"Do You See the Gorilla?"  Judy Skaggs, UPC

Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31

During the season of Easter, the 50 days following Easter Sunday, instead of Old Testament readings, the lectionary offers texts from the book of Acts. These texts give us a look into how the resurrection changed the disciples, into how life was for the early Christian community. Perhaps these readings are also to remind us that just because Easter Sunday is passed, we are not back to something like business as usual. No, Easter is not just a solitary event, but rather the beginning of a new way of looking at the world.

For these 50 days, the church lives into the reality of the resurrection, into what it means to be a community that is willing to witness to the dying and rising of Christ as a way of life.

Let us listen to how the Spirit is speaking to the church today.

Read Acts; John.

My guess is that associate pastors across the church are once again faced with this story of “doubting Thomas” as he has been named. The text from John is the Gospel lesson every year on the Sunday following Easter Sunday.

We usually say something like how grateful we are for old Thomas, that he is the doubter that hides somewhere in each of us – the questioner we are often afraid to be.

But today, I’d like to take us in a different direction. In order to do that, I’d like to share with you about the conference that San and I went to over Spring Break on the Emerging Church. I think one reason we went to the conference was that no one had ever been able to explain that term – the emerging or emergent church – and we wanted to understand this term that is being talked about so much these days.

One of the speakers that we heard, Brian McClaren, began his talk by having us look at a short video. He explained that in the video there would be people in black shirts throwing a ball back and forth, and people in white shirts throwing a ball. 1/3 of us were to count the number of times the blacked-shirted people passed the ball; 1/3 were to count the white-shirted passes; and the rest of us were to count every time the ball was passed. So, he showed the short video and then asked for numbers, and we all shouted back how many we had counted.

Then he said, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” Well, San and I looked at each other and shrugged. Then he showed the clip again, and sure enough – a guy in a gorilla suit walked through the middle of those tossing the ball, and most of us did not see it.

Then, Brain said that what we focus on determines what we miss.

His idea is that at the heart of the emerging church, there is a refocus, a fresh look, at who Jesus Christ is.

If you think about it, we have been taught to focus on certain things about Jesus – probably from childhood. But that means that there is a lot about Jesus that we may have missed.  Jesus did not come to proclaim and form a new religion, but rather to proclaim a new kingdom. Jesus taught disciples to pray for that kingdom, and we still pray that every Sunday – your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

So I thought we would look for the gorilla in the story of Doubting Thomas. What do we miss when we concentrate only on the theme of doubting and believing? What other theme might we look at?

I suggest that we look at the theme of the formation of community that is occurring when Jesus appears to the disciples after his resurrection. We can see what Jesus does in this story that might lead to community.

We discover that the disciples are gathered in fear, but Jesus comes to relieve their fear by offering them peace. How could they ever form a community, a gathering of followers who can still trust in their Master and trust in each other if they continue to live in fear? But notice that Jesus continues to offer peace. Remember that when Jesus was preparing them for his departure he says this, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled. And do not let them be afraid.”

Clearly this peace of Christ pushes the community from behind the closed doors of fear. For Jesus then sends them out, to be for the world just as he was sent to be for the world. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

The other community-forming thing that Jesus speaks of is forgiveness. Once again, we have to ask if we can truly live in community with others if we cannot bring ourselves to forgive. Forgiveness is probably the hardest thing that Jesus asks of us, and I know that forgiveness is not something we can do instantly, but if we are truly working toward being community, we must also be working toward forgiving each other.

Perhaps working toward being at peace, toward going out into the world as Christ did, working toward being more forgiving – all these community building acts – made the early church “one heart and soul,” as those verses from Acts described them. They trusted each other so much that they were willing to bring all their possessions and their wealth together so that it was held in common.

And this amazing verse is there, “there was no needy person among them.” Can we even conceive of a world or even a city or even a neighborhood where that is true? There was no needy person among them.

Well, at the conference, we heard from a young man who belongs to a community that is trying to live out of that Acts passage in a very literal way. His name is Shane Claiborne and he lives in Philadelphia in a community known as the Simple Way. His talk was extremely challenging, as you might guess.

One story that he told was about a group of homeless people, mostly mothers and children, in Philadelphia, who had moved into an abandoned church. The church had been empty for several years, but apparently when the dioceses heard that people were living there, they wanted to get them thrown out. Shane and his college friends heard about this and went to visit the people living in the church. They got to know them, worshipped with them, and did all they could to help. They hung a banner outside the church that read, “How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” The story was carried by the media, and so for several months, the dioceses left them alone.

Finally the dioceses called the fire marshal to get the fire department’s help in evicting the families. The building was, of course, not up to code, so they could ask them to leave – after all, it was not safe!

Shane and his friends all went down to the church the night before the fire marshal was supposed to come. They sang and prayed and ate together. About midnight there was a knock on the door. When they answered the knock, there were some firemen. Shane and the others said that they had until the next morning, but the firemen told them that they had misunderstood. They were there to help, in fact, they could loose their jobs by being there. So, they came in and installed fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, and exit signs to bring the building up to code. The next morning when the fire marshal arrived, he was amazed, and saw no reason to evict the people.

Shane went on to tell us about other ways that they acted as a community. Many of their neighbors do not have health insurance, so everyone who can, puts money in a fund and they have paid several million dollars in medical costs for those who could not pay themselves.

For Shane and his community, church is emerging in a way that is true to Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I don’t want to speak for San, but for me, all the speakers at the conference were very inspiring, and each had a different take on what is emerging now. But what I kept hearing was that the community is becoming more and more important as the post-modern, post - denomination, post-Christian (or whatever name you would put) church emerges.

We do not know yet what it will eventually look like. Perhaps it is a gorilla that is already in our midst, but our focus is somewhere else. But we do know that Christ continues to call us to be his body, to be the community that takes his good news, his peace, his forgiveness with us as we go out into the world. So let us live into that Easter community, as Acts says, “for great grace was upon them all!” Amen.