The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 15, 2007

2 Easter – C
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
I Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

The Second Sunday of Easter always reminds me of my New Testament teacher, because of the story he once told as an illustration of the Gospel for this day, his story about his buying some new undershorts. He said he bought a different brand from what he usually bought, because this different brand was on sale at an advantageous price. What he didn’t notice, however, was that the new brand had the label in the front, while the ones he had worn for years – he meant the brand he had worn for years – had the label in the back.

So the next morning, when he pulled out one of his new pairs of undershorts to put them on, he just looked at the label as usual and said to himself, “Right. They go on this way.” And he didn’t give them another thought until somewhat later in the day when, as you may have guessed by now, he found himself all turned around back to front.

Now this story does make a point about today’s Gospel reading. The point is that when we look only at nonessentials, we’re likely to get all turned around back to front. If we don’t concentrate on what’s really important, we’re likely to get very confused.

We often get turned back to front, very confused, about church. The Church is that community of people who are gathered in Jesus’ name and are sent to proclaim the peace of Christ following the Resurrection. But just who are we? And just what makes us who we are? And just what is it we are sent to be and do? If we look only at nonessentials, we’re likely to get all turned around back to front. If we don’t concentrate on what’s really important, we’re likely to get very confused about church.

Jesus’ Church gathers in all kinds of circumstances. There is, for example, no common architecture. Some churches seem to have everything: stained glass windows with millions of pieces of imported glass, grand pipe organs with multiple ranks, choirs with dozens, even hundreds of members, all with professionally trained voices, and eloquent preachers who go on for a lot longer than I do.

Some say that what’s most important in a church are friendly people. Others, like some mega-churches, invest in bowling alleys, swimming pools, and large-screen closed-circuit TVs. I’m told that Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral always insisted that the most important thing a church is a huge parking lot, that without a large, accessible parking lot a church is at a great disadvantage.

Still other churches are simple wood shelters where you have to look for beauty in the people rather than on the walls or in the windows. There are churches where there is no choir at all, and no preacher, and certainly no swimming pool or bowling alley, and where the few who gather wait simply and quietly for the leading of the Spirit.

So what is the essence, the bottom-line, of church? What is it that binds the heirs of Jesus’ resurrection together as one body? What is that essential thing we need to keep our eye on if we don’t want to get turned back to front about church?

We find it in the Gospel reading from John this morning. On the evening of the Day of Resurrection, we find the church stripped bare of all nonessentials. It is a church with no choir, no organ, not even an old upright piano. There is no bowling alley, no pool, no pulpit or altar, no pastor, no plan, no mission, no conviction, no nothing. It is the first miserable little congregation ever to take upon itself the name “church.” It is the disciples, a small scared, disheartened, defensive group hiding behind locked doors, cowering like frightened animals, hoping no one in town will discover they are there.

“What kind of advertisement might this church put in the Saturday paper to attract members?” Tom Long asks. “The friendly church where everyone is welcome”? Hardly. “The church with a warm heart and a bold mission”? Forget it. “This,” Long says, “is the church of sweaty palms and shaky knees.”

Here is a church with absolutely nothing going for it, except – except the presence of the risen Christ, who, despite the locked doors, stands among those who were gathered and grants them his peace.

Isn’t this every church, stripped down to the essentials? Regardless of parking lots, vestry plans and commissions, pulpits and preachers, organs and choirs, bowling alleys, pools, and gorgeous windows, we are, left to our own devices, nothing more than a huddle of confused, timid, cowering failures to follow Jesus.

Remember how we got here today. Just a few days ago, one of us, Judas, used a sign of friendship to point Jesus out to the police. Another of us, Peter, saved his own skin by denying he had ever laid eyes on his best friend. The rest of us all scattered in fear, abandoning every principle we had promised to live by, leaving Jesus to a kangaroo court that declared him guilty of a crime he didn’t commit and then had him executed him in one of the most hideous ways possible. That was us, the community of Jesus, just two days ago.

And then early this morning the women went to Jesus’ tomb. They went to anoint the body of their friend, which is more than we men had the guts to do. And when they arrived at the tomb, they found it empty. “You are looking for Jesus?” a young man near the tomb asks. “Don’t be afraid. He’s not here. He is risen. Go and tell Peter, and the others, that he wants to see them again.”

And here we are later the same day, a pitiful huddle of shameful, frightened, timid souls who hope no one else in town will find us. And our friend, the one we betrayed and denied and handed over to be crucified just two days ago, appears among us and says, ”Peace be with you.” “Peace be with you” – it is, as John Claypool says, the greatest miracle of Easter. Not that God raised Jesus from the dead (that was a piece of cake for the Creator of the universe!), but that after all we did to Jesus on Good Friday, and before that, Jesus came back to us on Sunday and wanted to see us again to offer us his peace.

“Peace be with you,” he says again. And he breathes on us and says, ”I want you to go out now and do for others what I am doing.” And our pitiful huddle of shameful, frightened, timid souls becomes church.

All our sacred trappings and spiritual pretense do not make us church. And all our arguments over who is right about this, that, or the other do not make us church. The bottom line of the Church of Jesus is not about being right; it’s about being in love with God and with one another. The essence of church is the presence of the wounded, risen Jesus, the presence of the One we betrayed, denied, and crucified, who comes reconciling us all to himself, forgiving us despite all we have done to him, and who, once again, gives us pitiful, shameful, frightened, timid souls the Holy Spirit and his ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation.

All life is gift, even church. All life is gift, even worship. All life is gift, even the Holy Spirit and the ministry of reconciliation to which we have all been called. And without this gift we’re likely to get all turned around back to front about church. We’re likely to get very confused. Without this gift we are apt to think that church is all about us and our righteousness when, in fact, church is all about God and his grace.

Those of us who prepare for our parish worship here each week have learned this. We carefully select every hymn coordinated to the texts for the day. We prepare bulletins we hope will correctly tell everyone “where we are” in the service. We spend hours every week preparing sermons we hope will be spiritually edifying. But we know that despite all our educated planning, worship – real worship, the “My-Lord-and-my-God” kind of worship that Thomas experienced – is not something we can create, not even with the most magnificent of Anglican liturgies. Worship is gift, pure and simple, a gift from the risen Christ, regardless of circumstance.

In fact, I wonder sometimes if our laborious planning, our selecting and evaluating, isn’t perhaps just another form of the disciples’ locked doors, another way of trying to avoid the living God, a way trying to keep things fixed, tied down, under our control, another form of fear and death, whereas the Spirit would come to bring us a fresh breath of life.

But sometimes – Who knows? Maybe today will be such a time – sometimes by the grace of God, the risen Lord slips through the closed doors and through the fear and the death, and there is worship, real worship, worship not of our own creation, but worship as gift, worship as peace. And we take off our shoes in awe, and by the grace of God we say with Thomas, ”My Lord and my God,” and we become church.

When you come right down to it, isn’t the peace which the forgiving Jesus gives us the only thing we have to offer as church that is unique, the only thing we have to offer the world that is different from what we have to offer in all our clubs and cliques? “Peace be with you.” Not just peace in Iraq, but that peace which passes all understanding, that peace that is impossible without the gift of Christ, peace between you and the person next to you in the pew, peace in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, peace between the ones we have denied or betrayed or offended, and us, the deniers, the betrayers, the offenders.

This peace is Jesus’ Church turned front to front. It’s what all our sacred trappings and spiritual exercises and parish plans and commissions and budgets and worship really come down to if they come down to anything at all? Worship, at its root, is like all life. It is gift, pure and simple, because it is centered on the One who comes to us through the locked doors of all our fears and through the locked doors of all our disagreements and of the houses of straw we build and who, through his forgiveness of us, makes it possible for us to forgive each other.

The same Holy Spirit who brought you and me here seeking God today, the same Holy Spirit who brought Thomas to that first pitiful congregation of confused and frightened disciples, brought all the others as well. The same Holy Spirit who brings some people to Shove Chapel seeking God today brings all the others to North Tejon Street.

In her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris tells of the time when she realized that worship [time] was different time, a time of grace, a time of gift.

Norris tells about the day she joined the church in her small town. Before the service that day, she says, ”[we] new members gathered with some of the elders. One [elder] was a man I’d [known before and] never liked much. I’ll call him Ed. He’d always seemed ill-tempered to me, and also a terrible gossip, epitomizing the small-mindedness that can make small town life such a trial.”

“The minister had asked [Ed] to formally greet the new members. Standing awkwardly before our small group, Ed cleared his throat and mumbled, ’I’d like to welcome you to the Body of Christ.’ The minister’s mouth dropped open, as did mine. Neither of us had ever heard words remotely like this come from Ed’s mouth. Like distant thunder, the words made me more alert, attuned to further disruptions in the atmosphere. What had I gotten myself into? I was astonished to realize, as that service began, that while I may never like Ed very much, I had just been commanded to love him. My own small mind had just been jolted, and the world seemed larger, opened in a new way."

In that moment, Norris was turned front to front about church. Worship happened, the way it happened in that other small, locked room in Jerusalem so long, long ago.

Such moments, moments that turn us front to front, are sacred moments, holy time which we pray will sometimes happen in this holy space, and wherever else the living Christ decides to enter through the locked doors of our rooms and hearts and agendas.

Lutheran pastor Rich Mayfield tells of worship that happened one Wednesday night at the beginning of Lent a few years ago. It happened “in the midst of one of the worst blizzards I can remember,” he says. “The weather left our sanctuary with fewer than fifty people in worship, but worship we did.”

“I believe we sang a little louder, prayed a little harder, believed a little bolder because of our circumstances, [which were lousy and] which weren’t made any easier when all the power went out just as I held the chalice up in preparation for Holy Communion. We came forward in darkness, and I would hazard a guess that just about everyone in attendance felt a certain wonder at what we were doing in the dark.”

“It seemed a holy moment, as the wind raged against our building and we few fools for Christ knelt to receive that strange and wondrous meal. It was a powerful metaphor for me, and I suspect for others as well. Surely this is something of what it means to be a Christian, with the storms of the world banging on the walls as we waited to receive the gift of the one who has reconciled the world with himself and who sends us out into the world with the spirit and ministry he has been giving all along.”

It was a moment of worship, a “My Lord and my God” moment, a moment of turning front to front about church.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.