A Practical Man

Happy Easter!

Easter isn’t a day; Easter is a season. We have several more weeks of Easter Season to celebrate the Risen Christ.

He is Risen. He is Risen. He is Risen Indeed!

The disciples all celebrated!

They had seen Him die on Friday after. They had seen Him buried. The women went to the tomb early Sunday morning to clean His body and cover it with spices before reburying Him. Mary came to the disciples and told them that Jesus wasn’t at the tomb. Peter and John raced to the tomb – and He wasn’t there. They went back to where they were staying. Two men walking to Emmaus were joined by a third man, a man who joined them for an early supper – and turned out to be Jesus. The two raced back to Jerusalem to spread the news. Jesus had appeared to Peter. Ten of the disciples and some others gathered in a locked room – and Jesus appeared to them. He gave them the Holy Spirit and the power to forgive people’s sins.

Notice that Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” They have received the holy breath of God Himself, Jesus. As I’ve mentioned before, the Greek word Pneuma means breath, wind, or Spirit. They receive the Holy Spirit through Jesus’ Holy Breath.

And then Jesus gives them great power. He says “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Such power passed onto the disciples. Such power that passes down to us, 2000 years later.

Have you considered that, as a representative of Jesus and God on earth, you have great power to do good – and power to do harm? So many times a person comes to us wanting to unburden their souls of some sin, great or small. We need to listen to them, for healing begins when we listen to the injured person.

And the person who is talking to you will tell you about some argument or fight they are having with another person, or they will tell you of something they have done that they feel guilty about. Now in the case of hearing one side of a fight or argument, you can’t forgive the person that is not there. But you can help the person who is talking to you understand what they’ve done wrong – possibly it is just their reaction to a great provocation – someone injured their pride and they fought back, like the man who was slapped on his cheek and punched back, when Jesus clearly tells us to simply turn the other cheek. And then, if they are sorry for whatever they’ve done, forgive them. Assure them that God will also forgive them if they ask God to be forgiven. Say, “I forgive you – and I know God also forgives you, or will forgive you.” And they begin to heal – and a step is taken for healing in the future because your friend will be less likely to respond in anger in the future. Simply saying “You are forgiven” is powerful healing.

But when might you say, “You are not forgiven.”? Perhaps when the Holy Spirit tells you that your friend is not the least bit sorry. For the whole purpose here is for people to recognize that they must be humble in front of God, recognizing that God has the right to set the rules and the power to enforce those rules, and the first and greatest rule and commandment is to love the Lord your God. And that requires a recognition that God is more powerful and worthy of respect than I am. We must bow down in Spirit, if not with our physical bodies.

Why does God care that we bow down to Him and His Son?

Because God knows and understands that a soul who will not humble himself or herself will grow more and more distorted by that pride over the centuries. If we will accept that God is wiser and more powerful than we are, we can be taught. No matter how messed up we are, over the centuries, God can teach us how to live well and how to be a pleasant soul to be around. But if we will not bow to God, God cannot teach us, and, left to our own devices, our soul will grow more twisted over the centuries.

Imagine the kind old lady who has practiced being kind for 70 years. Imagine how kind she will be after a thousand years of practice! Now imagine the gruff old man who has practiced causing trouble for 70 years. Imagine how evil he will be after a thousand years of practice!

God wants to guide us onto a better way. He wants us to be pleasant to be around in eternity. And we must bow down to Him and Jesus to be teachable.

That evening, those disciples who were there received the Holy Spirit and began to become men who would start the healing of the world through forgiveness.

But Thomas wasn’t there. Why not?

Thomas, the surviving twin, had shown himself to be a practical young man, a bit sarcastic. When Jesus said He was going to return to the Jerusalem area where he had almost been killed a few months before, returning because Lazarus was dead, Thomas had said, “We might as well go with Him to die also.” Thomas was loyal, yet practical. He knew what was likely to happen when Jesus showed up in Jerusalem.

On Thursday night, When Jesus started to talk about going to His Father’s house, and told the disciples, “You know the way to the place where I am going”, Thomas said to him “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Practical, loyal, sensible. Thomas wasn’t into miracles; He didn’t care about visions or dreams. He cared about what he could touch and feel and see himself. He was practical. If he were living today, he would probably have made a good auto mechanic, a good chemical operator, a truck driver. Thomas wasn’t a dreamer, a visionary, a man who would write novels or motion pictures. He might write a book on “How to repair a Ford 460 V8 Engine” or “Build your own household solar energy system.” Thomas was a practical man.

And so, when Jesus died on the cross, Thomas was no where around. Thomas wasn’t hanging around the foot of the cross like John. When Jesus had been arrested late Thursday night, Thomas skedaddled. He knew he wasn’t going to fight a bunch of Temple guards. He left the area and hid out. Friday, he watched Jesus nailed to the cross, die on the cross, and be stabbed in the side by a Roman spear. But he watched from a distance where no one would see him or talk with him. He wasn’t going to get crucified by the Romans, too. He was practical about such things.

And so he was missing in action on Easter Sunday and nobody saw him when Jesus came back from the grave. For Thomas had never seen anyone else come back from the grave – except Lazarus. But that was special. You see, Jesus had the power to raise Lazarus. But if Jesus were dead, who could raise Jesus? It had been a great run, three years together on the road, wonderful times together, but it was over. It was time to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Would he find a girl and settle down on a few acres of farmland up in Galilee? Or would he travel, maybe going down to Egypt to study under a different rabbi. Whatever it was, the Jesus part of his life was over. His hopes had been raised and then dashed. You can almost see Thomas sitting somewhere with a bottle – no, a large jug of wine.

And then, the other guys, they met him in the streets that week and they all said the same thing, “We have seen the Lord!” But you know how young men are together. They tease, they play jokes, they prank each other. It wasn’t funny, them all telling Thomas that Jesus was alive. He didn’t believe them. He was practical – Jesus was dead. He told them, each time a new disciple met him in the street, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Thomas was very practical. But he did agree to join them the next Sunday evening for prayer.

And so that next Sunday, the disciples were there, all except Judas who was dead. Even Thomas was with them. They locked the doors – and Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” And then Jesus turned to Thomas and said, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas, the practical man, did the practical thing. He said to Jesus: “My Lord and my God!” You see, Thomas bowed to Jesus and accepted that Jesus was God – and Thomas’ Lord, the one he must follow forever.

And then Jesus gently, so gently chewed him out as He accepted Thomas back: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.”

The disciples stayed together several months before the persecution began with Stephen’s death. It appears that even after this persecution began, at least a core group of disciples remained in the Jerusalem area for several years, perhaps a decade or so, for they were still together when Paul and Barnabas come to Jerusalem to get a ruling on how difficult it would be to accept Gentiles as Christians. During these years, the assembled Apostles settled much of what is today Christian doctrine. Although they did not make the Apostles Creed – it was first written around 381 – they largely settled the ideas that it is based upon.

We don’t hear about Thomas, though, after the second chapter of the Book of Acts. He might have stayed with the others, or he might have moved on.

Early Christian tradition has it that eventually the Apostles cast lots and then dispersed to evangelize their areas. Thomas is said to have received Parthia, which is the part of Iran near Tehran in the north. He traveled with Bartholomew, and then traveled into what is today Pakistan and northwest India. Here, after a while he was attacked. He got onto a boat and according to the people of southwestern India, Kerala state, in A.D. 52 Thomas stepped off the boat and began establishing churches in southern India.

When we lived in Atlanta, a couple from Kerala, India moved into the house next to us. After some discussion, we found that they were believing Christians, from the church of St Thomas the Apostle, to whom they looked back to the founding of their churches. These Christians call themselves, “Nasranis”, which is derived from Nazareth.

Thomas may have taken a trip to Indonesia and also to China, but he returned to south India. He was martyred in the town now known as Chennai, formerly Madras, on the southeastern coast, around the year 72. His churches today have about 5 million members of the Churches of St Thomas.

But what does the story of Thomas the Apostle have to do with us today?

There has long been a tendency for us to separate two realms – there is the world of God and the world of humans, Heaven and earth. Thomas effectively believed this. Jesus had been on earth for awhile and now Jesus had returned to God’s world, to Heaven, and the door between Heaven and earth had slammed shut, just as it always did when someone died.

Thomas was very much a man of earth. He did not even expect Heaven one day – few did, for that was one of the ideas that Christ brought to us. In Thomas’ day, when you died, you were dead.

The Greeks believed in an underworld where you lived a terrible life, tortured like the guy who was sentenced to trying roll a huge boulder up a hill which always came crashing down on him just as he got to the top, or like the other man who had to fill a huge pool with water carried in a bucket with hundreds of holes in it. And to a certain extent, the popular Jewish imagination of the day had somewhat bought into this idea. But officially, when you died, you were dead. Life was over.

Thomas believed this, no matter what Jesus had said about a resurrection. And, you know, today people have a strange mixture of beliefs.

On the one hand, many people believe that everyone actually goes to Heaven except a few very evil types. If you aren’t a serial murder or Adolph Hitler type, you’ll go to Heaven. This is what most people believe when they are healthy and happy. This is what Thomas believed when Jesus preached it on the roads while they walked around the Holy Land.

On the other hand, when sickness comes, when they are lonely, when they are lying awake in the middle of the night listening to the clock tick away and sirens in the distance, most people believe and worry that when you die, you’re just dead. That’s the end. That is what I see with many people in that time between the death of a loved one – and the funeral itself. There is a tremendous hopelessness that many people have when faced with death – their death or the death of a loved one. And this is what Thomas believed when Jesus died on the cross. Dead meant dead.

Yet when we hear the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection – and his promise that His followers will rise again, we can begin to have more hope. We want to believe, we want to be joyful, we want to say, like Thomas, “My Lord and My God!”

So often we, like Thomas, are practical. We also have to see some sort of proof. We have to see the miracle, to touch the miracle, to feel Jesus’ hands and put our fingers in Jesus side where the spear thrust into Him. We want to believe, but there is doubt with us simply because – we are practical men and women.

And so the story of Thomas is our story. How can we get that assurance that we can truly live again?

C.S.Lewis, a powerful Christian mind, wrote “The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe”, a delightful book that is simple enough for children to understand and deep enough for adults to love. There are four British children who have been sent from London into the countryside during World War II to stay at an old professor’s house. Edmond and Lucy are the two youngest children. Edmond is always lying and playing tricks and generally can’t be trusted; On the other hand, Lucy is honest, sweet, never causes trouble, and generally is a great kid.

Lucy finds something miraculous, Edmond joins her and also sees the miracle. So they go back and Lucy tells the older children. Edmond says it didn’t happen, that Lucy is lying. And indeed, the miraculous thing sounds pretty far-fetched. So they take it to the old professor, who asks, “Who usually tells the truth?“ The older children answer: “Lucy.” The professor continues, “Who usually lies?” They respond, “Edmond”. The professor concludes, “Then why don’t you believe Lucy?”

Do you want assurance that miracles can happen? Ask people you know and trust, who always tell the truth as they know it. Ask them what they have seen of Jesus, of God, and of miracles. Join us here and listen to the stories of the miracles we’ve witnessed. Listen to their stories and our stories, trust them and store them up in the cupboard of your mind. Eventually, those stories will burst out of that cupboard because you’ve tucked away so many of those stories and late one night you will get out of bed, get on your knees, bow your head and say, “My Lord and My God!” And your healing will begin.

And if you already have seen miracles – be ready to tell others about those miracles. Don’t exaggerate, don’t go overboard. Just tell people what you have seen and heard, what you felt and what you smelt when the miracle happened. Tell of the day when you were delayed just enough that you missed the wreck. Tell of the time when the tumor was diagnosed, the church prayed and the tumor went away even before chemo started. Tell of the day the money arrived just in time to keep the checks from bouncing. Tell of the day when God spared your friend. Let your testimony become the reason your friend, your relative, your neighbor, even your enemy bows to Jesus and says, “My Lord and My God.”

For Thomas did not believe when the first apostle spoke to him. Thomas did not believe when the second apostle spoke to him. Thomas did not even believe when he walked into that room and the doors were locked behind him that Sunday evening. But then Thomas saw a miracle – and practical Thomas believed!

So what do we believe?

Let us join together in reciting what we believe, as expressed in the ancient Apostles Creed (UMH #881)

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth;
And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;*
the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic** church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.