But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them.
Where was Thomas, the Sunday before, when everything happened?
Where was he?
A little over a year ago, the new 2025 St. Paul’s vestry met for a long meeting to plan the coming year. Our consultant got things started with an ice-breaker exercise. The prompt: Your name, how long you’ve been at St. Paul’s, and a fantasy world you’d love to live in. There are so many fantasy worlds: the Stars, both Trek and Wars; the dark, intriguing Battlestar Galactica; Middle-earth; the worlds of Anime. Or do you want to be an X-man, or a Marvel avenger, or someone in DC Comics? Ursula LeGuin, Neal Stephenson, Philip Pullman: feel free to choose your favorite fantasy author. Whose world would make you feel at home?
This was my response to the prompt: My name is Stephen Crippen, I’ve been your pastor for [at that time] two years and counting, and my favorite fantasy world is a sub-world in the Star Trek multiverse: the starship Voyager.
Voyager is a home far from home for our heroes. Flung to the other side of the galaxy, they spend seven television seasons working their way back. What I love about this world is how everyone is stuck together. I realize this dream of mine might be your nightmare: we’re all on board a ship together, like it or not, and we have to work together if we want to survive, and accomplish our shared mission. If we argue, we have to make up, because we’re going to see each other in the corridors and mess hall, and it’s just impractical to stay mad.
Before long, Captain Janeway is talking about her crew as a large family, but this time, it’s not inaccurate or problematic for a boss in a workplace to talk like that: they really do come together as a real kinship network. They have to. Their survival depends on it.
When I shared this preferred world with the vestry early last year, I explained why this is so compelling for me. Like many developer priests, I pay close attention to attendance, to the weekly Sunday head count. (The devil tempts me to compare ours with other churches.) But I watch attendance not because I am competitive, or because I have a high achievement orientation. (I admit those character traits, and even admit that they are also occasional character flaws, but they aren’t the primary reason why I focus on attendance.)
The primary reason is that I truly love to see you all, and be with you all. I often wish this parish church were a closed ship hurtling through space, on a shared mission, or a shared dilemma, that keeps us all together and close. Again, I realize that my wish might be your claustrophobic hellscape. But it’s just a wish; it’s just a feeling; it’s really just the fact that I love you, and want to be with you.
Sadly for me, that has never been how churches work, not even at the very beginning, on the first Easter Day. Was Thomas really not there that first evening, when Jesus appeared to his closest followers? Or is this a literary device of John the Evangelist, whose objective is to create a truthful, compelling narrative that gives new members of the movement — those who never were able to meet Jesus — a way into the Resurrection event? Oh, it’s probably that latter explanation. But it doesn’t matter. The truth remains: never, not once, in all the history of our faith, has a Christian community contained every one of its members in one room.
Even if everyone who pledges to St. Paul’s came into this room today; plus everyone in their households who rarely or never comes here; plus everyone who may or may not pledge but calls St. Paul’s their home; plus every volunteer, every soul anywhere who has some important connection to us: if every one of these people came here today, we still wouldn’t be complete, because we are bound to all Christians everywhere, numbering in the billions; and also, closer to home, our beloved dead have gone before us, and their absence here still tugs at us, still wounds us. Never, not once, in all the history of our faith, has the whole Christian community contained every one of its members in one room.
So my Voyager fantasy will remain just that: a fantasy. And yet, it does touch a truth. Our beloved dead are not sitting here next to us, but the Risen One gathers them at this Table, even if they remain beyond our sight. Those who are homebound or otherwise unable to come here physically can join us on livestream, and we visit them with the sacrament. We are inspired by the Risen One to reach out to people we haven’t seen in a while; the Risen One hallows the graves of our friends, tucking them in; he helps us connect prayerfully with those of us who are traveling, or have moved far away. And ultimately, we share the lectionary readings, the baptismal waters, and the Eucharistic Table with all Christians everywhere.
And so it turns out that my Voyager dream is only a vain fantasy when I attempt to gather people by myself, counting you all as I anxiously work to make the flock ever bigger. That is a fantasy, and also a vanity: I can’t gather you. I can’t ensure that everyone will come. The work of gathering God’s people always belongs to the Risen One. Only he can bring us all into the same community (if not the same room) together.
After all, look again at Thomas: did he rejoin the community because they met his demands, and he touched the wounds of Christ to confirm that what others had told him was true? No, the risen Christ offered Thomas the opportunity to touch the wounds, but Thomas, when presented with exactly what he demanded, found that he didn’t need it after all: the risen Christ had already gathered him back into the fold. “My Lord and my God!” Thomas cries out, gaping at Jesus but not touching him. The risen Christ accomplished it all without Thomas doing what he had planned as the only possible way to fully rejoin his friends.
And so it is with us. As much as I want to see everyone, every Sunday, only the risen Christ can bring you here. And wherever those of us who aren’t here today might be — and wherever Thomas had been that first Easter evening — they are all where they belong right now, and they are all still here with us, joined as they are with us inside the sacred heart of the risen Jesus. He will bring them back in his time, for his reasons, just as he will bring you back, and me back, whenever we journey from here on our various adventures, our vital and diverging missions.
So I don’t need a closed starship that holds everyone close. And even the fictional Voyager couldn’t prevent the occasional death of a crew member.
But this reminds me of something that always bugged me about that show! Voyager continued the long tradition of so-called “red shirts” on Star Trek shows — the unnamed or otherwise minor characters, typically wearing red uniforms, who are killed on a dangerous mission, while the main crew we know and love survives. On Voyager, when a “red shirt” died, they would place them in a torpedo shell and solemnly shoot them out into space. Then the ship would resume its long course back to earth.
Keep the body with you! I would shout at the screen. Build a columbarium! If you make it back to earth, won’t their original families and friends want to bury the remains?? It’s so frustrating!
But even this can inform our reflections on this glad second Sunday of Easter. Even if you are separated from us by an insurmountable distance; even if there’s been a painful estrangement that seems irreparable; even if your own death has painfully placed you beyond our reach; even then, you are still here with us. Never mind the fantasy world of Voyager, in which they accompanied the launching of a coffin into deep space with the bland and underwhelming reassurance that the deceased person will live forever “in their memories.” We have received a greater reassurance.
For us, the people of the Resurrection; for us, the followers of the Risen One; for those among us who would love to lock everyone we care about safely inside one room, forever; for us, we have been given this great news of glad relief and glorious joy: the Risen One binds us all together, close by and far away, reconciled or estranged, living and dead. The Risen One binds us together in spirit and in mission. The Risen One binds us together in identity and shared purpose. The Risen One binds us together in fellowship and love. The Risen One binds us all together as one, no matter where we are, no matter what we’re facing, and no matter what’s gone wrong.
And together, bound as one community in this wondrous but ever-changing world, together, we now gaze upon his shining wounds, terrible wounds that proclaim his self-giving love; passionate wounds marking open hands; loving hands that gather us and embrace us, join us and then send us, forever.
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Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter (Year A), April 12, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31