April 3, Second Sunday of Easter

John 20:19-31

Bryan Cones

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? It’s not a question one gets asked too often in an Episcopal Church, nor in the Roman Catholic churches of my youth. But it is one I grew up with in East Tennessee among Southern Baptists, as perhaps some of you also did if you came up among evangelical Christians.

It’s the kind of question that might feel a little uncomfortable; it was the kind of question meant to get at the kind of Christian you were. My Roman Catholic mother told me always to say yes, because I had been baptized as a baby, so she and my dad had taken care of that for me. Our Southern Baptist neighbors didn’t quite agree on that: for them an experience of Jesus came first, then baptism.

Even though that question reflected a difference between my Catholic family and my evangelical neighbors, I never heard their question as an unkind one, though—the people who asked it mainly wanted everyone to experience what they had. I remember a college friend, an evangelical Lutheran, rewording the famous verse John 3:16: “For God so loved Bryan that he sent his only Son…” Surely I was not all that important, I remember thinking. The good Catholic in me always insisted that we are all saved together, as a community, as a body, even as a whole creation.

But it always made me curious: When my evangelical friends spoke of “being saved,” accepting Jesus, just what was that like for them? Intellectual certainty? Having all your questions answered? All doubts removed? I came to understand in their telling of it, which they were always happy to do, that it was above all more like a feeling, a feeling of being loved and protected and embraced, not only safe from some eternal hell, but protected also from ever falling away from God’s love, or falling out of love with God. It was God’s response to their longing for Jesus— not really in their heads at all, even if it was something they thought about.

I was thinking about that same question reading today’s gospel: the story of how Thomas accepted Jesus not only as Savior, but as “my Lord and my God.” What might that have been like for him? We tend to refer to him as “doubting Thomas,” as if he was intellectually unconvinced by what the other disciples told him, and needed proof. But when we listen to this story closely, Thomas never says, “I want to understand” or “Prove it!” He says, “I want to see him, I want to touch him.” He needs a personal encounter with Jesus to believe, not an argument for why he should. Perhaps he felt left out or overlooked or forgotten by Jesus. And he won’t take “no” for an answer.

And guess what? The risen Jesus says “yes”: “Go ahead, touch me!” And Thomas believes. But, to be honest, I don’t think we should call him “doubting Thomas” so much as brave Thomas, bold Thomas, for daring to ask for what really needed to believe, and trusting that Jesus would respond.

Amazingly, that’s what the risen Jesus seems always to be doing in these stories from John’s gospel: Saying “yes” to his friends not in their joy and wonder and awe, but in response to their doubt, uncertainty, even disbelief. As Kristin reminded us on Easter Sunday, it was Mary Magdalene in her deep grief that the Risen One came to, calling her by name so that she could see him through her tears.

The Risen One in today’s story appears among the cowering disciples, passing not only through locked doors, but through their overwhelming fear of sharing his fate. In the story that follows this one about Thomas, the Risen One appears again to the disciples in their forgetfulness, after they’ve thrown up their hands and gone back to fishing. And immediately after, the Risen One has another personal encounter this time with Peter, deeply ashamed of his denial of Jesus, deeply in need of forgiveness.

Mary Magdalene, the Ten, Thomas, Peter—and us as well. All of us invited to encounter the Risen One from wherever we are, joy and wonder and awe and praise and thanksgiving for sure, and also grief and uncertainty and doubt and unworthiness and fear.

I remember my own encounter like that, somewhere around age 17, not at all certain that anyone could love me as I was, and probably not the only one who ever felt that way. And yet on a weekend retreat, I did have an experience of Jesus’ love for me not unlike that of Thomas, when finally what those evangelicals had been talking about made a little more sense to me. It was less an experience of me accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior—my mom was right, I already had— but an experience of being accepted by my Lord and my God, just exactly as I was, in all my uncertainty and fear.

As I have grown into that experience, I have become utterly convinced that the Risen One is always waiting for any of us to be like brave Thomas: to ask with boldness for what we need so that we can believe, in whatever state we are, so our Lord and God can do just what we have asked.

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Better yet: Have you accepted that your Lord and Savior accepts you, exactly as you are, without question or reservation. Now that is what I call good news worthy of an Easter alleluia. 

Katherine Pargellis Bowe Memorial

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Luke 24:13-35

Kristin White

I met Kathie Bowe for the first time three years ago this spring, when she came to St. Augustine’s Easter Vigil service. It’s a magical night, my favorite service of the year. We gather for every Easter Vigil on the night before Easter Day, processing into a darkened church, with candles and chanting and a fire; we read the stories from scripture that remind us of who we are – stories of creation and deliverance and wisdom and salvation. We sing the first alleluia since Lent began.

Kathie wasn’t a member of St. Augustine’s quite yet, on that night three years ago, though that wouldn’t be too far off (at her son Charley’s – and our then-warden’s – persistent invitation). She said some generous things about the worship that night, and the music, high praise from someone for whom music mattered so much, who had sung with some pretty gifted choirs in her lifetime.

A few weeks later I met Kathie at her home at Three Crowns for lunch and a chance to get to know her better. She had some thoughts about church and politics and music, which she shared with me between bites of a really good lobster bisque, hearkening back to her life in Maine. She showed me pictures and told stories. She talked about how very proud she was of her boys and their families, how much she loved her grandchildren. She pointed out the planters on her back patio where she would plant flowers when the ground warmed up enough. She had a particular sort of unvarnished candor and unsentimental hospitality that reminded me of the people in my life I find real and trustworthy.

When she did join this parish, Kathie began to serve as a lector. Lectors are the people who read lessons from scripture in our worship on Sunday mornings. On the Sundays Kathie read, the congregation was captivated as we listened to her sharing the word. When she read the Ten Commandments in church last year, people sat at attention. “You shall not murder!” she said. And I remember sitting up very straight in my pew, and thinking: “No! No, I promise, I won’t!”

Last year at our Easter Vigil, Kathie read the story of creation that we heard her son Charley read from Genesis just a little while ago. We quoted that reading back to her, beginning at a rather raucous Easter dinner the next day, and continuing all year long. The phrase that wouldn’t go away? “It was good.” And it was. The thing that strikes me about both the stories I’ve heard about Kathie and the experiences of her that I witnessed is her deep delight in the creation of which she spoke so amazingly at that Easter Vigil. It was good. Indeed, it was very good. 

It was good, the life she built for her family, together with her husband John, and their sons, Tony, Sandy, Charley, and Rob.

It was good, the beauty she sought and found in music and literature, the standard of ethics she hoped for, and was willing to dig in and work for, in civic life.

It was good, the quick humor she wielded in matter-of-fact ways.

It was good, her life right here in recent years, the chance to really know her grandchildren and be a part of their lives, to live in a community where she found kinship with you.

And it is good, that image we have of her standing at the edge of the water in God’s creation, the sun and the wind on her face as she looks out onto the horizon.

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The gospel passage today is another sort of Easter story in this Easter season. As you heard it read, two disciples meet Jesus along the road, and they don’t know that it’s him. He walks some distance with them, and explains and interprets scripture in a way that might have led those disciples to give perhaps just a little bit more credence to the testimony of women at the tomb saying that Jesus is alive. The disciples' eyes are kept from recognizing him, though. But they also don’t want him to leave. “Stay with us,” the disciples ask. "Stay." And he does.

Very near to the end of that passage, Jesus sits at table with those disciples, his friends, the people with whom he has shared his life and his ministry over these past years. At their meal together, he blesses bread, breaks it, and gives it to them. And in the flash of a moment, their hearts burn within them. They know. God is there, right there with them, in the person of Jesus. And it is good.

Sometimes, as was true for those disciples, those moments can come even at a time of profound loss:

…praying last rites in an emergency room just before a cold midnight in February  

…a family gathered together the next night, hands held, to pray their beloved mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, “Nonkey,” out of this life and into the next

In the flash of a moment, God is right there.

Tony and Sandy and Charley and Rob, you who are her beloved sons; and you who are her beloved daughters-in-law; and you who are her beloved grandchildren; and you who are her beloved family, and friends – I call you to look for those times in your lives when the beauty of creation is inescapable, when that which is holy draws very near and is offered to you. Watch for those times when, in the flash of a moment, your heart burns within you, and your own eyes are opened. 

God is right here.

And it is good. Indeed, it is very good.