April 19, 2009
Second Sunday of Easter, 2009

Today is the day to roast the apostle Thomas for his unbelief. The story we have of him is that he is "doubting Thomas" - to distinguish him from you and me who are supposed to be "not doubting, but believing." I don't know about you, but this stretches my believability radar and seems too pat. After all, this story was not written in time sequence, but the Fourth Gospel in its first edition perhaps appeared around 90 CE, or at least 60 years after the crucifixion. And, like the creation story, there was not someone there with a digital camera filming it live and broadcasting it by DirectTV or cable around the world. So, might there be a fresh way we can approach this Thomas story?

When my godmother, my Aunt Frieda, died, I thought I knew about all there was to know about her. Before I started grade school in Owensville, Mo, my father had bought a house for his parents, my grandparents, in Owensville, since Grandpa retired from the Lutheran ministry, but at that time had no source of retirement income. I remember Aunt Frieda coming to Owensville from St. Louis to visit grandma. By then grandpa Brenner had died. I remember building palaces with her and her friend, Billie, with the beautifully colored falling maple leaves that lined grandma's house.

During my freshman year in High School, I had lived with Aunt Frieda in her little house on Nebraska Street in South St. Louis. When I left for high school, she left for Lutheran Hospital, where she was Director of the School of Nursing. That year I lived with her, 1953-54, she would share with me her work in getting her nursing school affiliated with Valparaiso University so that her nurses would get a baccalaureate degree, but that did not register anything to my young mind.

My mother's story about Aunt Frieda was that she was "strange" since she'd never married. The story that was told in the family was that Aunt Frieda's fiancé was killed in the trenches in France in World War I, and Aunt Frieda never found anyone to her liking. I know mother hadn't liked the fact that when my father enrolled in the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, that Aunt Frieda helped him financially, and landed him an internship at Lutheran Hospital. When grandma was sick, Aunt Frieda took a leave of absence and moved to Owensville to help with grandma's care, but mother said she was difficult, didn't know what she was doing, made nursing errors, and was in the way since grandma's last months were spent in our house.

When Aunt Frieda died in her upper 90s, I was living in Jacksonville, Florida, and drove up to St. Louis. At the wake not many people came, since she had outlived most of her peers. My sister had flown in from England, where she was living at the time. So, there was my sister and I, and Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Leo, Leo being Aunt Frieda's other brother. (By the way, Aunt Dorothy had much the same story about Frieda as did my mother. I don't think she was too happy that twice a week Uncle Leo took care of shopping and house details for his sister. Aunt Dorothy did not participate. But, I digress.)

It was late and the room was empty except for us, and we are getting into a consensus to call it quits, when the doors sprung open and a very professionally dressed and attractive woman in her 50s or so appeared at the door. We all did an eye to eye check to see if anyone knew her, and no one did. So, I went up to her and introduced myself as Aunt Frieda's nephew, and asked her how she knew my aunt. She replied by saying she had written her doctoral thesis on the accomplishments of my aunt.

Well, Aunt Dorothy, Uncle Leo, my sister and I could have all fallen over and broken our necks on the spot. Who of us knew that Aunt Frieda was worthy a doctoral thesis. The woman with the new story was the Director of the School of Nursing at St. Louis University, and she told us how "our" Aunt Frieda had been one of the early organizers of nursing as a profession, and that she had pioneered in the movement to have nurses receive baccalaureate degrees. Some of you may not know that at that time nurses were trained in "schools" that were part of hospitals, and that they were not well respected by the doctors. At any rate, suddenly I realized there was much about Aunt Frieda I did not know and was learning after her death.

Years later another story about Aunt Frieda was introduced to me. She had made scrap books of the story of our family, and I was looking through one in which I saw pictures of her with, as she always worded it, "my very dear friend, Billie." There I sat seeing and remembering Billie. Billie always wore a feador, like Cary Grant, and always wore slacks, a shirt often with a tie, and a jacket. This was the 1940s. There were pictures of the three of us making maple leaf palaces in grandma's yard. There were lots of pictures of Aunt Frieda and Billie on vacations, always Billie with her arm around my aunt. Well, how had I missed that part of the story all those years?

So, what has this story of Aunt Frieda to do with today's Gospel about Thomas and Jesus, which ultimately is about you and me and our relationship with Jesus?

In today's Gospel Thomas had a story about Jesus, and his story had come to an end when Jesus was crucified. For Thomas the story stopped there: and what all had died within Thomas along with Jesus? Had Thomas expected Jesus to bring in the final judgment of God and liberate the Jewish people? Had Thomas believed that Jesus was going to inaugurate the New Age in which justice would finally prevail and the poor and despised be exonerated? Had Thomas hoped for a special place in the new order he thought Jesus would bring? Had Thomas thought the temple and priesthood would be cleansed from contamination, and a true temple with God's presence on earth be restored? Whatever it was that had stopped the story for Thomas, his struggle was to discover there was more to the story, and he was to become part of that story in a way he could never have imagined!

Our question is: what is your own story of Jesus? Of God? Are you current in or do you have unresolved business from the past that has you stuck where you once were? Or have you been content to let your understandings "rock along" as they were, justifying it by saying the rest of your life is complicated enough without stirring the religious/spiritual pot! Does your religious/spiritual consciousness end with the catechism and confirmation? Does it end with a Sunday School understanding of Bible stories - some kind of "moral" to follow? Did it end with your last encounter with a nun's ruler? Did it end with a bad experience with a congregation or minister or priest? Did it end with getting kicked out of a church for your sexuality or theological nonconformity? Or did it stop when you asked for a miracle from God that did not materialize? Did it end when you felt sure you were going to heaven and not to hell?

Can you identify where did your religious/spiritual story stopped growing, stopped developing, stopped challenging you to wrestle like Thomas with the Unknown? Stopped confronting you with the unexpected? Stopped by some interpretation or teaching to which you could agree or disagree? When was the last time you struggled with an idea about God or a situation with God you were trying to make sense of, whether the incarnation, miracles, crucifixion, resurrection, baptism, the Eucharist, the Triune God, heaven, hell, the devil, the meaning and use of Scripture, sickness, injustice, disease, loss of income, loss of job, death? Or is it how the cosmos works? Or is it how to reconcile the findings of psychology, biology, DNA, science, Quantum Physics, with the language and world view of the Bible and faith? Or is it the failure of Christianity to make a positive difference in the complex world, being part of the problem instead of the solution? Or maybe some of these are burning in you now, and you are wondering how to reconcile your questions with your faith, and whether you can still be a Christian and doubt.

This is not just an individual issue, but there are Christian groups which have stopped the story at various points in order to fulfill a political agenda or a social agenda. There are those who want their church to have political power to control the country. There are those who reject the equality of women because Jesus and the apostles were male. There are those who exclude many of us in this room because of laws given to the Jewish people. There are those who believe that God rewards you when you do "right" and punishes you when you do "wrong" -- but then struggle because life seems to do the opposite: reward the wicked and punish those who seek the right and justice. Or, there are those who to keep things just the way they are, don't mess with anything that makes me comfortable, and for God's sake don't do anything that would make me uncomfortable.

The story of Thomas in today's Gospel is about how his story with Jesus continued, with Jesus, not as an external figure, but as an ongoing spiritual presence experienced and known within, and now Thomas was to embody the spirit of Jesus compassion, mercy, care, inclusion in his own life.

How does your own experience continue the story of Jesus we have a week ago re-enacted from the Procession with Palms to Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday? Have you ever been betrayed by someone close to you? Have you ever been accused of something that was not true? Have you ever been ganged up on and treated with verbal or physical violence? Have you ever been labeled with a term that was held in social disrepute or disgrace? Have you ever suffered for your integrity and lack of compromise for what you knew to be right? Have you ever asked God to deliver you from a situation in which God did not provide an escape but propelled you through it? Have you ever been surprised that something different happened to what you experienced and that was OK? Have you groped for answers to a perplexing situation that did not, or does not come? Have ever things been turned upside down in terms of your expectations? Have you ever discovered something good that you were not expecting or looking for? Have you ever experienced the beauty of the world?

Any of these and many other experiences involve us in the ongoing life of the Spirit of Jesus in the world through his new resurrection body, the community, the church. The first reading from the Book of Acts, although idealized, was written to demonstrate that the Church on earth continues the kinds of things that Jesus himself did. From this point of view our stories make up the Gospel according to St. Francis Lutheran Church. Each of our stories is a continuation of the story of Jesus in human life and the world's life. For example, Kirsten's story of her work with hospice, Grant's story of his healing, Max's fund raising during the AIDS walk, Rebecca's beautiful soprano voice raised in singing, Tom and David's garden in Sebastapol, Scott's dedication to the little children, Bruce's struggle with the unknown, etc.

So what have you to take home today in your spiritual brown bag? First, we can be grateful for Thomas, for his questioning led him to a deeper faith. What questions are you asking that can lead you to deeper faith? What is the story you are telling yourself about yourself? How would your story be different if you saw your own story as a continuation of the story of Jesus as a spiritual presence in the world? Don't be afraid of your doubts. There is grace for that, too. Amen.