Year C
 Acts 5:27-32
 Psalm 150
 Revelation 1:4-8
 John 20:19-31

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

Today’s Psalm is one of two choices allowed by the Revised Common Lectionary…  the other is Psalm 118:14-29…  but in today’s Psalm…  in this translation of today’s Psalm…  the word Praise appears eleven times in six short verses…  eleven times…  [ pause ] well…  actually thirteen…  since Alleluia…  or Hallelujah…  as it’s often rendered from the Hebrew…  also means Praise Ye the Lord…  and the Psalm ends with the exhortation…  that everything which has breath…  which has been given breath by God…  ought to praise God… ]  thirteen times…  so many times that it prompted one commentator to write that what we have here…  is like one Easter Alleluia expanded into an entire Psalm…  that’s a lot of praise in not very many lines…

In contrast to all this joyous praise…  on the evening of the first day of the week…  all the doors of the house were locked…  the disciples were afraid of the Judeans…  and when we remember that this Gospel was written in about 85 AD…  maybe the persecution of the first Christians had already been going on long enough for there to be some real fear…  and our reading from Acts was written before John’s Gospel…  and demonstrates Luke’s interest in presenting the early church as moving from strength to strength…  and in this passage…  the Jewish and Roman authorities do have the upper hand…   and they oppose the apostles…  but one line in this passage stands out for me…  one thing that Peter says in response to their accusation…   We must obey God…  rather than any human authority…  now how many times have we heard this or some variation of it…  sometimes from conservatives…  and sometimes from progressives…  all of whom believe they have private access to God’s will…  especially against their enemies…  and as J. Michael Krech wrote…  some will see as an inheritor of Peter’s boldness…  the public high school valedictorian who inserts a prayer into her speech at graduation…  despite being asked by the school principal not to do so…  thus obeying God rather than human authority…  others will see as closer to the spirit of Peter…  the protesters whose placards and chants of No War for Oil…  break up a Congressional committee hearing on Department of Defense appropriations…  and sometimes these people say…  or just imply…  that their ends justify their means…

We must obey God…  rather than any human authority…  and in response to events in just the last few days… . I have to wonder…  does God ever command anyone…  to repeatedly lie about what they’ve said…  even when they’re presented with an audio recording in which they clearly say…  what they’ve said they didn’t say…  and then say again that they didn’t say it…  does God ever command one Michigan senator…  to accuse another Michigan senator by name…  in a fundraising email…  of sexualizing children and grooming them for pedophilia… and if not God…  then who or what commands them…

We must obey God…  rather than any human authority…  how do we really know what God commands…  for one thing…  we have to be able to talk about it in community…   we have to be guided by the words and actions of Jesus…  and if we’ve done something which damages or breaks relationship…  we have to be able to acknowledge the error we’ve made…  the sin we’ve committed…  instead of doubling down on it…  even if that means we lose the power and authority we’ve gained by those sins…  we have to learn to distinguish what serves God and God’s will for all of us…  from what serves only us…

One of the commentaries I read for today…  was accompanied by an image by cartoonist Charles Addams…  an image that appeared on the cover of a 1981 New Yorker magazine…  and in the image…  a man is standing just inside his penthouse apartment…  a steel door separates him from what we suppose to be the hallway…  and his steel door has not one…  not two…  but four locks…  and a security bar…  yet…  on the floor…  pushed through under the door…  is an envelope…  and on the envelope is a red heart…  a Valentine…

The Rev. James Liggett wrote…  Easter…  of course…  is about the fact that God comes through locked doors and offers us himself…  and his love…  and his peace…  and he offers us the possibility of faith…  and of new life…  and it’s all a gift…  slid under our steel barriers…  and in the Gospel story…  the disciples don’t do anything noble…  heroic…  or even mildly admirable…  ]  and remember…  the last things they showed Jesus were their backs as they ran away…  the last thing we heard from Peter was his denying three times that he even knew Jesus…  after that…  the disciples just hide out…  that’s all they do…  but Jesus comes through the locks and he offers peace…

Then…  a week later…  Jesus appeared again to the disciples…  and notice what they have done that week…  they have kept the doors locked…  and they have failed even to convert Thomas…  the testimony of the entire church wasn’t persuasive or compelling enough to convince the one guy who really wants to believe…  so instead of calling this a story about Doubting Thomas…  it’s perhaps more a story about the Unpersuasive Disciples…  in fact…  if we’re going to say this is a story about Doubting Thomas…  then we also need to call Peter Doubting Peter…  because Thomas only wanted to see for himself…  what Peter wanted to see for himself…  when he ran to the tomb…  when the men called the women’s story an idle tale…  and Peter was amazed…

A clergy friend of mine said that resurrection…  is rebellion…  which is vindicated…  a rebellion against lies…  which is vindicated…  a rebellion against corruption and tyranny…  against autocrats…  against systemic racism…  a rebellion against the walls we erect to keep others out…  and a rebellion against the lie of death…

And one way to rebel…  is to tell the truth…  to hold accountable those who start wars…  those who lie about what they said or did…  to stay in power…  to rebel is to be a light in the darkness…  to rebel is to be vulnerable…  to rebel is to praise God…  and not the gods of the world…

I used to feel frustrated…  it’s been two thousand years…  and we’re still behaving in many of the same ways…  but that reality doesn’t diminish my hope…  it just helps us realize that many of the lessons we all need to learn…  the ways in which we need to become Real…  are not neatly boxed apart from each other…  but are intertwined like a plate of spaghetti…  and those of us who just read Waking Up White learned about some of that…  which is why I’ve begun to wonder whether what we’re looking at may be more like a ten-thousand year program…

John Shea points out…  that in this Gospel…  Jesus leaves them his peace…  and this giving of peace is contrasted with how the world gives…  the overall sense…  is that the world gives and takes away…  the security of one moment is replaced by the anxiety of the next…  the world cannot sustain an abiding peaceful presence…  yet that is precisely how Jesus sees himself…  an abiding presence that transcends the vagaries of the world…  Jesus does not stop the chaos of the world…  rather he is present within it…  calming and untroubling the heart…  and bringing peace… and so it’s worth considering…  from what do we lock ourselves away…  and what do we lock in with us…  refusing to let it go…  we can try to lock ourselves away from Christ…  but Jesus is persistent…  Jesus will respect the walls we erect…  and the barriers we construct…  but Jesus will also find ways to come to us…  to slide an envelope with love’s red heart under our door…  and to breathe the Holy Spirit of new life on us…  the question is…  will we unlock and open the door…  so we can breathe it in…