Monthly Archives: April 2012

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Thought for the Day, on Writing and Life

Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea was one of my favorite speakers at FFW. I went to his session with Debra Dean and they were a hoot together.

Here’s a paraphrase of something he said:

If you’re writing about matters of faith, you have to be vigilant against cliche and grandiosity.

So go through your work and look for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—those moments with the angelic choir, bathed in light and going “ahhhhhhhhh.” Take those out. Faith is too messy and gritty for them. Instead, replace them with James Brown.

May your day be funky, friends.

 

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Friday Link Love

For all your procrastination needs.

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24 Hours of Photographs — Colossal

My obligatory Colossal re-post. This is the result of a thirty-hour photo shoot, stitched together.

The round green bit of terra firma in the middle reminds me of the Island in LOST. (I’ve really had LOST on the brain lately; maybe it’s the “writing about pop culture” presentation I went to last week at FFW. Dang, I still miss that show.)

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No Red Ink on the Vision Chart — dmergent

This post is about casting a compelling vision for one’s church, and has sparked a twitter conversation that you can read here.

We know that it is not simple to find a vision, but it is just as important to realize when your ministry has lost or been burdened with poor vision. Just as I believed seeing double was normal, many churches and ministries keep going, not realizing they would have a difficult time reading the bottom line on the metaphorical eye chart.

Jan Edmiston had similar thoughts here, “Measuring a Year in the Life of a Church”:

What questions would you ask church leaders in order to discern if a congregation is “thriving” spiritually or if a congregation is merely “surviving“?

Here are some off the top of my head:

  • Can you identify an occasion in the last year when the congregation chose faith over fear? Tell me about it.
  • Is the church living off an endowment or do the tithes and offerings of the congregation cover all expenses?
  • Can you name things your congregation tried that failed in the past year? (Note: if you didn’t fail at anything, you probably didn’t try anything new.)
  • Can you name ten people who were spiritually transformed in your congregation in the past year? What did that look like?

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I Learned How to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years — Lifehacker

OK, I haven’t even found time to read this post, so obviously Way Has Not Opened for me to do this. But maybe some of my dear readers will. In the meantime, I have saved this article in Evernote, tagged “bucketlist.”

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Four Simple Solutions to Everyday Dilemmas — Improvised Life

Bread bag clips as labels for power cords, a sock over a vacuum nozzle to find small things—I love these tips, even if I have no use for them personally. Urazawa is a new term for me, and I love the art and craft involved in improvising solutions. Robert and I came up with a number of tips and tricks during our year of Sabbath; they’re sprinkled in the book under the heading “Sabbath hacks.”

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What to Expect When Your Church Is Expecting

A few months ago I recorded a video for Bruce Reyes-Chow’s We Are Presbyterian project. It was fun, and I learned a lot in the process.

In the video I suggest that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is not “gravely ill,” as some have suggested.

Instead we are… well… take it away Barbie:

We’re not terminal. We’re just pregnant.

Apparently the video has hopped the Presbyterian fence and is wandering around other backyards, specifically Lutheran and Episcopal ones. It’s been fun to hear from friends and colleagues who’ve spotted it. I’m glad it resonates with others too… is there a baby boom happening in the mainline?

The video appears at the end of this post, but for those who prefer to read, here is essentially what I said:

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Recently a group of pastors wrote a letter to the PCUSA, expressing concern about where we’re headed as a denomination. According to the letter, we are “deathly ill”.

The group has facts and figures to back up this-lots of numbers related to membership loss, the declining number of baptisms we do, and so forth.

Well look… the numbers are what they are.
I can’t argue with the statistics.
I only argue with the diagnosis.

We are not deathly ill. We’re…
well…
we’re pregnant.

That’s right folks.
We’re Pregnant!
Expecting!
On the nest!
Knocked up!
Preggers!
With child!
Bun in the oven!

The symptoms are there, if you know what you’re looking for.

First, there’s the fatigue. I see a lot of tired people out there, trying to keep life going, keep ministries going, keep the sermons coming, the nursery staffed, the money flowing in, the furnace in good repair… often with fewer people-less energy-than before. It’s tiring!

I see some bad queasiness too: morning sickness, which folks will tell you doesn’t just come in the morning, but sometimes round the clock. There’s a sense that the world has changed right out from under our feet, and we don’t quite know how to deal with it. What is this “emergent” stuff? How do we deal with the internet and social media? What about this younger generation? How do we respond to the culture without being coopted by it? Not to mention our new Form of Government, the passage of amendment 10A, and on and on. It’s to be expected that we’d be feeling a little woozy, a little green, a little sick.

And there’s a lot of anxiety too… that question every prospective parent asks: Can we do this? Are we ready? Do we have what it takes to step into this new chapter of life?

So here’s a bit of motherly wisdom, a guide, if you will: “what to expect when your church is expecting.”

I offer these reflections knowing that the metaphor is complicated. Not everyone who’s pregnant wants to be pregnant. And there are many who struggle to become pregnant, or who grieve the loss of a child. So I just acknowledge that and tread as lightly as I can.

But here’s what pregnancy offers us that “deathly ill” doesn’t.

1. It’s deeply biblical. Scripture is full of images of pregnancy. The whole creation groans in labor pains, Paul writes in Romans 8, and he uses the image again in I Thess 5. Even Jesus couldn’t resist using the metaphor: “When a woman is in labour, she has pain. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy.”

(That’s not true, by the way.)

The Bible is also full of women that society had written off as barren, women who thought their time had passed. And similarly, some say this whole PCUSA thing doesn’t have much life left in it. And that may even be true on some level. Maybe we are in our declining years. But guess what? Sarah and Elizabeth were in their declining years too, and yet God used both of them to grow new life and give birth to a whole new world.

2. Another way pregnancy connects with our church right now: Pregnancy ain’t pretty. As much as we talk about women glowing, it is not a glamorous time. Your face breaks out. Your joints go slack. You get gas. You can’t sleep at night. You have to pee every 10 minutes. And let’s not even talk about the dreaded “cankles”:

It’s a bit of a freak show, to be honest.

And yeah, this period we’re in right now as a church? It ain’t pretty. We’re cranky and itching for a fight with one another. We used to be young and fresh, the belle of the ball. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we were thriving. People were flocking to our doors. But we’re not there anymore.

Now we’re in tremendous upheaval as a denomination. It seems like almost everything is on the table-our practices, our polity, our way of worshiping, our music, our structure…
But what’s not on the table for us is whether God is working.
What’s not on the table is what kind of God we serve: a living God, an incarnate God.
God is capable of doing a new thing: it springs forth, now, in nine months, in nine years, over a lifetime.
New life is what it’s all about. It’s the business we’re in.

3. Your sense of time is all messed up in pregnancy. On the one hand, it’s a quiet, slow, lumbering time. The nine months pass slowly. You can’t move as fast as you did. I had sciatica that would act up whenever I was walking too quickly; I finally decided it was God saying, “Slow down! Don’t go through this time at a breakneck pace. Stop, look, listen and feel.”

Even mental processes seem to slow down. Nouns and verbs come more slowly: “Honey bring me that, that… what is that? That thing! Beside the doohickey?” And maybe we as a church need to move beyond words for a while. Maybe we need to just be silent for a while, stop making so many pronouncements about the church. Sure, Mary sang, but she also pondered in her heart. Maybe it’s OK to shut up and let God do what God’s gonna do.

The time goes slowly… but it’s also an incredibly busy time. There’s a lot to learn, and pregnancy is a great time to do research. Hospital or birth center? Epidural? C-section? Breast or bottle? Stroller or sling? Pacifiers or thumb-sucking, cloth diapers or disposable? Television: harmless, or idiot box that will keep your kid out of Stanford?

And we’re doing the same research in the church. Every week I hear about a new group that’s meeting, a new conference to attend, a new website to keep track of. And the books! Oh, the books! Each one promising to give you that just-right approach to ministry, promising to grow your church, keep session meetings joyful and productive, and so on and so forth.

And any parent will tell you, that research is all well and good. But then the child is born. And it all comes down to that child’s personality, that child’s gifts, what that child needs. The books, ultimately, don’t tell you what you need to know. Your child does. So we in the PCUSA need to learn flexibility. We need to learn to respond to this thing being birthed, whatever it might be, instead of some idealized notion of what it might be. Is it a bunch of new churches? Ministries beyond the traditional church? Who knows, but as any parent will tell you, our kids are not carbon copies of us. They are their own people and they deserve to be treated as such. What is being born in the PCUSA is going to look different everywhere. We’re not all going to win beautiful baby contests. We are not birthing many 1950s Presbyterian churches anymore. No more perfect Gerber babies.

5. The final and, I think, most important parallel is this: Pregnancy, labor and parenthood are all embodied experiences-blood, sweat, tears, vomit… and poop. Once that labor starts, you can’t think your way out of it. You don’t do the work up in your head. You’ve got to participate in it with every bit of your being.

And that’s what this new phase of our Church is going to require too. It’s not enough to think about stuff. It’s not enough to talk about mission. It’s not enough to claim to value diversity. It’s not enough to give lip service to evangelism. We’re going to have to practice these things that we believe. To jump in, body and soul.

But I think the best thing pregnancy offers us as a metaphor is this: it’s hopeful. It’s a great big crazy leap into the unknown. It’s a vision for the future. It’s something you grow into. Nobody’s “ready.”

The question is, what are we going to do during this time of gestation?

Thanks for listening, and a special thanks to my friend and colleague Elizabeth Goodrich for the pregnancy metaphor.

We Are Presbyterian 2011 — A New “Diagnosis” for the Church from MaryAnn McKibben Dana on Vimeo.

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Word to the Impatient

This meme has overstayed itself by about three weeks, but I couldn't resist. Inexplicably, this came up when I googled the phrase from Romans, "hope does not disappoint us."

There were many nuggets, stories and quotable quotes from last week’s Festival of Faith and Writing, and I’m sure some of them will make it into sermons and future writings. Here’s one.

The last presentation I attended was by Paula Huston, who presented on the topic “Writing as a Spiritual Practice”—incidentally, she did so with laryngitis. There was something fitting about preparing to leave the conference, about shifting my energies from festival to home… just as the words were diminishing into a whisper.

Huston spoke about waiting many years (thirteen?) for her novel to be published, and talked about struggling with impatience. I listened, but with a detached and clinical interest since impatience isn’t something I ever have to deal with.

~cough~

She finally decided to get some spiritual counsel and talked to one of the monks at a monastery she often visited for retreats. She asked, “How can I have more patience?” He replied, “Your problem isn’t a lack of patience. Your problem is a lack of hope.”

There was a palpable “aha!” that reverberated in the room when she said that. She elaborated: if you trust the process, and you trust yourself, and you trust that all things are working together for wholeness and good and abundant life, then patience and peace are the truest response.

I think I love this, even though I want to test the limits of her view against the kind of impatience that presses for change. We’re seeing that with the Columbia Seminary situation. Truth be told, I think the policy will change soon so that committed same-sex couples will have access to campus housing. Not soon enough, I know, for current students who are paying more for housing because they can’t live on campus, and not soon enough for people who’ve been waiting for justice for years. Agitating for change seems like a holy impatience to me, a faithful discontent with the way things are.

Even so, I wonder whether it’s possible to cultivate a patient impatience.

I’ve been tired and full since the Festival. Last night I wanted nothing more than to get the kids to bed and settle into my own with a book or two. But the kids were slow and needy, and every room I went into had yet another thing that needed to be done before I could read and rest. I know about resting when it’s time to rest and not when the tasks are all done—I wrote a book about it—but this was stuff that couldn’t wait. Like, giving the cat her medicine so she doesn’t seize.

I was testy and impatient over all of these things. So I began to mull Huston’s statement. What’s going on when I am impatient? What’s happening internally when I just can’t wait to get to the next thing?

Maybe I am acting, in the words of Paul, as one without hope. Maybe I need to cultivate hope. But not hope that everything’s going to be OK. I’m a fan of Vaclav Havel’s understanding of hope, which is not the assurance that things will work out, but a conviction that things make sense, regardless of how they turn out.

My life—cat medicine and all—makes sense. There is a strange coherence to it. And there is no next thing. There is only the current thing, whether it’s brushing James’s teeth or writing a blog post or reading My Life in France. This I believe.

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Frick and Frack: A Tale of Justice

Below is a letter I am sending to the president of Columbia Theological Seminary, Dr. Steve Hayner, and members of the “cabinet”:

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I know you have been receiving countless communications about your recent announcement regarding Columbia’s housing policy. One of these letters is from my friend, Michael Kirby.

I write now, with his permission, to tell you a part of the story that he did not.

Michael and I were friends long before seminary. We met in Houston, Texas, both former Southern Baptists who attended the same church, St. Philip Presbyterian. Michael was an elder; I was a deacon and later a staff member. We were in Sunday School class together. We sang in the choir together. We went on young-adult retreats together (back when we were young adults). And, nurtured in the loving care of that amazing church community, we felt God calling us to ministry—not exactly together, but in parallel.

We were interested in some of the same seminaries, and happened to attend the same CTS Inquirer’s Weekend in November 1999. We didn’t talk much that weekend, giving each other space to discern, but I found myself wondering whether he was as lit up with excitement as I was over what Columbia had to offer. He was.

I still remember the tentative conversation with Michael the day the scholarship announcements went out, and the explosion of joy when we found out that we had both received identical scholarships. Over the years at Columbia, it’s fair to say that we competed, but in the best possible way: We drove one another to do our absolute best. We supported and encouraged one another and studied together. We gave each other tips for navigating our home presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry. We each found our own niches and leadership opportunities while drawing closer to one another. We remain close to this day. I celebrate his ministry in Chicago and across the larger church, particularly as a voice for justice and for the compassion of God that knows no bounds.

I’ll be honest. In my early stages of discernment, when I pictured myself in seminary, I imagined striking out on my own, not with someone from my hometown. But I cannot imagine my call story without Michael Kirby.

Our stories diverge in one important way. Michael, a gay man, arrived at Columbia unpartnered, whereas I came with a husband. And therein lies the cruel twist: despite our similarities in background, despite our mutual commitment to academic rigor and excellence in ministry, and despite our shared love for the church, had Michael been the one to arrive with a husband instead of me, he would have been barred from campus housing.

That, in short, is a travesty.

I do not envy you the many constituencies and interests you must consider in stewarding Columbia Seminary, an institution we all love and revere. But as you listen to the myriad voices on this issue, don’t forget the future Michael Kirbys out there:
folks who are just now feeling the Holy Spirit tug at them,
folks who feel most alive when they are serving the church,
folks for whom a seminary education may be out of reach financially if they are forced to live off campus…
And folks who will not consider Columbia Theological Seminary so long as they and their families are excluded from a vital part of campus life.

What profoundly gifted servants of God will you never have the opportunity to nurture and grow with as a result of this policy?

Thank you for listening.

Peace of Christ,

The Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana
M.Div. 2003

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Back from the Conference

Someday I Will Forget These Things

There was the quote
I had to scribble down,
quickly, the pen faltering like a toddler’s dragging-mad footsteps.

And the wisdom,
shared in a tumble of tweets,
a paper chain across the universe.

And the poem that exploded the room,
or made the air leak out in a sigh.

There was the certain conviction that words matter.

And there were hands to receive, and offers of help.
There were people
who saw the door open a crack,
who pushed it wide
to allow others through.

And there was the tree dusted with purple
and a yellow hydrant kneeling underneath.
I could not bear to take its picture.

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(Door image came from Sue Baller-Shepard, a new friend.
Check out her wonderful Spiritual Book Club site.)

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Friday Link Love

Still at FFW. (Ah, the joy of pre-scheduled posts…)

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Gymnast Johanna Quaas — YouTube

She’s 86.

That’s Eighty-Six:

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95 Tweets against Hell — Two Friars and a Fool

I love the friars, and this is a tweeting tour de force:

#95Tweets #E1: Eternal Hell is not in any way restorative – it eternally severs relationship and eternally prevents redemption

#95Tweets #E2: In fact, eternal Hell is the teaching that there are people and things that can never be redeemed, even by God

#95Tweets #E3: Eternal Hell is vengeance made infinite, and is therefore even less noble than vengeance

#95Tweets #E4: Eternal Hell lacks the sole moral underpinning of punishment, which is correction

And yes, there are 95 of them.

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How to Store Fruits, Vegetables and Eggs without a Fridge — Improvised Life

Such ingenuity and simple beauty in this approach.

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Walking the Tightrope: Thoughts on Vulnerability and Hurt — Brene Brown

Brene is one of my heroes. With this post, she takes a stand: she will no longer write articles for venues that don’t moderate their comments or have some basic controls in place to keep the discussion civil.

Brava.

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Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy — YouTube

My friend Todd passed this along: why the first follower is just as (more?) important than the leader. Good stuff and a joy to watch:

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A Congregation of Theological Coherence — Alban Institute

I really like the idea of a congregation having a common theological vocabulary:

This pastor leads a congregation that is sturdy. It isn’t likely to be the focus of a church growth study, or make the cover of Time during Holy Week. However, it is a congregation that makes a difference in people’s lives. The parking lot is full during the week. The lights are on in the evening. Membership numbers are steady.

Several conditions enhance a congregation’s ability to address the challenges and opportunities it faces. They include simple yet important realities: use of outside resources to learn new capacities, clergy and laity learning together, and congregations assuming the initiative over their futures.

Another emerging condition we’re observing is theological coherence; the ability to think clearly about God and then act accordingly. A congregation that is clear and consistent about how it understands God, and applies this understanding to its daily life, is more able to deal effectively with challenges and opportunities.

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Why Storytellers Lie — Atlantic Monthly

I’ve just put Gotschall’s book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, on my Goodreads:

When we tell stories about ourselves, they also serve another important (arguably higher) function: They help us to believe our lives are meaningful. “The storytelling mind”—the human mind, in other words—”is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence,” Gottschall writes. It doesn’t like to believe life is accidental; it wants to believe everything happens for a reason. Stories allow us to impose order on the chaos.

And we all concoct stories, Gotschall notes—even those of us who have never commanded the attention of a room full of people while telling a wild tale. “[S]ocial psychologists point out that when we meet a friend, our conversation mostly consists of an exchange of gossipy stories,” he writes. “And every night, we reconvene with our loved ones … to share the small comedies and tragedies of our day.”

…Every day of our lives—sometimes with help working things out via tweets or Facebook status updates—we fine-tune the grand narratives of our lives; the stories of who we are, and how we came to be…

…We like stories because, as Gotschall puts it, we are “addicted to meaning”—and meaning is not always the same as the truth.

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Have a good weekend, dear readers.

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“A Prize I’ve Won by Not Doing Something”

Written earlier this week, before I left for FFW:

This article, called “The Hunger Game and How to Win It,” resonated with me on many levels: the fact that the author David Gessner has a self house, for one, which is something I covet. But also in this tangled-up stuff about achievement and possessing stuff. And hunger:

We have turned [our] insatiable hunger on our own land, swallowing, goring, fracking, drilling so that we can have more and so that we can fuel the vehicles and machines that transport us elsewhere. One of the reasons I find it hard to be too fully moralistic about this behavior is that I share it. In my own work -which is writing — I am always hungry, wanting more and better, and I recognize in my own ambition the same never-sated animal that I see in others. Long ago, I sent a letter to a neighbor on Cape Cod who had built a monstrous trophy house. I wrote: “You’re obviously an ambitious man and in that we are alike. While your workers hammer away up on the hill, I hammer away at my keyboard. Like you, I dream of creating something big, something great, and like you, I sometimes feel that my passion for this controls me, and not me it.” So you see, I am not writing about hunger as an outsider, not Spock looking on puzzled at a world full of Kirks.

And yet that does not mean that I believe that this gets me, or us, off the hook, that we can let our inner Kirks run wild and shoot phasers in the air and make out with every Nurse Chapel they run across. The next sentences in my letter to my neighbor were these: “But we are more in control than we admit, than it’s fashionable to say these days. I don’t suggest the laughable premise that we are rational creatures, or that reason controls our lives. What I do suggest is that our imaginations can be nudged, and work best if nudged earthward.”

He goes on to talk about the ramshackle cabin he built, and how a nest of wrens took up residence thanks to the fact that he neglected to screen up a gap between the door and the roof:

My life feels better, more intense and elevated, having this new family around…

For my part, I am not ready to retire like a Zen monk to my shack. I am still hungry for things. A Pulitzer Prize would be nice, for instance, and after that maybe a Nobel. But right now I am enjoying a different sort of prize, and I can’t help but think this is a prize I’ve won by not doing something.

That is a wonderful characterization of Sabbath, so the quote grabbed me. That’s grace, isn’t it? The goodness that comes to you when you’re not pursuing it.

But I also related on a literal level: our family, too, hosts a family of birds. I wrote about them in Sabbath in the Suburbs. They live in the exhaust vent of our range hood, and they show up every year. Because every year we forget to plug up the dang hole.

I try to be honest in the book about the difficulties of choosing a day of rest over so many other things—things like installing a finer mesh over a hole, so our stove’s exhaust fan doesn’t blow out because the duct is clogged with twigs and leaves and baby birds.

But I like the way David Gessner thinks about it. After all of this time spent Sabbath-keeping, I still have a lot to learn.

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On the Eve of FFW

I leave this evening for the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, a gathering I’ve been hearing about for years but never been able to attend. I’m eager to soak it all in, hear some inspiring speakers, deepen friendships, and network. If I’m feeling extroverted enough, my little box of Sabbath in the Suburbs postcards will be empty when I come home.

I’ve been to tons of writing things over the years: workshops, conferences and such. They provide a huge boost of energy and mojo. And if there is a lot of posturing and jockeying for attention, they can also bring out demons of competitiveness. I can’t account for why these group dynamics occur in some gatherings and not in others. Probably a chemistry thing—one or two people can really shift things into an unhealthy place. With any luck and grace, I am not one of those people.

However, there’s no denying that I am a person of ambition. I thrive on competition, particularly in academic pursuits. When this is channeled inwardly—when the competition is with myself—it’s a great source of motivation. When it’s not, well, let’s just say that Robert and I still do not speak of The Canasta Incident.

This has been a topic of discussion and reflection for me recently. You know how themes and ideas will keep coming to you when you’re working something out? That has happened to me. I appreciated this article by my friend Becky, who wrote about healthy ways to be driven to develop one’s skills.

And a friend shared this article about two best friends who are highly competitive in the area of Olympic-level kayaking. The relationship spurs them on to be better and better. I find this thrilling and hopeful:

Both Ashley and Caroline are training hard - the former near her home in Maryland, and the latter down in North Carolina. Caroline says it’ll be tough to face each other at the upcoming Olympic trials, since “we both want to be number one.”

But if nothing else, she says, it’ll strengthen their friendship… and their skills.

“It’s a very positive thing,” she says. “We push each other.”

Ashley agrees: “Ideally this year we’re pushing each other to get to that next level, to be able to compete with this international crew. Ideally, we’re training each other for the Games.”

I have been blessed to have mentors and spiritual directors who have said to me, “Stop trying not to be competitive or ambitious. Instead, keep pondering how to use that gift in a life-giving way.” Unhealthy competition means comparing oneself to others, making one’s self-worth about achievement, and being selfish and unsupportive. Healthy competition believes in abundance: one person’s achievement does not diminish another person’s; there is room for many offerings of gifts. It also means striving for personal excellence in one’s life, art, or whatever.

After all, competition is scriptural! Paul writes that we are to outdo one another…
in showing honor.

So be it.

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Unless I See

Postage stamp from India honoring the apostle Thomas

I don’t make a regular habit of posting sermons… but I posted the Easter one, and I kinda think that the two sermons are a matched set.

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
April 15, 2025
Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31

“Unless I See”

Poor Thomas, or should I say, “Doubting Thomas”… for indeed that is the name we hear more often. I saw a cartoon this week that features Thomas, hands on hips, saying, “It’s just not fair. It’s not like people go around calling him ‘Denying Peter.’”

It’s a dreadful mislabeling of the man, if you ask me. Thomas only wants what everyone else has already received—a glimpse of Jesus, resurrected. In fact, the word “doubt” does not appear anywhere in this passage if you go back to the original text. The New Revised Standard Version renders Jesus’ words, “Do not doubt but believe.” But Jesus doesn’t say not to doubt. He says, “Do not be unbelieving.”

Doubt, after all, is an element of faith, not a sign of unbelief. And I don’t think Jesus need have worried about Thomas being an unbeliever. Because if Thomas were an unbeliever, he’d be off living his life. He wouldn’t be sitting up there with the rest of the disciples, hoping Jesus might show up again. He is there because this was the place where Jesus was last seen. He’s up there, waiting, wanting to see evidence of this amazing thing that has taken place. Those aren’t the actions of an unbeliever. That’s someone who’s still engaged with the push and pull of his faith. Who’s willing to struggle and wait and watch and hope.

Thomas means the Twin, and as my friend Deryl likes to say when he preaches this text, he’s your twin, if you want him. And I know he is the twin of many of you, because you have told me your struggles and your questions… and yes, your doubts.

He’s a twin that folks would be blessed to have. I’d certainly like to write him into my family tree. Rather than trying to diminish him as many have done with the “Doubting” moniker, today I suggest that Thomas has the most robust faith of any of the disciples. He doesn’t grandstand like Peter: Watch me walk on water! Jesus, you will never wash my feet! Nor does he jockey for position like James and John, who elbow each other out of the way to see who might sit at Jesus’ right hand.

Consider the places we meet Thomas in the gospel of John. We see him in the story of Lazarus (ch. 11), whom Jesus loved, and who is ill, and later dies. Lazarus’s sisters have called for Jesus, who is game to go to Judea, but the disciples say, No, don’t go there, the Jewish authorities want to stone you. That’s the last place we want to be. But Thomas, notably, does not join the chorus of people eager to save Jesus’ skin, and their own. He says, Let’s go, so that we may die too.

We meet Thomas again a few chapters later (ch. 14). Jesus is teaching about God’s house, which has many rooms. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says. “I go to prepare a place for you… You know the way to the place where I am going.”

And Thomas answers, Umm, actually, we don’t know the way.

We might ding Thomas for interrupting what is one of the more eloquent discourses of Jesus, except that his question is vital if you actually care about following the man.

You don’t ask that question unless you intend to go where Jesus wants to you to go.

So. That’s Thomas in chapters 11 and 14, and then we have chapter 20 to round out our character sketch. We just heard that the first time Jesus appears post-resurrection, Thomas is off somewhere. I preached two years ago that Thomas is the patron saint of the day late and the dollar short crowd. They all get to see Jesus, while he’s off buying Cheetos and Mountain Dew at the 7-11.

But that’s not right, either. Where is Thomas? What is he doing? It seems obvious, doesn’t it? He’s not on a beer run; he’s looking for Jesus. Mary Magdalene said he’s risen, so Thomas is going to find him. He’s certainly not going to cower behind a locked door, quivering with the other disciples for fear of the religious authorities. Thomas is the only one brave enough to be on the outside. So let’s call him Courageous Thomas, not Doubting Thomas.

In the years to come, after Jesus is no longer with them, the disciples will go on to spread the good news and found churches. Thomas has a special distinction: he is the only one of the disciples to have ventured beyond the Roman Empire to spread Christianity. The tradition tells us he established churches in southern India, for heaven’s sake!

Thomas is a man of movement:
“Let’s go to Judea, even if it means our death.”
“I don’t know the Way, Jesus, but I want to know, so tell me.”
“I’m not going to sit up here in the upper room with the door bolted. If Jesus is alive I’m going to go find him and I’m not going to be afraid.”
That search takes him all the way to India, further than any disciple was willing to go.

* * *

You may have heard the story this week about the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker. Booker was coming home the other night and saw his neighbor’s house engulfed in flames. A woman standing nearby screamed that her daughter was still inside, and so without thinking, Cory ran into the house. He and members of his security detail were able to save the woman and others. Cory threw her over his shoulders, sack-of-potatoes style, and ran through the flames. He suffered smoke inhalation and a few second-degree burns, but he and the others are OK.

Now as often happens on the Internet, people decided to have some fun with this and inflate this government bureaucrat into a butt-kicking hero. A twitter feed sprang up on Friday called Cory Booker stories, and they are the 21st century equivalent of the tall tale:
“When Batman needs help, he turns on the Cory Booker signal.”
“When Chuck Norris gets nightmares, Cory Booker turns on the light and brings him warm milk until he calms down.”
“Smoke was treated for Cory Booker exposure.”

Those are fun, aren’t they? But the detail that made me sit up and take notice was from an interview Booker gave the next day, in which he said that the decision to go in was a “come to Jesus moment.”

Now, he probably means “come to Jesus” as in a moment of decision. That’s how we normally think about “come to Jesus.” But think about what the phrase means literally. Come. To. Jesus. He went toward a person in grave danger and called it a come to Jesus moment. I hear strains of Matthew 25 in that: For I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was perishing in a burning building and you dove in and saved me. That which you did to the most vulnerable and imperiled, you did to me.

Thomas, our disciple with the robust faith, would approve. He was a Come To Jesus kind of person.

* * *

This morning, several of my friends are preaching from the book of Acts, one of the other assigned texts for this day. A few of us were puzzling about how to connect Thomas with this snippet from the early church:

4:32 Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common….
4:34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.
4:35 They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Sometimes we press this text into arguments about communism and socialism, and I think that misses the point. The point is this: the church helped create an alternate system in which everyone’s needs were taken care of. Nobody had too much; everyone had enough. Everyone.

It is the church’s job to lift up an alternate vision in which that is possible. It takes a robust faith to do so…

And if Thomas is our twin then we have no choice. Notice he does not say, “Unless I see Jesus walking around in a perfect body with a halo…”

He says,
Unless I see the puncture wounds in his hands… unless I see the split in his side.
Unless I see that Jesus is a Jesus who suffered the depths of human pain and lived,
then what’s the point.
Unless I see that Jesus is the one who goes right to the heart of human suffering, taking it on…
then I have no use for him.

That’s the Jesus worthy of Thomas’s faith. And ours.