light out of every darkness

SERMON PREACHED IN AN UPPER ROOM

TO A COMPUTER AND AN INTERNET

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 19^th) 2020

READINGS

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1: 3-9

John 20: 19-31

It is often noted – or should be – that John carefully crafts his narration of the resurrection to emphasize the New Creation that is initiated in the upper room of faith. Jesus enters a place of fear, and there reconstructs the actions of the Creator. He breathes, indeed in New Zealand we might, if it’s not cultural appropriation, say “gives hongi to” – the timid huddlers in the room there.

Their timidity is understandable. Few of us are terribly brave, and having seen one’s leader brutally executed, and recognised one’s own failure to stand by him in his hour of need, few would be finding strength to do much more than huddle. Greed, shame, fear ... there’s a lot of emotions clustering in the hearts of those gathered in the upper room. It’s only a few nights since they celebrated Passover there, and while that was the beginning of the trauma, and Jesus’ behaviour had been a little strange that night, it was bliss compared to the tragedies that have unfolded from then on.

Unlike Luke, John doesn’t indicate a lull period before the commissioning of the New Era. For Luke it’s more a reversal of the Tower of Babel, but we’ll look at that another time. What is important is that for the New Testament people of God there was a powerful experience of new start, of reversal of dreadful past wrongs, and of empowerment. As we shall see at Trinity time, the embodiment of God in Christ became extended, universalised, and the first Christians and all since were enabled, as the hymn rather awkwardly puts it, to “try his works to do.”

In John, Jesus speaks specifically about breaking cycles of resentment and hatred, forgiving sins, rectifying wrongs. The Jesus sayings about forgiving sins can be terribly misunderstood. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” As we face up to a Royal Commission into sexual abuse we should be reminded once again that forgiving sin does not entail airily waving the past away, but acknowledging it, rectifying it, emboldening survivors of abuse to find footholds and stand tall once more. The people of God are called to forgive, and to model all that forgiveness and restitution, perhaps we might even use the word “reconstitution,” entails.

The resurrection scenes in the upper room, spanning two Sundays, address, in passing, questions of doubt and faith. Thomas becomes a symbol of doubt, and in his mythical, and perhaps actual subsequent career, a model of empowerment, for it is traditionally Thomas who heads East and takes the gospel to the Indian subcontinent. But perhaps we often do Thomas a disservice. Few of us would easily believe the experience that the disciples narrated – perhaps few of do even now, despite the invitation to be amongst those who believe without seeing. 

Certainly belief is no easy task, and I for one have often to silence the rationalist monkeys on my back as they cry “nonsense, nonsense.” As you may know, I will often refer to the six impossible things to believe before breakfast, and while Carroll was an enigmatic, strange figure, there is a lovely sense in which his deep but troubled faith and a fiercely mathematical mind coexisted in glorious, creative tension. For me too there exists a glorious tension between the irrationality of resurrection belief and the indelible hold the experiences of those first post-Easter days have had not only on the first disciples but their successors for nearly two thousand years. “I believe, Lord, help my unbelief” might well have been Thomas’ mantra, as well as that as the father of the possessed child of Mark 9. We might play with the idea that Thomas was that man, wrestling with faith and doubt and yet gradually enabled to carry the resurrection-gospel to world’s unimagined. We might seek for ourselves faith that stumbles on, spirit-infused despite the darkness through which most of us lurch.

The scene from the upper room seems to steer a circuitous path through doubt and end with something faith. Throughout the scriptural witness there is a difference between intellectual assent and faith, belief, trust. These latter, interchangeable words belong in the realms of grace. Lord, help my unbelief, Lord, save my unbelief, Lord, save me. Intellectually I cannot even begin to hold to resurrection doctrine, and many of the other complex teachings that emanate from that mysterious upper room. Teachings about the person and work of Jesus, his humanity and divinity, the complexity of the Trinity that we explore in the weeks to come: these are the language of love for and from the God who, in Christ, seized the fear of huddled disciples in John’s upper room, or the frightened women at Mark’s empty tomb account, and transformed it into the witness of martyrs and believers against all odds, through time and across our globe.

Despite the tumult all around us, not only of Covid-19, but of social and ecological and economic collapse, of disintegrating certainties, these promises of faith-beyond understanding can continue to whisper light in darkness, hope in despair, joy despite grief. Our task is to continue, against all odds, to surrender our hearts and minds and selves to that source of new creation who invaded and transformed the lives of the first frightened witnesses. Our task is to let ourselves be loved and transformed by the God who creates light out of every darkness.