A Community that Proves the Resurrection

April 27, 2025 - The Second Sunday of Easter

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Happy Easter, Church of the Epiphany! Yes, it is still Easter. I know the liturgical seasons are still new for at least some of us, and the bunnies and plastic eggs have gone back into storage. However, please know that we are now in the midst of the “Great Fifty Days of Easter,” the season between Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday, a time of joy and celebration that Christ is Risen, that death and sin have been defeated, that we have hope in the happy ending of this story we find ourselves in. You saw that rejoicing in our Psalm this morning, you’ll see it in music throughout these seven weeks. Happy Easter.

Holy Week, however; that is indeed finished. Many of you have said thank you to me for the services last week. I tried to pass along some of my own thanks in this week’s enotes newsletter: to Ellen, to the Altar Guild, and more. We are all thankful for that seasonal, concentrated time of focus and worship. But some of you have also said, “You must be so relieved it’s all over.” Well, yes, I did rest on Monday, but none of this is exactly “over” you know. The story of Easter and the resurrection is by no means the end of any story, it merely gives us hope for the end. For us and for the church, Easter is just the beginning.

We find evidence of that beginning in today’s lectionary readings. During the season of Easter, our Old Testament readings are replaced by readings from Acts, the New Testament book that Luke wrote as the sequel to his gospel. If the resurrection was the end of the story, we wouldn’t have a sequel. We wouldn’t have Paul writing to the churches, we wouldn’t need Revelation, pointing to the future, to the fully-realized Kingdom of God. We start these Easter readings in Acts 5, where the disciples had just been imprisoned for healing and teaching in Jerusalem, for being the church, and then they were released by an angel to continue in their teaching. Peter’s response in today’s passage, that they had to obey God and not men, well, that enraged the authorities who then decided to have them flogged. Verse 41, just beyond this morning’s reading, says that the disciples then rejoiced that they were “considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name of Jesus.” Their churchy, Christian work, well it had just begun.

But we need to rewind the story a little bit to get to the main entree in our readings today, the gospel story from John 20. Forget about brave, imprisoned Peter standing up to the high priest, forget about the floggings and persecution that were to come for the church in Acts. Instead, remember last week’s gospel: Jesus is Risen, much to the surprise of his followers Mary, Peter, and John. Those three saw Jesus last week and then went home; Mary announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” They are confused but hopeful, they are scared that those who killed Jesus may be coming for them, but they saw Jesus. They are hiding together, undoubtedly sharing stories about the empty tomb and wondering what it all means. And then we have this: evening on the first day of the week.

The timeframe is important: it’s the first day of the week. This, we assume, is Easter Monday, but it echoes something else that happened on the first day of the week in Jewish tradition, in the stories they tell themselves. It echoes their creation narrative. I’ve preached before here that much of the New Testament echoes or builds off the Old, that what happened with Jesus and the church cannot be fully understood without the context of the religious stories of the Hebrew people, lest we think Jesus was just a random, nice, enlightened teacher. The Jews’ creation story from Genesis 1 is a pretty well-known story still today; Christians have adopted it as ours too. In that story, God created the heavens and the earth, and on the first day, a wind, a breath from God swept over the waters as God separated light from darkness. There was evening, there was morning, the first day.

Here, on the first day in John 20, we have Jesus joining the disciples and quickly laying

out who he is and why he came. The disciples probably wanted to ask a bunch of questions, they probably wanted to explain themselves in light of his crucifixion and their abandonment and despair, but Jesus – just like the prodigal son’s father – doesn’t let them repent or confess, he just quickly starts: “Peace be with you.” God sent him, he says. Peace, he says. Forgive sins, he says. Receive the Holy Spirit, he says. Jesus creates something new, a new covenant, a new people, with his breath, echoing the way God created the heavens and the earth. We often think of Pentecost as the beginning of the church thanks to Luke’s telling of the story, but in John’s narrative, Jesus wastes no time: this new thing, this new way of being together, it starts now, on Easter, and it is founded in love, peace, forgiveness, his presence, and in the Holy Spirit.

Now, the more well-known part of this story that we hear every year in the lectionary comes in the next paragraph, in the story of poor Thomas: “Doubting Thomas,” as we call him today. He was a disciple, he followed Jesus for years, but now we know him by this one moment, when he had a perfectly logical and rational response to a resurrected Christ. He missed out on Jesus’s first visit, and so he reasonably says, “Hold on, everyone, I don’t believe that. I need to see the proof, the mark of the nails in his hands, the hole in his side where he was stabbed on the cross. Then, I’ll believe your stories.”

Remember that everyone else had seen Jesus and he hadn’t, so I think this is a completely fair response. If I stood up here and told you this morning that someone you knew and loved had been raised from the dead, you’d want to see the proof too, right? Doubting Thomas is just normal, just like us. We ourselves, me included, are no different: we need to see something, feel something, experience something to be really changed by it. I’m also an Episcopal priest, so I would never tell you that doubt in itself is a sin anyway. It’s healthy even, it’s part of an examined life of faith, it’s part of being an intelligent human in the twenty-first century, for goodness’ sake. Thomas has a reasonable response to an unreasonable, unlikely event, and for some reason we slander him for it. What Thomas needs is proof, so Jesus shows up again and offers it to him. When he does, Thomas doesn’t need to literally put his finger in the mark of the nails. He sees Jesus and believes.

So, if people need to see, feel, and experience something in order to believe it, in order to fully understand, how do we best share the good news of Christ risen today, of the resurrection, with anyone, with each other? Or do we at all? Proselytizing isn’t something we’re known for in this tradition, nor is sharing our faith at all really. In part, that’s because doing so feels offensive, or unwelcoming at the least, to say we have something good to offer that you don’t have yet. It can feel arrogant or condescending to say “we know something you don’t know,” there are bad examples of this type of Christianity everywhere. So, we rarely say anything at all. ...But we do believe something, right? We believe that in the church, here at Epiphany specifically, we have something really good and alive and important here. We have built (or at least discovered) a place of peace and love and forgiveness here, of working out love in relationship with each other, a place of unreserved welcome. This is not the only place where this happens, but it does happen here right? And that’s needed today? And we want to share it? To invite people along? I know I do. But talking about it never quite feels right... does it? It feels... awkward. I invited my mechanic to our church this week. Even for your priest... it feels strange.

Today is the 28th anniversary of my own baptism, April 27, 1997. I was baptized in another denomination, a strain of the Anglican-Methodist tradition that veered toward the Pentecostal-Holiness track over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a denomination I left behind in my early 20s. I was baptized by Pastor Mark Quanstrom at Belleville First Church of the Nazarene in southern Illinois as a 12-year-old, baptized into a community of faith that became my world, with friendships and events and classes and road trips, and eventually a Nazarene university and a role with a Nazarene aid organization in Africa. At least a dozen of the kids I grew up with are in the ministry today in a variety of denominations: Methodist, Nazarene, Baptist, Lutheran, non-denominational, Episcopal.

The church was a loving place for me. It was not flawless or faultless, it was not loving for everyone without reservation, it made and still makes plenty of mistakes. That church struggled then and it struggles now with how to live out this faith, how to follow this radical Jesus. We as Episcopalians struggle too, let me assure you, though maybe in different ways. On my more gracious days, I try to believe that basically all churches are made up of people doing their best to witness to the truth that there’s a God who loves us, a resurrected Christ who can save and lead and change us, a Spirit who can form us in the way of love. There was something real and beautiful for us in Belleville, and it shaped me; there is something real and beautiful here in South Haven, and it is shaping us today.

Today, we’re going to baptize our daughter Jane. Lily and Nora were baptized at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte while I was on staff there; today, Jane joins the church here at Epiphany. Abbey and I decide to do this as her parents because there is something real here, because there is something good and important at Epiphany, there is peace and love and forgiveness here. We see it lived every Sunday, we see it through the week, and we want our daughter, our daughters, to be raised in this stream of love, in this communion of saints; as today’s collect says, reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s body.

And we do this because we see, feel, and experience Christ here in this place, in you, in each other. That is why we call the church the body of Christ: it is here in us that the resurrected Jesus is embodied today. On this day with the story of Doubting Thomas, as today’s collect also says, here we try to “show forth in our lives what we profess with our faith.” We do our best to live the gospel, and that is how we share the truth of the resurrection with others, not with what we say but with who we are: a people of love, peace, forgiveness, as Jesus created with his breath on Easter Monday, 2,000 years ago.

There’s a phrase wrongly attributed on the internet, though I think he’d like it, to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.” For those who doubt, like Doubting Thomas, like all of us, it is this sort of preaching, with our lives, that will help all to see, feel, and experience something desperately needed in the world today, something worth living, something life-changing, this resurrected and embodied Jesus that forms us all in the way of love. May we live this gospel today to change our world through him, as proof for all of us who doubt, proof of his resurrection.

Amen.