Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
April 19, 2009
John 20:29-31

A Tangible God

It has been a busy day in Jerusalem.  Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene had gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body – and found it empty, with just the linen wrappings lying where he had escaped them.  At her summons, Peter and the beloved disciple had come running and also found Jesus gone.  Later, while Mary remains crying at the tomb, Jesus appears to her and instructs her to go to the disciples with the news that he is alive. 

And that evening, Jesus comes to the disciples himself, in spite of their hidden address and locked doors, appearing miraculously in the house with the words, “Peace be with you,” just as we greeted each other a few minutes ago.  Jesus commissions them to be witnesses to the love of God, sending them into the world, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

All except for Thomas who is not there.  When the disciples share this unbelievable news, Thomas – of course – doesn’t believe it!  This is where the expression “doubting Thomas” comes from.

And, now, it’s a week later:  Jesus appears again with the greeting, “Peace be with you” – and he challenges Thomas who is present this time.  “Put your finger here and see my hands.  Reach out your hand and put it in my side.  Do not doubt but believe.”  

A tangible God, one we can reach out and touch!  How can we do that?

This Sunday, Earth Day Sunday, we celebrate that we can reach out and touch our God in nature.  Our responsibility for Creation is grounded within the Christian tradition.  As early as the second century, Irenaeus wrote, “The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.”  Centuries later Martin Luther proclaimed, “God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.” And, “The power of God is present at all places, even in the tiniest tree leaf.” 

And Calvin claimed that all of Creation praises the Creator when he said: 

“For the little singing birds sang of God,

the animals acclaimed him, the elements feared

and the mountains resounded with him,

the river and springs threw glances toward him,

the grasses and the flowers smiled.”

So today is an appropriate day to break ground for a Peace Garden – evidence of a tangible God.  We will join the Creator in carving out a patch of grass in a circle of trees with a bench or two and some flowers and shrubs – and in their midst a Peace Pole with the reminder and the challenge, for us and for the neighborhood, “May peace prevail on earth.”

Truly, we need to work on peace.  Gun sales are up across the country.  Shootings between gangs in Rhode Island are becoming every-week occurrences.  Not to mention the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and North Korea’s military tests. 

And, let us be reminded, we need to work on the permanent harm we are imposing on our planet –

with pesticides that remain in the soil for generations, for plastics that will last for millennia, for more carbon than our oceans can recycle for eons.  Surely harmony of our ecosystems is broken; nature cannot regenerate fast enough to offset the damage we have done to our planet.  Many scientists call this “the planet’s latest great extinction.”1  Cleaning up our grounds this afternoon is important, yes, and I have my sneakers in the car, but our world is in bigger trouble than we can fix with a rake and a shovel.  This we need to acknowledge on Earth Day Sunday.  “As the saying goes, we don’t get out of this life alive – and neither will the Earth.”2

Contemporary poet Mary Oliver, lover of nature, speaks of the sacredness of life in this new poem, evidence of a tangible God:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the mouth of lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.3

For me, too, a tangible God is always found in baptism.  Perhaps it’s the presence of a precious child, conceived and born and raised in love, surrounded by a loving family and congregation, and welcomed into the family of the church with the splashing of the water, the two together, tangible evidence of the divine. 

I love the bright, curious faces of the children who come forward for the Sermon in the Sack.  I love the squeaks of the babies in their infant seats in the pews.  I love to see parents rocking fussy ones in the back.  God is present in all of our children, and we need to seek ways to nurture the divine spark in them with new programming as they grow older.  Just as Jesus was tangible to the disciples – even to Thomas – after the resurrection, God is tangible to us in our families. 

This poem written by UCC minister Maren Tirabassi captures the tangible God of relationships between grandparents and grandchildren:

We understand children – we know them better

for having come to an age when they matter more and matter less to us.

We know how precious it is to hold any child.

We care about unrelated children –

caroling on our doorsteps, offering to shovel our snow,

making noise and fuss in our nursing homes,

and those hurt or abandoned,

lost or refugeed on our televisions.

And, ah, grandchildren.

We weekend them with more pleasure and are content to send them home.

We can push a swing, play Go Fish, tell stories, and eat ice cream longer than their parents.

We need naps, too.

We don’t mind rock music in small doses, orange hair, peculiar friends

wearing chains and pierced in amazing places.

We will always bake cookies or buy cookies and sit at a kitchen table

and just listen and listen, and not judge.

We understand Christmas—not the children’s holiday

but the moment of hope that we interpret because the Holy Spirit

nest in our gray hair and wrinkles, replacement joints,

eyes with a trace of glaucoma, and wise old hands.

Each child is holy;

all parents need to be blessed

for the wonder and crosses in their future, and,

because we hear salvation in every newborn cry,

and recognize the birth of God in all toddlers and teenagers,

we can welcome in peace the someday-coming of our own death.4

But we don’t have to make God tangible by planting a garden or baptizing a baby.  We can make God tangible by building community: 

Louise’s son Dutch, here from Texas, told me the story this week of his little country church northwest of San Antonio, a story about how they came to make God tangible to some lonely boys who had exhausted all of their support systems.  The boys had been sentenced to the 3H Youth Ranch by the Texas court system; it’s the boys last chance of rehabilitation, their last chance to escape a life of crime and imprisonment.  The ranch is out in the hill country, in the middle of nowhere, away from trouble, away from the situations that led them astray in the first place. 

It seems Dutch’s minister – just a plain, down-to-earth caring pastor not especially well-educated but intent on ministering to his flock – began visiting the ranch on Sunday afternoons.  After a time, the ranch agreed to transport the older boys to church on Sunday mornings.  The men in the congregation began making breakfast for the boys on those Sundays and some of them would sit down with the boys and talk. 

The women in the congregation discovered that the boys had nothing of their own, so they made a quilt for each of them which they presented when each was baptized.  Home-cooked food, someone to listen without judgment, hand-made quilts stitched with love – all these gifts, all given for those young men who had never really been loved before – made the presence of God real for them.    

We read in the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus says, “Truly just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  When we reach out in loving kindness to a needy world, we make God’s presence in the world real, we real-ize God’s presence. 

“Peace be with you,” Jesus greets the disciples, and he shows them the nail holes in his hands and hikes up his shirt to show where the spear entered his side.  We worship a God who commissions us to make God’s love tangible in the world – wounds and all.  “How are you?” people have been saying to me all week.  “I’m fine,” I reply – although I can’t stop coughing.  How are you? someone may ask and you respond, “I’m fine!”  Yet you have been laid off from work, are waiting for the results of the CAT scan, are waking at night with flash backs, are losing your home, are facing surgery.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says, even though our earth is suffering, our lives are not perfect, our communities are in conflict.  Jesus comes into our midst, through the locked doors of our hearts, and says, “Reach out and touch me – and believe.”

Amen.

1. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007, p. 346.
2. Ibid, p. 345.
3. Mysteries, Yes.
4. Maren Tirabassi, An Improbable Gift of Blessing, “Prayer with Grandparents and Other Aged Blessers,” 1998, p. 23.