[Propertalk] Fwd: Sermon Resources for April 11

[Joe Parrish]

Sermons for Easter 2: 
     John 20:19-31 – “Thomas” 
     Revelation 1:4-8 – “The God Who Was, Who Is, and Who Is To Come” by Leonard Sweet
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John 20:19-31, the sermon titled "Thomas" 
 
If I were to mention the names of certain disciples to you and ask you to write down the first word that comes into your mind, it is unlikely you would come up with the same words. If I were to mention the name of Judas many of you would write down the word "betray" but not all of you. If I were to mention Simon Peter, some of you would write down the word "faith," but not all of you. If I were to mention the names of James and John, some of you would write down the phrase "Sons of Thunder," but not all of you. But when I mention the word Thomas, there is little question about the word most everyone would write down. It would be the word doubt. Indeed, so closely have we associated Thomas with this word, that we have coined a phrase to describe him: "Doubting Thomas."

You may be interested to know that in the first three gospels we are told absolutely nothing at all about Thomas. It is in John's Gospel that he emerges as a distinct personality, but even then there are only 155 words about him. There is not a lot about this disciple in the Bible but there is more than one description. 

When Jesus turned his face toward Jerusalem the disciples thought that it would be certain death for all of them. Surprisingly, it was Thomas who said: Then let us go so that we may die with him. It was a courageous statement, yet we don't remember him for that. We also fail to point out that in this story of Thomas' doubt we have the one place in the all the Gospels where the Divinity of Christ is bluntly and unequivocally stated. It is interesting, is it not, that the story that gives Thomas his infamous nickname, is the same story that has Thomas making an earth shattering confession of faith? Look at his confession, "My Lord, and my God." Not teacher. Not Lord. Not Messiah. But God! It is the only place where Jesus is called God without qualification of any kind. It is uttered with conviction as if Thomas was simply recognizing a fact, just as 2 + 2 = 4, and the sun is in the sky. You are my Lord and my God! These are certainly not the words of a doubter.

Unfortunately history has remembered him for this scene where the resurrected Christ made an appearance to the disciples in a home in Jerusalem. Thomas was not present and when he heard about the event he refused to believe it. Maybe he was the forerunner of modern day cynicism. Maybe the news simply sounded too good to be true. Thomas said: Unless I feel the nail prints in his hands I will not believe.

Now I cannot help but notice that Thomas has separated himself from the disciples and therefore, in his solitude, missed the resurrection appearance. I think that john is suggesting to us that Christ appears most often within the community of believers that we call the church, and when we separate ourselves from the church we take a chance on missing his unique presence.

But the story doesn't end here. The second time Jesus made his appearance Thomas was present with the disciples and this time he too witnessed the event. This time he believed. What can we learn from the life of Thomas?
 
1. Jesus did not blame him.
2. The most endearing things in life can never be proven.
3. We must move beyond doubt to faith.
 
The rest of this sermon following the outline above can be obtained by joining www.eSermons.com.
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Revelation 1, the sermon titled “The God Who Is, Who Was, and Who Is To Come” 
 
It has always bothered me that the symbol for Easter is a rodent. It is bad enough that the symbol for Pentecost is a dove, a fancy name for a white pigeon, or a trash bird. But the high and holy festival of Easter -- a rodent?
 
How's that for a beginning to what is sometimes known as "Low Sunday?"
 
Okay, okay. Technically, no longer are rabbits classified as rodents. As of 1912, rabbits and hares went from being classified in the order Rodentia to a new order, Lagomorpha, which also includes pikas. But up until 1912 rabbits were rodents.
 
Most kids have rodents as pets at some point in their lives. Hamster? Gerbil? It might as well be a rat or a mouse. [At this point if you can showcase and storyboard one or more cages of pet hamsters or gerbils, and even get their "owners" to tell something about them, so much the better.]
 
As a one-time parent of a child with a pet rodent, I can testify to a middle-of-the-night sound that used to drive me crazy until I got used to it. This is the constant squeak and rattle of the running wheel in the rodent's cage. With no place to expend all their energy, they frantically race their way to nowhere inside that spinning wheel.
 
Can you think of a kinder invention ever devised for our furry captives than this clear plastic exercise ball? Safely ensconced in the ball the critter can't actually "escape" to anywhere. But at least there is a feeling of making "progress" to somewhere. The human version of a rodent's running wheel is a treadmill, a Stairmaster, or some other stationary exercise machine. Our bodies go through the motions of running or climbing or rowing - but we don't actually go anywhere. Fancier versions of these machines now take pity on the poor human-gerbil-in-the-wheel.
 
Many now come with a video screen. You can pick what kind of beautiful scenery you are not actually running through. You cannot really run along the beach. You cannot really run in the mountains. You cannot really run beside a pristine lake. You can look at real pretty fakery, but you are still getting nowhere. Getting nowhere faster than you did yesterday. But still getting nowhere.
 
One of the things that makes human beings unique is we can simultaneously live in three dimensions of time. Of course, don't ask what "time" is. St. Augustine confessed about time that "I know well enough what it is, provided nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled." So don't ask me what time is.
 
But let's try to describe it from our text this morning. Raymond Tallis, in The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey around Your Head (Atlantic Books, 2008), puts it like this: "animals live their lives, humans lead theirs." Only humans, he says, have an explicit concept or idea of the past, the present and the future: which is both a tremendous advantage and a terrible burden…
 
The rest of Leonard Sweet's sermon can be obtained by joining www.Sermons.com
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The Reputation of a Lifetime

Thomas found a Lord who dealt with him where he was, in his present circumstances but led him beyond the passing into the permanent. I think it is criminal to call him, "Doubting Thomas," for one brief moment of his life. We should remember him for the permanent affirmation Jesus evoked from him.

I recall a story my grandmother told of a man in west Kentucky around 1900. He never touched a drop of "Demon Rum" except for one memorable occasion. He got roaring drunk, stole a horse and buggy, and raced down the main street of Arlington, Kentucky, all the while singing at the top of his lungs the song, "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!" For the rest of his life he was known as "Hot Time." One night and a reputation for a lifetime! It wasn't fair to call him "Hot Time" all his life, nor is it fair to keep on saying, "Doubting Thomas" for one request on one night.
 
John Ewing Roberts, The Thomas in Us
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No Evidence Necessary
 
When Thomas was first told about the meeting with Jesus that he had missed, he was understandably guarded. The notion that a dead man was back alive again was not exactly something you grabbed hold of and easily believed in a minute or two, not today and not 2,000 years ago, either. Modern scholars sometimes pet the disciples as such na bumpkins that they'd believe anything. Not so. They knew the dead stayed dead and this was not a fact you revised on a whim. So Thomas plays it safe but also then speculates aloud as to what it might take for him to believe this after all. As he talks, his rhetoric gets more and more exaggerated. "My friends, I'd have to see with my own eyes the nail holes in his hands. No, tell you what, I'd need to touch those holes with my own finger. Better yet, I'd want to stick my whole hand right into his side where the sword pierced him!" Thomas kept mounting up an ever-larger heap of evidence that he thought he'd need to believe. His words seemed calculated to induce some eye-rolling.
 
Of course, once he does meet Jesus, all that evaporates. To paraphrase a traditional aphorism, if you don't have faith, then there will never be evidence enough to convince you, and if you do have faith, no evidence is needed.
 
Without faith, no evidence is sufficient; with faith, no evidence is necessary.
 
Scott Hoezee, comments and observations on John 20:19-31

 
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A Year of Rehearsals
 
I had a good friend back in Memphis years ago, one of my fellow rock-and-roll musicians, who only attended church on Easter Sunday. I asked him once why he didn't go to church more often than that, and I will never forget his reply. He said, "Johnny, you know how I hate rehearsals. Why should I sit through 51 rehearsals? I want to see the real thing, and that's what happens on Easter Sunday!" An interesting point of view, isn't it?
Think about it. Easter is without a doubt "show time" for the church! Church choirs spend months in preparation for that one Sunday when we celebrate what is for Christians the central event in the history of the world, the resurrection of Jesus. The rest of the Sundays in the year can seem like rehearsals. But is that such a bad thing?

Johnny Dean, The Benefit of the Doubt, wwwSermons.com
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What's the Good Word?
 
A student from Korea was complaining about how difficult it is to learn the English language. He felt that American idioms were particularly difficult to comprehend. He said that he had studied English for nine years in preparation for attending the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. On his first day at the school, as he was walking across the campus, an American student casually greeted him with, "Hi, What's the good word?" The Korean boy stopped dead in his tracks. He thought to himself: "I don't know the good word! You would have thought that after nine years of studying English, someone would have told me what "the good word' was!"

Later, trying to solve this puzzle, he decided to turn the tables and ask an American, "What's the good word?" and listen to his reply. So, approaching a fellow student, he repeated, "Hi! What's the good word?" The quick response was, "Oh, not much. How about you?"

 
It was obvious that neither of these students knew what the good word was. It's a rather plastic greeting. But I can tell you the good word for today: Christ the Lord is risen. That's the Good Word. And because it is; it says a great deal about our lives.

 
Brett Blair and King Duncan, Collected Sermons, www.Sermons.com
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A New Shalom
 
When Jesus appeared to the disciples, his greeting was, "Peace be unto you." The Hebrew word shalom, for "peace," is a most comprehensive word, covering the full realm of relationships in daily life and expressing an ideal state of life. The word suggests the fullness of well-being and harmony untouched by ill fortune. The word as a blessing is a prayer for the best that God can give to enable a person to complete one's life with happiness and a natural death. If the concept of shalom became all too casual and light-hearted with no more significance than a passing greeting, Jesus came to give it new meaning. At Bethlehem God announced that peace would come through the gift of God's unique Son. The mission and ministry of our Lord made it quite clear that Jesus had come to introduce the rule of God and to order peace for the world.
 
Harry N. Huxhold, Which Way To Jesus?, CSS Publishing
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Peace Be With You...It Already Is!
 
Theologian Karl Barth once remarked that to say the old line from the creed, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church" does not mean that we believe in the church. It means rather to believe that God is present and at work in the church, that "in this assembly, the work of the Holy Spirit takes place. ... We do not believe in the Church: but we do believe that in this congregation the work of the Holy Spirit becomes an event."
 
Barth's words rang true for me some years ago, when I was invited by a church in a nearby town to be the worship leader at a special evening communion service. The church staff had planned this service to be educational as well as worshipful. The idea was that, first, the congregation would gather in the sanctuary and I would give a brief talk about the meanings of the Lord's Supper. Then, we would go into the fellowship hall and be seated around tables for the service itself.
 
At each table there would be the flour and other ingredients to form the dough for the communion loaves. The plan called for each table to prepare a loaf and, while the loaves baked in the ovens of the church kitchen, the people at each table were to engage in various exercises designed to get them talking about their experiences in the faith.
 
It was a good idea, but like many well-planned events, things looked better on the drawing board than they turned out in reality. There were problems. Children at many tables began to play in the baking ingredients, and white clouds of flour floated around the room coating everybody and everything. There were delays in the kitchen, and the communion bread baked with agonizing slowness. Some of the tables ran out of things to say; children grew weary and fussy; the room was filled with commotion and restlessness. The planners had dreamed of an event of excitement, innovation, peak learning, and moving worship. What happened was noise, exhaustion, and people making the best of a difficult situation. In other words, despite the rosy plans, it was the real church worshipping down there in the church basement.
 
Finally, the service ended, and, with no little relief, I was able to pronounce the benediction. "The peace of Christ be with you all," I said, and just as I did, a child's voice from somewhere in the room called out strong and true, "It already is."
 
Just that -- "It already is" -- but with those words the service was transformed into an event of joy and holy mystery. That small voice captured what the Gospel of John is trying to say. In the midst of a church that can claim nothing for itself, a church of noise, confusion, weariness, and even fear, the risen Christ comes to give peace. The peace of Christ be with you? Because the risen Christ comes to inhabit our empty places, then, as the child said, "It already is," and the church with nothing becomes the church with everything.
 
Thomas G. Long, Whispering The Lyrics, CSS Publishing
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Honey...It's Me
 
Perhaps you've heard the story of the Yugoslavian judge who was electrocuted when he reached up to turn on the light while standing in the bathtub. No, I'm not cruel or weird, let me tell you the rest of the story. This guy’s poor wife found his body sprawled on the bathroom floor. He was pronounced dead and was placed in a preparation room under a crypt in the town cemetery for twenty-four hours before burial.
 
Well, and this is the part I love, in the middle of the night, the judge came to. The judge looked around at his surroundings and suddenly realized where he was. He got pretty excited and rushed over to alert the guard. But instead of being any help, the guard was terrified and promptly ran off.
 
Fortunately, though, the guard returned with a friend, and they released the newly-revived judge. The judge's first thought was to phone his wife and reassure her that he really wasn't dead. Unfortunately, he got no farther than, "Honey... it's me," when his wife screamed and fainted.
 
So, he decided that the best course of action was to enlist some friends. He went to the houses of several friends; but because they all had heard the news from his distraught wife, they all doubted that he was really alive. They were all convinced he was a ghost.
Finally, in a last desperate effort, he contacted a friend in another city who hadn't heard about his death. And that person was able to convince his family and friends that the judge really was alive.
 
That story almost sounds like one of the Gospel writers could have written it, doesn't it? It sure sounds like the passage from John this morning.
 
Traditional Story. We have not been able to verify the veracity of this story.
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Just Because We Can't See It
 
A junior high school teacher was telling her class about evolution and how the way everything in the world was formed proved that God doesn't exist. She said, "Look out the window. You can't see God, can you?" The kids shook their heads. "Look around you in this room. You can't see God, can you?" The kids shook their heads. "Then our logical conclusion is that God doesn't exist, does He?" she asked at last, certain that she had won her audience over.
 
But one girl from the back of the classroom said, "Miss Smith, just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist….
 
 
The conclusion to this illustration and for many additional illustrations and sermons for Easter 2 can be accessed at www.Sermons.com.
 
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