Embrace the Mess
by Griff Martin
by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On John 20:19-31
For The Second Sunday of Easter
April 11, 2021
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
He is Risen! (He is Risen indeed…)
Now Incarnate and Present and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
Can you imagine if you wanted to learn to bake a cake and you went to someone you trusted, you knew made great cakes and asked them to teach you how to bake a cake and they began by telling you all that did not go into a cake (“you won’t be using meat or sharp cheddar cheese, don’t use onions or ketchup or pickles”). This would not be the most helpful way to teach someone to bake a cake, what you want are the actual ingredients that you will use and how much and when and why, that is how you learn to bake a cake. Listing all the wrong ways is not as helpful as listing the right way.
Church gets this wrong a lot when we teach things… saying what not to do is rarely as helpful as we want to think it is, it’s authoritarian and fundamentalism which is never good theology.
But with physical touch and bodies, we have often gone down that road…. It’s not something we talk about a lot in church. We are odd about bodies, we don’t quite know how to talk about them in a positive appropriate way so we just tend to create a list of not’s and don’ts and then we are silent which only further complicates things.
And in the last year we have actually talked a lot about bodies, social distancing is all about bodies, in particular keeping our bodies away from one another and how our bodies might be dangerous to one another… and a year of that teaching is going to have long and lasting impact on us. If you don’t already notice this, just observe your interaction with someone you are seeing for the first time… Are you fully vaccinated and can I hug you is not quite the New Testament greet one another with a holy kiss…. That odd elbow bump we are trying to figure out…We are all middle schoolers at our first dance or really just middle schoolers who are trying to figure out our changing bodies in a new world.
And our faith matters here, it just might save us… our faith is very physical. For better and for worse, it’s flesh and blood all the way through. Look at how it starts, creation is very physical (male and female God made them with skin and hair and lungs and hearts and kidney and butts and brains). Open up the long neglected Song of Songs and see how our love for God is best expressed physically (“Let him kiss me with kissed of his mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine”). Or just look the center most event of our faith, Jesus- Love in flesh and blood, Love with skin on, Love that laughs, cries, eats, dances, walks and bleeds.
And yet all this physical stuff made us uncomfortable, so we made faith and Jesus following a head thing.
Just think about it… and see you are expecting me right now to give you a list of all the ways we have made our faith more about our heads than our hearts, which would be a long list… but I don’t even have to do that because look at how I started that thought, “think about it.”
One afternoon after a long therapy session, my therapist looked at me with her loving eyes and said, “I tried to keep track today of all you thought and how often you say ‘I think I feel’ or ‘I think this or that.’ I lost count because you my dear do a lot of thinking, too much thinking. So stop thinking and tell me what you know right now.”
I know that bodies matter but that bodies scare me, flesh matters but flesh scares me.
I think (oh see), I remember back to a divine moment I had with this very text. It was a gentleman who wanted to see me for a benevolence request for some money for groceries once in Baton Rouge. I had never seen this gentleman before. He introduced himself and he started his story and before I knew it he was telling me about a double bypass surgery that was poorly done and bleeding out and a batch of bad blood that he received as a result and how he was now HIV positive and before I could stop him he was lifting his shirt over his head and showing me all his scars from his bypass surgery and blood infusions and what HIV was doing to his skin and it was not a pretty picture, it was gruesome and I was seeing so much more than I ever wanted to see and I immediately begin to think one thought: how do I get myself out of this situation as soon as possible, I needed out of the room there was too much gore and physical reality suddenly right in front of me… I quickly got him grocery money and out of my office. I watched him get into a good car and I realized I might have missed a moment, he very well could have gotten grocery money a lot of places, but maybe he came to the church because he wanted more than grocery money.
And it being the week after Easter, this was the very text I was preaching that week and struggling with. The text where a beloved disciple is struggling in their faith and to help them with the struggle Jesus takes his shirt off and says feel my wounds. I want to say that this story does not line up exactly with my story, but you know why I want to say that… because I want to be Jesus in the story not Thomas, but maybe I was Thomas and Jesus was sitting on my couch offering me his wounds and I had hurried him right out of my office.
So much for my daily prayer of “Let me see Jesus today.” I might as well be honest, “Let me see Jesus but in a sanitized way, with his shirt on and in a way that works for how I think and how I want to see Jesus and on top of all that gives me enough space to only be liminally involved.”
What is your preferred way of seeing Jesus? Because that is probably one of the things Jesus is trying to get you to surrender right now so you can see Jesus everywhere.
And you know how you see… you see with your eyes. My grandad tells the same joke all the time, whenever I ask him how he feels, he says with my hands and then he laughs as if he just invented the joke. But there is something kinda brilliant about it, which of course brings me to octopuses.
Evolutionary wise, we have a lot in common with the octopus, whose brains and nervous system largely exist outside the body, on the skin. And although our brains don’t exist on our skin, it all starts there and then works it’s way to our brain…. The brain does not think a key lime pie taste good until the first bite or that the sun on the skin feels good until the sun hits the skin or that smell of wisteria is perfect this spring until the wisteria has been smelled.
Experience comes before thought. So here is that line again, we live our way into a new way of thinking.
Which brings us to Thomas, who is absent from class on the day of resurrection, talk about a bad day to miss. We don’t know where he was, which would be very interesting to know. Has he called quits on the whole Jesus thing, has he gone out for a walk because he is so tired of listening to the rest of the disciples whining, is he out getting a snack, is he out looking for Jesus in the places he thinks Jesus should be right then? Whatever it is, he missed the first resurrection moment with the Formerly 12.
So when they tell him about it, he says “I don’t trust you… I need to see it and feel it.” He must have also missed the class on social etiquette and social distancing.
But this is actually Jesus’ love language, flesh and blood. Jesus knows that Thomas can’t be talked into the resurrection, he has to experience it. So a week later Jesus shows up again. And again it would be very interesting to know where he was, his resurrection appearances are ‘here and there’ in a Dr. Seuss way. So it’s a week later and they are again in a locked closed room and suddenly Jesus appears among them and off his shirt goes and he points to Thomas, “your turn.. here are the wounds, see them and feel them, put your hand in my side…. Experience it so you can believe it.”
Experience it, so you can believe it….. we live our way into a new way of thinking.
We need to hear that a lot…. In the recent Now Is Our Time survey, it’s pretty clear that we are a thinking church. Which is good because I don’t know that a lot of churches are anymore, the majority of headlines I see about churches make me believe they are not thinking anymore (and if you doubt that, google trophy wife and baptist later today).
But a thinking church is also dangerous because it means that when it comes to some of the issues we face, we can get lost in the thinking and never get to the doing.
For instance over the last few years we have talked a lot about the All People problem, how can we truly embrace and include all? We read books about it, I talked a lot about Brene Brown’s research- I read the research many times, I read stories about folks doing this work. And the truth is I can read for the rest of my life on how to make community with someone whose views disgust me, but nothing changes until I make that friendship.
Or the issue on our doorstep and that our city is handling as poorly as possible right now, our unhoused neighbors. I have a lot of books here too and I can research it on google on day and try to figure out different models of housing and camping, but then I look out the doors of our church and I see our local saint Selena sitting on the front porch with a gentleman who no one has bothered to have a conversation with in years and then later she tells me that she can’t meet with me tomorrow because she found out that guy is having poor vision and this is really impacting his life so is taking him to get his eyes checked and to get glasses or contacts because something that simple will change his life forever.
And here is the truth, I could not think or study enough in an entire lifetime to experience and learn all the she did in those two encounters. Her heart was open, my head was opened and that is not the same… broken open hearts transform the world, broken heads just need to be fixed.
As we look at what is next, may we be as brave and faithful as Thomas, willing to risk by embracing the mess, to know that fixing it often means getting involved with hands and feet and not having a predetermined outcome, to know that broken hearts change the world more than full heads, to understand it’s not what we think but how we live, to live our way into a new way of thinking by following Jesus with our flesh and blood, to know that enter the mess is the first instruction even before figure it out… which is all a fancy way of saying the final exam has one question and it’s not explain what you know about love, the only question will be share how you loved.
Incarnation demands month less than incarnation. His blood and flesh, our blood and flesh.
Amen and Amen.
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