So Easter Sunday comes and goes. We delight for a reason to wear our best spring outfits and share a good meal. We sing our Easter hymns triumphantly. We celebrate the good news of an empty tomb, the satisfying victory of life over death.

Then we enter the season of Eastertide — these fifty days between Easter and Pentecost — and for this first Sunday after Easter, we actually finish reading the Easter story. We hear not about the morning of Easter as we heard last week, but about the evening of Easter when all the disciples huddled together behind locked doors and said to one another, “This is some freaky stuff! Either this situation is a divine intervention beyond any magnitude that we could have guessed, or it’s a political stunt by someone who’s trying to frame us and get us jailed or executed. Either way, we don’t feel safe going outside.”

There was a great UCC devotional this past week in which a pastor wrote (summarizing), “We love the Easter message that death has lost its sting, but the reality is that we’re more afraid of living a new life than we are afraid of death.” She went on to say, “It’s life that hurts, with all its uncertainty, intense feelings, learning curves throwing us for a loop.”

We welcome Easter morning with its glorious message of new life. Come Easter evening, come Eastertide, we easily withdraw into locked rooms alongside the disciples, worrying together, “Is this what new life looks like? I’m not sure if I like it! We thought we could just live, we didn’t actually want to change!”

We celebrate Easter Sunday like this: [arms wide]. The disciples experienced that first Easter much more like this: [arms crossed tight].

…That is, until Jesus suddenly appeared in the room.

There the disciples were, whispering and fretting, wondering from inside their locked room about the state of affairs outside their locked room: wondering what might be going on in Jerusalem, how the Roman authorities were reacting, what the priests in the temple were saying. (They were wishing that there was some way to text or tweet to those on the outside, but the smart phone hadn’t been invented yet, so maybe that’s why Thomas wasn’t with them! Maybe he was out in the city, covertly eavesdropping to find out if it was safe for the followers of Jesus.) But in the meantime, the disciples locked themselves in, locked out the world, and they curled up into spiritual knots…

…until Jesus appeared. Living, breathing Jesus! Wounded, resurrected Jesus showed up in their midst with his arms wide open to greet them. Then, the disciples uncurled from their fear and opened their arms to receive the breath of Jesus’ peace, the breath of God’s new life.

Thomas the Twin missed that moment, for which he gets a bad rap. Really, Thomas’ conversion from fear to embrace, from doubt to faith, paralleled the disciples’ conversion on that Easter evening … only Thomas’ experience came one week later! In the meantime, during that week the other disciples tried to convince Thomas of what they had seen and experienced.

But how could Thomas believe it? He had followed Jesus for those three years, listened to Jesus, ministered alongside Jesus, watched the crowds call out for Jesus, watched the crowds shout against Jesus, witnessed him dying on a cross, walked with Joseph of Arimathea to the place where Joseph laid Jesus’ body in a tomb. And when you have seen & experienced such definite things as Thomas did, it’s very difficult to see those things differently…

…until Jesus stood in front of him, scarred but alive, challenging Thomas to open his arms to something that he had never imagined.

Some of you know that I was in church work before I entered seminary. Years ago I was a Christian educator; at that same time, I was going through a divorce, which didn’t strike me as the ideal time for God to repurpose me. But God nudged within me and the Spirit kept waving at me through the affirmations of others who thought that I should enter seminary. Divorce had me here — [arms crossed tight] — so it took a lot of God showing up for me to open my arms to the vision of seminary.

Even so, I had conditions. I was willing to go to seminary, but God had better not call me to be a pastor. Three years of seminary later, and God nudged within me and the Spirit kept waving at me through the lives & words of others, and I was willing to consider being a pastor … but God had better not call me to Pennsylvania!

And Jesus said, “See my hands? See my sides? See how I keep doing what I will do, regardless of how you see the situation, regardless of how you think I should do what I do? Open your arms, Thomas, to something you’ve never imagined.”

This past October, I was attending a two-day conference during which a job opening in the national offices of the United Church of Christ was announced. And God nudged within me … and I said, “Don’t you dare!” And the Spirit waved at me through others … and I said, “No.”

And Jesus said again, “See my hands? See my sides? See how I keep doing what I will do, regardless of how you see the situation, regardless of how you think I should do what I do? Open your arms, Thomas, to something you’ve never imagined.”

To which Thomas finally responded in John 20:28, “My Lord and my God!”

To which I finally responded, “Shoot!”

Sometimes we recognize the work of God right in front of us. Sometimes we doubt the work of God right in front of us, until we touch it and breathe it in.

There is a significant similarity between doubt and faith: you can become stuck in both places. Thomas could have entrenched himself in his doubt, certain that his experiences of Jesus’ life & death were the limit of Jesus’ life & death. Likewise, faith can dig its heels into a position where our understanding of Jesus’ life & death remains our only understanding of Jesus’ life & death.

But at their best, doubt and faith work together to keep us mobile and attuned to God. Doubt compels faith forward, needles faith to deeper exploration of the wounds & the realities. Faith for its part keeps doubt from hiding away in the nighttime of despair, prevents doubt from becoming its own cynical authority.

Doubt draws us nearer to touch Jesus.

Faith closes our eyes to breathe in Jesus.

Doubt and faith in cooperation keep us from crossing our arms, both in fear of death and in fear of new life. Faith and doubt together provoke us to unfold our arms and to open our spirits not only on Easter morning, but also into Easter evening and through Eastertide.

Easter teaches us not to be afraid of death. The season of Eastertide teaches us not to be afraid of new life. And notice: the liturgical calendar gives us one day of Easter and fifty days of Eastertide … one day to quell our fears of death, fifty days to practice opening our arms to new life.

Come, with Thomas. Come with your doubts as well as your faith, with your scars and your struggles, with your fears and uncertainties. Come. The living, resurrected Christ is calling us to open our arms, to breathe in peace, to know that God is God, and to trust that God is not done.

Amen.

Sermon preached at Grace United Church of Christ, 4/7/13.