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Good
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 Sermon
01/17/2010
Through Locked Doors ~ by Reverend Thomas
Cary Kinder
April 11, 2010
Second Sunday after Easter
First Congregational Church in Thetford,
Vermont, UCC
Psalm 116; Acts 5:12-32; John 20:19-31
The
Gospel of John describes how the disciples hid on Easter evening for
fear of being arrested and killed as Jesus had been. Then Jesus came and passed through
the locked doors and stood among them in the dim lamplight. It undoubtedly terrified them. Imagine how you would feel. But he said, “Peace be with
you.” He showed them his
wounds to reassure them. Then
he said “Peace be with you” again and sent them out,
breathing the Holy Spirit into them with all its comfort, guidance
and power.
The
book of Acts tells many stories of what the Apostles did with that
Holy Spirit, healing and raising people from the dead, growing of the
church, confronting authorities.
Even if you have a hard time believing that today’s
story in John is factual, if it seems more like a ghost story or a
myth to you, the truth is plain that whatever happened to those
disciples in that locked room, they emerged with a peace that
surpasses understanding, and with great spiritual wisdom and power,
and with the courage to overcome whatever fear they felt. We know this is true because the
church survived and flourished.
We
have other evidence, as well.
When the 116th Psalm says, “I love God
because God has heard my voice and has heard my supplications,”
when it says, “the snares of death encompassed me…I
suffered distress and anguish.
Then I called on the name of God: ‘O God, I pray, save
my life!’” when it says “return, O my soul, to your
rest, for God has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from
death, and my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling…. You
have loosed my bonds,” we can testify to the truth of that
quality of God.
We
can testify because we have seen others around us in distress and
anguish and the snares of death turn to God and find peace and
strength and new life. We can
testify because we have hidden in our own forms of sealed rooms, we
have barricaded our heart for fear and felt Christ come through the
locked doors and give us peace and send us back out into the
world. At times we have held
back from sharing the creative gifts that the Holy Spirit has given
us, afraid to make ourselves vulnerable—we have hesitated to
reach out with love or forgiveness or compassion to those who seemed
capable of hurting us, but then we have felt God’s higher power
liberate us so that we could do what we felt called to do.
The
resurrection power that released the disciples and launched the
church is still working in the world.
We have felt it in our lives and seen it in others, and yet,
we still find ourselves locking our doors and hiding for fear. We still find our addictions or
childhood patterns holding us captive and keeping us from being the
people we feel called to be.
We still have a hard time being as courageously loving or
compassionate or forgiving as we could be. We still try to do everything
ourselves, without the help of the Spirit’s higher power.
And
so it is good that we return every year on this Sunday to the story
in John to remind us of the truth.
It is good that we have this opportunity to crack the locked
doors and open to the possibility that we could live differently,
because so much depends on our being able to emerge from whatever
holds us back. Our lives are
speeding by, and will we let them pass by entirely without fulfilling
our calling and potential?
That is urgency enough, perhaps. But more than that, God urgently
needs us to do our part in the cosmic struggle between God’s
realm of peace, justice and mercy and the corrupt human realm of
violence, injustice and selfishness.
The poor, the oppressed, the war-torn, the environmentally threatened
of God’s creation need us to be free to give our lives for the
cause of love.
Today
people around the world are observing Holocaust Remembrance Day,
remembering the victims of the Nazis.
As Christians, we need also to remember that the vast majority
of church people hid behind locked doors and did nothing to stop the
slaughter. But we also
remember that some were able to go through their locked doors, to
rise out of their paralyzing fear of pain and death and do their
small part to save Jewish lives and undermine the Nazi regime. It is important to remember these
heroes because they are our models and our inspiration for our own
lives. Every time we overcome
an obstacle within or around us that blocks our Christ-like love,
every time we overcome the self-concern that keeps us from using the
gifts the Holy Spirit gives us to serve the cause of God’s
realm, we are doing exactly what those heroes of the holocaust
did—we are struggling on behalf of the same love that they did,
and our part of the struggle matters just as much as theirs, and is
just as heroic.
The
next time you feel like avoiding your calling to share your gifts of
love or creativity, or to confront some injustice or wrong, remember
that people like Corrie ten Boom overcame the same reluctance. The ten Boom family lived in
Harlaam in Holland
during the Nazi occupation.
The book and movie entitled The Hiding Place tell their story, and I have talked
about them before. They were
Christians who felt the scriptures were absolutely clear that they
must risk their lives to help save those the Nazis were rounding
up. They began hiding Jews in
their home and helping them escape to other countries. With the help of the underground
resistance, they built a secret room in their house and trained
themselves to hide within seconds the Jews who were there at any
given time. Eventually the
Nazis discovered what they were doing and stormed into their house,
but all the Jews were able to reach the secret room in time and
eventually they all escaped the country. The ten Booms, though, were sent to
the death camps.
The
two daughters, Corrie and Betsie, went to a death camp called
Ravensbruck. There they
continued the same kind of courageous Christ-like work, comforting
and helping other prisoners however they could. Betsie died there, but Corrie
survived. She spent the rest
of her life telling their story and all the lessons it had taught
them. One of the biggest
lessons she talked about was to learn to trust in the Christ who
comes through locked doors, to trust in Christ to give peace where
peace seems impossible, and to breathe the Holy Spirit into us with
just the gifts we need in just this moment in order to serve
God’s cause. As Corrie
often said, they learned that no matter how far down we go into the
pit of suffering, Christ is always waiting there to give us comfort
and strength.
Part
of the dehumanization of the Nazi death camps was that they reduced
prisoners to extreme hard-hearted selfishness in order to
survive. For instance, when the
prisoners had to march to a work site or stand for hours outside in
the frigid winter wind, the prisoners on the outside of the column
would feel the cold come right through their thin clothes and often
get frostbite or get sick and soon die, so most tried to force their
way to the inside. As Betsie
grew weaker, Corrie found herself acting more and more selfishly,
justifying it in her mind as being for Betsie. But she came to realize that she
was really doing it for herself, and she noticed that her heart had
gone out of all her caring for others.
Finally
one night she was reading from their smuggled Bible the passage where
Paul talks about his own weakness, and says that God’s strength
is sufficient and made perfect in his weakness. Joy flooded into her there in the
flea infested, freezing barracks.
She realized that her weakness, her inability to keep herself
from acting on her fearful, selfish desire, was a gift, because it
forced her to rely entirely on God’s strength in order to love
and serve those around her.
From then on, through Christ and the Spirit’s peace and
power, she was able to rise above her selfishness and do far more for
others than she thought possible.
After
the war Corrie fulfilled a vision that Betsie foresaw before she
died. She established places
where the people most damaged by the war on both sides could come to
heal and find forgiveness and reconciliation, where they could free
themselves from the hate and violence that had possessed them. But one night after speaking in a
German church, Corrie came face to face with a cruel prison guard
from Ravensbruck who had mistreated her beloved sister and helped
lead to her death. He held out
his hand to her, but after all her preaching urging others to love
and forgive, she found herself unable to do it. She stood struggling, wanting to be
Christ-like, but finding herself full of rage and hate. Finally, praying, she felt a power
from beyond her lift her hand to take the guard’s. An electric current of grace flowed
up her arm and into her whole body as she held his hand and looked
into his eyes. She said she
realized in that moment that Christ not only tells us to love our
enemies, he also gives us the love we need when the time comes.
These
are just the stories of one person during the holocaust, and there
were countless other people, Jews and Christians alike, who found
themselves able to rise above selfish desire and all the fears that
those desires stirred in them, to rise above even the natural desire
to live and the natural fear of death. We need to remember the holocaust
not only to remind ourselves of our ability to let the world become a
completely insane and cruel place, but also to remind ourselves that
it does not have to be that way.
There is a way out through our doors locked by fear or rage or
hate or despair. There is hope
that Christ will come to us in our weakness and give us peace and the
Spirit’s gifts and send us out to love and serve.
The
Gospel story has one overlooked detail that is especially hopeful to
me. Jesus came through the
locked doors to the disciples on Easter evening and gave them peace
and the Holy Spirit and sent them out through those same doors to do
their ministry. But a week
later, they were right back there again, and again Jesus came, and
again he showed his wounds to help them believe. It does not matter how many times
we find ourselves caught back in our old traps of attachment to
desire and the fear that we will not get what we desire, it does not
matter how many times we shut down and retreat into the stifling
darkness of that sealed room where we nurse our wounds or rage, it
does not matter how many times we forget to let go and trust in God,
every single time Christ is willing to come again and give us peace
and power from beyond and free us to love and serve.
So
relax, and rejoice, and wait patiently, and welcome the very thing
that is blocking you, because it is giving you this opportunity to
let go and trust in the higher power that is ready to help you yet
again, even now.
Let
us pray in silence saying yes to this possibility in our own
heart…
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