MONDAY, MONDAY

 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Acts 2:14a,22-32; 1  Peter 1:3-9;John 20:19-31]

“Monday, Monday”.  In addition to being the title of the 1966 hit song by “the Mommas and the Papas”, it was also how I felt on Easter Monday.  After a most intense Holy Week and a powerful Easter Sunday, I struggle with the disappointment and emotional fatigue that the world-at-large doesn’t seem to get the message of new life.  “Monday, Monday…can’t trust that day…”

I mention this even though such a confession comes with no small amount of embarrassment and even shame on my part.  We have gone through Holy Week and Easter and did our best to proclaim Christ’s victory over fear and death.  Yet, waking up on Easter Monday reveals not a transformed world, but the same old fear-driven, death-worshipping state of affairs.

On Easter Monday, we still have to go to work.  School remains open.  Our taxes are due.  People’s lives still need tending to because cancer continues; dying’s confusion and pressure don’t cease; and warring madness takes no holy days off.  “Monday, Monday”.  Amplifying these unredeemed realities, this year’s “Easter Monday” also contained the stupefying weight of the President of the United States’ bellowing about annihilating an entire civilization, acting not as a creative, thoughtful, and humane leader but as if he were an adolescent playing war video war games in his mother’s basement.  “Monday, Monday…”.

Only recently did I clearly identify how this “Easter Monday” syndrome emerges in my own behaviors.  I notice that I need something to do to try to create some order out of all the worldly confusion and personal disappointment.

For instance, when we lived outside of Syracuse, Easter Monday often found me going into our garage to sort things out.  I recall sweeping and vacuuming the garage floor, literally sucking up the frozen winter detritus that (having thawed inside) dropped to the floor.  After the grit and the dirt were removed, I’d move on to reorganize all the contents in the garage in preparation for a reliable experience of spring.  My present version of dealing with this Easter hangover is to tend my roses, ridding them of the winter’s harsh treatment, hoping that their life will soon blossom.  “Monday, Monday…”  How come all our “Alleluia’s” didn’t change things more?

I think the followers of Jesus also had some similar sense of this “disappointment”.  Even though our gospel for this day says that the disciples had returned to the house where a few days earlier they had celebrated the Passover meal with Jesus, and it was, not Monday, but the “first day of the week”, the fact remains that they were gathered together because of their ongoing fear of their Judean enemies.  Fear still dominated their orientation, even though they had heard what Mary Magdalene had told them of her own experience of Easter: “I have seen the Lord!”  But what did this mean?  How could this be?  Moreover, what difference does it make?  Tellingly, the door to the upper room was locked out of fear.  “Monday, Monday”.

Then it happened: The door to the locked room being securely bolted, nonetheless, “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you…’”  Addressing what must have been the sight of the disciples’ jaws-dropping, Jesus showed them his wounds, and without explanation, John again reports that all of the disciples “rejoiced when they saw him”.  All except Thomas, who was not present at this stunning and unexpected epiphany.

John’s gospel records the next scene.  It occurred “Eight days later” – a Monday.  Beyond moving his readers along in the story, “eight days later” is also a coded theological phrase that the Fourth Gospel uses to convey that the risen Jesus begins a new Creation, one that completes what the first seven days of Genesis started.  So it was that “eight days later”, the disciples gathered two Mondays after Jesus’ resurrection but also unknowingly at the beginning of God’s new creation and time.

In the same, hide-away house – still nursing what Jesus’ resurrection might be all about, still being bound in fear and no small amount of confusion as to “what’s next?”, their colleague Thomas joined them.  Upon hearing his fellow disciples’ proclamation that they, too, had seen the Lord risen and alive, Thomas famously rejected this as (at best) second-hand information, protesting that until and unless he could touch the wounds of this appearance, he would remain skeptical, withholding his heart.

But all hesitation became moot when the Risen One again appeared among them.  Directly engaging the wary Thomas, Jesus invited the suspicious one to touch his wounds so that doubt may not suffocate belief and confusion hide joy’s new insights.

It is crucial, I think, to remember that Thomas does not take Jesus up on this intimately daring and very physical invitation as a proof for faith.  No, love is not about proof.  You either trust love or not.  You either have faith in love; or you doubt love’s reality.  You either use doubt to explore and learn love; or you use doubt as an excuse to avoid all that love entails.  However, there is more to the Thomas story than doubt’s relationship to faith.  Thomas was after something else.

So, the Risen One gives specific direction to Thomas, by which this hard-boiled follower might “awaken to” the truth that God’s love is stronger than death and (more centrally still) that it is Jesus in the flesh who stands before the gawking Thomas.  Thomas, bless his soul, needed specifics, not generalizations.  In point of fact, Thomas needed to know two things.

The first had to do with was the figure he was confronting an actual, material body.  Unlike the “Cowardly Lion” of the Wizard of Oz, Thomas was not inclined to believe in “spooks”.  Was this strange figure, who was recognizable yet not confined to locked doors or time itself – was this figure actually real; or was it an apparition of grief or disappointed wishful thinking?

If this figure were real, if it were not a figment of any imagination, then the second thing that Thomas needed to know was: Is this body really Jesus.  The unequivocal answer came at the sight of the Cross’s wounds.  That was enough for Thomas to know that “the Lord is risen, indeed!”

The confrontation with a real body and the recognition that this body was Jesus’ body caused Thomas to confess what the Gospel of St. John had said from its beginning: namely, that God’s “Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth … and we have beheld his face…”.  To which, hard-boiled Thomas proclaimed: “My Lord and my God.”

We don’t have the same benefit that Thomas’ meeting with Jesus provided.  So, how do we get through the doubts and the hardships we face without forsaking our faith, our trust, our own experience?  How do we remember the truth of what we said Easter Sunday: That “God’s love is stronger than death”?

One way is to recall where we have been in stronger times: been there; done that; keep the faith.  Or when (as with the Artimis II space flight) we glimpse at life from a more comprehensive perspective and can resettle into a faithful and hopeful stance again.

In raising the “Monday, Monday” realities of faith and needing simple regrounding in faith’s soil, I went to St. Paul and what he tells our Roman forebears in Christ.  I offer them to you, as well as to myself as a reminder of Easter’s truth.  Paul writes:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? … For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Monday, Monday”.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.