Second Sunday of Easter
Job 42:1-6
Acts 5:12a, 17-22, 25-29
John 20:19-31

Introduction: It’s good to every now and then return to some fundamental questions to explain behaviors that can become habitual. For instance, why do we gather here in this room like we do on Sunday mornings? Why do we sing, read Scriptures, pray, come to dip bread in a cup of the fruit of the vine? Why listen to a talking head speaking from the front? It’s a bit strange behavior, if you think about it. How we answer that simple question might be the most important answer that we can give as the church.

I. If we listen to our culture, we gather to express our own brand of spirituality.
A. Calls for spirituality abound today. The last 20 years have witnessed an explosion of spirituality. We find spirituality on Oprah, on experimentation with Asian religious practices. Businesses have discovered spirituality; one can make a living as a spiritual consultant to businesses. Medical care has discovered spirituality; environmentalists; psychologists; mainline Protestants, progressive Roman Catholics, even the evangelical church embraces spirituality to run with it. Spirituality names an underlying depth to the human condition, the most basic impulse in humanity that calls for communal expression. These expressions may take different forms, but, so we are told, this human experience of spirituality is the same. Spirituality draws humans together as a community, linking individuals with others, with the world, with the cosmos, with God. Gathering together spiritually, we’re told, helps us find individual and communal meaning as we are enfolded relationally into the life process that is God-in-the-world through our own creative expressions in worship.
B. A person named Matthew Fox represents a popular expression of such an understanding of spirituality. You can find the basic tenets at Creationspirituality.info. Here’s what he teaches: (http://www.creationspirituality.info/Principles.html)
1. The universe is basically a blessing, that is, something we experience as good.
2. We can and do relate to the universe as a whole since we are a microcosm of that macrocosm and that this relationship "intoxicates" us. (Aquinas)
3. Everyone is a mystic (i.e., born full of wonder and capable of recovering it at any age; of not taking the awe and wonder of existence for granted.)
4. Everyone is a prophet, i.e., a "mystic in action" (Hocking) who is called to "interfere" (Heschel) with what interrupts authentic life.
5. That humans have to dig and work at finding their deep self, their true self, their spirit self; thus the role of spiritual praxis and meditation and community confrontation which can itself be a yoga. If we do not undergo such praxis we live superficially out of fear or greed or addiction or someone else's expectations of us. That salvation is best understood as "preserving the good." (Aquinas).
6. That the journey that marks that digging can be named as a four-fold journey:
Via Positiva: delight, awe, wonder, revelry
Via Negativa: darkness, silence, suffering, letting go
Via Creativa: birthing, creativity
Via Transformativa: compassion, justice healing, celebration
7. Everyone is an artist in some way and art as meditation is a primary form of prayer for releasing our images and empowering the community and each of us. Art finds its fulfillment in ritual, the community's art.
8. We are all sons and daughters of God; therefore, we have divine blood in our vein, the divine breath in our lungs; and the basic work of God is: Compassion.
9. Divinity is as much Mother as Father, as much Child as Parent, as much Godhead (mystery) as God (history) as much beyond all beings as in all beings.
10. That we experience that the Divine is in all things and all things are in the Divine (Panentheism) and that this mystical intuition supplants theism (and its child, atheism) as an appropriate way to name our relation to the Divine and experience the Sacred.”
C. From the perspective of the enlightened in our culture, we gather to celebrate the Sacred, the God-in-the-world-in-us. Spirituality is universal, pluralistic. We gather, so our culture tells us, whether we know it or not, as an expression of our deepest inner, communal self – an expression of spirituality that comes from being part of the divinity-in-the-cosmos.

II. There is a grain of truth in this position. But we have to recognize that if we gather for this reason, we have fallen to the anti-God forces in the world.
A. First the grain of truth. We come from God; we are for God; there is a lack that we experience when we close ourselves off from God. St. Augustine said, “We desire to praise You, for we are part of Your creation; we bear our mortality about with us and carry the evidence of our sin and the proof that You resist the proud. Still we desire to praise You, each person who is only a small part of Your creation. You have prompted us that we should delight to praise You, for You have made us for Yourself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in You.” Our hearts are restless. We experience a lack when we close ourselves from God. We experience unsettling at the deepest levels of our being until we find our rest in God. But this disquiet is ambiguous. The disquiet either opens us to the revelation of the Triune God or leads us astray into idolatry. We need care, lest the disquiet chases us into idolatry, and we end up worshipping a projection of our selves, our culture, our problems – an idol.
B. Idolatry is precisely what this emphasis on spirituality is. This postmodern notion of spirituality takes a human democratic political, capitalistic economic system and projects it onto the cosmos and calls it “God” even while claiming, at times, to contest capitalist forces. In 2005 two British non-Christians, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote a book, published by Routledge Press, called Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. The authors argue that the rise of spirituality “is a manifestation of a wider process of cultural shifts . . . associated with . . . the emergence of large multinational corporations (many of which are economically more powerful than most nation-states)” (p. 6). They continue to show how “spirituality” takes forms of life, language out of ancient traditions, dissects them, and markets them to empower the individual in the contemporary world. Spirituality “strips the assets of ‘religion’ by plundering its material and cultural resources, which are then repackaged, rebranded and then sold in the marketplace of ideas. This reselling exploits the historical respect and ‘aura of authenticity’ of the religious traditions (what in business terms is often called ‘the goodwill’ of the company) while at the same time, separating itself from any negative connotations associated with the religious in a modern secular context (rebranding). This is precisely the burden of the concept of spirituality in such contexts, allowing a simultaneous nod towards and separation from ‘the religious’. The corporate machine or the market does not seek to validate or reinscribe the tradition but rather utilizes its cultural cachet for its own purposes and profit” (pp. 15-16). If Carrette and King are right, and I think that they are, catch the irony here. Language of “spirituality” sounds so progressive, so inclusive, so all-encompassing and universal. Instead it is reactive, forces differences into the same, abstracts the particular into a universal, and arises out of recent colonial developments in the West. It is just as particular as any and all language.
C. Spirituality is nothing more than the exploitation of the faith given to the saints by the very forces that those who often invoke spirituality are trying to resist. Like all idolatries, like all that is not based upon God’s revelation but instead upon human wisdom, it projects upon the cosmos the contemporary understanding of what is human writ large. Spirituality names the unrest within us that drives us to God or idolatry. D. Spirituality cannot be an adequate reason for us to gather in worship, to live a common life as the pilgrim people of God in the world today.

Transition: We live in a cultural context that can push us towards a subtle shifting towards a “progressive faith” grounded in a “pluralistic spirituality” rather than more deeply into the faith handed over to the saints. We in this congregation have lost members in the past to such a position; there are persons deeply committed to such a faith who influence and teach us; such a position has and still endangers our unity as a congregation. I have such better news. I have such a better reason for gathering together, for engaging in worship, for our common life of love for each other, for life as a congregation – and each person within it – deeply committed to congregational and personal direct works of devotion and mercy to the poor.

III. We gather because God has raised Jesus Christ from the grave.
A. Hear the Good News! God has raised Christ from the grave! Death has been defeated by death; Christ has brought life to those in the tombs!!! In the resurrection of Jesus, the Creator God has revealed God’s self as Other than Creation, not enclosed or limited within it. God is God who rules over all history -- not a relational process within history. God is the God who creates all from nothing, and brings forth life from the dead! In the resurrection of Jesus we see that God has revealed God’s own self in Jesus Christ. God is worthy of worship because God created all and has redeemed all in life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are freed from the spiritual powers of darkness that would enslave us into the continuous repetition of the new and improved. In the resurrection of Jesus, God calls us to a life that really is life, life everlasting! The resurrection of Jesus shows us the universal in the particular, the radical inclusivity of God’s offer of forgiveness to us in Jesus, God’s universal faithfulness to God’s promise to all creation. Sin, death, and Satan have lost. God has shown that Love, Gift, Life is the last word, not absorption into a cosmic process, for God is Love, Gift, Life! Hear the good news: Jesus’ tomb is empty; He has appeared to Peter and his disciples!
B. Jesus’ resurrection is no mere spiritual resurrection; no mere collective artistic experience of the traumatized. Christ is bodily raised from the grave, a spiritual body, but a body nonetheless. We have witnesses. I say this, not on the basis of some incredulous, naïve statement of faith against reason. Faith is not a denial of reason, but its condition that leads to its perfection. Our gospel passage from the Gospel of John was most likely written by an eyewitness, written 60 years after the fact. Richard Bauckham, one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world, teaching at St. Andrewes University in Scotland, has recently written a book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Bauckham uncovers a tradition in the earliest church and evidence within the gospel itself that suggest that this gospel was written by John the Elder, a follower of Jesus from the Jerusalem area during Jesus’ life, present with him at his death, a witness to his resurrection. This is not John, one of the 12; this is another John, a John whose importance grew as others who knew Jesus died and his live testimony remained. Look at the story. It is tremendously understated; it does not bear the nature of glorious, splendiferous legends of superheroes: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side." Christ is risen; Christ appeared to his disciples! Don’t you understand? Everything has changed. God has revealed God’s self to us in the still punctured body of our Risen Lord!
C. “How, John? Explain the resurrection.” If we could explain the resurrection, it wouldn’t be true. The God whom we worship, the true God, is not an idol, not a process working itself out in relation to creation. The resurrection reveals the God who is the Creator of all, not one that we can dig out within ourselves or within creation. The actions of this God cannot be explained by us. If we try to explain the resurrection, we will end up with an idol. The resurrection stands at the core of the mystery of our faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” In the resurrection of Jesus we see the Mystery that is God does not act like an agent within creation, but acts uniquely as God, the Loving Sovereign over all. As we heard in our reading from Job concerning God: "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. . . . Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."
D. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ, confirmed in the resurrection, provides the basis for our gathering together in worship as the people of God.

IV. “I don’t know, John. Look at all the evil in the world, the needs, the degradation of the environment, the poverty. We’ve got to make a difference. I can feel spirituality; I can experience communal expressions of human creativity in worship; I experience the unity of all things around me in a cosmic change that everything is linked together by the same; I get motivated to help others, to be compassionate by reflecting on God-in-the-world. Faith in God through the resurrected Jesus is such struggle in the depths of the secularity of our world; it seems irrelevant to the challenges of our generation.”
A. I understand. Look at Thomas in the Gospel – “I won’t believe unless I see myself.” The culture of death is so prominent in the world in which we live, the reduction of persons to a commodity, the depth of poverty, the human activities that threaten the ecological balance in which we live. We want to grasp at what seems useful. God who is revealed in the resurrected Jesus? How useful is that?
B. We can’t subordinate usefulness to what is true, for ultimately, over time, only what is true is useful. Perhaps if we feel the doubts of Thomas, perhaps we can discover his confession. Jesus appeared. See what Thomas sees. Thomas felt his wounds in his hand and side. Thomas responded, “My Lord and my God.” The resurrected Jesus is still the wounded Jesus, bodily wounded by the depths of our sin, the injustice of our world. In the resurrected body of Jesus, we see the God who, in Christ, has taken into God’s self the wounds of injured humanity, indeed, an injured creation. The resurrected Jesus takes Thomas to God in the very wounds of his body. These wounds are not the last word. The wounds in the Body of Jesus are transformed by the God who is Love into God’s glory, God’s majesty, God’s sovereignty, into Life! Amidst death, we see life. We don’t have to participate in the sinfulness of the world to try to bring love by anger, to heal by destroying, to take control by protesting, to bring justice by intimidation. We are called to faith in God through the wounds of Jesus Christ, transformed by the power of the resurrection. We can enter the wounds of creation in the hope of the God who is sovereign over all, even death and injustice. We are freed to love, freed to be truthful; we don’t have to make a difference, we have to trust God who brings life from the dead!
C. Hear the good news. We don’t have to be useful as our world defines it! We can be faithful, do what is true, right, and good, patiently present within creation to let the God who raised Jesus from the dead make the difference. We can live out of control, to let God change us by calling us to the resurrected Christ amid feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, overseeing the sick, burying the dead, giving drink to the thirsty, honoring the image of God in all humans, even those who exploit and ruin God’s creation, being a committed part of a local body of Christ. We can discover ways of living in solidarity with the body of Christ throughout the world today as we live in solidarity with the saints through the ages. We are freed to hope and love through faith in the resurrected body of Jesus. “My Lord and my God!” We are freed to recognize that the most important task of our lives is to gather to worship the true God, the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. The most important thing is to believe in the risen Christ.
D. In the resurrected body of the wounded Christ, we move into the sinfulness of the world, not worrying about success or failure, but truthfulness, faithfulness, obedience to God in Christ.

Conclusion: We gather, friends, because God has raised Jesus from the grave. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ. Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword. As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”