Easter 3B
In the name of Christ: our light and life. Amen.
Several years ago I was living in Jersey City, in the
rectory of the parish I was serving at the time. It was a lovely little parish, with a wooden
church building that was 150 years old.
The rectory, on the same grounds, was actually even older than the
church. It had been built by a doctor
about 25 years before the church’s founding, and he donated it and the land
around it so that there could be a new Episcopal Church in the area.
As lovely as these structures were (and still are), there’s
a certain challenge that comes with buildings that old. Aside from the challenges of regular deferred
maintenance - a common issue in most churches - when a property is that old,
things just often go wrong.
Thankfully, one of the gifts of that community was that we
had a deeply dedicated sexton. She lived
across the street from the church where she was the building superintendent of
an apartment building as her main job.
But because she was so close, and because she cared so much, she never
minded popping over to the church to help out with any urgent need that might
arise.
One time, in particular, I was struggling with a drain in my
tub that had stopped draining. I bought
a snake at Lowe’s and tried to use it, with no success. I’d tried a couple of different chemical
drain openers, and nothing seemed to work.
I called Vanessa, and with apologies for bothering her at
her other job, I asked for her help. Did
she have any way of helping me with this clogged drain so that we could avoid
the unnecessary expense of calling a plumber?
Within a few minutes, she’d come over. She’d brought a pipe snake attached to a
drill so she could work through it better than I could manually. She’d brought a bottle of heavy duty drain
cleaner - the kind of stuff you can’t just buy at your local store. I took her upstairs to the bathroom, and to
the now-putrid soup of chemicals that had gathered. After turning on the hot water for a moment
to try to clear things out, she reached down, flicked the drain stopper, and
all the water instantly went rushing out.
It seems that in cleaning the tub, I’d accidentally adjusted
the stopper lever without realizing it.
But when I was faced with the problem, I couldn’t see my mistake. I could only see the problem. The water wouldn’t drain, so I must need to
find a way to open the drain. The
simplest solution - the one right in front of me - never occurred to me.
That same kind of myopia - that shortsighted inability to
see what was right in front of them - held the apostles in those earliest days
of resurrection reality. They had heard
the good news proclaimed to them by the women who’d first discovered the empty
tomb. They’d even had the good news
shown to them in person, when Christ came into the locked room with a rush of
wind, speaking peace to all but Thomas; and then, later to Thomas, too.
But when they met Christ in the world, they didn’t recognize
him. In fact, he scared them. They thought he was a ghost. And even after they recognized him, their
doubts lingered and persisted. They
didn’t really open themselves to the reality of Christ’s presence until they
ate; until they were at table, and broke bread together. That Eucharistic moment - even before the
Holy Eucharist, as we understand it, had really taken root - even so it was a
Eucharistic moment that helped them to see, and to understand, and to trust the
Christ in their midst.
It’s a common problem - this not seeing what’s right in
front of us. We’ve all done it in silly
ways, like forgetting to look for the easiest solution, like flicking the
drain-stop lever. But it can also be
easy to miss what’s right in front of us in bigger ways - in spiritual ways. Like those disciples who went before us, we,
too, can miss Christ in our encounters out in the world. We can miss recognizing Christ in our friends
and neighbors, but even more easily, we can miss Christ in the strangers we
pass on the street. We almost always
miss Christ in the people who scare us, the ones around whom we feel
threatened.
That’s one of the things that’s most important about our
Outreach ministries as a parish. We cook
and serve food for men at a homeless shelter in Paterson, not just because it’s
a nice thing to do, and not even just because they need it. But we do it because we need it, too. We need to
remember that those people, whose divergent life experiences help to draw the
lines between “us and them”; those people, who might intimidate us, or even
scare us - those people have the very faces and hearts of Christ. We need the ministry to help remind ourselves
of that.
It’s the same with the items we collect to support North
Porch - our ministry to needy mothers and young children. It’s the same with the food vouchers that you
purchase after church each Sunday - where we pool our money to support several
food pantries around the towns of our parish.
We do all of these things - and all of the many other ministries we
engage in - because there is great need among those people we’re helping. But we also do it, because we, ourselves have
great need. We need to practice seeing
Christ in the world. And even if we
never see the faces of the people we help, the very act of helping them helps us to remember that they’re there.
The Gospel says that once the disciples recognized Christ,
he opened their minds so that they could understand the scriptures. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it? To truly understand the scriptures?
Well, here’s the secret: when we do see Christ in the faces
of the people around us, in the faces of the people we’d usually ignore or
avoid - when we learn to truly see Christ, the message of the scriptures really
does start to come through. Our minds
are opened and we begin to see the truth.
I’m so proud of all of the ministries we do here at St.
David’s. The feeding and the giving and
the collecting. And also the praying and
even the playing - those are ministries that help us to see Christ, too. And they all come together to help us open
our eyes to the faces of Christ we might otherwise miss.
Remember that the next time you’re asked to give. Remember that the next time someone asks you
to spend time supporting one of these many ministries we offer. You’re giving, not just to the church, and
not just to the needy, and not even just to God. But you’re giving in all of those ways, and
even to yourself. You’re giving yourself
an opportunity to grow in faith and understanding. You’re giving yourself an opportunity to see
Christ in a new way - in a way that might have been right in front of you, but
that you’d missed. When the church is at
its best, that’s the way our ministry works.
Giving gives giving. Blessings
abound. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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