Wounded, But Still Risen

Texts: John 20:19-31 NRSVUE

Opening Prayer:

Happy Eastertide and belated Earth Day, everyone.

I invite you to settle in, take a few deep breaths and allow your ears to catch the sounds of Spring, just outside these sanctuary doors.

Let us begin in a spirit of prayer, as is the tradition here, with words, adapted from Psalm 19:

God, we gather this morning to dwell with Your Word, and with the wordless voice of Creation.

Let the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to You, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Sermon: 

So, I sat with today’s gospel passage under our Spring sunshine, listening as the creek behind our church swelled with melting snow. Trying to hear what you all need to hear about doubt and resurrection. And I thought—Thomas could’ve used the sounds of snowmelt and returning birdsong to help him come to belief in resurrection. 

Creation is singing with new life this week.

This week held a weird cadence of Easter, then Earth Day—a strange pairing of hope and fear. While we gather in the light of Christ’s resurrection, we also gather also in the shadows of a still-wounded world.  More than once this week, I found myself praying, "Let the kin-dom of God be here. Not someday, God, but now."

The the gospel passage we heard today, the disciples are in a similar mix of hope and fear.

It's the evening after Mary Magdalene told them Jesus had risen, and yet—the doors are still locked. They watched Jesus die at hands of empire. They're afraid the same fate awaits them. And into this locked, fear-filled room, Jesus appears—alive, risen but still bearing the wounds of His death. Still marked by suffering. And He shows them that, but he offers them peace. Then, He breathes on them and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Pause with me there. 

Imagine being in that room. The grief and fear of the last few days beginning to melt away. 

Imagine the warmth of Christ’s breath on your cheek.  I think that moment—His breath, His wounds, His forgiveness—might’ve been the beginning of what we call the Church.

And I think it was the right place to start.

After all, this was a group that fallen to pieces in Jesus’ last hours. 

Judas betrayed Him. Peter denied Him. The others absent from the foot of the cross.

I bet they probably couldn’t stand to look at one another. 

Even after Mary’s wildly good news, they were still hiding and afraid. Now, along with the Holy Spirit, forgiveness enters the room.  And they are sent to forgive others. 

…

But Thomas missed all this holy action.

Where was he? The gospel doesn’t tell us, just like it doesn’t tell us what Jesus was doing all day. Maybe Thomas was out running an errand.  Maybe Thomas slipped out into nature to pray.  Maybe, because this is probably what I would have done, Thomas has snuck away to see the empty tomb for himself. To look for this alive-again Jesus after Mary shared her good news. When he returns, and finds out he missed seeing this alive-again Jesus, he just can’t take their word for it. 

He says, ““Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Can you blame him? Maybe he feared his friends been duped in their grief and their fear. Maybe he wondered if Jesus came back for everyone but him.  And let’s be honest—Thomas is most of us at some point in our journey of faith. 

I believe faith can come through questions. Through examination. Through doubt.

If Other Nicole was blessed with the gift of tears, I was blessed with the gift of doubt.

This story is a balm to me, because where does Christ meet Thomas? Right there, in his freely expressed doubt.

Go ahead, Thomas: “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” And, then, Jesus says something I think many have misunderstood for centuries: “Blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have believed.”

A lot of people, through the years, have read that line as a condemnation of Thomas’ doubt. 

But I don’t. I hear a blessing— Mary Magdalene had to hear his voice. The others got to see His wounds before they recognized Him. He was not rebuking Thomas for his doubt. I believe He was blessing us in ours. When I hear: “Blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have believed,” I hear a blessing for us who weren’t there, who didn’t get the firsthand experience, and yet still show up here. 

As this week unfolded, I sat with the image of the wounded but risen Christ. And somehow, I found some hope for our planet's resurrection, too. Some mornings, especially after reading the news, I question whether God is really at work, making all things new. And where scripture doesn’t answer me fully, Creation often does. 

God speaks through creeks and crocuses, through migration and metamorphosis. You see, Creation doesn’t skip over suffering—it often grows through it.

Take the lodgepole pine—so common here in Colorado.  God designed its cones to be sealed by resin. They won’t open—until wildfire comes. When wildfire brings enough heat, the mature trees die. But then, and only then, the resin on the cones melts, they pop open, and seeds scatter. What looks like the destruction of the entire forest is actually resurrection ecology. 

From the ash of the old way of being rises new life—a healthier, more diverse forest than before. But, even in that sort of resurrection, scars remain. If you were to put your hands into the soil of that reborn forest, you’d still find a dark, ashy layer beneath the surface—reminders of the fire it took for it to begin again.

Many of you may remember the 1988 wildfires in Yellowstone.  The summer of 1988 was hot, dry, and windy. That area was experiencing its worst drought in decades. Humans had suppressed wildfire there, and left the forests packed with dry, flammable material. 

We misunderstood the rhythms of Creation. We saw fire as only a threat to valuable timber and parkland beauty—not as part of a healthy ecosystem. Combine that with a hot, dry, windy summer, and the result was fueled flames that consumed 1.2 million acres. People thought the park, as we knew and loved it, was gone forever.  But what came next was astounding: 

wildflowers bursting from ash, 

animals returning, 

new forests thriving. 

dead trees sheltering returned birds. 

fallen trunks cooled streams

Resurrection. 

God at work, making all things new.

Yellowstone still bears its scars, but Creation was somehow bigger than the wounding.

And, I know, it’s not that simple. Not every wound heals so well.  But I do think this image, given to us in our scripture today, of Christ’s wounded but still risen body tells us something hopeful. Paul says, in Christ all the fullness of God dwelled. And through Christ, God will reconcile himself to all things. Note: not just all humans. All things.

God is still at work on that reconciliation, in us and, I believe, through us. Christ’s scars give me a glimpse of how the Earth’s wounds could be transformed too—maybe they can still be woven by our Creator into something new, into something we can’t yet imagine.

Maybe we get to be part of that transformation. Maybe our invitation this Easter and Earth Day week is not to look away from wounds, but to touch them. 

Last week, someone asked me, "Nicole, does my choice of toilet paper really matter?" 

Another, lovingly challenged my purchase of almond milk coffee creamers, reminding me that almond milk, while better than dairy in terms of ecological impact, is less sustainable than oat milk.

Another reminded me that the concept of an "individual carbon footprint" was invented by British Petroleum to shift public focus on climate change from corporate responsibility to individual responsibility. To distract us.

These are all super fair doubts and probing. It was very Thomas-like of you all. If I were to put your doubts another way, it’d be this: In the face of large-scale systemic wounding of our planet, why do we bother at all? And, I think we could ask that about almost any justice issue. And, in response, our gospel story offered this:

We bother because resurrection isn’t something we just accept and celebrate over quiche and egg hunts—it’s something we are asked to live in the active hope of.

In this part of God’s story, I don’t want to be the locked-room afraid. I want to be more Mary Magdalene. More Thomas.I want to search, question, weep, touch what is broken.  I want to reach toward the new thing God is making with these same old materials.

I think we have different individual practices that participate in resurrection.  Yours may look different from mine—but the hope we proclaim through them is the same.

In our house, we don’t eat meat. We’re working on giving up dairy. We thrift before we shop. And, we leave our reusable water bottles all over town. It’s a work in progress, but the trying feels like active hope.

Maybe your practices include tending this church garden, or making sure none of the coffee goes to waste, or a thousand other ways your hands touch Creation and say, “I care about you.” These small acts are sacraments of hope.  They say: We believe that God’s not done here yet. 

And maybe, if practiced together over time, these small fidelities might help transform the broken systems that we know we can’t heal alone. I don’t pretend to know the end of God’s story for us, and for all things.  I don’t pretend to know how the kin-dom of God will finally come.But my guess is that it may not come all at once, despite my desire that it would. My guess is that we have been invited by the Holy Spirit to co-create it: to tend to this place that is still marked by scarcity and scars, to tend to it with our small, faithful, communal acts of hope even though they are not enough. Because they are the practices of hope in a God who is still making things new.

May it be so.

Communal Reflection

1. What is one small practice that helps you participate in hoping for and healing the world?

2. Where have you seen hope or healing in a place that once felt broken?

Reconvening from Reflection Time

As we return from sharing—

It is my hope that you hold some new seed of hope.

Christ breathes peace.

Creation sings resurrection.

God is at work transforming the world, us included.

May you rest now in a few moments of silent reflection, to listen for where God may be calling us to help in the healing.