Questions, Fear, and Incarnation!
Indianapolis First Friends
Pastor Bob Henry
April 16, 2023
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Our scripture text for this week comes from John 20:19-29 from the New Revised Standard Version.
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So, the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
“What do we do, now?” That must have been the query being discussed by the disciples and followers of Christ’s after Jesus’ crucifixion.
“What do we do, now?”
Our text for this morning describes the disciples cowering in fear behind locked doors. Fearing not only the Roman Empire, but also the religious leaders of the day. The reality was that no one was safe at this time. The disciples knew that the religious and state authorities had found a way to have Jesus crucified, and they knew they were already on the trail to find and do the same thing to them and the other followers of Christ.
The truth is that religious and state authorities don’t often like the followers of blasphemous, rogue teachers, who want to make their leaders out to be martyrs.
Instead, they would want to eliminate any possibility of this happening and do everything to keep their religion and/or state pure. This is sadly true of many religious and governmental groups in our world, still today.
Change is hard, and prophetic voices are those usually rallying for change.
It is one thing to watch someone die for a cause, but when you find out that the attention has turned on you because of your followership of this person, ANXIETY, FEAR, the NEED TO HIDE quickly overcome you.
Your mind flashes with visions of you being tortured by the authorities, carrying your own cross through the city of Jerusalem, and being hung to suffer the agony of public execution on a cross. These would have been vivid images in the minds of the followers of Christ.
The process the disciples were running through in their minds was, what I would call, a personal incarnation. They were beginning to incarnate (becoming a living embodiment of) what Christ had just gone through. And the disciples were left to answer that big question,
“What do we do, now?”
Jesus never really taught about Part B…and let’s be honest, the disciples hardly understood Part A – let alone having a plan for after Jesus was gone from their presence.
You may be thinking this is hard to relate to – but just ask yourself:
· When have you found yourself asking, “What do I do, now?”
· What was your difficult situation?
· Have you ever been gripped by fear wondering what was going to happen?
· Have you ever felt like you had no plan B – that life was at a dead end?
Just like where we find the disciples this morning, it is often in our lowest moments, when our plans, our ideas, our hopes, our beliefs are stripped away, this is often when the presence of the Divine is felt and made known – or maybe it is in these times we finally recognize that the Divine has been with us all along.
The text says that Jesus was literally “standing among them” and they didn’t even realize it. How long was he standing there before someone noticed?
Isn’t that how it is for us, often? The Divine presence is in our midst, or even in our own hearts, and we don’t recognize it or acknowledge it.
Folks, we are Quakers, the ones who are always to look for that of God in those around us. How often has the presence of the Divine or God been in our midst in the likes of a friend, a parent, a child, a teacher, even a complete stranger, and we totally missed it?
And then comes those famous first words from Jesus, “PEACE BE WITH YOU.”
The scriptures have recorded for us several other times when Jesus used those same words. Each time the disciples heard them he was using them to calm their lives.
If you remember, it was these words that Jesus used to calm the storms on the water as their boat was violently shaken by the storm and everyone was in fear.
The disciples would have known these words to be an acknowledgment and reassurance of God’s presence in the storms of their lives.
Yet, with all that they had been through during the last several days leading up to their best friend being executed in front of them, they still showed doubt this time.
This time they had been so shaken that he had to prove to them who he was so that their joy and peace would return.
The disciple, Thomas, even has to go one step further – I think I might have been the same. Thomas needed a hands-on-experience before he could believe.
Sometimes our lives are in such tumult that we need something a bit more tangible – a real-time, real-life experience.
Sometimes we need a physical – incarnate – experience. We need to hear a parent’s voice, sometimes we need a hug, sometimes we need a physical connection.
I think Thomas has been shafted by history. Beyond needing proof, beyond assurance, beyond even finding inner peace, Thomas needed a physical connection as he tried to wrap his mind around that question, “What do we do, now?”
And that physical connection again takes the shape of incarnation – embodying flesh or taking on flesh. Thomas was understanding the deep need for incarnation at this moment – he needed flesh to come to grips with what was going on.
I have said this many times, but again I believe too often the reason we cannot relate to Jesus, is because we cannot truly see him as a human being – with flesh.
He was no different than any of us in this meetinghouse. He had skin and bones, aches and pains, he bled…no different.
And what we need to realize is that Jesus showed us how with these fully human, fleshly bodies to truly live!
He taught us how to forgive, how to bring hope, how to reconcile, how to “incarnate” his life and ministry to our neighbors and to our world in this present moment. He showed you and me how to be the Light in our world, today. Just like I said last week after waiting worship.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said it so well, “What Jesus wants from us is not admiration, but rather imitation.”
It wasn’t just about the incarnation of Jesus, folks – it’s also about our incarnation. This is what Jesus was getting at in our text.
“Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you!’ As the Father has sent me, I am sending YOU!”
You and I are now the incarnated Christ to our world. We are the light-bearers being sent into our world.
Last week at the end of my sermon, I mentioned the “Body of Christ” metaphor that several used in the bible. You and I are the official incarnation of Christ to our neighbors and world. Let that sink in for a moment.
Ronald Rolheiser addresses this realization in his book, “The Holy Longing: The Search for Christian Spiritualty,” where he writes,
“If it is true that we are the Body of Christ, and it is, then God’s presence in the world today depends very much on us. We have to keep God present in the world in the same way Jesus did.”
Or as St. Teresa of Avila prayed:
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands but yours,
No feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which
Christ’s compassion must look out on the world.
Yours are the feet with which
He is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which
He is to bless us now.
We are the incarnation of Christ – We are the light bearers.
We are called and sent to be Jesus and live as he did in our world. We are filled with his light and love. We are to take our inner light into our world and become the presence of Christ to our neighbors.
And to sense God’s peace, forgiveness, his love - we must embody and live it in and with and among our neighbors. This is what it means to live the “Jesus Legacy.”
And along with this call will naturally come fear, as is illustrated well by the disciples cowering in the upper room in our text this morning.
The reality is that fear is real for most of us.
Being a peacemaker, standing up for what you believe, seeking justice and mercy, even asking or giving forgiveness are not always easy and often they cause us to fear living out the life God is calling us to.
Fear translates to hiding and worrying about what others think of us.
It leads us to cower, to isolate, and even build walls.
Sadly, a great deal of our politics, our military, our economics, our sports, our parenting styles, even much of our religiosity is based on fear and fear tactics.
But God is sending us into a world – not in fear – but rather in peace. Filled with God’s spirit and light - to offer forgiveness, to reconcile, to heal and bring harmony and hope.
We are to offer our neighbors and world the attributes of Jesus Christ – grace, mercy, justice, and peace. But sadly, too often our fear gets in the way...
It’s like what Quaker Gene Knudsen-Hoffman wrote,
Fear which lingers,
Fear which lives on in us,
Fear which does not prompt us to wise remedial action,
Becomes engraved upon our hearts,
Becomes an addiction, becomes an armor which encases us.
This fear guards and guides us and determines our action.
It leads us directly toward that which we fear.
We can’t let our fear keep us in a tomb of death. Barbara Brown Taylor said it so well,
"Fear is a small cell with no air in it and no light. It is suffocating inside and dark. There is no room to turn around inside it. You can only face in one direction, but it hardly matters since you cannot see anyhow. There is no future in the dark. Everything is over. Everything is past. When you are locked up like that, tomorrow is as far away as the moon."
And that is exactly where Jesus shows up for the disciples – in that cell of fear.
We can’t let that same fear keep us worried or fretting about what is going to happen. We can’t let fear keep us hiding and avoiding and not acting. That I believe is the case too often with the church, today. We make the walls of our Meetinghouse the walls of our cell of fear.
Instead, I want to be, and I want us to be, people who take up the mantle of Jesus Christ – people who incarnate Christ in their daily lives – to be people who live out of peace, forgiveness, grace, mercy and love and have learned to embrace their fears and step out of the cells they are in.
People who become Lights-bearers in a dark world.
Now, as we enter waiting worship, take a moment to consider the following queries:
· When have I found myself asking, “What do I do, now?”
· What traps me in a “cell of fear”?
· How can I embrace the Peace of Christ and become a light-bearer in the world?