Rev. Michael Poage
Fairmount United Church of Christ
(copr.2007 by M.Poage)

Prayer: God of new life and of constant hope, we greet you this morning much as the Christ greeted the disciples after the resurrection. We gather here today to support one another much as those first disciples gathered in a locked room wondering what was next for them. However, they cowered in fear. We gather in hope and wonder at a new day even as we contemplate how we will live out the resurrection on behalf of Your creation and of all of Your children. Guide us during this time of worship. Let our hearts meditate on Your love for us. In the name of the Risen Christ, we pray. Amen.

When I was in seminary, I spent a year volunteering at San Quentin Federal Prison. It is located in Marin County, California, on some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. Out of more than 2 million prisoners in this country, over 4,000 of them are incarcerated at San Quentin. It is very over-crowded and very dangerous because it is not a minimum security facility!!

To gain entrance – as a visitor, not a resident!! – one goes through three high-security gates where you take off much of your clothing, empty all pockets, have all of your items inspected – it makes no difference if you are clergy or not – and then you proceed to the second and then the third gate. As you enter the specific visiting area to which you are assigned, the sound of the final gate closing is particularly hard on the nerves. It clangs loudly and with certainty – as you see a sign on the wall that reads: "If there is a hostage situation, we have a no-negotiation policy."
Once you’re in, you’re IN!!

I thought of that work at San Quentin when I read the Gospel story for this morning. The opening verse (John 20:19) sets the tone. The disciples are hiding behind locked doors because, we are told, of their "fear". It is very natural when you have suffered some trauma in life, when you have been violated by some injustice in life, to lock yourself away.

There are many kinds of locks, or so-called security systems. A teacher once told me that his greatest challenge was, day after day, looking into the eyes of his high school students and seeing students who had simply shut down. They had failed so often, had experienced so often the door slamming in their faces, that they had withdrawn; they had locked the door and thrown away the key. There are all kinds of locks, not just the ones you might find at the hardware store.

Here, on the Second Sunday of Easter, our Gospel tells us about a group of people who are cowering behind a locked door. But this isn’t just any group of people; it’s the disciples of Jesus. It is night, a dangerous time – as we know – in nearly any city; but the city of Jerusalem, after the weekend of terrible violence worked against Jesus, causes his disciples to have many reasons to be fearful. Perhaps they were afraid of the scorn of their friends and families. We know what that can be like, right? We all have our ways of locking down, of hiding the keys, of slamming the metal gate behind even those we love. We can even create a hostage situation where we reserve the power to negotiate or not.

But going back to the Gospel reading from John, it is no small matter that those who have closed the door and locked the locks are Jesus’ own disciples. This is not a story about all the ways the world locks its doors against the claims of the Christian faith. This is a story about the way that those of us who are Christians lock our own doors. And in locking our doors out of fear of the world and what it might do to us, the irony is that the disciples have locked their doors to Jesus, and what he might do to us.

The irony of the Gospel today is that the soldiers of Caesar were not trying to get to the disciples; their critics among their friends and family were not attempting to get to the disciples in order to mock or hurt them. Jesus was trying to get to the disciples in order to bless them; in order to give them peace, in order to forgive them and empower them.

Our security systems, our dead-bolt locks (an interesting post-resurrection term) are not problem for Jesus -- only us. He gets through our most desperate and strongest dead bolts, turning hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, showing us His wounds and scars – and they look so much like our own. He says to us, even those of us so fearful of his retribution, "peace be with you."

Maybe we do not realize – maybe – that we are locking him out when we keep our faith safely tucked away within ourselves, when our religion becomes something that we practice only in the safe confines (confines – like prison??) behind the closed doors of our church -- rather than out in the world where it is dangerous, where we might face the hungry, the rich, the poor, the prisoner, the prostitute, the unemployed, those constantly making demands on our time and treasures. What do we do with all these people that Christ DIED for??

The Presbyterian minister and fiction writer, Frederick Buechner, has at least part of an answer for us. In his book, LISTENING TO YOUR LIFE, he writes words that I will use to close this sermon:

"I say that if you want to know who you are, if you are more than academically interested in that particular mystery, you could do a lot worse than look at your feet for an answer. Introspection, in the long run, doesn’t get you very far because every time you draw back to look at yourself, you are seeing everything except for the part that drew back, and when you draw back to look at the part that drew back to look at yourself, you see again everything except for what you are really looking for. And so on.
  Since the possibilities for drawing back seem to be infinite, you are, in your quest to see yourself whole, doomed always to see infinitely less than what there will always remain to be seen. Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are." (p. 86)

Amen.