C
Easter 2 BFC 2016
John
20:19-31
April
3, 2016
We can imagine the disciples all huddled together in
the upper room, wondering what might befall them next. Fear holds them and dictates every
action. Their leader and teacher has
been killed, some of them watching from a safe distance as the spikes were
driven through his hands and feet. All
of the excitement and energy surrounding their movement now swept away without
any sense that there was a future on the horizon. They grieve so much loss, choke back the
dread that they may be next on the cross, wonder out loud whether the lofty
dreams of Galilee are always swept away in the realities of Jerusalem.
Some of the oldest Christian churches in the world
are found in the southern part of India, Kerala, an area said to be evangelized
by the apostle Thomas in the early 50s C.E., a time that may pre-date the
witness, ministry, and evangelization of the apostle Paul. In the Nag Hammadi find in 1945[1] was
discovered The Gospel of Thomas, a
collection of Jesus sayings that some people believe has material that
pre-dates the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That gospel was supposedly entrusted to
Jesus’ twin, the title given to Thomas in the Gospel of John. And in another Nag Hammadi text, the Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus
addresses the apostle Thomas as his twin.[2] I know, right? You can tell all of your friends having gone to
different churches today that you think your pastor may have read from The DaVinci Code today.
But if Thomas is the twin of Jesus, it might make
his doubting a little more understandable. You have been with Jesus his whole
life long, you know him backwards and forwards, and now you are supposed to
believe bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh has somehow returned from what
the Romans did to him? You would have to
see that to believe it. You wouldn’t
believe that there was anything new you could learn, any new life that could be
known.
I would think it would have to be like, with no
advanced warning, “Wait a minute, you are saying that my twin sister was just
elected President of the United States?
You mean today? With no previous
political experience? Whaaaaaaat?”
And Jesus appears to them and Thomas wants to know
if this is some kind of dream or some kind of transcendence with no basis in
reality. He doubts that it is
possible. His critical eye tells him
that this is not Jesus or Jesus somehow escaped the torture, cruelty, and death
of the cross. When you think you know
something backward and forward, hard to imagine any new life out of that. Jesus wants Thomas to think bigger. The teaching, life, and ministry of Galilee
is not destroyed in the torture, cruelty, and death of Jerusalem. Christianity, and in particular resurrection,
contemplates not only the grief and pain we experience but that there might be
two somethings deeper in life and meaning.
Galilee and Jerusalem are a “both and” for Christian life and not, as
Thomas thought, an “either or.”
Many of you have probably read about the great work
that has been done by the Community Innovations in the downtown area. And most of you know that I work with the
Native American Coalition that is part of the Community Innovations project
aimed at speaking life into the struggles of people who are chronically
inebriated. As that project moved from a
law enforcement only model to a treatment model, downtown Billings has had
great success in helping people move to recovery and off the streets. Particularly because the Native American
community is so strongly represented among this population, it has been
critical to have strong Native American leadership and understanding in working
with this issue.
I ran in the Purple 5K race today because the money from the Purple
5K goes to Spare Change for Real Change which funded Joel Simpson’s job as a
Resource Outreach Coordinator to tune of $15,000 last year. Joel is not only Native American but also a
Licensed Addictions Counselor who now travels with the two police officers
downtown, Matt Lennick and Tony Nichols.
In just a year, the statistics are staggering for
what Joel, Matt, and Tony have been able to do.
In the first year of policing downtown, Matt and Tony had written 618
open container citations and arrested 474 people. In 2014, Matt and Tony were writing 20
tickets a day. And they kept on seeing the same people and dealing with the
same issues—over and over again. Matt
referred to the summer of 2014 as “a rough summer.” That’s when Joel Simpson came along.
o The chronic inebriate population cost the city 8.5
million dollars in 2014.
o From
Jan. 1 through Sept. 1, 2014, calls regarding public inebriation, including
alcohol-related trespass, numbered 832 within the Downtown area. During the same period [in 2015], 566 calls
came in.
o Open
container citations plunged during the same period from 1,050 in 2014 to 567 in
2015. Alcohol-related trespass, dropped from 466 to 357.[3]
Matt told me he loves what he does now because he
gets to do what he set out to do when he became a police officer—to help people. If Matt and Tony believed that they knew this
policing gig thing, knew it backwards and forwards, such that there was never
anything they could learn, or no new life could be breathed into what they do,
the whole downtown would feel much different right now.
Our church participates in this story not only
through me, but also because we now host two with the possibility of three
Talking Circles in our church building as a way of helping Native American
people on the road to recovery. Our
church is loved for hosting these Talking Circles. Lita Pepion leads out a peer to peer group
and Josiah Hugs leads out a Wellbriety group on Thursday nights. Joel Simpson looks like he might very well
move his group to our church because they need to find a space downtown.
Here is the struggle though. As people enter into recovery in these
groups, what we are hearing is that they are beginning to unearth the
incredible trauma found in these people’s lives. Sometimes that trauma spans generations. And as my good friend and colleague, Rev.
Paula Bidle, told me, trauma care has changed over the years. It used to be that what was done is get the
person to talk about and process the trauma.
But all that seemed to do was hardwire the trauma into a person’s brain,
heart, and soul. Now the treatment
prescribed is to find a story, a narrative in the person’s life that goes two
somethings deeper than the trauma. It is
to find something that transcends Galilee and Jerusalem.
People of faith should be the very people who,
through a transcendent faith, find meaning even in the midst of trial, trauma,
and tribulation. Andrew Zolli’s reasons
why people of faith are resilient:
So,
people who are psychologically hardy it turns out believe very prevalently some
things about the world. So if you believe that the world is a meaningful place,
if you see yourself as having agency within that world, and if you see
successes and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things, you
are more likely to be psychologically hardy and therefore more resilient in the
face of trauma. This is one reason why some researchers postulate that systems
of faith have been so resilient themselves in human history, and so prevalent,
so sticky. Not because the individual content of the beliefs or any particular
belief about, within those cosmologies is strictly true or not. But because
believing in those kinds of things are the very kinds of things that confer
psychological resilience upon us.[4]
Our
transcendent sensibilities, as people of faith, make us a transcendent
people. There is a certain sense of
transcendence in no matter what tragedies might befall us. But if we are glumly walking toward death
with no possibility for anything else, thinking we know things backwards and
forwards, with no possibility of new life, we lose that sense of
transcendence. In the end, that’s
basically what resurrection is—a belief in transcendence. Resurrection is the understanding that God
has a story that is two somethings deeper than the grief, death, and pain that
we experience in the world. Resurrection
is the idea that there is something bigger and greater than ourselves, that
there might be things yet to learn, that God may be speaking new life into
something we thought we knew backwards and forwards.
The message of the gospel is that we
do not have to stay locked up in fear in some upper room waiting for the world
to do its worst to us. God is working
out new life, even for those who thought they knew Jesus their whole lives
long. And we are the people of God, the
disciples of Christ. So let us find ways
to blow open the doors, expecting new life, a story that is two somethings
deeper to help us find a way that transcends our fear. Do not be afraid. Amen.
[1]
Pre-dating the finding of The Dead Sea
Scrolls in 1947 found near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.
[2]
Herbert Christian Merillat, “’Twin’”
of Jesus?” The Gnostic Apostle Thomas,
1997. http://gnosis.org/thomasbook/intro.html.
[3]
Mike Ferguson, “Downtown seeing results with serial inebriate initiative,” Billings Gazette, October 8, 2015.
[4]
Andrew Zolli, “A Shift to Humility:
Reslience and Expanding the Edge of Change,” On
Being with Krista Tippett, May 16, 2013, http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-shift-to-humility-andrew-zolli-on-resilience-and-expanding-the-edge-of-change/transcript-0#main_content.
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