Keeping it weird

 John 20:19-31

I’m going to preach to you today on “keeping it weird,” because that is what the Holy Spirit does. It keeps church weird—it keeps camp weird—it keeps you and me weird—and this, my friends, is a really good thing, because the alternative—well—the alternative is to lock ourselves in a room in fear while resurrection is bursting out all around us.

This begins with the scene from today’s Gospel. The disciples are huddled in a room afraid because they didn’t believe the women who told them Jesus had risen from the dead. Typical. And Jesus comes to them, shows them his hands and side, says “Peace be with you,” and then he continues with something really neat. He says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

We would do well to remember that the Holy Spirit does weird things. We have been largely desensitized to its work because we have heard the story so often, but everything that follows the Holy Spirit is really weird, and perhaps the weirdest thing of all is the primary work that the Spirit does: The Holy Spirit gives us faith. That’s right, faith doesn’t come from inside you, it comes from the Spirit through you. Only after they have received the Holy Spirit do the disciples go off and do disciple-y things. Once they have the Spirit, then they can fully believe.

So, what is the difference between Thomas and the rest of the disciples? Thomas has not met Jesus and received the Holy Spirit. And for two thousand years of church history that is how he has earned the label of doubting Thomas—for responding exactly as the rest of the disciples did a few minutes after they received the same visual evidence he was asking for.

Keeping it weird at camp in Idaho, 2006

Mary of Bethany, hidden figures, and our desperate need for perspective

Scripture: John 12:1-8

            One of the great benefits of camping ministry is that it takes us outside of our normal. There are countless benefits to getting out of our routines every once in awhile, not least that we might see something that we were blind to back home. This is what we might call perspective, and perspective can only be gained by stepping back and looking at things from a different angle. Our world needs more perspective these days. The more perspective we have, the more deeply God is revealed, and the more we may understand who God is.

            Take today’s Gospel reading, for example. There is something really obvious about Jesus’ ministry that we all should have probably noticed the first time we ever heard the Gospels, but if you are like me, you have been trained by a lifetime of biases to ignore it—trained by a world that values certain voices over others and taught to look elsewhere. If you look at this passage from one perspective, you can reduce the episode of Jesus, Mary and Martha to a moral: Be a Mary, not a Martha. And we move on.