Meg Peery McLaughlin
HeckifIknow
April 7, 2024
John 20: 19-31
He is Risen!
He is Risen indeed!
And in these weeks that follow Easter,
we will be looking at what the gospel writers
have to say after Jesus is out of the tomb,
what these Holy Scriptures have to say
about what it is to be the church
who gathers in the name of the Risen Christ.
Today we turn to the Gospel of John, the end of chapter 20.
As we come to God’s word, let us pray.
Prayer of Illumination
Living God,
the Good News is so wondrous
that sometimes we struggle to wrap our heads around it.
Give our hearts the wisdom to receive
that which our heads cannot fully understand.
And breathe your peace into every corner of our lives,
we pray in Christ, Amen.
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.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.25So 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.”
26A 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.” 27Then 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.” 28Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”30Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
This afternoon Jarrett and I leave for The Well.
The Well is a group of pastors who gather once a year to study scripture,
and encourage one another in ministry in the Presbyterian Church.
We’ve been together now for 17 years. It is life giving.
This Spring UPC’s endowment
approved a grant
to help a new young group of pastors start such a group of their own.
When The Well was just beginning,
I remember the stress of bringing having good scholarship and keen insights in the papers we write to present to one another. Honestly, that hasn’t changed.
And I’m grateful that an honest wrestling with God’s word
is still held to a high standard among us.
What has lowered, thankfully, is the incessant internal levels of comparison
about what it is to be a pastor.
I think it was Teddy Roosevelt who said: Comparison is the thief of joy.
It used to be that every single time I heard something interesting that another church was doing, I’d think—at least to myself—oh, I wish the church I served would do that!
One congregation has this really creative intergenerational mission day.
They organize service projects all across the city,
and groups to populate each job, all on one day in March.
They call it March Mission Madness. After all the outreach work,
they congregate back at church around tables for a meal to process the day.
Oh, I want the church to do that.
One congregation who particularly loves classical music,
has a huge community following for the art they offer the city.
They leveraged that to communicate their ethic of God’s inclusive love to the LGTBQ community, hosting the Austin based choral ensemble, Conspirare to perform Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio, Considering Matthew Shepherd.
Oh, I want the church to do that.
Retirees who build ramps or do other fix it projects in the inner city.
A live nativity on Christmas eve.
Congregants who workshop and write liturgy.
I want the church to do that.
But what is it exactly that the Risen Christ sends the church to do?
My friend Dan, pastor at First Presbyterian in Wilmington,
set out to respond to this question,
working on this text from John.
Dan carved out time to study it while
his family was away for a few nights and he had the house to himself.
Uninterrupted time and space to read and write. Ah—
He made a passable start on Friday morning – digging into biblical commentaries – before succumbing to the call of the sunshine outside.
He went to play tennis mid-afternoon and on the way back
as he rounded the bend on his street,
he noticed a car creeping slowly around that same bend,
and a dog walking lazily through the front yard there.
He didn’t think much of it. There was no reason to think much of it.
He should have gone right inside and back to his computer.
Instead, he walked back out to the street, to that the bend,
to where that car was still crawling along, the driver’s side window rolled down now.
A young woman said, “Hey, do you know that dog?
I think he’s lost or something.
I’d totally grab him myself but I’m like super pregnant.”
The phrase not my circus, not my monkeys popped in Dan’s mind,
but he didn’t say that, instead inexplicably he said, “Oh, ok. I guess I’ll try.”
So called out “Here boy!” to the dog, still ambling along in the yard.
The dog let out a bark and loped over. He was huge, tall and long limbed,
with short, white ringlets like a doodle of some kind.
But he was mangy too, with bare spots where his pink skin showed through.
And he was old. Like, really really old. Dan grabbed his collar and checked for ID. Nothing, just a rabies tag.
Dan held him by the collar and wondered what to do next.
He figured he would knock few doors down,
where he’d heard multiple dogs barking many times before.
He turned to tell the woman that, but she was gone now.
Apparently she’d done her good deed for the day by alerting Dan of the problem.
She was playing Hot Potato more than Good Samaritan.
Dan walked down the road to ring that doorbell, but got no response.
He met some other neighbors along the way, who said they’d never seen the dog before. They did let him borrow a leash, so Dan wouldn’t be hunched over, back aching, walking this dang dog all around the neighborhood.
Dan looped around the block asking at least a dozen folks: Do you know this dog? Have you ever seen this dog before? Finally, he brought the dog home,
tied him to a tree out front, as he just kept saying to myself: I don’t need this, I don’t need this, I don’t want this dang dog. The dog for his part was happy as a clam.
Dan checked in with his wife and the kids over Facetime and of course the kids were thrilled and, predictably, tried to convince Dan to keep him.
By then Dan was calling the creature HeckifIknow,
because that was the answer to every question one could ever ask about him.
Where did he come from? Where does he belong? What kind of dog is he?
And above all, how did he become Dan’s problem?!! Heckifiknow.
Dan let him spend the night. What was he gonna do – just turn him loose?
He knew Animal Control couldn’t be reached on a Friday night.
HeckifIknow happily hunkered down for the night beside the azaleas.
Dan remembered to turn off the sprinklers so he wouldn’t get soaked at dawn.
Luckily Animal Control was available in the morning,
and after much pleading, they eventually agreed to send an officer out to get him.
Dan sat working on the Well paper, waiting for the officer to arrive, wondering what in the world to say about the nature and mission of the church of Jesus Christ.
He couldn’t concentrate.
Heckifiknow was tied to the tree, just basking in the late morning sun.
When the officer finally came, he asked all the questions Dan been asking himself and every other person he’d met for the last day or so, then he took heckifiknow and hoisted him up awkwardly into the truck bed, said he’d check him for a chip.
Just a few minutes later Dan saw the officer coming back up the driveway from the road, slightly smirking, Dan noted curiously.
“We ran the chip,” he said. “This dog lives right down the road.”
Dan said, “What? What do you mean right down the road?”
He said, “215, I think. Right there at the bend.”
Oh, Dan.
That dog,
didn’t need anything from him,
except perhaps, when all was said and done,
and explanation for why Dan felt it necessary to abduct him
from his own stinking yard.
When I heard this story,
as a pastor,
as someone who really tries to do church just right,
someone who is deeply devoted to the call of Christ,
I felt, I don’t know,
how do you feel right now, convicted?
You—the kind of church people who are here the Sunday after Easter.
You’re the die-hards. For many, it’s the last weekend of spring break.
It’s a beautiful day out there and here you are. Back in the pew. Ready to roll.
Bless your hearts, not in the southern way, the real way.
I’d wager that many of you are the ones who read the newsletter even though you probably already know what’s happening around here, in fact,
you’re the ones who make it happen.
You not only bought a lily in honor of someone on Easter, but remembered to take a lily with you to bring it to someone who couldn’t be at church.
On your way out you stop by the white board in the office to make sure you have the names of everyone you want to pray for this week.
You are incredible. Truly.
And you, you what shall we say? resonate with my friend Dan.
Friends, the church has a way of staying busy
with a whole host of things
that we’re just sure the world needs desperately
and couldn’t possibly do without.
And we’re also good at creeping up on others to say
Hey! You should take care of that! That needs doing!
But does it?
What is most needful, most vital to the mission of the church of Jesus Christ?
In Matthew’s Gospel, after Easter we get the Great Commission:
Go, Make Disciples of all nations, baptize!
In Luke’s Gospel, we get a whole other book, the Book of Acts,
to tell us the busy-ness of the church.
John’s telling is strikingly different.
The verbs in this story are:
receive,
believe,
breathe,
be at peace,
have life
have life.
This gospel tells us of one who wants to be with us,
He breaks through every barrier we erect in fear to be with us.
The Gospel tells us that Jesus speaks peace
patiently, persistently
speaks peace to our wounds, our failures, our doubts,
that we would trust ourselves wholly to the one
who gives life, and life abundant.
There are other scriptures,
that have other important things to say about being the church.
Really important things.
But John knew us.
And he wanted us to keep this Gospel to remember
that to be the church,
is not to be given a list of tasks to complete,
to be the church is to be together
to be at peace in the trust that Jesus is alive.
The Risen Christ doesn’t NEED us,
but goodness, does he enjoy being with us,
spending time and sharing life –
not unlike,
a certain mangy Dog in Wilmington.
The call of the church is not always to do do do
as if the doing is what saves us,
no,
the call of the church is to abide in the saving grace of God,
to lope along toward the kingdom together.
May it be so.
Amen.