Limited Offers
John 20: 19-31
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
 

We live our lives behind locked doors. We lock the doors to our houses, our cars, our schools our churches.  We lock doors because we are afraid.  Because there are real and imagined threats.  We lock doors to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our property, to safeguard our privacy – in rooms, homes, and offices.  We lock gates at playgrounds and parks.  We lock ourselves in and others out because we suspect, and sometimes rightfully so, that if we do not, we will lose... something, or we will be harmed, or placed at risk.

And so locking doors becomes a reflex, a habit, a posture we adopt.
After living years in the center of the city, I visited my aunt in rural Vermont.  “We don’t lock doors here,” she told me after I had locked her out of her house twice and her car once.  My locking instincts are so engrained, my threat response so automatic, I cannot stop locking doors!

If you have ever experienced violation and vulnerability, then you know the importance of locking doors.  And yet, I have wondered how this orientation shapes our souls.

Some of you may have read the great newsletter article by our Trustees, “It Takes a Congregation to Secure A Building.”  The Trustees care for the physical plant and assets of Epworth on behalf of us all. They are committed to safe sanctuary for children and for all people.  But safety requires caution as well as hospitality. It requires limitations as well as assurances.

Novelist and theologian Frederick Beuchner has written, “We are captives in the house we have built for ourselves, which is, in many ways, a haunted house.”

We lock doors to make ourselves safe ... but locked doors can create prisons as well.

The disciples gathered together behind locked doors.  Theirs was a fearful time.  And that room was haunted by the all too recent memory of the cruel betrayal, denial and crucifixion of their teacher and friend and Lord.  They had heard word of his resurrection. Some had seen Jesus. But in such frightening times, it seemed wise to meet behind locked doors.

Jesus entered the locked room, and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this he showed them his hands and his side, his wounds.  Then he said to them again, “Peace be with you,” and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them.  Then he sent them out – through those same doors -- to ministries of forgiveness and just action.  

Thomas was not with them that day in that upper room.  So he wanted to see for himself.  Thomas is called, “Doubting Thomas,”  but he is also called, “Thomas the twin.”  Perhaps we are Thomas’ twin – each of us – asking to see and touch the risen Christ before we believe, not trusting the word of those who say “We have seen the Lord” while they gather behind locked doors!

In the United Methodist Church, we call for Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors  and usually mean the full inclusion of all God’s children in all levels of the church.  But Thomas reminds us that our minds, hearts and doors open to encounters with the risen Christ – encounters we will recognize as we open to receive the gift of peace, the breath of the Spirit, the gift of honest sharing of wounds.

Even when we lock our minds, hearts, and doors, Christ comes to us.   From the tomb to our rooms, Christ comes to us.  Christ comes through the locked doors of our lives again and again and breathes upon us, “I am with you!  Open your mind to question me. Open your heart to welcome me.  Open your doors to move out into the world and serve with me.”

See, touch, follow, says the Risen Christ to the locked-door dwellers we have become.

Philip Slater, a sociologist and keen observer of the U.S. wrote:
We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills, (self-help books) of every kind.  An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another...
One way we lock doors as a community of faith is to make faith a private matter, too personal to talk about or to live out in the public square.  We limit and lock down the gospel to a small sphere of spiritualized individualism.

But we don’t have to stay there.   Last weekend Epworth led three very public acts of worship and witness.  Three times we worshipped outside.

At sunrise on Good Friday, 200 people gathered at the Livermore Weapons Lab.  We prayed and sang and testified and heard the word proclaimed and offered confession and healing and commitment. Members of our community planned and led and organized this service.  Fifty of those who gathered prayerfully chose to continue their witness by civil disobedience at the gates of the Lab and were arrested.

At noon on Good Friday, about 50 people walked the streets of Berkeley, praying, singing, calling for a stop to violence.  Andrea Davidson led members of various congregations, and students from PSR in a beautiful worship service and witness, stopping to tell the stories at places of violence and places of hope in the neighborhoods of Berkeley.

And finally, at sunrise on Easter, 45 people gathered at the edge of the Bay to see the moon set, the sun rise, and to greet the day of resurrection living at Cesar Chavez Park!

God calls us out into the world to worship and to work and study and play and organize.  Think about the call to worship led by our children each week:  “Welcome Everyone, to the love of God!”  Imagine it sung not just in the sanctuary, but in neighborhoods, homes, hospitals, prisons, shelters, schools, city streets. Imagine it as the message that your presence brings wherever you go!  “Welcome, everyone, to the love of God!”

On May 7th, at 7:00 p.m., Epworth will host a regional gathering of the Bay Area Coalition of Welcoming Congregations.  We want to be prepared to act and speak with strong prophetic voices of faith for marriage and family equality following the California Court Decision. I hope you will consider being present.

This morning we celebrated the baptism of Noah Douglas Leonards.  As a community we made a commitment to him, we sang to him and welcomed him to this world and to this family of faith.  Our commitment to him is not just to be a spiritual home for him now, to love and care for him here, but to live out our faith in the world so that wherever he may go he may grow in the knowledge and love of God.  May we help create a world safe for and worthy of all God’s children.

Maria Pilar Aquino wrote:  “Jesus’ liberation does not support a split between the personal and the social, the private and the public, the transcendent and the historical, men and women, above and below.”

 We are called to reach out and touch the wounds of Jesus in the world.

The season of Easter is about encountering the risen Christ.  Again and again, locked doors cannot keep resurrection out.

We follow the One who calls us to believe in that which we have not seen or touched ... the One who is not contained or constrained by the limitations we place on ourselves and on God.

We follow the One who calls us to love our enemies, to pray for those who harm us, to see the image of God in everyone, and to expect life even in the midst of suffering.  

We are creatures of limitation who find ourselves transformed and empowered again and again by the one who loves without limits and leads us out into the world that God so loves.  Thanks be to God!