Easter 2: To touch the wounded is to touch God.

April 18, 2004 Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo ; Scriptures: Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

Peace be with you all. This passage, the doubting Thomas passage, evoked for me a few things. First of all, it spoke to me, and hopefully to all of us, about doubt, the nature of doubt. And that doubt is every bit as much a holy activity as belief. In fact, belief comes from doubt. If we do not doubt, we do not believe. And here, you see Jesus making an appearance, not just to any disciple, but to the one who challenges him with doubt. Albert Einstein who was a great theologian and a believer, a deep believer in God, said, "Doubt everything!" It’s doubt that brought me here, I don’t know about you. I tried to doubt the answers that the world had given me, the answers my own life had given me. I started to doubt in those common sense realities that we all take for granted. I doubted and so I came.

The second aspect of this passage that evokes something in us is the woundedness of Christ. Isn’t it interesting that Thomas doesn’t believe in the resurrected Christ unless he sees the wounds. Now, this is sort of like you meeting me on the street and not believing it’s me unless you see my appendectomy scar. It’s a little strange. Why wouldn’t he just know him from his face? Why wouldn’t he just know him from all those other markers that we take for granted? But no. Thomas knew him and Jesus presented himself to him wounded. And until, Thomas says, he puts his hands right in those wounds, he wasn’t going to believe anything. So there’s something about touching the wounded that shows us the very face of the divine.

I wanted to share with you a little story from my childhood. I grew up at the corner of Bedford and Bloor in a house that no longer exists there (it’s a store right now) and that was far from the neighbourhood it is today. But I remember as a child being very frightened of death. I think many of our children are very frightened of death. They don’t express it often but I think they are. I think this is perhaps part of not wanting to go to sleep at night because sleep is like a little death and children don’t understand what the world is like without a loved one in it. They don’t understand where those loved ones go. And I was raised in an atheist household and my mother really didn’t believe what she was saying and that’s probably why I didn’t listen very well. But, I think, to assuage my fears, she told me stories about heaven. And the heaven she told me about was always the same. There were clouds and people in white togas and shiny lights and things. And it never rang true and it never helped me. It never made me less afraid because I wanted to believe in a heaven that was exactly like Toronto. I wanted to believe in a heaven that looked absolutely no different from my home and the dinner table with all the familiar faces around it. And I wanted a heaven that looked like the corner of Bedford and Bloor. And I wanted a heaven that was the same as my walk home from Huron Street Public School. And I wanted a heaven that was filled with my friends.

That’s my vision of heaven, sort of still today interestingly enough, but definitely back then, it was more of the same. Now, I don’t know about how I would have felt about living at the corner of Bloor and Bedford for five thousand years. I don’t know about that. But I didn’t think it through really as a little kid. I just knew that home was heaven to me. Now, I wasn’t unrealistic about what home was about. I knew my parents didn’t have a perfect marriage. I heard the arguments. I knew they weren’t perfect parents. They asked me to do totally unreasonable things like clean up my room and eat my vegetables. That stunk. I knew that school was far from perfect, that school was kind of a battlefield, in my day, that you kind of survived every day. And the walk home from school was a perilous walk, when other kids taunted you and chased you and threw things at you. I knew that all of that was part of my Toronto. And I also knew that there was hunger, I sort of had that idea. There was hunger in my Toronto of various sorts, but it was still heaven. I still didn’t want it ever, none of it, ever to end. Maybe just polish it up a little bit around the edges. There is something about the woundedness, even of our city that speaks to us of the kingdom.

This was very biblical of me, of course. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the idea that a city is a representation of heaven is just like in Revelation and is just like in the Bible, where heaven is represented by Jerusalem. That’s what heaven looked like to them, the New Jerusalem. That was their image of what it looked like to be perfect. Not quite the Jerusalem they experienced, always a place of bloodshed, but the Jerusalem they knew Jerusalem could be, beautiful, things cleaned up, people not hungry, warfare ended. It was a city heaven. A city. But still I doubt that they could imagine even that city without a little bit of woundedness in it. Many of us have mystical experiences and we have mystical experiences about God. And mostly I hear stories of being in the outdoors, being by a canyon or in a forest grove and having this incredible sense of awe grip us. But there are also stories about being in the presence of the mystic, in the presence of God, in emergency rooms, by gravesides, where people are hungry and homeless, where people suffer, where there are tears shed, and where we know because of all of those things, Christ is there. So there he stood, he has his hands out and he asked a non-believing Thomas, "Go on", he said, "Touch me".

I thought what I would like to do today is just make a prayer. It is a prayer for all of you who work with the wounded, who speak to the wounded, who touch the wounded and who each one of us, are the wounded.

Blessed be you who work in the healthcare professions who are healers by trade. Blessed are you for helping look after the Body of Christ as it lies bleeding in front of you. Blessed are you who see the Body of Christ in the one bleeding in front of you who needs your care, your bandaging, your words of comfort. Blessed are you in the teaching professions. Blessed are you who encounter the Body of Christ as a young boy or young girl, the one who gives you trouble, the one who asks you questions you can’t answer. The one who comes to you and speaks out of turn, you know we have somebody like that in the evening service, we call him the resident atheist and he comes every Sunday night and he always challenges, he always interrupts the sermon just like you. He interrupts the sermon and he throws challenges at me sometimes I can’t answer. He throws challenges at us all.

Blessed be you who are teachers. Blessed be you who are homemakers or parents. Blessed be you who watch as your own children necessarily suffer and necessarily experience all the trials and tribulations of life. Blessed are you who are homemakers and parents who live through that and know that sometimes there are things you can do, but sometimes there are things that happen to your loved ones, your children, that are entirely out of your control. Blessed are you who see in the faces and the bodies of your children the face and the body of the one who was tried and executed and there was nothing Mary could do about it. Blessed are you who work in business. Blessed are you who encounter the risen one who comes and calls you away from that tax collection, that financial matter, that day to day of the business grind. It calls you to another place, the place where money, although still power is shared. The one who calls you away from the counting tables, who calls you away from all of that which seems so important at the time and calls you to another place where all of that isn’t so important anymore. Blessed are you who work at the ordinary jobs, the jobs that don’t seem to count for much, the retail clerks, the people who work in hotels, assembly lines. Blessed are you, for you are the ones who encounter Christ just there, just there and the one who calls you while helping you and the one who calls you from the worker next to you, who calls you from the customer across from you, who calls you with a new statement, a new wisdom, a new truth. Blessed are you who encounter the Christ in the everyday. Blessed are you who are in the clergy, oh even you. Blessed are you who are chaplains. Blessed are you who work in ministry and we all work in ministry. Blessed are you for doing just that little bit more, for listening to the insufferable. Blessed are you for those long days and those long nights when the phone rings and your own family life is interrupted by the bigger and broader family life of others who need you. Blessed are you.

The third aspect of this reading and the one that I’ll leave you with is this beautiful call to the church and we are church. You know, blessed are we as church who came this day when the weather would have us stay home and sleep in. Blessed are we who came to be part of a baptism, even though we don’t believe in that stuff. Blessed who came just because something told you to. Blessed are you who came to hear what I’m about to say. This is what Jesus said the purpose of you being here is. He said it very clearly in what is called John’s Pentecost, the gifting of the Holy Spirit upon the church. He said it this way. He said, "you have only one purpose as church and this is what that purpose is. Are you ready? It’s to forgive each other. That is your only purpose as church, your only and most important purpose of church is to forgive those you encounter, not to judge. Isn’t it interesting how the church has interpreted this passage as a judgment, no it’s to forgive each other because Jesus said, If you don’t do it, who will? If you don’t live out your purpose of forgiveness for even the most heinous of crimes, if you don’t live out your forgiveness of those things that people do to you that really hurt and if you don’t live out your forgiveness of yourself for the things that you have done that hurt others. If you do not forgive, then you are not truly church. That’s the purpose, that’s the call for us all to be here.

Isn’t it beautiful that as we come here, the voices of children always interrupt our thoughts. Isn’t it beautiful that as we gather here, we few, hear these words of forgiveness even to ourselves.

Let us pray together.
Dearest God,
We gather here as one family for the one purpose only, and that is the call of forgiveness.
You call us so that we might learn to forgive others and forgive ourselves.
That we might learn to see ourselves as blessed, as the blessed ones who encounter you in everyday of our lives.
For it was you who said, you came in many ways and many forms, but mostly wounded.
And blessed are you O God who shows your hands and your side and your feet, wounded all. And blessed are we who are brave enough to touch you.
In the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.