St Albans Uniting Parish

Readings

Acts 4: 32-35

The lectionary programme reads the book of Acts between Easter and Pentecost but the order is disrupted by the two Sundays of Ascension and Pentecost.  Therefore we begin with a vision of the building of the early church community.  Significantly this was a community that supported one another and gave themselves totally to the new community.  We could argue that this was because they expected Jesus to return within their lifetime and create a new world order so individual property was meaningless.

However it might also be true that, after Jesus’ death, his commitment and his refusal to compromise even in the face of death refocused them on the values of Jesus, so they truly saw a new way of being, and a real possibility of living the realm of God into reality.

John 20:19-31

This is a private transfer of the Holy Spirit which makes a wonderful counterclaim to those Christians who demand a public ‘Pentecostal’ experience.

The disciples meet the risen Christ in a locked room and he breathes on them and says ‘receive the Holy Spirit’.  True to the narrative construction we find in the gospel genre this episode connects with the first chapter of John’s Gospel where John the Baptist responds to the Pharisees who, in verse twenty-five ask, ‘Why then are you baptising if you are neither the Messiah nor Elijah, nor the prophet’. In verse twenty-six onwards John then says ‘I baptise with water.  Among you stands one of whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’  Then the following day John points out Jesus and describes seeing the Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism.  John concludes by saying that he heard the divine voice proclaiming that the one he saw the Spirit descend upon the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit. (John1:31-34)

Sermon

Having read Fredrik Backman’s book A man Called Ove which well and truly reinforced my belief in the power of story to convey meaning I am now reading My Grandmother Sends Her Regards And Apologises.[1]

In this book story is used to prepare seven year old Elsa for life without her grandmother who has not only been her major caregiver but also her only friend.  Through fairy stories that happen in ‘the land of almost awake’ Grandmother, who is dying of cancer, explains her past life as a doctor in the world’s trouble spots.  She also introduces Elsa to the people who she has rescued and housed in their apartment building and apologises for being an inadequate mother to Elsa’s mother.  All these stories happen in ‘the land-of-almost-awake’ and it occurred to me that this morning’s gospel reading could well have happened in the same place.   

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’. (John 20:19)

I can imagine the disciples in a state of shock following Jesus’ execution.  The women had told the disciples that the tomb was empty and Peter and another disciple had verified that fact.  But then the women also claimed that they had seen the risen Christ. 

Therefore it is reasonable that the disciples should meet together to talk about all the recent experiences.  They are most likely tired, I can’t imagine they slept well after Jesus was arrested, tortured to death and buried.  Now his body has vanished and there is also this unlikely story about the women meeting with him. 

Anyone who has been through the death of someone close to them will remember the unreal time of being in a bit of a daze. 

I can certainly imagine the disciples being in that sort of a daze and to add to the confusion they are also afraid.  They would be afraid that the authorities would look to round them up and execute them as Jesus’ followers.  That’s what happens in our world after a terrorist attack.  The police hunt out anyone associated with the perpetrators. 

The disciples would also be apprehensive about what they might do next.  Should they carry on the mission Jesus had brought them on, but avoid any further confrontation with authority?  There would certainly be no disturbances in the temple with the merchants and the money changers.  Or should they just go back to what they did before.  The final episode in John’s Gospel suggests that some of them did that.   

This was a time for the disciples when real things happen but everything also seems unreal.  Nothing would seem to connect with the busy world of everyday life and it could sometimes be hard to make the distinction between being asleep and being awake. It was a time that could easily feel like ‘the land-of-almost-awake.’

Of course we don’t know exactly what happened immediately after Jesus’ death and all the gospel accounts vary.  But all the Gospels tell us something important. 

John’s Gospel is the last of the four gospels to be written so he may also be drawing on the sort of ‘land-of-almost-awake’ imagery to connect his resurrection account with the experiences of his readers.

The important thing for us is what we draw from this story that connects us with the Risen Christ.  Many of us will have, or still might have, a time when we felt we were in the presence of the risen Christ.  It could be a time we might describe as ‘the land of almost awake.’  We might have been reading a gospel episode and our mind pictured what that scene might have been like and the power of the story opens a new insight to us.  We might have put the Bible down and thought, ‘what does that mean for me?’  

We may have been deep in reflective prayer and suddenly felt we were in the presence of the Risen Christ.  

We can also be with a crowd listening to an evangelical preacher and felt compelled to come to the front, or cry out in some way to demonstrate the action of the Spirit in our life, an experience that reflects Luke’s Pentecost episode. 

But this reading from John tells us there is a quieter way of meeting with Christ which can be just as meaningful.  Furthermore this passage tells us that questioning and doubt can be an important part of coming to Christ. 

In this Gospel episode Thomas was not at the first appearance of the Risen Christ and he would not accept a second hand account.  However that second hand account probably made him more open to his acceptance of the Risen Christ in the second appearance described.

There is strong archaeological and mythic evidence that Thomas went on from there to begin a church in India.  That happened long before the European church was established and even predating the writing of the Gospels.

But we should not to get too involved in the details of the story and, just as Elsa used her grandmother’s fairy stories as a guide to the realty of her world, so we can use the biblical stories learn about our world.

A good portion of us can identify with Doubting Thomas.  We also believe we are unlikely to come face to face with a reconstituted Jesus with nail holes in his hands and a fatal wound in his side. 

However we can recognise the power of story along with the place of hyperbole and metaphor.  Therefore we can understand that John is first of all trying to tell his readers that the experience of the Risen Christ is in some unexplainable way, real.  For those first disciples Christ was both a presence that cannot be excluded by locking the door and yet real enough not to be dismissed as a hallucination.

We can probably accept that, for a whole lot of reasons that psychologists could explain to us, our experience of the Risen Christ is always going to be different to the experience of those first disciples. 

But the inclusion of Thomas not only reassures us that doubt is normal it also allows John to give Jesus a very important piece of dialogue.

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’.(John 20:29)

That is an important statement for John’s community somewhere around 100 years after Jesus death.  It is also extremely important for us more that 2000 years after Jesus death.  Furthermore, although it is nice to be considered blessed if we feel the power of the Spirit Christ breathes into us, our doubts not only need to be dealt with but we must be able to bring others to a meeting with Christ. 

We need to live as Christ to others and that is where the readings from Acts are so helpful because it describes the action of the first followers of Jesus.  However we must still look for the message in the story rather than treat the text as an instruction manual.

Today’s reading continues the theme of caring for others that is so much part of the Gospel message.  Jesus’ ‘kingdom of God’ calls us to acknowledge the reality that humanity is a communal species.  So, although today’s Act’s reading could be seen as an alternative expression of Mark’s, ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his needs’ it is actually a story that suggests that caring for each other is the way to change the world.  The rich getting richer while the poor get poorer is not the way God intends us to live and Jesus is not alone in recognising that we are a cooperative species.

Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning "humanity". That is often translated as ‘I am because we are.’ On her blog Amy Rees Anderson tells a story that illustrates that meaning.

 ‘One day, a western anthropologist went to Africa to study the social behaviour of an indigenous tribe. He proposed a game to the children and they willingly agreed to be part of it. He put a basket filled with fruits underneath a tree and told the children that whoever would reach the basket first would win the whole basket and could eat the fruits all by him- or herself. He lined them all up and raised his hand to give the start signal. Ready. Set. Go! The children took each other’s hands and started running together. They all reached the basket at the same time. Then they sat down in a big circle and enjoyed the fruits together, laughing and smiling all the time. The anthropologist could not believe what he saw and he asked them why they had waited for each other as one could have taken the whole basket all for him- or herself. The children shook their heads and replied, “Ubuntu, how can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?’[2]

Anderson goes on to quote Desmond Tutu saying Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness.  You can’t be human all by yourself,

We could live as Christ would have us live in the sort of commune described in our reading.  But the disciples that met Christ in that locked room were sent out to make Christ real in a hostile world by living as Christ to others. 

Christ comes to us in that mystical world where fantasy and reality meets.  The Spirit is breathed onto us in that meeting and we are sent back into the world of reality to live as Christ to others.