April 24, 2022
There is no such thing as never being disappointed. Infants before six months if you watch closely, disappointment will register on their small faces. If humanity always managed to avoid disappointment, we would have long since brought about our own extinction. Disappointment can be a mercy, an invitation into honesty and evolution of the heart, mind and soul. Our mutual experience of letdown may be the invisible thread of empathy and generosity that connects us all.
Thomas – was without a doubt disappointed Disappointed that he missed whatever it was that happened that he doesn’t quite comprehend. The others are tired of forgetting he wasn’t there, weary of avoiding the subject when he is around. Anyone ever been there – either as Thomas, or the others? This primordial church in an upper room Is given peace and hope in the middle of a web of disappointment. Disappointed that everything changed and not everything changed They still have to watch their backs, their leader was executed days ago. Unsure of the world, who is friend or foe. Everything changed but we still have to live, eat, survive. The reconciliation is real, but it didn’t fix the wound.
Jesus loved us as we came to him It is so hard to do the same as he said difficult to live into In anxiety and confusion and crisis, disagreement and disappointment. Siturations like reading the news. Family life day by day.
Ezekiel speaks the comfort of God to a people decimated by war and exile. All is ruins, What it means to be loved and cherished, what it means to be the people of God, Lingers under tremendous questions of purpose and meaning and grief. And so it is the Spirit that moved over the chaos in the beginning Breathes life into ruins Changes dry bones Evolves a wasteland believed to be dead and gone. God breathes life. Life into what was lost that is now found. God offers the heart of what peace can mean in Hebrew – communal wholeness, well-being centredness. The bones that live still have to make their way through life, mouths to feed, roads to travel, new homes to build. But it is also changed – changed by breath, energy, community. Disappointment is the foundation from which we risk change, make promises, and seek fresh understanding. Disappointment is the starting stich from which we weave a better self, a better world.
If we didn’t know that life was thick with both promise and disappointment, we wouldn’t bring children to baptism. We trust that there is love and blessing, that Jesus loves us loves them, we hear him when he says care for them. God does amazing things from tiny packages: the reign of God begins here. Jesus’ resurrection is a spotlight that breaks through the thick evil and frustration of life on earth, Like the grandest child’s giggle that ever was, like the hand of a young one sharing a cheerio when we are hungry. This love and commitment is so brilliant that it is stronger than death. How does that make you tremble, shift in your seat, Or feel like a thin string lifting the top of your head?
This day we celebrate the love of Jesus for this particular child, and all persons who choose to follow his way. Today we all make promises to meet the disappointments as people who have felt the breath of new life and the growing pains of new muscles of following Jesus. We meet the disappointment of life itself with the yes/and Word of God and his water and his light. Thomas is the only person to ask for a sign and get one. Thomas doesn’t walk away from the disappointment, and he is given a sign. Dismay is best worked through not in isolation (with the worst imaginations of our hearts) but in the challenging network of sacred community. We make promises to raise her in the ways of Jesus, duties never met by humans alone. When we renew the promises we renew them for all – for each and every neighbor and quark of creation. This is the way – the form of church is the body of believers – it is God in Christ Resurrected in the here and now In the community of disciples who get it and don’t get it, and hang together and get in disagreements and come back to his table anyways.
The church is being for others in the way of Jesus that is as touchable as water oil wax bread wine. Being a community of people baptized in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus isn’t teflon or a magic spell, Together we bear all the delights and the disappointments in solidarity, new flesh on dry bones, wounds in his living hands. Today you are invited to glimpse or remember, the holy thread that binds us to each other and God in Jesus. Invited to find yourself tangibly reconnected to the promise of redeemed humanity striving always for God’s ways and for the common good. Today we are all invited with a beloved child to grasp the tread of the Word of God in community, to take hold of our duty for her place in this body, one of a questioning and hopeful people rising from and through disappointment, May we be bathed in the peace of God’s steadfast love, forever and ever, Peace he gives us – before and behind and above us. Alleluia. Amen.