Resurrection in Locked Rooms

4-19-20

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our crucified and risen Lord and savior, Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! Lent is OVER, and Easter is HERE. All seven weeks of it. That’s right folks. We have six more weeks of the Easter season left to go. It’s the Sunday after Easter, and what about the world has changed? Anything? It’s after Easter, but some days the world feels more like it is still Good Friday. Yes, Jesus has been raised from the dead – and hallelujah for that! – But what, exactly has that gotten us?

I don’t know about you, but I feel like it’s been an entire month since Easter. Probably because after Easter, we were well into our fifth week of social distancing, waiting and wondering when or even life as we know it will ever resume, and knowing it will look different when we do. Not unlike the disciples, one week after the very first Easter morning, the second Sunday after Easter… AKA “Doubting Thomas Sunday.”

Poor, poor, Thomas, forever to be saddled with the nickname “doubting.” He gets such a bad reputation. We can’t really blame him for his reaction to the other 10 disciples. If I were him, I might think that the rest of them were playing some cruel version of an April Fool’s joke while I was out. But Thomas is not actually the most egregious doubter in this resurrection account. The true doubters are the other 10 disciples.

Earlier that day, according to the gospel of John, Mary Magdalene had gone to the tomb of Jesus, only to find the stone rolled away. And later, after Peter and the other disciple had corroborated her story and went home, Mary encountered the risen Jesus while she was still weeping outside the tomb. Their Lord was alive! He had risen from the dead! And what do you think happened next? Did they start running around, telling people the good news? NOPE. On Easter evening, they locked themselves in a room.

After the FIRST Easter, on the very evening that Jesus had been raised from the dead and appeared to Mary, the disciples actually WERE of one heart and one soul. But not the heart and soul we are supposed to emulate, a heart of love and a soul of generosity. They were united in fear, and of one soul in the desire to hide. So, they locked the door. They were still afraid.  It was after Easter – but the disciples were still stuck in Good Friday.

And so that is where Jesus found them, when they were all together, except for Thomas, locked in a room out of fear, when he burst INTO their locked room, just has he had burst OUT of the tomb.

Perhaps a better game plan for Jesus would have been to go and find some new disciples, for heaven sakes! But he didn’t. The evening after he was raised, he showed up in the very locked room that they had hidden themselves away in. Their fear had locked them IN, but it could not keep Jesus OUT.

But after other ten disciples saw Jesus for themselves, a week later - one week after Easter – where did Jesus find them? Yet again, they were sealed up in their old familiar tombs out of fear. And so, Jesus had to bust in YET AGAIN.

I think this year we understand the disciples just a little bit more. We are all in our own homes, physically distant from one another, because of some very real fears. We have sealed ourselves off from one another to keep each other safe from spreading a contagious illness, it does not buffer us from the very real fear we might feel about the unknown. We can wear masks and social distance as much as we can, but it doesn’t always completely protect those we love from getting sick ... and it certainly doesn’t protect us from things like job loss, loneliness, and depression.

So we ask ourselves: What’s now? What is the way forward? How do we walk through these uncertain, fearful times? How will we be living our lives now? Questions that I’m sure the disciples themselves were facing in that locked room.

In her book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” (which we will be reading together as a congregation) Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down….. We keep thinking that the problem is out there, in the things that scare us: dark nights, dark thoughts, dark guests, dark emotions. If we could just defend ourselves better against those things, we think, then surely we would feel more solid and secure…..” And we are just as scared here in our locked rooms as we are about the scary things that wait for us outside of them. Nowhere seems safe, and we are trapped in the locked rooms of our own fear, immobile and isolated, fearing that there is no way out and no way forward.

But, we have seen and heard what Jesus does with sealed tombs and locked doors. We have seen and heard what Jesus does with the bonds of sin, with the sting of death, and the captivity of the fear.

The Good News of Easter, which is just as true today as it was a week ago, is that Jesus has busted open the stone of your tomb like it as if it were nothing; he has ploughed through the doors of your locked rooms as if they were butter. He stands in the doorway, reaching out to take your hand, showing you the marks of the crucifixion that still remain his body. And he calls you, as he did to Lazarus, while standing outside of that dead man’s tomb, calling to him, “Lazarus, come out!”

As Barbara Brown Taylor also writes in her book about the darkness in our lives:  “...new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.” Fortunately, Peter, Mary, Thomas, and the rest of the apostles DO eventually get out of the locked room. And someday we too, will be able to leave our locked rooms, and we can still witness to what God was up to in our lives even as we were social distancing and under quarantine. New life begins here, shut away, but it doesn’t stay there. Nothing can hold it at bay and keep it from transforming our lives forever.  

The way forward is unknown, but it also well-tread. Thomas has walked this way before, as has the other 10 disciples, and Mary Magdalene, and the other women at the tomb. Together, we learn to walk in the dark, knowing that we are not alone. Thanks be to God. Amen.