Easter 2C - "Passing the Baton"

 

Saint John 20:19-31

Every athlete will tell you that the one of the most important plays in any sport is the handoff. Fumble a handoff and things will not go well for you.

In football it is obvious.  If a quarterback fumbles the handoff to a running back there is trouble and maybe even a turnover.

In baseball it is not so obvious, but it is still there on every double play.  An infielder must somehow get the ball smoothly over to another infielder who is covering second base in a toss that goes so effortlessly that the one who is covering second can relay it on to first in time to get the batter out.  There is almost a ballet-like quality to this hand off that requires smoothness, agility, and the grace of a ballet dancer.  

In a swimming relay race, there is a “hand-off” between the one in the water and the person waiting on the blocks that must go, if you’ll pardon the pun, swimmingly.  Leave a moment too soon and risk disqualification. Leave a moment to late and risk losing by the tenths of seconds by which most races are decided.

Perhaps the most important hand off is in a relay race when the baton needs to be passed from one runner to the next.  They practice this a lot because the moment in crucial.  Have anything but the smoothest of smooth hand-offs and, like in swimming, precious seconds may be lost along with the race.  Drop the baton and it is all over.

Passing the baton, handing a ball off from one player to another in any sport is incredibly important. 

Nobody on this day, when we mark Elizabeth’s retirement, can doubt how important passing the baton is.  Elizabeth has been the rock, the fount of information for one long term pastor and two interims.  I’m not sure I would have been able to remotely function without her able assistance. And she will be deeply missed by us all or, at least any of us who would like to get something accomplished.

It is also surprising and appropriate that neither she nor I realized how fitting today’s gospel is for this day.

Jesus is about to hand the gospel off to the disciples.  He is about to pass the baton to them but at first it appears they are not quite ready.  They are not passing anything on to anybody. They may think they are keeping the world out but in reality they are keeping themselves locked in.

The doors are locked for two very good reasons.  The first was fear.

It wasn’t just the learned religious leaders that the disciples were afraid of it was also the Roman authorities. 

Remember, it was their guards who were posted at the tomb with the charge to keep it secure, but they dropped the ball. The tomb that they were supposed to guard was empty.  What happened to the body? 

I wonder who had a bigger stake at finding it – the learned religious leaders or a government that had prided itself on its security measures and now had to deal with the blow back of having one of them fail.  It appears that somehow, someway, they had not been able to guard something as simple as a tomb with a body it.  Big time fumble!

"Where was the body?"  "Who had the body?" That group hidden behind lock doors were the prime suspects but and this is important for all of us to know.

Don’t tell the people who were here last week celebrating the resurrection with us that for Luke in his gospel the events of that first Easter morning do not include an appearance by the resurrected Christ.  The original ending of Mark has no A.M. appearance by Jesus either.  Only Saint Matthew and Saint John complete the story by having Jesus appearing to Mary in one case and a group of women in the other.

When we pick up the story today Jesus’ resurrection is a matter of pure speculation.

The hand off is not going well because there is no small measure of uncertainty.  You can imagine the disciples rehearsing and re-rehearsing the scene.  “Was the tomb really empty?”  “Are you certain?” “Did you really see him?” “For sure?” “Maybe it was somebody who looked like him?”  On and on the conversation must have gone on and on in one of those maddening circular spirals of speculations that we have all found ourselves in.

Maybe that is why Thomas wasn’t there.  Maybe he gave up on this game altogether.

Maybe he got tired of sitting shiva for someone who may, or may not, have been dead. Perhaps he got tired of the endless speculation about what happened.  Perhaps he was as confused - as we can sometimes be - by all the stories of resurrection encounters with Jesus.  Perhaps he was just tired of staring at the wallpaper and wondering what to do.  Perhaps he needed a breath of fresh air.  We don’t know what Thomas was doing. All we know for certain is that he wasn’t in the room where it happened when Jesus made his grand re-entry into the disciples’ lives.

Upon his return all Thomas does is wonder if what his friends are saying is true.

Thomas walks into the upper room, and everyone says, “Oh my gosh, guess who was just here? Jesus! He breathed in our faces, OK that was weird, but then he showed us his wounds! It was really him!”1

They are trying to hand the story off to him, but they all fumble it.

Remember, what they are telling him is that his friend Jesus who was stone cold, definitely dead only a few days ago is now running around making guest appearances to everybody Thomas knows.  Everybody that is but him. 

We’ve been celebrating Easter for all of our lives.  We’re the ultimate Monday morning quarterbacks. While the story has not lost one bit of its power for us experiencing it for the very first time must have been an entirely different matter.  This is not something that is taken in easily and Thomas is not sure he can believe it just based on word of mouth.

It is then.  It is exactly then that Jesus arrives back on the scene in puts the ball, or baton, or whatever, back in their hands.

Jesus could have responded to Thomas: “All right then, don’t take your friends word for it.  Don’t listen to them for all I care.”  He could have even said, “Listen I’m not going to subject myself to your cockamamie tests.  Either believe or don’t believe but don’t you go poking me.”

Instead, Jesus shows up and says: “Whatever you need Thomas.  Poke, prod, ask, talk, do whatever you want.”

Above this post is a painting by Michelangelo Caravaggio called “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” where Thomas and two others are not just staring a Jesus’ wounded side but Caravaggio with his usual over-the-top graphic style has Thomas’ finger about one knuckle deep in Jesus’ wound. 

If you don’t remember anything else I say this morning, remember this: Jesus was faithful too.  Jesus never gave up on Thomas or any of the other disciples.  And he never gives up on us.   That is our promise in those moments when we worry if we can execute a good hand-off or not.

The disciples may not have been the greatest team in the world, but they were his team and not only were they his team he was still going to use them.

With this story we are told that Jesus can use us to.

Sometimes we doubt.  Sometimes we believe.  Faith is a struggle.  It waxes and wanes.  Faith is sometimes strong and sometimes weak.

In this story we hear Jesus tell us.  “Yes, you weren’t there to see my miracles firsthand but here you are in church anyway faithfully working your way through your doubts and opening your eyes to faith.”

When that moment comes and faith triumphs maybe we’ll be able to say with with Thomas - perhaps in a shout, perhaps only in a whisper - “My Lord and my God.” 

And if all goes well in our lives and with our witness maybe others will be led to say of Jesus, my Lord and my God too.

This gospel has been handed off to us.  The ball ours now. Let’s not drop it.

________________

1. MaryAnn McKibben Dana, “Doubt Your Faith, Have Faith in Your Doubt,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverySunday.com, April 3, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/sermons/a22-second-sunday-easter-year/.

Easter 2025 - "Conjunction Junction

 

Saint Luke 24:1-12

Before I was forced into attending Confirmation classes, which in the church of my youth were held for two hours every Saturday morning learning what was certainly true and what was not, I spent a good part of those mornings watching cartoons. 

These varied offerings had a certain mind-numbing quality to them, although they certainly in no way surpassed the numbness that was brought on by a long-winded pastor in a stuffy, steam heated room.  Few things could surpass that.

And Confirmation certainly could not compete in interest with the madcap qualities provided by the Warner Brother’s Looney-Tunes stable of characters.  Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Yosemite Sam, and my personal favorite, the Tasmainian Devil put Luther’s Small Catechism to shame.

Then there was the aimed at adults but over the heads of most children efforts of Jay Ward and Bill Scott who gave us Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Dudley Do-rite and Nell, who had the adults in my house laughing at their countless strings of double entendres while me and my friends wondered what exactly was so funny.

William Hanna’s and Joseph Barbera’s offerings contributed to the mix with a hound named Huckelberry and a bear named Yogi while still saving their most famous characters for either end of the timeline, the Jetsons and the Flintstones, for primetime.

Trying to bring some measure of respectability to the Saturday morning mayhem was a program called, School House Rock whose themes included science, economics, history, mathematics, civics and, most important for this day, grammar.

Do you remember Conjunction Junction?

“Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hookin' up words and phrases and clauses. I’ve got ‘and, or, and but’ that will get you pretty far.”

The most important word from “Conjunction Junction” today is the word “but.” 

But connects two words or ideas singling a change in direction.  As the song goes, “not this but that. Dirty but happy, sad but true.”1

huge word and perhaps in all of literature it looms no larger than it does in today’s account of that first Easter in St. Luke’s gospel.

Perhaps you were catching your breath and missed the first word in our reading.  Perhaps you were putting your bulletin down and not quite ready so let me read that first line again.  “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb...”2

Luke suggests something I have not noticed much until this year. Unlike those of the other Gospel writers, his account is peppered with the word but. But on the first day of the week at early dawn, Luke says, they came to the tomb with the spices that they had prepared. For Luke—in only 12 verses— that defiant conjunction but shows up six times. It’s as if Luke is grabbing us by the lapels, stopping us in our tracks and forcing us to understand that no matter what we’ve heard, we haven’t heard the whole story yet. So he begins that story in a curious way, with a tenacious conjunction. “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb . . .”3

For Luke the word but is huge.  

So much so that the always winsome and wonderful Dr. Scott Black Johnston who brings no small measure of joy to his pulpit at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, brought my attention to this word when he announced that he considered titling his sermon last year, “Easter’s Big But”, until his much wiser wife talked him out of it causing him to complain “it is too bad that  adolescent humour is wasted on the young.”4 

I would never even think of doing such a thing.  Nor would I even think of mentioning it.

The word “but” makes us ask ourselves what happened before and after that little word appeared in a sentence.  

We know what happened before.

Their friend Jesus had been killed in the worse possible way imaginable by a paranoid government that would not tolerate any dissent.  My guess is that his friends spent the next day in an absolute stupor of grief and despair.  The one they had loved and put their trust in was lost to them and their world had to have been completely shattered. 

The 23rd chapter of Luke ends with Joseph of Arimathea wrapping Jesus’ dead body and placing it in a tomb. {Then} Early on Easter morning, some women from Galilee went to the tomb where they had left Jesus. They came because they had been up all night, as people in grief often are, and because it is somehow easier to grieve at the grave site.  “But,” begins chapter 24, “on the first day of the week, at dawn, the women came to the tomb and found it empty.” But. However. Nevertheless. These are words that signal a sacred intrusion.5

Sometimes conjunctions can work in our favour and sometimes they can be a detriment like in the response of the disciples to this piece of amazing news. “But,” there’s that word again only this time, “these words seemed to them an idle tail, and they did not believe them.”6  Stopped here, at this little conjunction, the story could have come to a grinding halt.

There have been many translations to the women’s friend's reaction.  “The words seemed to them like "an idle tale,"6 "empty talk," "a silly story," "a foolish yarn," "utter nonsense," "sheer humbug."  The translations differ; you can take your pick.7

However, let me share a secret with you. It’s about the Greek word we translate as idle or any of those I mentioned.  People who are much better with Greek than I am, and I have never pretended or even tried to impress anyone with my skill in ancient languages, tell us.

That Greek word is leiros. Leiros is not used anywhere else in the New Testament, but the most accurate translation of it is not “idle.” Leiros is more like the stuff organic farmers use to fertilize their fields.  Preaching professor Dr. Anna Carter-Florence says that leiros is “a locker room word, a wet towel whipping through a chorus of jeers” kind of word.8

To some the story may be just that.  A little tale as old as time that we tell ourselves every year that makes us feel good for a day or two but peters out.  It may stick with us no longer to takes the last notes of the organ and brass to die out or, if we are lucky, the lilies to look a little tired.  But this story can also be one that changes our lives.

It did for Peter but not right away.  

Luke tells us with absolute honesty that all Peter did after he got out of bed and ran to the tomb was look in and go back home.  That’s it!  He didn’t do anything more than, the Good Book tells us, than walk “away puzzled, shaking his head.”9 He went home “Wondering what had happened.”10

“It is somewhat reassuring to realize that the first Christian sermon ever preached did not register high on the Richter scale either.”11 Rather, the Easter story starts—not with everybody jumping to their feet to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus.”12 but (Ahh! There is that word again!)  something had to have happened to them because their lives changed.

As New Testament professor Dr. Amy Jill Levine memorably said: “Look, I’ve seen Elvis twice on West End Avenue pumping gas, but it didn’t change my life. The people who saw Jesus [the resurrected Christ] it changed their lives.”13

“Only the resurrection could turn ordinary women and men into saints and martyrs, preachers and prophets, activists and organizers.”14

They added themselves to the resurrection story with another conjunction, “and.”  And us too.

And they saw the little moments where there is only hopeless and despair but experienced a message that brought life.

And they saw meanness and hostility but turned them into to moments of hospitality and forgiveness.

And they saw in their lives moments of laughter and song, joy and gladness. And we can see moments of resurrection all around us if we but stop to look and see them.

We can see the reality of Easter and resurrection all around us. 

We can see it in people who live in dreadful circumstances but still carry on with grace and dignity. 

 We can see resurrection in the woman who will not give up but continues to fight the good fight for peace and justice.

And we can see resurrection in the parents who continue to care for their challenged daughter.

We can see it in the physician who uses his retirement not to jet off to the south of France but uses his resources to start a clinic.

We can see resurrection in the teacher who could make a lot more money doing countless other things but who will not give up on her students and shows up in the classroom day after day.

We can see resurrection in   the musician who could be outside playing in the sun but instead can be found practicing relentlessly to add beauty to life. 

We can see resurrection in the ordinary people who will not settle for war and injustice but give themselves over to work for peace in Christ’s kingdom. 

We can see resurrection in the lives of Easter people who believe that hope is stronger than despair, that hate may be strong, but the love of Jesus is even stronger.

This is not "an idle tale," "empty talk," "a silly story," "a foolish yarn," "utter nonsense," "sheer humbug." or even a little bit of leiros, but it is a story about women who came to the tomb on the third day and discovered that hate didn’t triumph after all but that love won and Jesus was risen.  

That is what this day is all about. 

Love won and lives were and are changed because Jesus is risen. 

That’s our message Jesus is risen, and lives are being changed by the message of this day.  The message of resurrection power. 

No ifs, ands, or buts, about it.

________________

1.    Conjunction Junction, Schoolhouse Rock, 1973.

2.    St. Luke 24:1a. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

3.    Theodore Wardlaw, “Unnatural Event: Luke 24:1-12,” The Christian Century, March 20, 2007, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2007-03/unnatural-event?=0_-31c915c0b7-86361464.

4.    Scott Black Johnston, “The Life Resilient.”  Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York. March 31, 2024.

5.    M. Craig Barnes, “We’re All Terminal,” The Christian Century, April 6, 2004, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-04/we-re-all-terminal?

6.    St. Luke 24:11. (NRSVUE)

7.    Thomas G. Long, “Empty Tomb, Empty Talk: Easter Sunday, April 15 (Luke 24:1-12),” The Christian Century, April 4, 2001, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/empty-tomb-empty-talk?

8.    Shannon Johnson Kershner, “Easter Rising.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. March 27, 2016.

9.    St. Luke 24:12. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene Peterson, The Message (Carol Stream, Illinois: NavPress, 2016)

10.    St. Luke 24:12.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]

11.    Long, loc.cit.

12.    Barnes, loc.cit.

13.     Amy-Jill Levine and James D. Howell, “Jesus And...Holy Week,” Myers Park United Methodist Church Weekly Bible Study webcast (Charlotte, North Carolina, April 6, 2022).

14. Shawnthea Monroe, “March 27, Easter Sunday: 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12,” The Christian Century, March 16, 2016, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-02/march-27-easter-Sunday? 

Lent 5C - "Wasn't That A Party"

Saint John 12:1-8

For over ten years cartoonist Bill Watterson delighted his daily readers with the exploits of an only child named Calvin and his pretend, but very real to him, tiger Hobbes.  Following in the footsteps of Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” “Calvin and Hobbes” was described by Slate magazine as “the last great newspaper comic strip.”1

To my mind it was because, even though Watterson had brothers and sisters he perfectly portrayed what life as an only was like leaving us with memorable images and one-liners that have stood the test of time.

Like when Calvin, borrowing a page from Schultz’ Lucy character decides to set up his own self-help booth. Only, unlike Lucy who offers psychiatry help for five cents a visit, Calvin is offering from his booth, “Opinions on your face” for a quarter. Hobbes comes up to him and asks, “Making any money?” To which Calvin replies, “No, but I am giving away lots of free samples.”

There is truth here because booth or no booth some people give away free samples of their opinion unsolicited and absolutely free of charge.

Sometimes they are funny.  Like the Muppet Shows’ Statler and Waldorf who perched in their balcony stage left were known for their cantankerous opinions and shared penchant for heckling whatever act they had just witness or, in their case endured. As the website Silver Screen Hub called them the “self-appointed kings of criticism.

Statler and Waldorf are not just grumpy old men—they are the embodiment of every cynical, sarcastic, and hilariously brutal critic ... ever encountered. With a wit sharper than a razor and an attitude that makes even the toughest performers cringe, these two Muppet legends ... turned heckling into an art form.  Their laughter—often more menacing than joyful—is infectious, proving that even negativity, when done right, can be a source of hilarity.2

Sometimes opinions are only funny in retrospect.

A friend of mine, who was one of the ministers at a large United Methodist church in Minneapolis, tells the story of one of his more opinionated members who came up to a wedding soloist privately after the ceremony and said, “My dear, I know no one else will tell you this, but it is time you stop singing in public.”

I can’t imagine what the reaction was at the time but when my friend Chris told the story at her memorial service, he reports that there where gales of laughter. 

Opinions, solicited and unsolicited, contain no small measure of danger which i is why I have come to believe that there had to be more than a few opinions expressed in and about the little dinner party that we have before us in today’s gospel.

The first may have been expressed by those who received the invitation to dine at the home of Lazarus.  

“Lazarus?” those who weren’t in the know might have said to each other, “Lazarus? I thought he was dead.”  “Well, if he is and he’s still sending out invitations we’d better save the stamp because some day that is going to be worth a lot of money. But if he was but now, isn’t we better go because this is going to be a party for the ages.”

Indeed, it was because we are still talking about it to this day.

There was Lazarus cleaned up and looking fit as a fiddle. He’s walking, talking, laughing perhaps harder than he has ever laughed before. One witty bon mot after another from this guy who has literally been given a new lease on life.

His sister Martha was busy doing what she did best.  She was busy serving her guests making sure everything was going well.  I always pictured Martha as one of those hostesses who took the place closest to the kitchen and sat side-saddle through the entire meal in order to leap up at a moment's notice should anybody need anything. Every good party needs someone like Martha to keep things going.

However, if you want to have the party be controversial and you want the get the opinions flowing then Mary has to be on the guest list.  She’s impetuous.  She’s bold.  She does things that no one else would ever think of doing.

Even now she is the one squirrelling around at Jesus’ feet pouring outrageously expensive perfume on them and then {GASP!} wiping them with her hair.

Dr. Craig R. Koester in his book Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel tells us:

In this context it would appear that Mary's action was a gesture of gratitude for bringing her brother back to life.  A slave was virtually the only one who could be expected to wash and anoint the feet of another person....washing or anointing the feet of another person remained identified with slavery.  The act of anointing Jesus' feet, when taken in its literary and cultural context, displays Mary's utter devotion to Jesus.3

That is exactly what makes Judas’ unsolicited opinion so telling.  While others in the crowd may have put down their drinks and stared with faces agog Judas speaks out.  While others in at table might have waited until they were outside to offer their opinions quietly to one another.

  “Did you see that?”  “What was that all about?”  Judgement, to be sure, but judgement spoken quietly and in private which may be the worst kind.

Judas’ opinion is right out there in the open and spoken loud enough for everyone to hear.  “That perfume was worth a fortune. It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.”4

He didn’t mean it.  He didn’t mean it at all.  

“Thankfully Jesus has Judas’s number and calls his bluff.”5

He knows “there always church people, and certainly skeptics outside the church, cockily pronouncing upon what others should be doing for the poor? Which poor is Judas intending? Or which poor do critics of Christianity, or even the devout, imagine here?”6

You and I all know people who look at beautiful churches or lovely things in churches and say “Shouldn’t that money have better been spent by giving it to the poor.”  Sometimes that criticism is valid and churches become so inwardly focused that they forget about people outside of their doors.  However, it has been my experience in people that I know that, while they are offering opinions on how the church should spend its money, they give very little, if anything, to a church or any charitable institution. 

Opinions need to be backed by deeds. As Dr. Tom Long wrote in a Christian Century article.

John wants us to go to this ordinary dinner party in Bethany, but not to miss the hint of resurrection we can see in Lazarus. He wants us to hear Judas’s pious speech about caring for the poor but also to discern in those words the treachery that lies in the human heart. He wants us to see Mary not just as hostess but as prophet. He wants us to see her anointing of Jesus not as a mere impulse of indulgence, but as a costly act of worship.7

Judas can’t see that.  Those whispering in the parking lot about what just happened can’t see that.  Even those offering good natured ribbings from the balcony may not notice what is going on, but we can.  We can see this party as something else. 

It is worship in its fullest and finest.

I had a Quaker friend who said that there was a little bit of worship in every dinner party.  And to that, I would add, there should be a little bit of a dinner party in every worship.  It had been my experience that all too often church has been a place where joy goes to die.

But in front of us this day we have a story.  

John ends his gospel with a story about human extravagance. Mary anoints Jesus with perfume that's worth a year's wages. The anointing of Jesus at Bethany is the last event in John before Jesus's "triumphal entry" and the ensuing passion narrative.

So, John ends his gospel with a party where it began with the wedding at Cana in Galilee which, if you remember, was a wedding banquet that lasted so long that Jesus had to save the day with an extravagant outpouring of new wine.

“So, from start to finish in the life of Jesus ... is characterized by excess and extravagance, both received ... and reciprocally returned back ... by us.”8

Dr. Dan Clendenin writes a column every once and awhile for the website Journey with Jesus.  Recently he told of seeing a bottle of whiskey at Costco {of all places} on sale for $36,999.99. After texting a photo of it to his family, He had this sort of fantasy of buying the whiskey and drinking it with his friend Chris who was dying from a glioblastoma, and had called him to say, "Dan, it's time to drink the good stuff."

I don’t know whether Dr. Clendenin bought the bottle and drank every last drop with his dying friend.  I don’t know whether I would have bought the expensive stuff or looked around at Cosco for something cheaper.  After all, this was Cosco, there had to be something cheaper.  

But if they did. If he bought the wine and then drank it as a toast with and to his friend I am sure that Calvin, Hobbes, Stattler, Waldorf, and even my friend’s outspoken member in Minneapolis would agree that it had to have been quite a party.

Quite a party indeed. 

________________

1. Chris Suellentrop, “The Appeal of Calvin and Hobbes.,” Slate Magazine, November 7, 2005, https://slate.com/culture/2005/11/the-appeal-of-calvin-and-hobbes.html.

2. Silver Screen Hub, “Statler and Waldorf.” Facebook page. March 30, 2025

3. Craig R. Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003).

4. St. John 12:5. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible.  (Carol Steam, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]

5. Stephanie Perdew, “A Rite of Spontaneous Love.  April 6, 2025: Fifth Sunday in Lent,” The Christian Century, April 1, 2025, https://www.christiancentury.org/sunday-s-coming/rite-spontaneous-love-john-12-1-8?

6. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say? April 5. Lent 5,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, accessed April 5, 2025.

7. Thomas G. Long, “Gospel Soundtrack: Sunday, April 1 John 12:1-8,” The Christian Century, March 14, 2001, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/gospel-sound-track?

8.    Dan Clendenin, "In Memory of Her." Journey With Jesus essay, March 30, 2025.