“Something Happened.”
Sermon Preached on Easter Sunday 2023 at First Presbyterian Church-Memphis.
Some of you already know that I am third generation clergy. Yes, much to the disappointment of my 20 year-old self, who swore I would never follow my mother and grandfather in this path, here I am. One of my strongest recollections of being a PK or a “preacher's kid” comes, not from memories of hearing my mother preach, or seeing her in a robe, officiating a wedding or a baptism. My strongest associations with my mother being a minister that I recall from childhood come from playing Monopoly. Yes, Monopoly, the board game. See, my mom had a skill for quoting scripture or referencing biblical characters to fit any scenario in the game of Monopoly.
When I was ahead and would become predatory, as most people who are ahead in Monopoly tend to do, I would offer her deals that would allow her to survive to the next round, but that ultimately would put her in an even more vulnerable position. And she would look at me, shake her head, and say, “Get behind me, Satan.” Or when she would make an unbelievable comeback from the brink of bankruptcy, and while everyone was staring at her, mouths agape and wondering how in the heck she did it, she would shrug her shoulders, and say, “Oh, ye of little faith.” Or when she would purchase a property that most rational people would think it made no logical sense to purchase in the grand scheme of how the game is played, she would say, “I know what's going on. Don't be a Doubting Thomas.”
It's a charming fact that I still can't play the game of Monopoly without hearing some of these lines in my head. And that last line, brings us to our scripture today. “Don't be a Doubting Thomas.” It's an expression that you're probably familiar with. In the Christian world, it's probably the most common association with the disciple named Thomas. He was a doubter. Not really a positive attribute.
The story of Thomas's encounter with the risen Jesus in the Upper Room is often told as a story of failure – the failure of Thomas to believe in the risen Jesus based on the merely the words of others, and only coming to believe once Jesus was in front of him, inviting him to touch his wounds. The message we hear is, “Don't be a Doubting Thomas! Have stronger faith than that!”
But I think this account of Thomas is more a story about resurrection, and how we come to understand the meaning of that phrase we call out to one another this morning - “He has risen!” It's more than a story about a suspicious disciple who wanted to be sure that his friends weren't just messing with him with stories of a dead Jesus walking around and visiting people.
The reality is that the resurrection means different things to different people based on our faith traditions - the various Christianities that have influenced us along the way, and what we've been taught over the years about resurrection. Our understandings of resurrection are also varied based on how our own theological imaginations work, and our own levels of tolerance for the more supernatural elements of the Christian story.
Back in 2007, while I was in Divinity School, I was doing a pastoral internship at a UCC church in Nashville, and was assigned Easter Sunday as one of the Sundays where I would preach. As Lent began, I started hearing rumblings from some of the church members about how the previous year, the pastor had preached a sermon that essentially laid out why she didn't believe in a literal bodily resurrection of Jesus. Naturally, because this was a progressive protestant church, half of the congregation loved it, and half of them thought that Easter had just been ruined! Needless to say, I felt a great deal of pressure not to revisit the Great Easter Crisis of 2006 when it was my turn at the pulpit.
At the time, I was being mentored by the late and great David Buttrick, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt Divinity and a giant in the field of homiletics or preaching. As we were talking about my plan for Easter Sunday, I looked at him and said, “Just out of curiosity, do you believe in a literal bodily resurrection?” David looked at me and he smiled, and in his very David way shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don't know. Something happened.”
Something happened. If you're curious, the Easter 2007 sermon at that church was a dialogue sermon preached as a back and forth conversation between David and I, and the title of the sermon was, “Something happened.” David passed away a few years ago and I don't know that I ever told him that one of the greatest theological lessons in the whole of my theological studies came in those two words. Something happened.
In much of western Christianity, we place a lot of pressure on having the right understandings of certain elements of our faith. Orthodoxy, which literally translates as “right opinion.” What is the proper method of baptism? How do we understand original sin or the virgin birth? Do we have to get those things right in order for our faith to have efficacy? And one of the greatest points of contention is the resurrection. Did Jesus rise from the dead – a full bodily resurrection?
There was an entire Christian movement called Docetism formed in the early church which stated that Jesus was not quite fully-human, but merely some sort of ethereal or ghostlike being. My New Testament Professor, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine called this “Jesus the friendly ghost.” He was human-appearing. As such, his suffering was therefore not totally a bodily experience. This was rejected as heretical at the Council of Nicea and most of Christianity today still operates with the belief that anything but a truly embodied crucifixion and resurrection is simply inadequate.
So who’s right? How exactly did the resurrection occur? And why does it matter?
My friends, there is a lot of debate and confusion about what is right or orthodox in Christianity, but there is something that I do know about the nature of God, and I have the receipts – I have biblical evidence to back me up. When God encounters humanity, an event called theophany from the ancient Greek “theophania,” meaning “appearance,” it's not in one single way or form of being.
God has appeared as a burning bush, or a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God has taken a human-like form and physically wrestled with Jacob. God has appeared as a voice in the silence. Sometimes God appears to be embodied and sometimes a spectre or ghost-like being. Sometimes God appears in huge, dramatic ways and sometimes as a simple and quiet whisper, or in a dream.
There is a multitude of ways that God appears to humanity, and you know what? We see this with the resurrection as well. When it comes to the biblical accounts of the resurrection, we also have that diversity in the post-resurrection appearances. These appearances are noted in several places in the Bible. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians is actually believed to be the earliest written account, and in this account, Jesus appears to a lot of people – including a crowd of 500. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, and then to all of the disciples. In Luke, he appears to Cleopas and another unnamed disciple on the road to Emmaus before then appearing to the 11 remaining disciples. In Acts, Jesus appears to Paul on the road to Damascus, and to Stephen the martyr. And in John, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then then to the disciples minus Thomas, and then to the disciples with Thomas as we read in our text today.
None of the biblical accounts of the resurrection are the same. Why is that? Well ,one of the reasons is that we know that the authors of the Bible wrote and told their accounts of Jesus in ways that would best resonate with their particular context – with the communities they were talking to and trying to persuade to believe the faith.
So we see that God meets humanity in various ways throughout the Bible, including the accounts of the resurrection. The reason for this is perhaps one of the most beautiful lessons of the Easter Story. The God, who cannot be killed, meets us where we are, and appears to us in ways that are most meaningful and instructive in our faith. We have a diversity of resurrection stories to connect with a diversity of communities.
So was Thomas a failure for not believing his friends who told him that Christ had risen? I don't think so. It's possible that Thomas just felt left out. After all the text tells us that when Jesus appeared to the group without Thomas, he greeted them with a blessing and breathed on them which many believe means he imparted the Holy Spirit upon them. Maybe Thomas could sense that something was now different with the others – that their grief from the crucifixion had been transformed into something new and powerful. Note how when Jesus did encounter Thomas, he didn't scold him, or shame him, or kick him out of the room. He met Thomas' disbelief by inviting him into an incredibly intimate moment. Approach me. Stick your hand here in this unhealed wound in my side. Jesus knew in that moment, that this intimate encounter was what Thomas needed to understand resurrection.
Sometimes we're all at a point in the life of our faith where it takes very little for us to believe in the supernatural power of God, where we can clearly understand resurrection easily. Other times, we need that invitation to a more intimate encounter. “Come. See. Touch. Yes, they killed me. Here are the wounds, and yet, here I am before you, because they cannot kill me.”
Resurrection is just one more way that God meets us wherever we find ourselves – in life and in faith. The broad assortment of narratives around the resurrected Christ give us permission to believe that the risen Christ appears to us in the ways that we need. In a crowd or alone. As an exalted shining spirit or as a flesh-and-bones human like you and me. In a pristine body, or still bearing the wounds of crucifixion.
Theologian John Calvin went to great lengths in his writings to insist that the wounds of Christ had to be gone when Jesus appeared to others after the after the resurrection. He believed the wounds were unnecessary on the resurrected Christ. Similarly, many of us in progressive Protestant churches, don't really like to focus too much on the blood and gore of the crucifixion, and the wounds after resurrection. For others, the brutal crucifixion and the rising of Christ still bearing the marks of violence is how they best understand what it means to be resurrected.
So hear this, my friends, how we experience resurrection on any given day is often a result of our lived experiences and the lived experiences of our communities and ancestors. Maybe your body and the bodies of your ancestors have never been beaten or lynched, or maybe some of us have never been a victim of violence at all. These factors can inform how we understand and experience resurrection.
If, unlike Thomas, you believe in the risen Jesus from afar, from word of mouth only, without seeing it for yourself, that's great! Others may require a wounded Jesus to appear before them and invite them to stick a hand in the wounded side. Both accounts of resurrection are in the Bible. Both are valid. Sometimes we might need God to make a special visit and appear before us, inviting us into an intimate, embodied encounter, and that is OK. Thomas said that was what he needed, and Jesus showed up and gave him what he needed. Resurrection meets us where we are, in the boldest moments of our faith and in our times of doubt and despair. Resurrection meets us as whole and healthy individuals, but it also meets us as doubters, as those with questions, and as survivors of trauma and violence. This is the magic of resurrection.
So what happened in the actual resurrection? To quote my dear friend and mentor David Buttrick, “I don't know. Something happened.” Perhaps rather than asking what exactly happened at the resurrection of Jesus, it is better to ask what does resurrection look like to you? Because the risen Christ will meet you there, and will show you the enduring truth of our faith – that the light of God's love cannot be extinguished.
He is risen. He is risen, indeed. Amen
(Photo: Christ shows himself to Thomas, mosaic at Washington National Cathedral by Rowan LeCompte and Irene LeCompte.)
