Sermon

April 23, 2006

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on April 23, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

This is a sermon about the Church and grace and forgiveness. I’d like to begin by contrasting visits to two local dry cleaning establishments. This is not a commercial message, so the cleaning businesses will remain anonymous, though I assure you the incidents are real. The encounters began with a treasured heirloom. My father was an Episcopal priest and when he died I inherited the ecclesiastical wool cloak he wore for funerals in cold weather. It is a graceful and useful garment, but it is much too short for me. When I married Judy Baldwin , we were both delighted to discover that it fit her perfectly, so she became the proud owner of the cloak. Now a funeral cloak is, thank heavens, not a garment you have to use often, so the cloak hung in a hall closet, and, as it happened, must have slipped off the hanger. A few years ago, when Judy needed it, we found it in a heap on the closet floor. At the time we owned a white cat, so you know where this is going. The cloak was a mess when we found it: thick with white cat hair and dotted with little muddy paw prints. Off it went to the cleaners. To my amazement, the cleaners yelled at me: “This is filthy! You’ve ruined this garment. Take it away! It is just a rag. We don’t even want it in the shop.”

We came very close to throwing the cloak away. After all, the dry cleaners were an old and trusted firm, and if they said it was beyond hope, who were we to question their judgment? So it was with fear and trembling and a sense of desperation that we took the precious cloak to another establishment. Naturally as I laid the filthy garment on their counter I apologized profusely, starting to explain about the cat and my dad and all. But the clerk broke in. “Don’t apologize. That’s why we’re here! If you could take care of it yourself, you wouldn’t need us.”

That, it seems to me describes pretty well God’s relationship with us, and it describes pretty well the attitude that ought to prevail in churches. In our Gospel this morning, the risen Christ breathes on the disciples he finds cowering behind locked doors in an attic room: “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” Jesus is in the forgiveness business. Almost the last thing he ever said in his earthly life was, “Father, forgive them.” The death and resurrection we have so recently commemorated was about forgiveness. It was about his knowing what a mess we are and yet being willing to die for us anyway. The disciples to whom he gave the gift of his spirit were not courageous and loving people. Every last one of them had deserted and betrayed him. They were not gathered in that upper room trying to figure out how they could help save the world, they were up there trying to save their wretched skins. The rising to life again and the promise of new life is not made to squeaky clean people with nothing to be ashamed of. This new life is held out for people who couldn’t possibly achieve it for themselves. Like the second dry cleaning firm, Jesus’ answer to the messes of our lives is: “If you could take care of it yourself, you wouldn’t need me.”

St. Thomas , too, about whom we also read this morning, is a pretty good example of who the church is for. Thomas, we suspect, wants desperately to believe that Jesus has risen, but such belief is just not in his nature. He needs a physical encounter with the risen Christ in order to believe. I, for one, suspect that the other disciples were about ready to write Thomas off as a hopeless case, when Jesus appears in a way that Thomas can accept and shows him his wounds. To Thomas, too, Jesus seems to be saying, “That’s why I’m here. “If you could take care of it yourself, you wouldn’t need me.”

And that, of course is what Church is all about. It is about people who would like to be better and who long to be more loving and more effective. It is about Thomases who would like to believe and it is just not in their natures. It is about people who have dirty laundry that they are ashamed of and don’t really know what to do about it. Every last one of us in this room would take care of these needs by ourselves if we could. But we can’t. So we are here looking for some touch of the Risen One. We are looking for someone who’ll show us their wounds and for someone who won’t recoil in horror when they find out we aren’t as perfect as we’d like to appear. We are, all of us, here looking for the One who says, “That’s what I’m here for. If you could take care of it yourself, you wouldn’t need me.”

By the grace of God may we hear that voice of forgiveness here. By the grace of God may we speak those words of forgiveness to those around us. AMEN