FOMO Thomas

 

4-11-21

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

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! It’s the Sunday after Easter, and what about the world has changed, besides everything and nothing?

I don’t know about you, but I feel like it’s been an entire month since Easter. Probably because this is our second Easter dealing with Covid – still wearing masks and socially distancing, but now also waiting to get vaccinated, and wondering when or even IF life as we know it will ever resume and what it will look like when it does.

We are 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.” But Thomas is not actually the most egregious “doubter” of the disciple squad. The true doubters are the other 10 disciples.

I think this last year, we understand the disciples just a little bit more. We have spent a year in our own homes, physically distant from others, because of some very real concerns over a very contagious and deadly virus. While we have sealed ourselves off from one another to keep each other safe, it does not buffer us from the very real fears we might feel about how our world has changed around us in the last year.

But that doesn’t get them off the hook: Their Lord was alive! He had risen from the dead! Mary SAW him, and then later the rest of the disciples got to see him too. 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. It was after Easter – but the disciples were still stuck in Good Friday.

And so that is where Jesus found them that first time, when they were all together, except for Thomas, clinging to the familiarity of the locked room, when he burst INTO that room, just has he had burst OUT of the tomb.

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 familiar, safe room. And so, Jesus had to bust in YET AGAIN.

Given this context, who was the more unbelieving and doubting? Sure, Thomas has FOMO – the “Fear of Missing Out.” But he just wants what the other disciples already experienced. This might come across as demanding or whiney to the other disciples - and to us - but really, he just wants his own turn to see the Risen Jesus.

Sort of like the phenomenon many of us are experiencing – vaccine envy. For the last two months, I have seen my social media filled with “vaccine selfies” from my friends. And take it from me, nothing is more annoying than seeing the SECOND vaccine selfie from your friends while you yourself are not even eligible in your own state. I’m glad that so many people I know are able to get vaccinated, but for a long time I wondered when I would get to be a part of that club.

As I dream of having my first indoor haircut since January of 2020, I also am painfully aware of the inequity of this whole process. A pastor friend of mine serving in my home state of Wisconsin showed me two sobering maps: one tracking covid 19 deaths, and one tracking rate of covid vaccination distribution. Frighteningly, the locations with the highest rates of covid deaths tracked almost exactly with the lowest vaccine distribution rate. All converging in the Milwaukee area, which has the highest percentage of African Americans in the whole state.

While so much of our world has changed, so much has remained the same. We are still locked in rooms of inequality, systemic racism, distrust of our neighbors, and attitude of scarcity.

So, we ask ourselves: What’s now? What is the way forward? How do we walk through these uncertain, in-between times? Are we going to use our new-found freedom to just to do more of the same as we did in the “before times”? Does the vaccine exist so that we can go back to our old dining, shopping, and travel habits? Have we been freed to just go back into locked rooms of the “same old, same old” attitudes and ways of living? 

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 door of whatever tomb you are trapped in; he has ploughed through the doors of your locked rooms as if they were butter. He stands on OUR side of the wall, reaching out to take your hand, showing you the marks of the crucifixion that still remain on his body resurrected body.

The time he spent in death has marked Jesus forever. Just as our time during this Year of Death has wounded us in ways that we will be untangling for years to come. His wounds did not kill him forever, but they have become part of who he is – the one who was wounded so that we would not have any FOMO – we won’t miss out on abundant life at the hands of our own wounded and brokenness.  

We have seen and heard what Jesus does with the bondage of the familiar, with the sting of death, and the captivity of our woundedness. We have seen and heard what Jesus does with sealed tombs and locked doors. 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.  

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, or waiting for the full effects of getting vaccinated.

The way forward is unknown, but well-traveled before us:  Thomas, other 10 disciples, and Mary Magdalene, and the other women at the tomb. We will never miss out on the Love of God, that leads us and shows us the way, by the hands of Jesus the still bear the scars of death defeated, this Easter season and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.