yesterday, though, with some paperwork and only he was there. The truth is, I stood there feeling helpless as his grief spilled over, coming up as we are now on anniversaries of her diagnosis and too-soon dying. He haltingly told me how it has been for him…

“The proof is in the pudding.” Actually, this saying is an edit of an older one from the 1600s: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and didn’t refer to our dessert treats but to savoury dishes cooked in bags: you wouldn’t know if it was properly cooked until you tried eating it. When we use it, we mean that we want to see and experience something for ourselves rather than just trust the words of someone else. Thomas applied this test to Jesus’s resurrected body, but what if we turned it around applied it to our own faith? Our faith is proven by what we believe and trust—sometimes in spite of our circumstances?

Perhaps you recall the story of that great man of God, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. A young man named Steven Cook accused the Cardinal of having sexually abused him many years ago. In part because so many such stories have turned out to be true, many people were disposed to believe it, and a man whose integrity and faithfulness had been widely admired was called into question. But it turned out that the accusations were false. Steven Cook acknowledged that he had lied, that his claims had arisen out of his own anger and bitterness at the church and his own despair as a young man who was dying of AIDS. When this became known, the Cardinal privately invited Steven Cook to meet with him. The Cardinal, who was himself dying of cancer, prayed with his accuser and freely forgave him. Afterward, Steven Cook said, “A big burden has been lifted from me today. I feel healed and very much at peace.” Bernardin’s own account of the incident was published in a little book which carried the title The Gift of Peace...

A TIME magazine issue in 1984 presented a startling cover. It pictured a prison cell where two men sat on metal folding chairs. The young man wore a blue turtleneck sweater, blue jeans and white running shoes. The older man was dressed in a white robe and had a white skullcap on his head. They sat facing one another, up-close and personal. They spoke quietly so as to keep others from hearing the conversation. The young man was Mehmet Ali Agca, the pope’s would-be assassin (he shot and wounded the Pope on May 13, 1981); the other man was Pope St. John Paul II, the intended victim. The Pope held the hand that had held the gun whose bullet tore into the Pope’s body. This was a living icon of mercy. John Paul’s forgiveness was deeply Christian. His deed with Ali Agca spoke a thousand words. He embraced his enemy and pardoned him. At the end of their 20-minute meeting, Ali Agca raised the Pope’s hand to his forehead as a sign of respect. John Paul shook Ali Agca’s hand tenderly. When the Pope left the cell he said, “What we talked about must remain a secret between us. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.” — This is an example of God’s Divine Mercy, the same Divine Mercy whose message St. Faustina witnessed...

Edith Zierer, a Holocaust survivor now living in Israel, recalls how Karol Wojtyla, who later became Pope John Paul II, carried her to safety after she fled a Nazi concentration camp when she was 13 years old. Polish-born Zierer was 13 when she ran away from the Nazi camp at Czestochowa in Poland after the Soviet army liberated it in January 1945, five months before World War II ended in Europe. She was heading towards her hometown in Poland to find her parents, who, she would later learn, had died in the Holocaust. Exhausted, she reached a train station and sat there for two days without food or water while people ignored her. “Suddenly, there he was,” Zierer said, referring to Wojtyla, the seminarian, in his priestly robe. “He brought me some tea and two pieces of bread with cheese and then carried me to a train carriage. He sat with me and put his cloak on me because it was freezing. We came to Krakow and then I ran away because people started to ask why a priest was walking with a Jewish girl.” After spending, a few years in orphanages in Poland and France, Zierer emigrated from Europe to British-mandated Palestine, where she later married and bore a son and daughter in what became Israel. She now has five grandchildren. She wrote to Wojtyla after he became Pope in 1979, saying she was the little girl he had saved at the train station in Poland decades ago. After a correspondence ensued, the Pontiff invited her to the Vatican in 1998. She last met him in 2000, when he visited Israel on a millennium pilgrimage and met several survivors at the Vad Vashem Holocaust museum. She said she and the Pope kept up their correspondence, writing mostly during Christmas and before birthdays. “I received a letter from him last year and I knew it was the last,” she said. “He included a picture from his private collection and his handwriting was very shaky. I wrote to thank him for the memory that never left.” Edith Zierer, 84, mourned the death of her former savior, and remembered the warm look in the seminarian Karol Wojtyla’s eyes in the railway station years ago and God’s mercy expressed in his actions. “He was a kindred spirit in the greatest sense — a man who could save a girl in such a state, freezing, starving, and full of lice, and carry her to safety,” she told Reuters. “I would not have survived had it not been for him.”...

A couple of weeks ago, I stepped into a hospital room where a different kind of tension was in the air. The door was not locked, but it could not have been opened recently for the air was stuffy and tight. It seemed oppressively hot. I thought this must be what an airless tomb feels like. There were five family members and four friends of Jim jammed into that small space, keeping a weepy vigil over his weak and labored breathing. The end zone was near for Jim. It was fourth and goal. The nurse was the next one to enter. I felt sorry for her trying to push her way through this crowd of sad people. Their shoulders were stooped; their faces were bent. They were hunkered down like a team trying to keep the ball from crossing the goal line. This time I kept the door open. The room seemed to need some climate control. The nurse wasn't Jesus, though she did use the word "peaceful" a number of times to describe Jim. Her words helped calm the room. She spoke beautifully about what a good patient he was and how confident she was that he was not suffering. The family seemed to inhale her every word...

Jacques Derrida was deeply impressed by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on “touching.” Derrida’s last book published just before his death was titled On Touching– Jean-Luc Nancy, in which he discusses the importance of “touching” in all the gospel narratives. Derrida writes: “Not only is Jesus touching, being the Toucher, he is also the Touched one, and not only in the first sense… (that is, touched in his heart by heartfelt, merciful compassion): he is there as well for the touching; he can and must be touched. This is the condition for salvation– so as to be safe and sound, accede to immunity, touching the Toucher.” “It is not the touch that is saving, then, but the faith that this touch signifies and attests.”

In Letters to a Young Poet, Franz Xavier Kappus shares his correspondence with the brilliant mystic and poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In a letter penned to Kappus on July 16, 1903, Rilke writes, You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear Sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Jesus’ response to Thomas seems to me a pastoral word to John’s readers and to us millenia after: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”...

All of us need help in facing the disappointments and sufferings which make up so much of our lives. I've drawn inspiration from Fr. Stuart Long. The movie Father Stu tells about his dramatic conversion to the Catholic faith and his subsequent call the priesthood. In his forties a debilitating disease struck him, leading to his death seven years later. He said, "My suffering is a gift from God. In this life, no matter how long it lasts, it's a momentary affliction preparing us for eternal glory." Father Stu added, "No one suffers perfectly...even Christ had his moments of despair."...

When another good friend of mine had encouraged me to check out the TV series “Ted Lasso” and I explained that had been one of my brother Craig’s recommendations and why I was resistant – he assured me it was funny and something heartwarming and that I would really like it. I didn’t realize that “Ted Lasso” had become this monster-hit for Apple TV, receiving critical acclaim, getting the most Emmy nominations for a new show, surprising many in the entertainment industry. As the star of the show, Jason Sudeikis observed: “it’s shocking to me because it is built around two things Americans hate: soccer and kindness.” While I am a fan of kindness, I can say that for the most part, I’ve never been a fan of soccer. The premise is that Ted is an American football coach who hails from Kansas City Kansas and has been hired by this British soccer team as their head coach...From the moment he lands in England, Coach Lasso’s primary goal is trying to break his players out of yielding to the pessimism that they all are struggling with. He’s seen over and over trying to get them to let go of their failures or mistakes on and off the field, not to keep overthinking and sowing doubts about themselves as individuals or as a team. His approach is summed up with a handmade sign that he tapes up in the locker room that has a single word on it: Believe...

A man who was sent to begin a new leadership assignment for the corporation he was working for was gathering with his new team for an introductory meeting. The office manager thought a good way for people to introduce one another was by sharing their name, how long they worked for the company and what was their biggest fear. So they went around the room: Somewhat unsurprisingly – one person said “spiders.” Another went for a laugh with “unemployment.” Someone answered “death” which brought about a couple nervous chuckles. Then another person followed up with “not belonging.” Effectively taking what was meant to be a light-hearted ice breaker into a very deep exercise...

A few weeks ago, Daniel and Lisa had to fly on an airplane. Air travel mostly seems to be happening on an urgent basis, but they needed to go visit a loved one. So they did. On the return flight, they hit turbulence, really bad turbulence. Daniel said it was that kind that makes you close your eyes and collapse into yourself and get really quiet. There was a teenager sitting in their row. They were strangers. They had not yet said anything to each other. In the midst of this turbulence, he said very intensely, “I need you to talk to me right now. I have terrible anxiety and this is my first time to ever fly alone, and this turbulence is messing with me. I need you to talk to me right now.” So they started talking. Lisa introduced herself and her husband. She said, “we are going to be your best friends for the next 90 minutes! We are so proud of you for telling us what you need! That took a lot of courage and we’d be proud of our own kids for taking the risk you took. We’re all going to be okay, and we’re here for you, so just tell us what you need.” They talked for the rest of the flight. They learned that Braden is 16 and that he plays the guitar, ukelele and piano. And that he’d just finished recording his first album...

This is finally who Jesus is: someone wounded, just like us, someone who shares his wounds. Richard Rohr is a theologian who said, "Jesus dies for us not in the sense of a substitute but much more in solidarity of all humanity since the beginning of time. The first is merely a heavenly translation of sorts; the second is a transformation of our very soul and the trajectory of history. That’s atonement, that’s the power of realizing our sin, confessing our sin, getting right with God and one another… It is a solidarity with all humanity."...

Kristen Berthiaume and her family live in Alabama. They wanted to promote racial justice in their community. Seeing that nationwide protests and demands for justice were often met with open racism and ignorance, the family decided to create an Anti-racist Little Library in front of their home. Kristen noticed that books about racial justice were high on bestseller lists. So, she stocked their library with them, hoping they might educate their community and allow kids to see themselves in a wider variety of books. Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley Jones was filled with hope when she found her book, Reparations Now!,” tucked inside the Antiracist Little Library. Jones is not only the first person of color, but also the youngest person, to be Poet Laureate of Alabama...

Some of the old-time folks at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia may recall my esteemed colleague, the Rev. Stephen Weisser. Pastor Steve is a pretty cool guy who served briefly as interim pastor a few years before I came on the scene. As saints and heroes go, I have to give Steve his props because he soldiered on for years as a servant of the Lord in spite of being a hemophiliac. I can’t wrap my brain around what it must be like to live in Steve’s body. Any sudden bump or scrape could start a potentially mortal bleed. It really has to suck to be so stinking fragile and to find yourself constantly at the doctor’s office or the hospital or forever having an arm or elbow or some other joint in a bandage. Steve has always been pretty accepting of his condition, and he even found it to be kind of a blessing when he took up the post of chaplain at Paul’s Run, one of the retirement living homes supported by and through the ELCA. If Steve suffered from aching bones, needed to take a boatload of meds every day, and lived with a constant fear of falling, he was no different from the residents of the facility he served. I’ve heard it said that old age is God’s way of making us not sorry to go in the end, and I rather believe it. The senior citizens at Paul’s Run know what it feels like to feel crappy 90% of always. In Steve Weisser they had a chaplain who—although much younger—knew exactly how they felt. When they saw Steve with his arm in a sling or using a walker for support, they knew he got it...

When I was a kid, my father read the end of John 20 at the dinner table one night for our family devotions. After he read the part about Jesus’ telling Thomas that there would be lots of people who would not see him but who would still believe in him anyway, my mother commented, “Jesus means us. He’s talking about us. We’ve never seen him the way the disciples did, but he is our Savior and we believe in him. Jesus is talking about us.” All these years later, I can still remember marveling a bit over a thought that tantalized my young heart: I am in the Bible! Little Scott Hoezee of Ada, Michigan, is in the Bible! Cool...

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus, they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers...

Reality TV says that the purpose of life is to claw your way ahead, to do everything you possibly can to make money, to win in the end, to survive by being number one regardless of what happens to others. Resurrection reality with Jesus offers a purpose that is far beyond just looking out for number one or just advancing your career or just earning money.

The story of Jarena Lee, the first woman licensed to preach in the AME Church, is fascinating. Hired out as a servant at the age of seven and separated from her mother for fourteen years, Lee struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide for much of her youth. She is convinced that she will never find happiness here on earth. Then, at age 21, she sets out for Philadelphia, where she finds an AME Church and a caring pastor named Richard Allen. They quickly become the family she has never had. Within three weeks, she experiences conversion in the midst of a worship service. She leaps to her feet and declares that God has pardoned the sins of her soul and she tells of the wonders and the goodness of the God who has clothed her with salvation. Seven years later, she hears the voice of God, calling her to go preach the gospel. At first, she thinks she has imagined it, or perhaps it is the voice of Satan, rather than God. Nevertheless, she musters the courage to go see Richard Allen, only to be told that women cannot be pastors. She goes home more depressed than ever. Convinced that she will never get to preach, she marries a minister instead. But the call simply will not go away. Her husband dies just six years into her marriage and, as Anna Carter Florence writes in her book Preaching as Testimony, Jarena can no longer avoid the thing that has been haunting her in dreams and visions for nearly eight years, until she has physically and spiritually sick. The cost of denial is too high for her to pay. She might be a widow; she might have a two-year old child and a six-month-old infant to support; but it is time to face her call to preach.” So, she goes to see Richard Allen a second time and he allows her to conduct prayer meetings, but that's about it. Then one Sunday right in the middle of a sermon, she jumps to her feet, interrupts the pastor and begins preaching a message that God has put on her heart. With that, she sits down, fully expecting to be expelled from the church. But to her astonishment, Pastor Allen tells the congregation that she has indeed been called by God to preach. From that day on, he supports her and for years she preaches, exalting the risen Christ, proclaiming a message of freedom and confronting the oppressive culture of her day. There is a message on her heart and this unlikely spokesperson cannot but speak of what she has seen and heard...

Jesus meets people where they’re at: Mary Magdalene in her grief (John 20:11–18), Thomas in his doubt (John 20:24–29), Saul in his murderous zealotry (Acts 9:1–19). And he transforms them. After their encounters with the risen Christ, Mary’s tears give way to joy; Thomas’s doubt transposes into belief; and Saul goes from persecutor of Christians to key apostle, with a ministry of preaching the gospel, planting churches, and writing letters of teaching and encouragement that have become sacred scripture...

Kids and adults live side by side, but they occupy different worlds. One is filled with wonder, the other with worry. To some extent, both wish that they could step into each other’s worlds. Why can kids not do what adults do? Why can’t we adults go back to a time when our imaginations were a cause of delight, not anxiety? Would that we could all dwell in a world of wonder without worry! Every Easter, we are reminded that we do, or at least that we can. Because, you see, in Easter a third world enters our own. A world none of us can comprehend because neither kids nor adults have ever seen such a place. A dimension where life follows death and repudiates it. When the first disciples, who were adults, saw this world with their own eyes, they could make no sense of it. Their beloved Jesus had suffered the worst possible death, yet now he was among them again, speaking to them, letting them touch him. They might have been better prepared to understand such a world if they had never grown up to be adults. Such is the world of wonder the Resurrection opens!...

You should have been there. Oh, it was incredible. You missed out. It was the best ever. The greatest moment in history. Oh, you should have been there! I don’t have to continue because I am sure we have all heard one variation on this or another. For me, the most memorable moment was when I was 16 years old and a group of my friends, boys and girls, were going to Natchez, Mississippi, for a weekend trip. No parents and, most importantly, no chaperons. Just time together and away from the whole wide world as teenagers. My parents would not allow it. So, most of my friends went together and spent three days in Natchez, and when they got back, I probably heard the stories a million times in two days with one variation or another. But the refrain was the same, spoken or unspoken: “You should have been there! It was the best. We had so much fun. You should have been there!”...

The story goes that a priest was visiting Rome and was fortunate to have an audience with Pope John Paul II. Just an FYI, that’s not an extremely common thing. Being the head of over one billion Catholics, the Pope’s a busy man – you can’t just email the Holy Father’s secretary and schedule something. Anyway, this priest had an hour free before he was to meet with the Pope so he decided to go to the Church across the street from his hotel to pray before his meeting. On the steps of the Church were several beggars. As the priest passed to go in to pray, he thought he recognized one of the beggars sitting on the steps. But, he passed him by and went in to the Church to pray. As he knelt down in the Church, he realized where he knew the beggar from. He rushed back out of the church and asked the man, “Do I know you?” To which the beggar replied, “Heh, yeah, we went to seminary together.” The priest replied, “So, you’re a priest then?” And the beggar replied, “I used to be, but look at me now.” So the priest kind of speechless for a moment told the beggar he would pray for him to which the beggar replied, “A lot of good that will do.” The priest left for his meeting with the Pope but was saddened and startled by this unexpected reunion...

An Ohio grandfather was driving through Pennsylvania Dutch Country with his 7-year-old grandson. When they passed an Amish horse and buggy, the grandson was curious. “Why do they use horses instead of cars?” he asked. His grandfather explained that the Amish don’t believe in automobiles. After a few minutes, the boy said, “But can’t they see them?” Of course Amish people can see cars. They believe that cars exist, but they trust horses, they put their confidence in horses. Diana Butler Bass says, “the point isn’t that you believe in the resurrection. Any fool can believe in a resurrection from the dead. The point is that you trust in the resurrection. And that’s much, much harder to do.”...

In a humorous scene in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, Rob Reiner's financial firm character is lambasting hedonistic investment bankers, played by Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio, for spending $26,000 on one meal. The bankers defend themselves arguing that what was expensive was the "sides." Meaning they spent the money on the side orders like mash potatoes and veggies. This was, of course, a diversion to direct attention away from those things they really spent the money on. Instead they wanted to talk about the sides. Doubting Thomas wanted to talk about sides, too. He asked Jesus to show him the holes in his sides. He said unless he touched Jesus' sides he would not believe. Jesus showed him his sides, but then said, "blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."...

One of the most difficult disciplines that film actors need to learn is to resist the temptation to look directly at the camera. Actors need to pretend like the camera is not even there because if for even a second or two they glance into that lens, viewers see it immediately. In fact, if you’ve ever watched amateur video productions, then you know that one of the main things that distinguishes amateur work from professional films is that you can often spy one of the people in the scene cutting their eyes in the direction of the camera. It’s hard to resist! But it’s a problem because when it happens, it breaks the magic spell that films try to cast—it breaks down what in theater they call “the fourth wall” which is the one that exists between the stage and the audience. Viewers need to suspend the awareness that this is just play acting so as to get immersed in the movie or the play as though it were really happening...

Sometimes you need to see for yourself how things are at the moment before you can move ahead. Artists need that too, especially printmakers. While painters can step back from an easel and assess a painting in process, printmakers can't do that. The printmaker is developing the composition on some kind of plate (a slab of wood, a piece of linoleum, a metal plate). Once the plate is manipulated according to the artist's plan, ink is applied to the plate and the inked plate is pressed to paper. The paper is lifted from the plate to reveal a mirror image of the plate. So print makers may pull a print while still in the development process to see the current state of the print and what it will look like on paper...

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Remember the words of Tennyson's In Memoriam, written upon the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam: Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He found his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the specters of the mind And laid them; thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own.

One of the beautiful things I’ve come to recognize about trees are their scars. Look closely at any of them and you will see some evidence of the life they’ve lived–a branch shorn off by a browsing deer, a crown pierced by lightning, the enclosure of bark around an insect attack. So much of the experience of a tree is there, evident on its body, available as a witness that life keeps going...

The importance of touching Jesus' Body was brought home to me by an unlikely book: Alienated America. After the 2016 election Timothy Carney began investigating what's happening in our country. Why do so many of our fellow Americans feel depressed, like the American dream is dead for them? Carney visited parts of our nation where industries folded or relocated leaving people unemployed or without a decent paying job. He began to observe that while some of those communities collapsed, others bounced back and even thrived. What was the difference? The thriving communities had functioning networks of families and church. They had other civic organizations, but church congregations were crucial. Carney realized that the American dream involves a lot more than a well paying job. Even more important is having a network where a person feels needed and loved. Those communities where families were breaking apart and churches were shrinking or closing - those communities tended to sink, often into alcohol, drugs, isolation and even suicide. A lot of the isolated people are actually believers who read their Bible. Yet they don't connect with a church community...

“Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves?” writer Ruth Margolis asked in a recent edition of the news magazine “The Week.” In this article, she describes how Jack Dosey, who as the founder and CEO of Twitter is one of the wealthiest people in our nation very surprisingly and publicly practices an extreme form of self-denial that she said left her “troubled and puzzled.” Dorsey eats only one meal a day in the week – and then on weekends he completely fasts. He starts his day, everyday, with an ice bath – and despite whatever the weather – walks the five miles from his home to his office. Dorsey is one of a growing number of highly successful individuals who’ve embraced this Stoic lifestyle. Margolis gives examples of these successful billionaires who exhibit very un-billionaire like behavior. Some refuse to put on a winter coat as they say they are “surrendering to the earth” and learning to accept things as they are… Others fast for weeks at a time. She writes that most of these individuals have adopted these practices as a way of thriving in the extremely high-stress environments that they live in – or perhaps more accurately, environments that they’ve created...

Just last Sunday you remember what happened in those churches in Sri Lanka. Suicide bombers in three separate Catholic churches killed perhaps 300 plus people. The archbishop there this week has announced that there should be no Masses at any church except the cathedral to try to bring the whole community together. His message is one that we must forgive. There were some already planning to take revenge, but he’s trying to prevent that and rightly so because Jesus says there is no place for violence in response to violence. We must forgive as Jesus did...

I can still recall the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when the trailer lurched forward and caught my dad’s hand between it and the hitch on the back of the family station wagon. I was twelve, maybe thirteen years old. That would have made my sisters eleven, ten and nine years old. I was still bigger than they were and stronger. Mary, Sarah, and I had been assigned to the back of the camper to push and Martha was standing next to my dad waiting to guide the camper into place. Only the wheels were caught on some kind of grade and try as we might we couldn’t seem to get it to budge. My dad shouted at us to push just one more time and I gave it all I had and felt it give. Before we could fully understand what had happened, our mother was driving him to the local emergency room with a towel wrapped around his bleeding hand. We were left to sit and wait around a now cold campfire — I remember carrying the guilt heavy in those waiting hours for I knew it was my effort that had hurt him. A few hours later they were back. His wounded hand now sported a couple of stitches and a big white bandage. He was quick to assure us that it was his fault, not ours, for we were only doing as we were told. And then he went on to say that he was glad it was his hand that took the blow and not Martha’s… for he knew the damage to her much smaller hand would have been far worse. Like any loving parent, he would willingly take the pain in place of his child any time and every time if he possibly could. He bore the scars of that particular afternoon for the rest of his life...

I remember long ago, when I was an intern trying to learn what it is to be a pastor. I’d never been to a visitation at a funeral home before. I remember putting on the uniform of a pastor. Back then, I wore the collar and the black-shirt not so much as someone wears a uniform, but rather as someone who puts on a suit of armor – hoping against hope that the uniform would give me an air of competence and perhaps even hide the fear that so often wells up in me. I don’t really remember much about that particular funeral home visitation. I couldn’t tell you who it was who had died. I remember being relieved to see a familiar face in the long line up to greet the widow. I remember sticking close to that familiar face trusting that she would show me what was expected of me. Then suddenly it happened. I was confused as to why it was happening. It was like we were a sea parting as we made way for a woman who strode into our midst with such purpose. People stepped aside, got out of her way and then we all watched as this woman, this widow opened up her arms to embrace the newly widowed woman. Their wounds were not the same except perhaps in their depth. No words were spoken between these widows and yet the magnitude of their touch was a kind of miraculous healing...

And Jesus said something poohish to his disciples on the night before he died. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard,” Pooh said. That is why the Lord Jesus gave himself to them under the appearance of bread and wine. It was his way of saying, as Christopher Robin once said to Pooh, “Forever isn’t long at all when I’m with you” and “We could just be we; forever you and me.”...

When Evan Ruggiero was 5 years old, he was at his sister's dance class one day, and thought, it looked like fun and something he wanted to do. It became obvious that the guy was a natural at tap dancing. He started taking classes, getting accepted into all these ensembles, dancing at Lincoln Center, NJPAC. He said that at this young age Tap Dancing was something that he wanted to do forever. So, very wisely, in Fall of 2009, he came here to Montclair State, and was a part of the Fine Arts in Musical Theater Program. On his 19th Birthday, during his sophomore year, while preparing to be in rehearsals for a musical, he felt a pain in his leg. He went to the doctor thinking it was a fracture or a sprain, and very quickly discovered it was bone cancer. The guy would have to go through 10 surgeries; he suffered recurrences of the cancer as it spread to his lungs; endured intensive chemotherapy (coupled with what Sloan Kettering Hospital called some of the worst side effects they had ever observed in a patient) Ultimately, the doctors determined that the only course left for Evan, was to have his right leg amputated...

“BAM!” My little Datsun was slammed into by a large delivery truck doing 60 miles an hour. It hit the car right behind the back door and the car spun round and round like a top, then “WHAM!” it stopped, wedged into the ditch on the side of the road. Every window was broken; the steering wheel was broken; the seat was broken. My head was in the backseat, passenger side and my feet were under the steering wheel, and I couldn’t breathe. I literally could not breathe. That truck knocked the wind out of me. One of my parishioners ran over to my car from the convenience store across the road and leaned in the broken window. “Pastor, Pastor are you all right?”...

Many of you know that I’m a step-parent. The thing about being a step-parent is—you have to earn it. You aren’t automatically mom or dad; you’re Jim. You’re an awkward pause when someone asks the child with you who that man is. When I became the step-parent of my older kids, I had no idea how to earn them. So I tried various things; some worked some didn’t. The one I remember most we called the owie report. My daughter Amy was a runner and a jumper and she constantly got scratches and little injuries. These were bandaged with great seriousness. And then every night, when I went to kiss her good night we would examine each one. We’d start with the oldest wounds. We’d discuss whether something was still an owie and then move on to more recent ones. Sometimes we’d replace old band-aids. All this was done with great solemnity. Each wound was offered; each was kissed. I did this for years. By the end, I was her parent. I still am...

Have you ever used the phrase “running on the smell of on oily rag”? It’s a phrase we might use when talking about how little fuel there is left in the car and how far we still have a way to go. Somehow, we get to our destination. I know it’s happened to me and when I’ve filled up, the tank has taken the maximum amount that it can hold. The car must have been running on fumes or as the saying goes “on the smell of an oily rag” – at any moment it could have come to a complete stop. Sometimes it’s a bit like that in our life’s journey. We are flying along with a full tank, a but few steep hills and sharp curves and sudden stops sucks up our fuel and soon we are pretty much “running on the smell of an oily rag”. We are anxious, stressed, down, discouraged and wondering how much bleaker the future could possibly get. Have you ever felt something like that? At some time, all of us hit a few potholes that buckle our rims and leave us stuck on the side of the road. That’s enough of the motoring metaphors apart from adding that today’s gospel tells us the disciples were at the end of the road, so they thought. They were “running on empty”...

I’m an old movie buff, but I’ve seen so many flicks in my time that I can’t remember them all. I think the scene I’m thinking of was in the 1937 version of The Good Earth, which starred Paul Muni as the Chinese peasant farmer, Wang Lung. If I remember rightly, there’s a scene in the movie in which Wang or one of the characters goes begging for a job. An employer demands, “Show me your hands.” Upon inspecting the smooth hands of the supplicant, the employer turns him away declaring, “You have never worked.”...

When I was a kid, my father read the end of John 20 at the dinner table one night for our family devotions. After he read the part about Jesus’ telling Thomas that there would be lots of people who would not see him but who would still believe in him anyway, my mother commented, “Jesus means us. He’s talking about us. We’ve never seen him the way the disciples did, but he is our Savior and we believe in him. Jesus is talking about us.” All these years later, I can still remember marveling a bit over a thought that tantalized my young heart: I am in the Bible! Little Scott Hoezee of Ada, Michigan, is in the Bible! Cool. A few years later when I ran across that same passage in high school, I realized that my mom might have been guilty of a little rhetorical excess...

Near the end of The Odyssey, Homer’s ancient tale, Odysseus finally returns home. The family nurse, Eurycleia, begins to bathe a man whom she thinks is some stranger. Only when she sees Odysseus’ old hunting wound does recognition occur. From “Book Nineteen” of the old epic: “This was the scar the old nurse recognized; she traced it under her spread hands, then let it go, and into the basin fell the lower leg. … Her eyes filled up with tears; her throat closed, and she whispered, ‘Oh yes! You are Odysseus! Ah, dear child! I could not see you until now.’ ”...

Modern American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is probably best known for his “Combines,” a term he invented to describe a series of works that present found objects on canvas and therefore combine aspects of painting and sculpture...

In his book The Gift of Doubt: From Crisis to Authentic Faith, Christian author Gary Parker claims (as you might guess from the title) that doubt is indeed a gift, because it means that you care enough to ask questions, and that you’re prepared to make your faith intentional: If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles with evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I have to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naïve faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time...

Did you have one of those mothers who could sew a costume for you? Make you look like a bunny or a bear or even a tomato, with leaves coming out of your head? I did not. My mother could sit down before breakfast and sew a button back on without anyone being late for school, but that is all she did in terms of sewing (unless cross-stitch counts). So when our Cub Scout Pack sponsored a costume contest, she and I were at a disadvantage. My friend Steve had already found a Zorro hat, complete with hanging red balls, and his mom had sewn him a black cape. He planned to draw on a black mustache. What chance did I have? My mom suggested that I go as a robot because a robot costume did not require sewing. A big fan of the ’60s television series “Lost in Space,” I decided that my mom was a genius. We wrapped a large box in aluminum foil, with knobs for controls, and were going to do the same for my arms and legs. Aluminum-covered shoe boxes would be my feet. But what about my robot’s head?...

I clearly remember talking to a group of secondary school pupils. We were discussing prayer and I asked them if they ever felt that their prayers were answered. One girl said that together with her whole family she had prayed very hard for her grandmother who had cancer. She explained that although they had prayed for a cure the grandmother actually got worse and eventually died. Despite this she felt that her prayers had been answered because her grandmother had died peacefully and was happy to go to God. It was also clear that this girl's own faith had been strengthened through this experience and that she felt closer to God and to her family as a result...

John the Evangelist, the writer of the gospel, begins the story today with these words...It was on that day. You know, THAT day. Do you have a THAT day? The day that comes to mind when you think of the day that changed the course of your life. Maybe it's your wedding day. Your graduation day. The day you saw the love of your life across the room. The day you realized you were miserable in your job and decided to make a change. You know, THAT day. The day that changed everything. It was THAT day. And the disciples were hiding. They were scared. They thought that the Jews were after them. They were huddled together like a bunch of wounded animals, talking quietly and just stalling from life. Nothing was eventful about THAT day at all until Jesus came. And then everything changed...

I’ve been reading Gregory Boyle’s new book Barking to the Choir. Early in the book, Father Boyle makes reference to a New Yorker profile of American Baptists that relayed the resignation of one congregation’s leaders to the fact that “secular culture” would always be “hostile” to Christianity. “I don’t believe this is true,” says Boyle. “Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel.” These words make me think of Thomas, that great doubter...

I sat in with the Theology Class a few weeks ago. We watched a presentation by Richard Rohr. He was talking about levels of spiritual development and “liminal spaces.” A liminal space is a time of transition, a place where we are on the threshold of something new, a time when things are changing. It can also be a very difficult time, a time of doubt, a time of confusion. Often it may be a time of pain and loss that we experience. It can be through those kinds of times that we grow spiritually. It was certainly that kind of time for the disciples. It was that kind of time for Thomas...

In the Passion narrative of John, only a chapter before the passage we heard this morning, there is a profoundly touching moment in which Jesus gives one of his disciples to his mother and his mother to the disciple. On Good Friday, the distinguished preacher Fleming Rutledge reflected on this moment as part of the traditional Seven Last Words service at Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In giving two unrelated disciples to one another, Rutledge pointed out, Jesus was creating a new family or community of believers—the community that would become the Church. At a key moment towards the end of his life, a moment in which Jesus could have been focused only on his own suffering and the death that was about to envelop him, Jesus remained intent on connecting people to one another and building community, thus demonstrating how central community was to the essence of his life and mission. If we are to follow Jesus, Rutledge claimed, we must be willing to share in community with others...

Some years ago on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had as his guest the movie actor. Michael J. Fox. Fox, as you probably know, has Parkinson’s Disease. At the time of that interview, he had recently gone public with his diagnosis. He shared, that night, how he had kept his diagnosis secret for seven years. He was worried about what it would do to his career. As the years went on, he found it hard to live with the lie. He was one of the hottest talents in Hollywood, but he was leading a double life. He’s now devoted to the very public role as a Parkinson’s Disease activist. He’s found great reward in making other people’s lives a little better. In his own words, from that interview: “Once you accept it and fix it in space and say, ‘This is this and it’s not anything else and it’s not going to go away any time soon, and you’re going to have to deal with it’ then you open up to all the stuff that’s around it and say, ‘Wow, this gives me an opportunity to help people out, this gives me an opportunity to look at things in a way that I might not have looked at them before…’”

Some years ago, a priest was visiting Rome and was fortunate to have an audience with Pope John Paul II. This priest had an hour free before he was to meet with the Pope so he decided to go to the Church across the street from his hotel to pray before his meeting. On the steps of the Church were several beggars. As the priest passed to go in to pray, he thought he recognized one of the beggars sitting on the steps. But, he passed him by and went in to the Church to pray. As he knelt down in the Church, he realized where he knew the beggar from. He rushed back out of the church and asked the man, “Do I know you?” To which the beggar replied, “Heh, yeah, we went to seminary together.” The priest replied, “So, you’re a priest then?” And the beggar replied, “I used to be, but look at me now.” So the priest kind of speechless for a moment told the beggar he would pray for him to which the beggar replied, “Lot of good that will do.”...

("One of the most difficult disciplines that film actors need to learn is to resist the temptation to look directly at the camera. Actors need to pretend like the camera is not even there because if for even a second or two they glance into that lens, viewers see it immediately. In fact,one of the main things that distinguishes amateur work from professional films is that you can often spy one of the people in the scene cutting their eyes in the direction of the camera...")

A long time ago my father was in a car accident. His hand was crushed in the accident and despite the doctors’ best efforts it wouldn’t heal properly. So, several months after the accident the doctors amputated one of my father’s fingers. When my father was still recovering from the surgery, my niece Sarah was just a baby. To this day, I believe it was the joy that only a first grandchild can bring that got my father through those painful weeks after the surgery.

The little girl loved her mother. She was only 12 days old when she first smiled up into her face, though it was her mother, and not the baby, who remembered this. You don’t remember much at 12 days old! She was only 2 months old when she was separated from her mother. The baby needed to go and live with a woman named Rose, who could feed her because her mother was not able to. The little girl lived 13 months with Rose before she came home to her own mother, her father and her sisters. By then it was hard to say goodbye to Rose. That is a lot of goodbyes! So, although she was happy as a toddler, she did cry if she was separated from her mom.

GlobeServe Ministries in Ghana, West Africa has been expanding at an amazing rate. The organization has been in existence for twenty years and started out with a passion to go to villages where there are no churches and share with them the love of God. GlobeServe started in the small town of Adidome and had five people for their first worship service. According to Rev. Samuel Kofi Dunya, the head of GlobeServe, they are now planting a church in rural northern Ghana and in the northern Volta region every four days and there is talk about moving into surrounding Burkina Faso and Togo as well.

Last summer I noticed that the Regal Lilies I have in the border had set seed. Normally I snap the old flower heads off when they have finished flowering so their energy goes into building up the bulbs, but I’d forgotten, and they formed big, fat seed heads. I let them ripen, and eventually they split open. They were full of seeds. Now, that’s red rag to a bull if you like growing things. I didn’t know whether they were likely to be viable, but what did I have to lose? I did a bit of research, which told me that lily seeds didn’t need any special cossetting or heat, so I sowed them in this shallow tray of compost.

“These are written so that you may come to believe/continue to believe...” What does your translation say? And which translation would you choose? It’s a little scary to consider that a sermon could hang on a textual variant. But here we are, with a rather important one.

what Thomas wants is to know that this is the Jesus who suffered. In fact, Thomas seems to be the only one willing to remember the suffering of Jesus. The other disciples seem ready to move on - and so they should - and so should we. It is after Easter, after all. And yet, moving on doesn't mean forgetting. How quickly we want to forget that Jesus suffered (because of us!). It is sometimes a battle to have people dwell in the betrayal, crucifixion and death of Jesus for even the 48 hours between Maundy Thursday evening and an Easter vigil.

According to Scripture, how many rooms did Jesus visit? A cave with a manger. Joseph and Mary’s home (or homes). Peter’s home. Mary and Martha’s home. Had he met with Nicodemus in a room? Though not described, Jesus dined at Zacchaeus’ house. A rich man had a dinner party and invited Jesus. There must have been a rented room or a borrowed hovel in Capernaum, where much of Jesus’ ministry was centered. He was chased from a synagogue . . . and probably more than one! (Jesus surely had bruises from other tough Friday nights.) He hung around the Temple in Jerusalem as a youth and adult. As a man, he could at least venture inside. There was the famous “upper room.” You can see that space in da Vinci’s painting. Did it only have three walls? The Jewish authorities, and later Pilate and his minions, certainly dragged Jesus through several grim rooms for the questioning that lead to the torture that led to the cross. What rooms did I forget? And then, of course, there was that room where the disciples gathered after the nasty business in Jerusalem...

Mother Teresa’s diary reveals a saintly person who struggled with a type of doubt that would crush the faint of heart. She wrote to her spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, in 1979, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” For the last nearly half-century of her life Mother Teresa felt no presence of God whatsoever — neither in her heart or in the Eucharist. That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta and— except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, Mother Teresa lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. She bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she was undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. Nevertheless, she continued to love the least in God’s creation and dedicate her life to Christ to the very end...

In the film Boycott, about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King Jr. and local civil rights leader E. D. Nixon are standing outside Nixon’s house as it burns to the ground. Nixon knows that white supremacists are behind the arson, but he also seems to know that they will go unpunished. Adding fuel to the fire, the fire department has arrived at the burning house, but the white firefighters elect simply to lean against their trucks and look on while it burns. King arrives and stands beside Nixon, both of them helpless as the house goes up in flames. Nixon asks King how he can stick to his nonviolent principles—or if he even should—as he and his family are physically threatened and attacked by the powers opposing them. King doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, speaking slowly as though it pains him to do so, he quotes from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 39: “But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved” (NIV).

After experiencing two back-to-back miscarriages, I was fairly convinced that the God I serve could have allowed those babies to live yet chose not to. Even though it would throw me into a grief and despair like I had never known; even though it would leave me with a gaping hole in my heart and my faith. I had faith that God existed. But that God “rewards those who earnestly seek him”? Not so much.

For me pistis is believing—that is, understanding, testing, selecting, and accepting doctrines of my Christian tradition with thoughtful discernment. Pistis is also trusting—that is, dedicating life to the challenging, correcting, sustaining, and healing ways of Jesus. And pistis is faith—resolve, persistence, steadfastness, and patience in the lifework of believing and trusting. As a name for this spiritual lifework, I might suggest “faithing,” were the word less clumsy.”...

A priest was going from the USA to Latin America. On the plane he found himself sitting beside a woman from Peru. She told him how she was returning home with her mother who had undergone three operations in America. “Is your mother feeling better now? He asked. “Oh yes,” the woman replied. “She’s completely cured. All her family will be waiting at the airport to welcome her back.” Then the woman asked him why he was going south. He told her that he was a priest and was going there to do missionary work. On hearing that he was a priest her faced changed dramatically. She leaned over, took him by the arm, and whispered in an agonized voice, “Oh Father, mother’s cancer is very advanced, and there is no hope for her.”...

Denise Levertov was born in England to a Welsh mother and a Russian Hasidic father. He had emigrated to the UK from Leipzig, converted to Christianity, and become an Anglican priest. After moving to the United States in 1948, Levertov taught at a number of places, including eleven years at Stanford (1982–1993). By the time she died, she had published fifty volumes. Carved panel of Doubting Thomas, Abbey of Santo Domingo del Silos, Spain, c. 1150. Carved panel of Doubting Thomas, Abbey of Santo Domingo del Silos, Spain, c. 1150. It was at Stanford, where her papers are now housed, that Levertov converted to Christianity at the age of sixty. Her little book The Stream and the Sapphire collects thirty-eight poems that trace her "slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith."

“As I placed my key into the ignition – and started my car alone, in the dark, after a long day at work – I took a deep breath. On this particular day, I felt as though I had not paused to breathe since I rose from my bed so many hours before. For the past week, life had spiraled into a state of turbulence and unrest. My responsibilities at work felt overwhelming, as project after project landed on my desk. My commitments after work felt unmanageable as another family event pops up on top of spending the weekend driving to soccer practice, swimming lessons and play rehearsals. I wonder if my life will ever be normal again. I feel the kids and my work are running my life. I’ve lost control of my life”.

The great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis suggests this theory about our spiritual yearning: A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for paradise proves that I will enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world. (C.S. Lewis “The Weight of Glory”)

Fergus and Connell were good friends, the best of friends and one day they were walking along the seashore when they started to argue. The argument became so heated that Fergus slapped Connell across the face. Connell didn’t retaliate. Instead he took a stick and wrote in the sand, “Today Fergus slapped me.” They went of to the pub and over a few pints and a wee touch of the nectar, they made up. A few months later they went for a swim in the sea. Connell’s foot became entangled in some seaweed and he couldn’t free himself. The sea was becoming rougher, and Connell began to panic. “Help!” he called, “I’m drowning!”

Ironically, skeptics and doubters make daily acts of faith. When they board an airplane, for instance, they’re making acts of faith in the pilots of that plane, in the engineers who designed it, and in all others who have manufactured and maintained that airplane. So also they make acts of faith in their friends and in those they love. For in order to say “I love you” and really mean it, one must believe in the beloved. Love and belief are two sides of the same coin. I can declare “I love you” because I believe in you, and I can say “I believe you” because in a certain way I love you. Acts of faith fill our daily lives… they are the stuff of our friendships and our loves. Yes, skeptics and doubters make daily acts of faith. And they are reasonable acts of faith. Faith is ultimately based on credible evidence. Faith is an act of reason. I believe someone because I have seen that it is reasonable to believe in them on the basis of what they have said and done. That is no less so when it comes to the eyewitnesses who have told us about Jesus. Their testimony is reasonable and credible. With them I believe in Christ Jesus… and that is a reasonable thing to do...

Every material has a breaking point. A point at which it can no longer take the stress placed upon it. That stress will cause the material to bend, to stretch, to deform, and eventually to break. Eng ineers even have a term used to describe the ability of a material to withstand stretching before it br eaks or fails . That term is tensile strength. The greater the tensile strength the stronger the material. Steel has a very high tensile strength. That strength has allowed us to use steel to construct ever larger and taller structures. But steel and all other materials have a defined tensile strength. They all have a breaking point. What is true for steel, is also true for human relationships

The Buddhist mystic and author Pema Chödrön writes eloquently and provocatively about our need to blame others in her book, When Things Fall Apart: We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society.

But as the Duke Divinity School theologian Norman Wirzba points out in his insightful little book From Nature to Creation (2015), the notion of nature as a passive object, which lies ready to hand for our use, even our exploitation, is a relatively modern. The ancients thought the world to be infused with spirits. These spirits were the explanation for the phenomena, at which our forebears marveled. Spirits, good or bad, caused storms, earthquakes, childbirth and death.

There is a quote, often attributed to Gandhi – probably wrongly – which is very popular these days. We need to "be the change we want to see", it says. I’d like to paraphrase that and say that we need to "be the Christ we want to see". The risen Christ comes into our presence in one another. We embody him when we love as he loved, forgive as he forgave. We all have countless opportunities to reject others or to welcome them, to tear people down or build them up, to hoard or to live generously, and each choice either makes Christ visible, or obscures him.

A couple of weeks ago, I stepped into a hospital room where a different kind of tension was in the air. The door was not locked, but it could not have been opened recently for the air was stuffy and tight. It seemed oppressively hot. I thought this must be what an airless tomb feels like. There were five family members and four friends of Jim jammed into that small space, keeping a weepy vigil over his weak and labored breathing. The end zone was near for Jim. It was fourth and goal. The nurse was the next one to enter. I felt sorry for her trying to push her way through this crowd of sad people. Their shoulders were stooped; their faces were bent. They were hunkered down like a team trying to keep the ball from crossing the goal line. This time I kept the door open. The room seemed to need some climate control. The nurse wasn't Jesus, though she did use the word "peaceful" a number of times to describe Jim. Her words helped calm the room. She spoke beautifully about what a good patient he was and how confident she was that he was not suffering. The family seemed to inhale her every word...

Take a look at the two images here. Consider the similarities:Two men are at the center of the composition. One has his right arm raised while the other reaches out to touch under that raised arm. These two central figures are flanked by groups of people and the whole scene takes place within an architectural setting.

Brene Brown, the great shame researcher, coined a great term: vulnerability hangover. It's that thing that happens after you totally give something all you've got, or open yourself up to others in an intimate way. It usually comes after giving the talk/pitching the idea/publishing the blog post/etc, when you wake up at 3AM in agony thinking, "Why did I say that?" "Why did I do that?" "What will people think of me?"

As our culture becomes more and more dystopian, it becomes harder to set aside cynicism. Among my friends are those who fell away from Downton Abbey because the series was too impossibly sweet, and those who stayed watching, but scoffed at the series for finding too much good in a world they believe to be much crueler than that. And in the new Fox series, Rosewood, an African American Medical Examiner (Morris Chestnut) holds out hope and faith in life to all those doubters around him, who are invested in one or another form of disbelief in their ability to be accepted in this world, in their ability to survive pain, and in the power of forgiveness.

Last week I heard a story on NPR about friendship. It referenced a study in which volunteers were exposed to mild (though the reporter who participated disagreed with that descriptive term “mild”) electrical shocks while watching a video screen. When the screen displayed a red X in the corner, the volunteer’s chances of getting a shock were one in five. If an O was displayed, no shock was forthcoming.

("She and a group of friends had decided one afternoon to climb Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Before they were able to descend, a late afternoon fog rolled in and enveloped them all in its thick, obscuring whiteness. They couldn't see the way ahead, and so they agreed they would move down the mountain very slowly, inch by inch. And they agreed they would all hold hands and they would not, under any circumstances, let go of each other..." and other illustrations)

("If you are interested in hearing a saint's tale of Thomas, who legend has it went to India to share the Gospel, listen to Bob Wilhelm's story at his Sacred Storytelling website. Bob will share with you a short version of the story, a longer version and reflections on the tale...")

("We've seen from our reading today that when we're 'running on empty', the risen Jesus gives us encouragement with his calming, peaceful presence in the middle of everything that is chaotic in our lives; when we're 'running on empty', Jesus show us how much he loves us as he invites us to gaze upon his scars; when we're 'running on empty', Jesus offers us forgiveness when guilt and remorse suck the energy out of our lives; when we're 'running on empty', Jesus gives us hope that sees in our Saviour a bright future and motivates us to new possibilities...")

(includes several quotes)

“He’s naked! the little boy shouts to his mother. A hush captures the cheering crowd as horrified eyes search for the culprit. “Then the ripple starts, swelling to an explosion of laughter and relief. The emperor is naked. “The talk about the new Court fashions is a charade. Yet no one in the subservient crowd was brave enough to call it so, until the emperor in all his silliness paraded before a little boy. “Fools may tread where angels fear to roam, but the little boy was no fool. He was young and honest enough not to have been silenced by societal pressure. “The little boy doubted what everyone else doubted but would not admit, even though the facts, and the emperor, lay bare and exposed.” Val Web recounts this story of and commentary on, the ‘Emperor’s Clothes’ in her book: In Defense of Doubt: An Invitation to Adventure. But she tells it, not as a children’s story, but as the root of new knowledge. Honest, creative, courageous doubt. Doubt which is recognised as an active agent in all of life. She writes: "Doubts are signs of our own health because they come from who we are, from our experiences. They are the grains of sand that irritate the oyster until the itching produces a beautiful pearl…..

("Richard III's physical description pales before the moral figure Shakespeare drew. His Richard is responsible for the murder of the weak Lancastrian King, Henry VI, and, when Richard's brother becomes the Yorkish King Edward IV, Richard secures his own succession to the throne by engineering the execution of his other brother George, the Duke of Clarence...")

("There was once an innkeeper in Galilee, and he was the meanest innkeeper you are ever likely to meet. There were no free little pots of peanuts on the bar in his inn. Anything you wanted you had to pay for – even a glass of cold water. The innkeeper had started to hear stories about a travelling preacher and teacher from the neighbouring town of Nazareth. This man – Jesus – spoke about the generosity of God, how he gave life in all its fullness to anyone who wanted it, free of charge, overflowing...")

("The Anthropocene is the suggested description of a new geological era. Homo sapiens; that is, us, have had such a profound impact on the planet that we have become geologically significant. Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law at Duke University in North Carolina, writes that in the last 5000 years we have made the world our anthill...")

["Last year I took a class to determine my Enneagram number. Some of us reside in the heart (or feeling) triad, as Suzanne and I do, and some in the head (or thinking) triad. My guess is Thomas would belong in the third triad: the gut. He says the thing or asks the question that emanates from his gut. Sometimes I think Thomas's problem isn't doubting so much as blurting. He says things that nobody else dares to say...."]

("When Eddie Wiggin showed up, none of us knew he was coming. Eddie is the son of a parishioner who was, until the time of his death, a very active and beloved member of the congregation. Their son Eddie was born with Down syndrome and when he first was born he was sheltered, hidden from the congregation, until a former priest of the church said, "Bring him to church." He learned to serve at the altar, skills that I was impressed he hadn't forgotten....")

("At the end of March both Coachella and Lollapalooza announced that they were banning selfie sticks as reported by NME, the music news site. Both Coachella and Lollapalooza are big-deal music festivals. Buzzfeed reports that the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Coliseum in Rome, and the Palace of Versailles in France have all banned visitors from using selfie sticks...")

("a Jewish child was separated from her parents when the Nazis took over Poland. Little Edith was sent to a work camp at Czestochowa. She somehow survived until the Germans began to retreat from Poland. Still wearing her prison uniform, she made her made her way to a town near Krakow. Emaciated and cold, she huddled in a corner. A young man, wearing a black robe, approached her. 'What are you doing?' he asked. She said she was going to Krakow to look for her parents. The seminarian brought her tea and some bread with cheese...")

("The Scottish minister and academic, A. J. Gossip, used to tell the story of a young soldier with whom he had served in World War I. The lad failed, through sickness, in the face of the enemy, and was court-martialed and punished. But his colonel said to Gossip, 'We must show that we still trust him'...")

"Paul Jones once described the ticketing system for stagecoaches in the Old West. Passengers bought one of three types of tickets. During most of the journey there was no difference. It was only when difficulties arose that the class system kicked in. In case of a accident or a breakdown, first-class passengers could remain in their seats. Those with second-class tickets were expected to get out of the coach and stand back out of the way. Those with third-class tickets not only had to disembark “they also had to lend a hand with repairs..."

("Denise Levertov always had an affinity for Thomas the Doubter. She wrote a Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus. And in The Stream and The Sapphire she included the poem St. Thomas Didymus. The Greek Didymus and the Aramaic T'omas both mean 'the twin'. In her poem, though, Levertov imagines Thomas identifying with his spiritual twin rather than his biological brother.'Thomas's spiritual twin is the desperate and doubting father in Mark 9:24: 'I do believe, help my unbelief'...")

("While Thomas waited for his mission to become clear, he went back to his old job, as a builder, says the story, working in his workshop in Caesarea. Then, one night he had a dream, and in his dream he heard God's voice. 'Thomas!' called God. 'Yes, God' called Thomas. 'I have a mission for you'. 'At last' thought Thomas "'only not to India, please.' 'Thomas, I want you to go'"'Yes, God (not India…)' 'I want you to go to India!'...")

("The new minister quickly learned that Trev's enthusiasm was rarely followed up by matching action. Things promised did not materialise on time, or at all. What was done was half done. She changed her expectations accordingly, and delegated the more important tasks to other folk. Then she began to hear the whispers. Apparently Trev's enthusiasm and support in Church Council contrasted with his attitudes elsewhere...")

("Easter Sunday, when Eddie Wiggin showed up, none of us knew he was coming. Eddie is the son of a parishioner who was, until the time of his death, a very active and beloved member of the congregation. Their son Eddie was born with Down syndrome and when he first was born he was sheltered, hidden from the congregation, until a former priest of the church said, 'Bring him to church'...")

A century ago, the First World War created unimaginable death and suffering. Poets examined that suffering in their writings, longing to believe in a God who would allow such horrors among people who were supposed to be civilized. One of those poets, a Christian by the name of Edward Shillito, found the only answer that made sense to him: “He showed them His hands and His side.” If we have never sought, we seek Thee now; Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars; We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow, We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars. The heavens frighten us; they are too calm; In all the universe we have no place. Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm? Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace. If when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near, Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine; We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear, Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign. The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak; They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. We give thanks for this Jesus of the Scars, the resurrected Christ who has breathed new life into us.

"In her children's sermon and attempting to hook the children with something familiar before making her point, the priest asked the children to identify what she would describe. 'What is fuzzy and has a long tail?' No response. 'What has big teeth and climbs in trees?' Still no response. After she asked, 'What jumps around a lot and gathers nuts and hides them?' a visiting boy could stand the silence no longer. He blurted out, 'Look, lady, I know the answer is supposed to be 'Jesus,' but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me'..."

("I would like to tell you about a man who overcame fear in a remarkable way: Thomas Byles. Ordained in 1902 the bishop assigned him to a rural parish in Essex, England. During Lent 1912 he told the altars servers that he would be gone for several weeks after Easter. He was going to America to do his brother's wedding...")

("The Scottish minister and academic, A. J. Gossip, used to tell the story of a young soldier with whom he had served in World War I. The lad failed, through sickness, in the face of the enemy, and was court-martialed and punished. But his colonel said to Gossip, 'We must show that we still trust him'...")

A couple of years ago in Winston-Salem, a couple planned a small family wedding in their Baptist Church. The wedding was on Saturday night, there had been an all-day Missions conference at the church, and the family had only an hour or so after the conference ended to clean up the church and decorate for the 7 PM wedding. It was only after the service that the bride noticed one glaring mistake in their preparations. Across the front wall was a huge banner which read WORTH THE RISK!...

("In 1899, Congressman William Vandiver coined a phrase when he said, 'I come from a state that raises corn, cotton, cockleburs, and Democrats; and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me.' 'People who require evidence have been saying, 'I'm from Missouri' ever since. Probably Thomas was the one disciple who could be said, in Congressman Vandiver's sense of it, to have been "from Missouri...")

“[D]oubt is not the opposite of faith or belief. The opposite of ‘faith’ is to be without the experience of ‘faith’; the opposite of ‘belief’ is ‘unbelief’… Doubts appear in religion… where there is a difference between what we are told to believe-taught as ‘truth’-and what we experience or intuit. Doubts occur when the belief system does not line up with our experience” (Webb 1995:4). While Brandon Scott says: “John’s sense is more ‘Be not faithless, but faithful’” (Scott 2010:196). So instead of swallowing all the traditional stuff about Easter, I reckon we need to try and understand the mind of the storyteller, John, and why only he tells this story...

("Here's small passage from the novel Eventide in which Harold, resting after his return from the cemetery, ponders what heaven would be like for his brother. 'He lay in the old soft bed with his eyes shut but soon he opened them again, sleep would not come to him, and he turned to lookout the window and then turned again to look overhead, and he realized that this room he lay in was directly below his brother's empty bedroom...")

("One day as I was walking home along I saw in the far distance an elderly man on a bicycle. There was only him and me on this otherwise deserted street, but I became aware as he got closer that he was shouting something, and eventually he was close enough for me to make it out. 'Believe on the name of the Lord Jesus and you will be saved'...")

Those of you who take seriously your commitment to support the fellowship of this congregation with your attendance are giving a very real gift in yourselves. People who attend infrequently miss so much! I say this with a great deal of sympathy and empathy. Most of you know that I was a Presbyterian pastor for twenty years, and that I have been an Episcopal priest for the past seven years. For the eight years in between, however, I was a 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. school teacher complete with all the evening grading, planning, and occasional weekend commitments that went with such a regular job. In other words, I got the chance to live and observe life and the Church as a layperson for that time. Some odd things happened to me. For instance, I found that I have a favorite location where I prefer to sit in when I am simply a visiting worshiper at a church. I want to have it open and waiting for me when I arrive on Sundays, and I've had to learn to be "Christian" when someone has beaten me to it. Something else is the discovery of just how warm and comfy bed is on Sunday mornings. It's an even greater comfort than on a Monday morning. I can't explain why; it's just so. It can be genuinely hard to get up, especially if it's been a hard week. I can understand rationalizing how God would want me to sleep-in, because he would want me to be rested and well so that I could be a good witness for him to my associates during the week ahead. I confess, before you, my brothers and sisters, that there were Sundays when I surrendered to it all. I really do understand that desire, even sense of need to give in. Just one thought kept me from giving in altogether; the lover of my soul, the savior of my life was there waiting for me. He asks only for this time of worship, and gives his own body and blood to feed our hearts, and the warmth of friendships among you to strengthen our spirits. He gives, and you give, how can we not come and take part in and be a part of that gift?...

("For several years now I've been intrigued by the hypothesis of Dr. Elaine Pagels that the Gospel of John was written as a critique of the Gospel of . In many of her works, but especially in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of she paints the picture of two rival Christian communities; Christian believers who rallied around the apostle , and another group of Christian believers who rallied around the apostle John...")

("Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, wrote, 'Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith'. And Frederick Buechner, who I always quote too much, wondrously said, 'Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith'...")

("As a youth, St. Christopher was gifted in every way, except faith. He was a big man physically, powerful, strong, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked by all. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others. His one fault was that he found it hard to believe in God. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal...")

("As I read my father's posts on the disciples living in fear following his death, I am reminded again of how living in fear can keep us from fully experiencing God's love. When I was a freshman in college I chose to get a tattoo. I found a good place and went to check it out. As I am standing in the store looking at the choices, the owner of the place walks in...")

("Robert Fulghum tells a story about visiting the island of Crete, and having a conversation with a doctor and professor of that land who spent his life seeking to heal and repair the hate that the people of Crete had for the Germans following World War II. They talked late into the night, and Fulghum finally asked him how he was able to continue such fruitless work, how he could find meaning in such work...")

(scroll down for this sermon)

(Paul Jones once described the ticketing system for stagecoaches in the Old West. Passengers bought one of three types of tickets. During most of the journey there was no difference. It was only when difficulties arose that the class system kicked in. In case of a accident or a breakdown, first-class passengers could remain in their seats. Those with second-class tickets were expected to get out of the coach and stand back out of the way. Those with third-class tickets not only had to disembark, they also had to lend a hand with repairs.)

Vance Havner was a Baptist preacher many years ago. He said that “God uses broken things. Broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.” And it was Ernest Hemingway who wrote “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.”...

("Harriet, the town gossip, knew everything about everybody...But Harriet made a mistake, when she saw George's ute parked all afternoon in front of the town's only bar. She commented to George and others in no uncertain manner that since it was parked there so long everyone knew that he was an alcoholic...")

("But when we let the story end with a label as easy as, 'Doubting Thomas', we let ourselves reside in disbelief as well. Recently, David Brooks of The New York Times criticized YouTube phenomenon Jefferson Bethke for just this. In a public display of doubt over institutionalized religion, Bethke's rebellion resonated with over 20 million viewers...")

When I was a kid, my father read the end of John 20 at the dinner table one night for our family devotions. After he read the part about Jesus' telling Thomas that there would be lots of people who would not see him but who would still believe in him anyway, my mother commented, 'Jesus means us. He's talking about us...

("for me, it's only when I've allowed myself to stand still in my own doubt that I have discovered answers and meaning and hope again. In fact, in their new little book, Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is, Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams name doubt in the second chapter as something for which we should give profound thanks. For as they write..")

("My colleague and friend, Ed Searcy, re-discovered in his doctoral studies that the root for the word 'testify' is 'testes' and comes from the practice of requiring men to cover their clothed genitals with their hand as they swore that what they were about to say was "the whole truth and nothing but the truth". The implication being that they were staking their own future generations on their testimony...")

("The movie The Hunger Games has a scene the book does not, since the book is in the first person, and the movie takes a broader view. In this scene, President Snow talks to the Game Maker, Seneca Crane, about striking the right balance between hope and fear among the oppressed people of the districts of Panem. Snow asks Seneca, 'Why do you think we have a winner?' 'What do you mean?'...")

("You may wonder, as I have, what U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, Eliza Doolittle, and Thomas the Apostle have in common. To discern this, we need only listen to their own words to uncover a common denominator. You first, Congressman Vandiver: "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me...")

("The things that make us stand out in the crowd define us in a million little ways. They can remind us of the most dramatic, heroic moments of our lives, and of every small indignity and cruelty that has happened since...")

("Several years ago a mother scooped up her toddler son from the swimming pool and began to walk towards a lounge chair. As she stepped onto the tiled patio, her foot slipped on the wet slick surface. She was also seven months pregnant. Within a split second, she knew her momentum was toppling her forward, and she could either face-plant and land on top of both her son and her unborn child, or she could fall on her knees...")

"In the virtual world of online gaming, players can fully participate in alternate realities and existences. Through the "magic" of the web, people can put themselves into almost every situation imaginable. Whether it is becoming a mythic creature or conquering another civilization, gamers can be part of any simulated world they choose..."

("I remember receiving a few "going away" presents when I went away to college. Daddy handed me $10, the first time I remember him giving me money that I had not earned working. Mama gave me a couple of shirts she got on sale. And my cousin Julia and her husband Sam gave me a Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. I spent the money on gas and wore out the shirts but I still have the dictionary sitting on my bookshelves...")

(includes several quotes from Raymond Brown)

("When people ask, Why can't you just have more faith? I say, Because I've seen the rabbit. Now, before visions of Donnie Darko begin running through your head, let me explain. You've probably seen the famous optical illusion of the duck and rabbit. Well, let's say that the duck represents a faith-view of the world and the rabbit represents a chance-view...")

Yehudi Menuhin, many of you probably have heard, Yehudi Menuhin was a wonderful violinist. He was from Russian Jewish parentage, but he was born and grew up in New York, and he lived for about eighty-two years. And, in that time, he became, in most violinists’ eyes, the greatest violinist who ever lived. And they said that when he picked up his violin, it wasn’t a violin he was playing, he was playing his heart. And he really believed that, because he was playing his heart, he was playing God’s heart, and that who would listen to the music very carefully could hear the voice of God speaking to their heart. One day he said this: “If I could go to the Sistine Chapel” — this, of course, is the famous chapel in The Vatican, it is the chapel filled with the beauty of Michelangelo’s paintings and full of the great tradition of those who serve God — “I thought then, if I played in the Sistine Chapel, I would bring a peace to the world. “But then I found out that peace, shalom, only comes from something else than a violinist. It comes from a deep change in the heart. It comes from a rekindling of love.”...

("This wound of the self that calls for help, this self that is closed in upon itself and now is open just a little bit, is an opening through which we can listen to and answer God. For the wound is more than a wound. It is access to the outside, to God, to others..." and another quote from Henri Nouwen)

("One of my favorite paintings is Carvaggio's The Incredulity of Thomas. In it, Jesus appears to Thomas and Thomas is leaned over looking intently at Jesus' wounds as he thrusts his finger into Jesus' side. But what is especially striking to me is that in this painting Jesus is not viewing Thomas accusingly...")

One of the most difficult disciplines that film actors need to learn is to resist the temptation to look directly at the camera. Actors need to pretend like the camera is not even there because if for even a second or two they glance into that lens, viewers see it immediately. In fact,one of the main things that distinguishes amateur work from professional films is that you can often spy one of the people in the scene cutting their eyes in the direction of the camera...

("Some of you may remember the old radio program 'Fibber McGee and Molly'. I confess that what I know of this show is limited to what I learned about it from watching "The Waltons" years ago! But a running gag on that show was that no matter what they did to be and look respectable, at some point someone would open Fibber McGee's closet...")

("For several years now I've been intrigued by the hypothesis of Dr. Elaine Pagels that the Gospel of John was written as a critique of the Gospel of . In many of her works, but especially in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of she paints the picture of two rival Christian communities; Christian believers who rallied around the apostle , and another group of Christian believers who rallied around the apostle John...")

["Doubt and faith are opposites. The Greek word translated believe is an adjective, pistos. The word translated disbelief is also an adjective, apistos. (Retaining adjectives in the translation would result in less natural English: 'Don't be disbelieving, be believing.') The prefix "a" in Greek, like a- in English, usually expresses negation or absence..."]

The etymology of the word belief may be of help here. The word is related to the German belieben. I took German in high school and college, and to be honest it doesn't pay off all that often, but here it does. Lieben is to love. Lieblich is lovely. Belieben is connected to loving – it means something like to belove...

David Heller is a psychologist who has done a lot of work in the area of children's spiritual development. He compiled a little book called Dear God, which is a collection of children's letters to God. Here are a few of the letters...

("Recently, I returned from a trip to the holy land ... Memphis, Tennessee. Now, Memphis is holy land for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their BBQ. Now, for those of you who are not Southerners, please understand BBQ is a holy thing. In fact, it is part of what we call the southern trinity: BBQ, Basketball and the Bible...")

("Douglas Todd who writes in the Vancouver Sun wrote an article about life after death. He talked about the atheist philosopher AJ Ayer having a renewed sense of life after having chocked on a piece of Salmon and went into cardiac arrest, being literally dead for four minutes...")

("As a teenager, Joni Eareckson Tada loved life. She enjoyed riding horses and she loved to swim. One summer in 1967, however, that all changed. A diving accident left Joni, a quadriplegic, in a wheelchair. While swimming with some friends, Joni dove into a lake not knowing how shallow it really was..." and another illustration)

I’m currently reading a book by Frank Schaeffer, who was a fundamentalist evangelist but who has grown into what I’m calling “Christian skepticism.” The title of the book is Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion {or Atheism}. In the prologue to this book Schaeffer writes This is a book for those of us who have faith in God the same way we might have the flu, less a choice than a state of being in spite of doubt… this book is for those of us who are stuck feeling that there is more to life than meets the eye… If an angel showed up outside my office window and explained “everything” to me, I’d simultaneously question my sanity, be scared as hell, and feel mightily relieved, because believing in invisible things is tough...

In the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, a powerful wind, God’s ruah if you will – in the form of a tornado – comes into Dorothy Gale’s drab, dull life and it lifts her out of her place, spins her around, disorients her and drops her smack in the middle of a new world, where she has a very important mission to accomplish. In this new world, nothing is the same as it had been before the wind came. There is beauty and wonder the likes of which Dorothy has never seen before, but there is also danger. As Dorothy is faced with these new dangers, she also meets others who have exactly the gifts she needs – wisdom, compassion and courage. And in the end, Dorothy and her new friends accomplish an incredibly unlikely mission...

("I have come to know, through the writings of James Fowler (Stages of Faith) and others that doubt often comes as a catalyst to deeper faith. Walt Wangerin Jr. suggests that faith is a verb...")

I Doubt It is a fun card game that's great for children and adults to play together.

("Is there something that you are afraid of? What is it that either paralyses you with fear or starts you screaming? Maybe it's one of these. Mysophobia is fear of dirt. Hydrophobia is fear of water. Nyctophobia is the fear of darkness...")

("Once there was a brilliant university professor who, after he received tenure, turned his attention to miracles, contacts with the dead, and near death experiences...")

During his 1990 Edward Cadbury Lecture given in the University of Birmingham, England, Brazilian Rubem Alves told a story of a boy who found the body of a dead man washed up on the edge of a seaside village. There is only one thing to do with the dead: they must be buried. In that village it was the custom for the women to prepare the dead for burial, so the women began to clean the body in preparation for the funeral. As they did, the women began to talk and ponder about the dead stranger. He was tall... and would have had to duck his head to enter their houses. His voice... was it like a whisper or like thunder. His hands... they were big. Did they play with children or sail the seas or know how to caress and embrace a woman's body. The women laughed "and were surprised as they realised that the funeral had become resurrection: a moment in their flesh, dreams, long believed to be dead, returning... their bodies alive again”.

("Skepticism is a stimulant, not to be repressed. It is an antidote to smugness and the great glow of satisfaction one gains from being right...")

("Early in his magnificent novel Les Miserables, Victor Hugo describes the fall, the actual moral disintegration, of Jean Valjean, a common laborer who is sentenced to five years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family...")

("The story is told about Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist of Princeton University in the early 20th century. Einstein was traveling from Princeton on a train, and when the conductor came down the aisle to punch the passengers' tickets, Einstein couldn't find his...")

("Have you ever heard of the Tamworth two? The Legend of the Tamworth two is based upon a true story of two little pigs who escape from the slaughter house and set in motion a hue and cry across the Midlands as they evade capture for days...")

("Not too terribly long ago I made my way up to a first church in a rural county seat town in the South to deliver the Sunday morning message. As I drove into town, I nearly ran off the road when I saw a sign just in front of a little brick ranch home that said 'Laotian Buddhist Temple'....")

("Listening is not one of my natural gifts. My 17-year-old son recently said something like this to me - 'Dad, you sure do seem to have picked jobs where you get to do a lot of the talking'....") (You will need free passwords to access this site.)

("Tonight I pulled out a card, received from a friend years ago. On the front of the card is Caravaggio's depiction of the scene that we find in this week's lectionary reading...")

("In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every pilgrimage, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us insight into the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old farmhouse")

("A saintly man who was a professor in a science department of a university, once was asked by a junior colleague, an agnostic, how he managed to reconcile his religious belief with his scientific knowledge...")

I’m reminded of that great scene in one of those Indiana Jones movies - Maybe you remember it? It’s the one where a bunch of bad guys are chasing Indy through a very long and very dark cave. They’re shooting guns and throwing spears at him – and they’re just a couple of hundred yards away from killing him. And Indy’s running as fast as he can – he’s trying to stay ahead – but then, all of a sudden, he’s brought to a screeching halt. Indy’s arrived at the end of the cave – and it looks like the road he’s been running on stops right at the edge of a tremendous, high cliff. Indy looks down: and it’s a thousand feet to the bottom – And then he looks back: the bad guys are almost on top of him with their guns blazing - What’s he going to do? Either way lies certain death – and he doesn’t have time to call his sponsor! And then there’s a really intense moment of silence up there on the screen. You can almost see Indy going inside and starting to pray. His life is back at Step One again – Things are definitely: unmanageable! So it’s then that Indy remembers a piece of spiritual guidance that he’d been given by his sponsor – Some Wise Old Man we met back at the start of the movie. And that old Man’s voice is playing in his head and it’s telling Indy that he needs to “ let go” – He needs to step off the cliff and trust – Trust that the hand of God will be there to catch him, and hold him, and carry him safely over to the other side. But like most of us, he hesitates; Like most of us, he’s terrified of letting go. How does he let go of the world that he can see, and feel, and touch? And turn his life & his will over to the care of a God that he can’t see at all - and he’s not even sure that he really exists? It’s Step Three time for Indiana J. So Indy raises his right foot, and he squeezes his eyes shut, and then, in what the Big Book calls: a moment of complete abandon, he steps off the edge of that huge cliff. And just as he does, then those of us in the audience can see that the road that looked like it ended – well, it didn’t really end at all. The road had continued on - but somehow it had blended into the rocks behind it and so it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye...

("Jesus proposes to rehire those who have proved to be incompetent disciples. In what settings does this make sense? Of course it doesn't make sense in the Board Room. Donald Trump presides over a TV reality series called The Apprentice...")

["John Donne, the great English poet and Anglican priest wrote a powerful poem about fear and the forgiveness that Jesus brings. He worried that if God forgives his sin, would he really be done (play on the poet's name), because there are more?..."]

("Some of you may remember the old radio program Fibber McGee and Molly. I confess that what I know of this show is limited to what I learned about it from watching The Waltons years ago!...")

("A man bought the very last seat for the Superbowl. It was a rotten seat, closer to the blimp than to the field, but early in the first quarter, he noticed an empty seat on the 50 yard line...")

("Several years ago, medical doctor Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a little book entitled On Death & Dying...")

("A veterinarian prescribed three huge pills to be given to a sick mule. 'How do I get him to take the pills?' the farmer asked. 'It’s quite simple,' replied the vet. 'Just insert the pill into a pipe. Put the pipe in the mule’s mouth and blow on the other end. He will swallow the pill without realizing it'...")

("Once upon a time there was a man who counted carefully all his grudges. He remembered all the cruelties of the school yard, the taunts from his class when he did something well, the feather-brained irresponsibilities of the young women he had dated...")

("Once there was a brilliant university professor who, after he received tenure, turned his attention to miracles, contacts with the dead, and near death experiences. Such events, he argued, were delusional wish fulfillment, ignorant superstitions...")

("The great champion of lay ministry and author Verna Dozier wrote that 'Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Fear is...")

("The author Anne Lamott in an article God Doesn't Take Sides, wrote this: 'The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do...")

("One particular theologian has been helpful to me. His name is Henry Drummond who makes a distinction between a doubter and an unbeliever. I have found his distinction between a doubter and unbeliever helpful...")

("Nail Bender was a fighter, the kind of woman whom one yearned to have as an advocate. Certainly, there was nothing in her physical demeanour that even suggested the persona of strength. Her slight frame and wispy greying-blond hair offered no hint to her tenacity or stamina...")

("At one time, I became very interested in what happened with people when The Great Depression actually occurred. The reactions to that fateful day were varied. Some people refused to believe it. They tried to remain in their world even though they had lost everything. Some people lost all hope. They simply quit. Some gave up their life because they lost all hope...")

("We drove across town to a large hospital. We walked through the corridors and found the room of the patient whom I was sent to visit. The patient was a young doctor in his late 30s who was dying of an inoperable cancer...")

("Just outside of my hometown, there is a church that caters to people suffering with AIDS. This was just an ordinary little church like every other ordinary little church doing all the kinds of things ordinary churches do. But I think the way the story goes is that one of sons of a church member contracted AIDS. The church rallied around the family...")

("At an all-church retreat I asked the question, 'If Jesus thought like you, what would he have done after the resurrection?' A young father said, 'He would have bought a sports car and ripped around in something pretty flashy...")

("Carl Coleman was driving to work one morning when he bumped fenders with another motorist. Both cars stopped, and the woman driving the other car got out to survey the damage. She was distraught as any of us would be. It was her fault, she admitted, and her car was brand new. She dreaded what her husband would say...")

("In Love and War is based on the World War I experiences of author Ernest Hemingway. The eighteen-year-old Hemingway is a Red Cross volunteer in Italy just before the end of the war. While stationed there, he meets, falls in love with, and proposes to Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky...")

("On Wednesday of this past week I had a Spiritual Direction appt. My day had not been playful. I was stewing and anxious. We had to meet at an alternative place, because my director is having work done on her house. That alternative place was St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. I drive by this church every day on my way to work. I do not like it...")

("A paratrooper compared his faith experience to that of his first parachute jump. They had prepared him as best they could on the ground with jumping and rolling exercises from four foot ramps. They were all young and adapted well, but there came a day when they got them up in a big transport plane...")

("The word for forgiveness in Greek can even be translated 'to free', or 'to let go'. Thus, the gospel story is always a freedom story. To those whose sin was obvious, and who had been cast out of community because of their shame, Jesus kept saying things like, 'Your sins are forgiven. Be restored.'...")

("This past Lent I had a somewhat unusual book for 'spiritual reading'. Titled Privileged Planet it was a book about cosmology by Drs. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. Previously I had read Rare Earth which had a similar jarring thesis: Earth might be the only planet in the galaxy capable of supporting more than simple life forms...")

("A few years ago a woman by the name of Anne Herbert - a writer who lives in California accidentally started a movement called 'practising random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty." She came up with the phrase while doodling on a restaurant placemat in Sausalito one day...")

("In the year 1300 King Edward I ordered that every gold or silver item should be analysed by the officers of the Goldsmiths' Guild in London before it could be offered for sale and each item was stamped to indicate that it had been tested. These markings are called ‘hallmarks’...")

("Once upon a time, a man, attempting a bank robbery, shot and killed a young woman who was a teller. He was a worthless man, a drug addict, an abuser of women, a cruel, vicious, evil gangster...")

("I am continually amazed that when Nelson Mandela came out of years and years of confinement in a South African prison, he did not call for retaliation and a violent uprising. Rather he called for a time of speaking the truth and seeking reconciliation...")

("It was in China that I experienced that trust. On a mission team I shared with members of a congregation in Beijing, an elderly gentleman told his story of faith that included his congregation. When the Red Guard had taken power, the churches were closed and the pastors sent into the countryside to work in factories...")

Sociologist Peter Berger once posed the following scenario: A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother...

("Fifty years ago religious pundits said Christianity was dying. Harvey Cox wrote in The Secular City that we had entered a new era, when people were learning to live without religion. But look at the events of the last few years. The remarkable controversy over Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. The unflagging popularity of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code...")

("I have a friend I'll call 'Wilson' . I heard that Wilson was about to have open-heart surgery. I heard that it was serious. So I gave him a call before his surgery to see how he was doing and to say a prayer with him. When I called, he told me that his surgery had been postponed and possibly cancelled...")

("The Voynich manuscript[1] eluded the best cryptologists in the world. This manuscript, discovered in 1912, contained 234 pages of hand-lettered, code with no punctuation or any indication of where the document began or ended. WWII cryptologists, who broke Nazi code, were unable to decipher this mysterious code...")

("today I am standing before you as a pastor who is a recovered skeptic. That is important. Not all Christians are recovered skeptics...")

Yesterday the State of South Carolina held burial services for the crew of The Hunley. Until several years ago there were many stories and many mysteries about the first successful submarine. One of the stories and mysteries concerned the captain, Lt. George Dixon. He was a veteran of several battles in the war. One battle is of particular note, the Battle of Shiloh. At this battle he was wounded but he was also saved. He carried with him a gold piece given to him by a young lady, Queenie Bennett. The bullet hit the gold piece and caused it to deflect enough to spare his life. He supposedly carried the gold piece with him on the fateful night aboard the Hunley. Here we have the makings of a wonderful love story. The mystery actually occurs in two parts. Was Lt. Dixon really on board the Hunley? Did he actually have the gold piece? I can tell you that as a young boy growing up in Charleston, the story and the mystery were always told as one tale. They were actually told as if the story and mystery were indeed fact. The oral tradition passed the story down as belief. When I was older the questions really came to the foreground. These questions really became prominent when the submarine was found. Indeed they did find the gold piece inside the sub. They also found some other articles that helped identify the remains in the captain's seat as Lt. George Dixon. The stories were indeed true. Material evidence had been found to corroborate the stories passed down from generation to generation of young children in the Charleston area...

("When I was a little boy there was a huge plate on a shelf overlooking the living room in our house. We had often been told that my great grandmother had given it to my grandmother and that she had passed it on to my mother on her wedding day...")

("I used to be on cordial terms with a family who ran a classy restaurant. It was revealing to sometimes be chatting in the kitchen and seeing what went on behind the scenes. Some evenings their stock of certain items on the menu, like for example barramundi, might run out. There were times when other fish was prepared to emulate a barramundi dish for an importunate customer..."and other illustrations)

("In November of 1980 an old woman died. She was eighty-three and, at the time, lived in a room in a place called Maryhouse, a home for the destitute in the Bowery district of New York. Her room was next to that of a bag lady. Her name was Dorothy Day...")

A few years ago the action/adventure hit of the summer was the Nicholas Cage movie The Rock It is set in San Francisco, and the plot concerns a terrorist takeover of the abandoned prison on Alcatraz Island. To defeat them the U.S. government must break into the prison. Who better to break into the prison than someone who had previously escaped from Alcatraz?..."

("When I was in college my freshman year I received word from home that a very good friend of the family had died. He was a young 12-year old boy and his family was very close to ours. That greatly distressed me because it was the first time I had lost anyone close. But, it was even more distressing since it was a young boy who had died...")

("Baseball season opens this week. Perhaps some of you remember Tommy John, the leading pitcher in the National League in 1974. His team was on its way to the World Series, but during a game in September, Tommy ruptured a ligament in his elbow. When he asked his surgeon if he had any chance of pitching again, he was told, 'The odds are one in a hundred.'...")

("In a Charlie Brown cartoon, Charlie and Lucy are walking home from their last day of school year; when Charlie suddenly bursts out with joyful enthusiasm telling Lucy the good news. 'Lucy, I got straight A’s, isn’t that great?'...")

("A Christian mother died and her two daughters discussed whether they should attend church the next day since it was Sunday. One said, she thought people might think it strange that they appear in public so soon after their mother's death...")

("an elderly woman left the grocery store with a shopping basket full, but as she approached her car she saw four strange men sitting in it. She whipped out her pistol, assumed the two hand on the gun stance, and yelled at them to get out of the car with their hands up. They got out, but they ran away escaping her wrath...")

("It was coffee hour, and a parishioner was fussing with the food table, hunched over and preoccupied despite the hubbub of voices swirling around her. It had been six months since her husband had died, and we had yet to touch base in an unhurried way. As soon as I approached, her eyes welled up with tears...")

("In Book XIX of the second great piece of western literature ever written, Homer's ODYSSEY, there is another a story that hinges on the subject of identity. The hero, Odysseus, has been gone from home for some twenty years. Upon his arrival neither his wife, Penelope, nor son Telemachus recognize him..." and other illustrations)

("Once upon a time not so very long ago, 16-year-old twin brothers received invitations to the big party the senior basketball players were throwing at the lake over the Memorial Day weekend. Now the twins knew their parents would not be too pleased at the idea of them attending this party...")

("Someone recently related his experience as a small boy when he went to his first symphony orchestra concert. He marvelled at the different musicians as they came onto the stage and sat down. They all seemed so different. Some were young, others were old..." and another illustration)

("Almost everyone is afraid of something. What is it that sends shivers up and down your spine? What is it that either paralyses you with fear or starts you screaming? Is there something you are afraid of? Maybe it's one of these. Mysophobia is fear of dirt. Hydrophobia is fear of water. Nyctophobia is the fear of darkness..." and another humorous illustration)

("In the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Wendell Berry's mad farmer warns against the love of 'the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay', a life which makes one 'afraid to know your neighbors and to die'...")

("Once upon a time there was a college basketball player who was very good and very lazy. He felt he was so good that he didn't need to practice. Even without practice he was all conference and second team all American...")

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Nora who refused to believe that people she saw on television were real people. She knew that the characters on the soaps and the sitcoms and the police stories were only make-believe...

Once upon a time there was a scientist who did not believe in God or life after death or anything else. He was particularly skeptical about "psychic phenomena like the so-called Near Death Experiences which he explained as the result of brain chemistry as the body dies...

("Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, Oh, yes, Lord, Sometimes, I'm almost to the ground, Oh, yes, Lord. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, Nobody knows like Jesus, Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, .... Glory, Hallelujah...")

("The origin of the word hallmark is this: many years ago all items made of silver - whether pots, dishes, trays, utensils or jewelry were produced by a member of a guild or union, and at one time those guild members both met and worked in large rooms called 'Halls'. Hallmarks are etched or engraved into every item for two reasons...")

Virginia was 19 years old and pregnant when she went to live with her 15th set of foster parents. Her case file read like a textbook example of neglect, abuse and bureaucratic failure. She sat silently in a chair, hands neatly clasped, staring into her lap. The foster parents, whose three children were in school, had been appraised of Virginia's story and promised that this placement would be "temporary". (Temporary was the story of Virginia's life.) Finally, the foster mother said, "Are you frightened, Virginia?" "Kinda," she replied without looking up. Then, "I've been in lots of homes." "Well," the sympathetic woman tried to reassure the bewildered young mother-to-be, "Let's hope this time turns out for the best." Virginia's reply is one of those statements that sticks to your soul -- it was flat, without change of tone and without Virginia even looking up -- "Hurts too much to hope."...

("Madame C. J. Walker, who was born Sarah Breedlove, in Delta, Louisiana, became America's first black millionaire. She defied the odds of her state of existence. She was illiterate but eventually developed a business that influenced the world's hair products...")

("Forty pilots were hired to carry air mail in the 1920's. Thirty-one died in crashes. The main reason: in flying through clouds a pilot becomes disoriented. He ends up flying sideways even though he is certain that he is flying straight and level. The information his senses deliver to him is faulty information. The inner ear cannot function for balance in such circumstances. So the pilots go into a tail spin and crash..." and another illustration)

("Fifty years ago religious pundits said Christianity was dying. Harvey Cox wrote in The Secular City that we had entered a new era, when people were learning to live without religion. But look at the events of the last few years. The remarkable controversy over Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. The unflagging popularity of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code...")

"according to the tradition, St. Thomas, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, came to India in 52 A.D., and landed at Kodungallur on the Malabar coast. He preached the Gospel to the Brahmin families of Kerala, many of whom received the faith..."

("When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother used to talk to it..." and other illustrations)

("Thus does the Easter Lord keep on inviting, 'Touch me and see'. That touch surmounts every barrier. Remember the magic moment near the end of the film Driving Miss Daisy: The black chauffeur and the white patrician lady wordlessly clasp their hands in a simple yet profoundly moving gesture...")

Another minister told me of a woman in his congregation who had been assaulted, in her own backyard, at ten in the morning. It was a terrible thing. But through a good counsellor and a loving family, she made her way back. One day she called and said that as part of her therapy she needed to tell someone other than a family member or a minister what had happened to her. She said that she wanted to tell her story to Joe Smith. Now, Joe was well known in the congregation. He was a sometimes recovering, often not, alcoholic. He had lost many jobs. Now why did she want to tell Joe, why not another woman? "Because," she said, "Joe knows what it's like to go to hell and live to tell about it." It is a curious thing about our wounds. We believe we ought to cover them up, but perhaps we should doubt that. Wounds and scars that the world regards as a sign of failure may lead to another's healing and wholeness...

("The story is told about Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist of Princeton University in the early 20th century. Einstein was traveling from Princeton on a train, and when the conductor came down the aisle to punch the passengers' tickets, Einstein couldn't find his...")

Hitler had conquered Europe and was on the verge of conquering England. Churchill had doubts that England would be able to survive, but he could not permit his doubts to show. His task was to rally the British Empire and help the British people to act to save themselves. With a marvelous ability to lead and inspire people with his words, Churchill helped to translate the doubts of the British people into acts of faith. On one occasion, Churchill said: "When I look back on the perils which we have already overcome, and upon the great mountain waves through which the ship has been driven, when I remember all that has gone right, I am encouraged to feel we need not be afraid that the tempest will overcome us. Let it roar. Let it rage. We shall come through."...

("One of the world's greatest actresses is Susan Sarandon. In 1995 she won the Oscar for Best Actress in the film Dead Man Walking. It is the gripping portrayal of an American nun Sister Helen Prejean who ministers to the men on death row. But that powerful film only tells half the story and left out the best part!...")

("I'd like to prod our imaginations a bit more with the imagination of Walter Wangerin, Jr., who tells this story as part of his novelistic telling of the biblical story, in The Book of God. You will recognize many of the feelings we have already identified, but listen for something else, too, as I read his version of this gospel story...")

("For the main theme of this dream was that I was somehow the chaplain for four prisoners who were to be executed together on the same day. And one of the bizarre aspects of this dream was that these prisoners were being held in my basement. There weren't any guards watching them. They were simply confined in my basement somehow...")

Jesus appears in a vision to a man called Abbanes. Abbanes was an envoy of an Indian King named Gundaphar. Gundaphar sent Abbanes on a mission to find a master builder to construct his palace. In the vision Jesus tells Abbanes that Thomas is a master builder. As a result, Thomas is sold to Abbanes as a slave. Abbanes brings Thomas back to India presenting him to King Gundaphar as a master builder. Gundaphar gives Thomas a huge amount of Money to build the palace. However, Thomas does not hire artisans or stone workers. Thomas spends his time moving among the people. He preaches the Gospel. He gives all of the money away to the poor. Many of the people convert to Christianity. Gundaphar seeing no results toward his palace has Thomas arrested and plans to kill him. Thomas has a miraculous escape and Gundaphar has a vision. God comes to Gundaphar and tells him Thomas has built him a palace of living stones. As a result Gundaphar converts to Christianity. Thomas continues to travel around the countryside preaching and baptizing. On his journey he enters the city of Misdai, which belongs to another king. This king's wife and son hear the Gospel and are baptized. As a result, Thomas is arrested and taken outside the city by four soldiers. These four soldiers kill Thomas with their spears...

("I was sitting in my easy chair preparing to speak at the morning worship service of Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church. I sat there reading my Bible and drinking my coffee. My son Seth was playing on the floor content with whatever it was that he was doing at the time. My coffee cup became empty and I stood up to get another when Seth yelled at me: 'Daddy! Daddy! Your Tubes!! Your Tubes!!'...")

("Rape is violation. It is the taking by force of what, in itself, in the right context and when freely given, is beautiful and unitive. Sexual rape is probably one of the most horrible possible ways of degrading and oppressing another human being. But there are many other kinds of rape. There is ecological rape and rape of the environment...")

("In a recent movie, COURAGE UNDER FIRE, Denzel Washington plays a soldier who makes a tragic error. At the beginning of the film, he and his men engage the enemy. It is night, and it is a dark. The battle is filled with bullets, explosions, fear and courage, but more than anything -- it is filled with confusion..." and several other illustrations - recommended!!)

("In the movie Jaws, three men are out at sea searching for the man eating Great White Shark. During a lull in their search, they find themselves sharing coffee and sharing horror stories. Each one has scars and each one tries to one up each other. One of the characters has scars from the war, another has scars from a previous shark attack..." and another illustration)

("One of my favorite writers is Henri Nouwen, a Jesuit priest who wrote a number of books, but who saw his primary accomplishment in life as a servant. The first book I ever read of his was The Wounded Healer, in which he says that it is in our woundedness that we touch one another with the healing power of Christ - not through our skills or gifts, not in our strengths, but in our weakness...")

("According to tradition, in 52 A.D., Thomas took the gospel to India, where to this day, a church bears his name, the Mar Thoma church. In the city of Madras, there is a St.Thomas Mount and a shrine where he was martyred, ironically, by someone thrusting a spear in his side! Every year, the Mar Thoma church hosts the largest evangelistic convention in Asia, known as the Maramon Convention..")

("My boyhood pastor, George Seale, used to stop his car on the side of Lincoln Street on some cold winter nights to let the neighborhood derelict sit down and get warm. George would sit with the man for an hour or so, with the heater on full blast, sharing a cup of hot coffee...")

("One of my favorite true stories is the story of the Yugoslavia judge who was electrocuted when he reached up to turn on the light while standing in the bathtub. He was pronounced dead and was placed in a preparation room under a crypt in the town cemetery for twenty-four hours before burial. Well, and this is the part I love, in the middle of the night, the judge came to..." and other illustrations)

("In his autobiography Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington recalled how the shirts worn on his plantation by the slaves were made of a rough, bristly, inexpensive flax fiber. As a young boy, the garment was so abrasive to his tender, sensitive, skin that it caused him a great deal of pain and discomfort...")

("Sister Wendy Beckett is the cloistered nun whose work as an art historian has led to several books and television programs. One time when a program of hers was about to air, she was interviewed on the radio show 'Fresh Air' by interviewer Terry Gross...")

("Douglas Todd who writes in the Vancouver Sun wrote an article about life after death. He talked about the atheist philosopher AJ Ayer having a renewed sense of life after having chocked on a piece of Salmon and went into cardiac arrest, being literally dead for four minutes...")

("Almost everyday a couple would take walks around the bay. Over the years they noticed a homeless man, who had made his home in Mission Bay. After a while, they decided the time had come for them to do more, to see if they couldn't get him off the street, to rebuild his life. In the words that they like to use, "to become a whole person again...")

("The name Hans Lippershey is not a famous one,but he made a tremendous contribution to the world of vision. In l600, he created the first telescope. He was a Dutch spectacle maker. One day two children came into his shop and were playing with some of the lenses scattered around. They put two together which greatly magnified a weathervane across the street..." and other illustrations)

("When I was a youth I used to play a card game called I Doubt It. The objective of the game was to get rid of all your cards. You played the cards in order and when you didn't have the right card, you laid a card face down. Your opponent had to decide whether or not you were bluffing since you could also lay the correct card face down...")

("A 29-year-old police officer was shot on the streets of New York City. For days his life hung in balance. Finally he pulled through, but he remains a quadriplegic. Today, Steven McDonald occupies a wheelchair and is attached to a ventilator. He travels the country telling his story, speaking about the forgiveness he has found for his assailant...")

("Few have illustrated this better than Kirby Puckett, for 13 years center fielder for the Minnesota Twins baseball team. He had a career batting average of .318, made the All-Star lineup ten years in a row, and won six Golden Gloves for defensive play. He was one of the most loved men ever to play the game, and a well-known Christian. Dennis Martinez, pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, once crushed the left side of Kirby's face with a pitch...")

("My first visit to one of the churches, I found a large chain and padlock on the front door, put there, I was told, by the local Sheriff. 'The Sheriff, why?' I asked. 'Well, things got out of hand at the board meeting last month, folks started ripping up carpet, dragging out the pews they had given in memory of their mothers. It got bad...")

("Church tradition tells us that he preaches in ancient Babylon, near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where Iraq is today. He travels to Persia, present-day Iran, and continues to win disciples to the Christian faith. Then he sails south to Malabar on the west coast of India in 52 AD. He preaches, establishes churches, and wins to Christ high caste Brahmins, as well as others...")

see also Denise Levertov's poem under the Worship Resources for Sunday, Easter 2A.