A New Sermon

For Southfield Presbyterian Church in Southfield, Michigan

"A Christology of Scars"

John 20:19-29

My first career, before I gave it all up to become an unemployed preacher, was in the theater.

For almost 20 years I worked in theaters from Duluth, Minnesota to Monroe, Louisiana, from Ogunquit, Maine to Ashland, Oregon.

Because almost everyone who works there comes from some where else, theaters become a community and a family pretty quickly.

The bonding happens, usually over beer, at gatherings that have existed longer than the people attending have worked for the company.

When I was at Oregon Shakespeare, it was called “Beer School” and it took place at Cook’s Tavern on Main Street.

At the Alabama Shakespeare Festival where I worked for eight years, it was called “Dock Party.”

Almost every Friday there was a Dock Party, but there could be an impromptu one any night of the week if there happened to be beer left in the fridge.

The loading dock of ASF’s scene shop was well known as the place that chairs go to die. Therere was always at least one couch and probably 10 to 15 chairs of all sorts, half broken office chairs, ratty old recliners, what ever turned up.

They weren’t there because we needed them for our work, they were there so that when the work was done for the day we could gather in a circle, and with the beer providing conversational lubrication we would tell our stories.

No subject was taboo, and pretty much any subject you can imagine was touched on at one time or another, but there was one set of stories that would come up again and again.

No matter what theater it was, whether it was Beer School, Dock Party or some unnamed regular break, you could count on these stories coming up, especially if there was someone new in the circle.

The stories that were told over and over again, were the stories of what had gone wrong.

“We were doing 'Julius Caesar' and we had this cable drive turntable on the forestage and opening night the cable snapped. Clay had to run the whole show from the trap room reaching up through the maintenance port and turning the thing by hand.”

"We were striking 'Hamlet' and Matt and I were up on the third level of the set, 16 feet off the deck taking down the handrails. So he an I are at opposite ends of this six foot piece of pipe when something hits the set between us and bounces down to the floor, just missing the painter who was working down there. Turns out it was a foot long piece of inch-and-a-half pipe that had fallen from the grid, 65 feet above the stage. So, we yell up to the people working on the grid, 'A little warning next time guys!' and they yell back, get this, 'Oh, was that that pipe?'”

Everybody who works in the theater has a set of those stories they can share, for technicians they’re about when things broke, or when somebody got hurt. Actors talk about the time they forgot their lines, or when so and so missed a cue and they had to improvise.

When we get together, we get to know each other by telling our stories, and sharing our scars.

Is it any wonder then that when I read this text, the first thing that comes to mind is Dock Party?

The first thing that I think of is the image of all the disciples gathered in one room behind a closed door.

I imagine that I can understand some of what they were feeling.

Between theater and just being who I am, the feeling of turning inward to a community that understood and supported me and away from a world that can be hostile and cold is one that I know well. That feeling is a lot of what dock party is about; it’s about being in a group that shares experiences and understanding that the strange town outside doesn’t have.

It’s about being in a safe place when all of the things that have kept you safe in the past are far, far away or gone all together.

Yes, I understand what the disciples are feeling. I can even sort of picture what the room was like: everyone is sitting in a circle, there’s bound to be a couple of wineskins being passed around, it’s evening and the windows have been covered so there are a couple of candles or lamps providing a little light.

Some of them, Andrew and James maybe, maybe more, just want to sit, think, or drink, they want time to remember and reflect.

Others, Peter and John maybe, feel the need to talk; they have to tell their stories, their memories of this great friend and teacher that they’ve just lost.

However they were expressing their grief, they were all shocked when, despite the locked door, someone new joined the circle, someone who looked strangely, impossibly familiar.

>And it’s actually that moment, when Jesus stands before them and shows them his scars that reminded me the most of dock parties and which drove me to this sermon.

Dock parties are all about sharing scars, both literal and figurative scars. It’s how we get to know each other, how we recognize that new people are part of our group. We may never have met before day or week, but we can show each other that we are connected through our scars.

And this is also the point where Christology rears its head.

Christology is the sub-division of theology that deals with what we believe and understand about Jesus. And I suppose that it should come as no surprise that throughout the history of the Christian church, Christology has been the source and the center of some of the biggest arguments we’ve ever had.

At the center of those arguments has almost always been what theologians call Christ’s dual nature. The Bible tells us that Jesus is both human and God. It sounds so simple to just say that, it’s one short, declarative sentence: The Bible tells us that Jesus is both human and God.

But it is the hows and whys of that simple sentence that have been wrestled with for 2000 years. And almost everyone of those wrestling matches has it’s own -ism.

One of the earliest and most famous of those was Arianism. Which basically said that Jesus was a lot like God, but not really God.

Then came Monophysitism, which claimed that Christ only had one nature, not two. It had two sub-isms, Eutychianism, that held that the presence of Jesus’ divine nature had destroyed his human nature and Apollinarianism, which said that Jesus’ body was human but his mind was divine.

there’s Docetism, the favorite of the Gnostics, that says that Jesus never was human at all, he was always only God and just appeared to be human.

he other end of the scale then is Adoptionism, which holds that Christ was fully and only human, but that after his Baptism, God adopted him for God’s purposes.

I Could go on and on about the arguments that raged back and forth around all of these isms, and the various church councils that addressed them. But what you need to know, is that for as dry and academic sounding and they seem today, in their time they were very lively and public debates.

It’s been said that in the fourth century, during the debate over Arianism, you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread at a market in Constantinople without getting into a discussion about the divinity of Christ.

What all of these isms have in common is a desire to explain away something that we have great difficulty understanding, that is, how can Jesus be both fully God and fully human.

It’s just a terribly hard thing for us to get our heads around and so people try to find ways to deal with it, usually by focusing on one of the aspects and disregarding the other.

That’s why we hear things like, “Jesus was really God, he only looked human,” or “Jesus was human until God took over and then he was God.”

What your more likely to hear in this age is that Christ wasn’t really God at all, but a just a very good human, a teacher, a prophet, a leader.

And really, some of you may be asking, what difference does it make? What’s so important about Jesus being both God and human? Wouldn’t it be ok if we just thought of him as one or the other?

Well, I think it makes a very big difference and I think today’s text shows us why.

The amazing thing about this scene is the way that all at once, we get to see both aspects of Christ’s dual nature.

On the one side we have the resurrected Christ magically appearing in the middle of a locked room. What could be a clearer example of his divinity. He was dead, they knew he was dead, we knew he was dead. But then, he wasn’t, three days later and he was alive again! Just last week Christians around the world greeted the morning with “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”

This is the Jesus that is God. This is the Jesus that has defeated death, that cannot not be contained or kept out. This is the Christ that ascends into heaven and sits at the right hand of God.

It’s easy to understand why the Gnostics and the monophysites wanted this to be the primary aspect of Christ, to the extent of doing away with the other, human aspect all together.

And it is now wonder that in all of these post-resurrection stories the divine Christ is what we tend to see. The miraculous is so big that we can’t see past it.

Usually, when we go looking for the human Jesus we look to the stories of his childhood or to times during his ministry when he was tired, or frustrated. And we point to those times and say “See he is human, he gets tired and angry just like us!”

But, in this moment when Christ seems so magical, so truly divine, he also, for me, shows himself to be the most fully human.

Jesus turns to his friends and shows them his scars.

When my co-workers and I would gather on the loading dock and share our stories and our scars, through them we became more real to one another and we changed ourselves from strangers to friends.

Christ showing his scars to the disciples feels just the same to me.

The way I think we’re taught to view this moment is that Jesus is showing his scars as a form of I.D. so that the people in the room will know that the being standing in front of them now is the same person who, three days previously, had been hanging on a cross.

But Christ’s exposing his scars is more than just identification. In showing his scars, Jesus is also saying “Look, I am still like you.I n spite of all that has happened I still bear the scars, the marks and the memory of a human.”

“Look, I am still like you.”

“Look, I am still like you.”

How wonderful is that.

What could possibly be better than to know in your every day life that not only is God always with you, but that God is like you.

When we go to God we can know that God doesn’t just remember what it was like to be a human 2000 years ago, but knows today what it is like to be human.

"Look, I am still like you.”

The resurrected Christ is still the human Christ. There is no discontinuity.

That’s the miracle of this passage: we can rely not only that Christ is with us always but the Christ who is with us is fundamentally one of us.

And that’s where all of those isms I was talking about earlier go wrong—in explaining away the dual nature of Christ they lose the greatest truth about Christ.

And what about Thomas? Poor Thomas who couldn’t believe without seeing? I've always thought he got a bum rap. Mainly because I agree with him. Seeing those scars, knowing those scars are real, and that the resurrected Jesus still carries them with him is so important to me that I would want to see them and touch them myself even if it meant that for the next 2000 years people would call me Doubting Meghan and shake their heads about what a shame it was that I didn’t have enough faith to believe without seeing those scars.

Sure, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed, but I’ve got to think that there’s something really good about seeing and believing.

Being human is a dirty, messy business. We make mistakes, we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. For many through history and today it’s too much to think about God also being human, so they find ways to explain God’s incarnation away, to minimize it so that they can focus on the glory and majesty of God.

There’s nothing wrong with the glory and majesty of God. We’ve spent the last two Sunday’s, Palm Sunday and Easter, celebrating our awe at that glory and majesty. And that’s why this text is important for today, so that we have a chance to stop and celebrate another kind of wonder:

"Look, I am still like you."

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Amen

Comments

[Muphinsmom]

Amen