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

None of this is a credit to the disciples. All of it is a credit to the weirdness of the Holy Spirit. And because of this Holy Spirit’s weirdness, we have some weird stuff in the Small Catechism as well. Martin Luther wrote the explanation to the 3^rd article of the Apostles Creed (which you may have learned in Confirmation), and we would do well to go back to these words every so often and reflect on how incredibly counter-cultural and weird they are. Luther says that the 3^rd article means this: “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy, and kept me in the true faith…”

The Holy Spirit does all of that! Not us by our own awesomeness. We do not pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and believe harder or try to have a little more faith, because faith is not something we can generate from within. It is not to our credit when we have it or to our fault when we feel it is lacking. Faith comes only from the Holy Spirit given to us through Jesus Christ.

The disciples who get credit for believing did not in fact manage to believe even when Mary Magdalene told them explicitly of the resurrection… and they did not even manage to believe at first when Jesus appeared to them and showed them his hands and feet. That was weird but apparently not weird enough. It was only when Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit that they managed to believe. So, sure it’s doubting Thomas but it’s also doubting all-the-disciples. In fact, it’s pretty much doubting-everybody-in-the-Gospels. Faith apart from the Holy Spirit is just like that camel and the eye of the needle—a thing that is impossible without God working on your behalf.

            So, what’s the good news here?

            In fact, it is the very same news that at first feels bad. You can’t believe on your own, and yet, Christ provides this Holy Spirit that is everything that you need and more. So, when you are feeling uncertain, when you are doubting, and when you cannot summon the oomph you need to believe as you feel you should, it is not because you failed to try hard enough or suck it up enough. Rather, you need to be reminded that God’s spirit is for the lost and the least, and on occasion that is all of us. You are free to swim through doubt with the Holy Spirit anchoring you to a promise you may not always see.

            After all, at the end of this episode when Thomas finally does appear, Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” And we so often take those words as piling on to Thomas. Haha Thomas, you are not blessed because you had to see me. But that does not make a whole lot of sense in the context of a story in which nobody believes without seeing—none of the disciples—well, maybe the women at the tomb… we do seem to forget about the women… But anyway, Jesus is proclaiming that it is a blessing to be able to believe without seeing. Those who can feel the effects of the Spirit’s blessing upon them as surely as they breathe, but not all will. The Spirit moves in ways that are weird to us; so often electing the least and the last and the littlest when we spend our lives in search of the best and the boldest. We can hardly discern the Spirit in ourselves, how can we hope to understand who else the Spirit might elect?

 

            Camp is one place that provides the fertile ground for the Spirit to work its magic—and it does! You know it’s happening because of the weird stuff that follows—kids and young adults come out of their shells; they find themselves inspired by things that otherwise would have made them uncomfortable; they feel the dirt between their toes and the water on their shins and the uncomfortable things connect them with a God who they knew differently back home. And they come away better for it.

            The Spirit meets us against what is comfortable and normal. Campers leave their air-conditioned homes behind and the Spirit blows through the summer heat and amidst the bugs and the smell of campfire smoke. Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit in the least comfortable of places—when we are baptized into death; when we take our last breath—and in some ways camp, like so much of our Christian ritual, is a place and time where we embrace discomfort for the sake of spiritual growth. That is where the Spirit runs rampant with us, changing us.

            I have a friend that I first met when I was a camper doing Idaho Servant Adventures in the mid 2000s. He was the guest musician for the week and his name is Nate Houge. He was a church musician who now operates a Bread Company. When he visited churches, Nate had these bumper stickers that said “Keep Church Weird”—a take-off on the branding used by the city of Portland, Oregon. And I think we need some of these bumper stickers for every Christian ministry—Keep church weird—Keep camp weird—because the weirdness is the work of the Spirit. The weirdness is the counterstroke against the fear of what might be. It is only when we hold too tightly to what is normal and comfortable that we may become like the disciples, locked in a room, even after Mary Magdalene has told them that their Lord has been raised from the dead. The disciples needed to be opened to what is weird, but it was only the Holy Spirit that was ever going to get them there.

            The surest sign of the Holy Spirit at work is weirdness.

            So, I make no apologies that camp is a bit of a weird place. We have weird conventions. At first, it can seem a little intimidating… that is, until you leave your comfort zones behind and experience it. Then, I have found that very quickly it doesn’t feel weird at all. What it feels like is freedom—freedom to explore who you are, freedom to delve deeper into your faith. Best of all, this is available to us anywhere. After all, that Holy Spirit came even to a group of faithless followers locked in a room out of fear. They experienced that freedom first, and the rest of the story is truly weird. Those disciples went out into the world without fear, telling people about the God who set them free, and they were arrested for it, and killed for it. It’s super weird that they who were locked in the room became some of the first preachers (after, ahem, Mary Magdalene and company), but then again, maybe it isn’t so weird.

            After all, Christ comes to us in much the same way. He doesn’t have the courtesy to knock—he just shows up, shows us himself, and gives us the Spirit. And what happens next is truly weird… you end up at a church like this one with friends and neighbors, hearing from a person like me, who has experienced this in much the same way. And, yes, I am here representing camp where this happens every single summer and many times in-between, but it is also happening in your communities and your homes. The weirdness of the Spirit at work drives us forward. So, keep Decorah weird… keep the church weird… keep camp weird. And faith will follow. After all, that’s the work that the spirit is always doing.