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I have a core memory from my childhood that reveals interesting backstory about my character, my leadership style, my worldview. I have worked on this memory in therapy. I strive (successfully!) to develop beyond it. Here is the memory, reinforced for years when I was a child: I sat in the back of the family van.
Most of you know I’m one of seven children, fifth in the line. We kids would pile into the van every summer for the long, hot drive to visit my mother’s family in Denver. My dad would take the wheel, driving us across the monotonous miles of southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado.
Family legend recalls the hot, dusty afternoon when my father was flooring it (I think understandably) on one of the highways, probably in western Nebraska, and he got pulled over for speeding. As the officer walked alongside the van on his way to my dad, he saw a little-kid face in every single window of our vehicle. (Some accounts of the story uncharitably put snot in every child’s nose. Other versions are kinder to us, but all of the storytellers maintain that each kid stared manically out of their respective window.) The highway-patrol worker, when he finally reached the driver’s-side window, let my dad off with a warning, saying, “I think you’ve got enough problems today.”
All of this is to say that I know in my bones what it’s like to have a lot of peers, and what it’s like to assume a place in the back, to let the group decide, or let the parent decide, or let the older sibling decide what’s happening, where we’re going, what’s next.
And this personal experience guides my contemplation of another great sibling in the faith, Saint Thomas, the faithful disciple who is cast in a supporting role, but who nevertheless is all in, who wants to see, who wants to know, who wants to participate fully.
Whatever Thomas wants, he makes it known. Maybe he doesn’t have a juicy role like Peter or Mary Magdalene, but Thomas isn’t a back-of-the-van person.
When Jesus assures them that they know where he is going, Thomas says what others likely thought but were afraid to say: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” This sets Jesus up to pronounce one of his great “I AM” statements: “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Jesus proclaims to Thomas.
In another important encounter, Thomas encourages his friends, stirring them up, bracing them to follow Jesus even to their deaths, when he says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
Thomas does not sit quietly in the back of the van. He knows what he wants, and he knows what he needs. He summons courage to assert himself to meet those needs. He’s the kind of apostle I want: Thomas is an advocate. He speaks up. He is our model, our example, a saint for all who have too often stepped back when the healthier choice, the braver choice, the best choice, is to step forward.
And Thomas is called, curiously, “the Twin.” Thomas the Twin: this is probably meant to give all of the rest of us a place to join the story, a place closer to the front of the van. If Thomas is a twin, and his twin is not named, then we can assume that we — all of us who hear and read the Good News — we are the Twin of Thomas. We enter the story through his window, his perspective, his vantage point.
And doesn’t that track? Like Thomas, we weren’t there when the Risen One appeared to his friends on Easter Evening. And as the Twin of Thomas, we often can share his confusion about where Jesus is going, where Jesus is leading us, even the basic question of who Jesus is. (Thomas tells the others, and the world, who Jesus is, but only after Thomas asserts his need to see and touch Jesus, intimately.) And finally, if we are the Twin of Thomas, we may also share with Thomas his vigorous, dreadful, life-changing passion to give it all for the cause.
So… we can’t meekly cower in the back of the van. Dear twins of Thomas, my siblings in this parish, which in its own way is a van crammed with people, hear this challenge: it is our job to speak up, to act up.
Like Thomas, I demand to see the wounds of Christ. I insist on seeing how this Body of Christ, here and now, is wounded in mission. Over nearly a year and a half now, St. Paul’s has begun to grow again, welcoming newcomers just about every Sunday. That’s exciting! But it is also challenging. We don’t truly welcome newcomers only by greeting them and authentically making a place for them by our side. That’s important, and don’t get me wrong: I found out last year that a child in our parish saw a picture on our social media advertising abundant cake at coffee hour, and begged her parents to take her to this delightful cake-eating church. This inspired my resolution to feature cake at coffee hour as often as possible. Church is fun. Cake is delicious!
But church is also a place where we are beautifully wounded, and that is something I believe newcomers want to see, too. We don’t just renovate a beautiful building and tend a garden around it so that we can enjoy aesthetic beauty; no, we build an urban mission that connects us beautifully to this wounded — and wounding — neighborhood. We are doing vital — and painful — ministry here. This gives our lives meaning. And we attract many others who, without a world-changing mission, would struggle to find inspiration and meaning in their lives. Without our mission, they’d find it harder to affirm their vocation.
Thomas speaks for them when he demands to see the wounds of the risen Christ: not just the living Christ, but the wounded Christ. Thomas is not just trying to verify the improbable, mystifying news of the Resurrection, though that alone is a worthy goal for him and for us, who were not there to see it. Thomas wants to see the wounds. If this is Christ, then he is wounded. If St. Paul’s is a church, then we are wounded. One of our newer members, when visiting some time ago, told me she stayed when she saw our porous borders that allow unhoused neighbors to be close to us, to be part of us, to be us. If we ever chose to seal ourselves completely behind a secure wall of hostile architecture, this person told me, she would not see us as a church anymore. She would not see our wounds. We might not even be wounded, at least in the way that Christ is wounded.
Like Thomas, I want to see the wounds of the Body of Christ. I want to see suffering, death, and resurrection — all of it — happening here, and then I will believe; then I will trust; then I will follow.
In recent weeks I’ve been reflecting and praying about a certain neighbor of ours who has found housing, with our help. We didn’t obtain the exact apartment he lives in, and we haven’t given him lots of money to secure that housing. All we’ve done is build friendship with this person, over time, holding him in prayer, hearing his story, asking him to pray for us, asking him to guide us to others, drawing on his wisdom in our street-centered ministry, letting him evangelize us, and recognizing that God has brought us to this neighbor — and not the other way around. We are the newcomers to the mission of this neighborhood, where this friend of ours is one of the presiders, one of the celebrants, one of the leaders. He is deeply wounded of course, but all of us are, with wounds of the body, wounds of the mind, wounds of the heart and spirit.
And I tell you this: the light in this person’s eyes; the gratitude he expresses for the help he has received; the help and encouragement he offers to others, and to me: all of the wounds of this resurrected person reveal to me, right here at 15 Roy Street, right now in this fraught and frightening first half of the 21st century — these bright wounds reveal to me the Risen One moving easily through the locked door of our anxiety, standing among us, breathing peace through all of us. We have helped save the life of this neighbor, and he has helped save other lives, while strengthening the hope I feel in my own life.
When I see all of this, here in this community where almost nobody cowers in the back of the van, then like our sibling Thomas, I can’t help but cry out, “My Lord and my God!”
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Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 7, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31