HERE WE GO

1. Eleven Is Not Twelve, and Thomas Needs An Attitude Adjustment Last week, on Easter Sunday, Latah Valley hosted approximately 80 people at our 6:30 sunrise service and exactly 100 people at 10 o’clock. We are genuinely enthused and grateful for each person who joined us for worship then. And this morning we are equally grateful. But I have to tell you something: it might as well have been “eleven.” “Eleven” is the number that’s provided in Matthew 28:16. And “eleven” is the two-digit symbol that represents who’s left among the original disciples of Jesus. “Eleven,” therefore, is not twelve and consequently presents a sad reminder that Judas Iscariot is not present. Now, you and I may not have liked Judas anyway. We may have been glad to see him exit the stage. But, if by choosing the original twelve peasant fishermen, not to mention the assorted zealots and random tax collector—if by choosing them in the first place—Jesus had intended to re-enact or to re-configure the twelve tribes of Israel (that are mentioned in Genesis 49:28 and Exodus 24:4), what we have now is incomplete. Eleven is incomplete. Eleven is not finished yet. And what’s even more startling is that among the eleven who are left to greet and to meet the resurrected Jesus, Matthew 28 says that “some doubted.” So, let’s re-cap. At this very crucial and monumental moment in human history, we not only do not have our full complement of disciples, but among the crowd are those who are not even fully on-board. What is this about? In the last church that we helped start, there happened to be a guy, named Tom. Tom, of course, was unrelated to the Thomas who is mentioned in John 20. But listen to what Tom said and did. During one of our first Vacation Bible School programs, we were in a tent in the middle of an open field, and we were short of craft supplies. So, when Tom’s group of children needed the crayons, he marched over to one of the other adult volunteers and in front of the five year old kids, he said, “We need these now, and so I’m taking ‘em.” Now, in weird times of miscommunication, my tendency has always been to confront. I confront and clarify what I perceive to be the problem attitude and let the chips fall where they may. But, you see, this morning I am moved to hear what Jesus says to that incomplete group of eleven disciples, including Thomas. He says, Go! He tells them, All authority has been given to me… therefore, go! And, you see, as they go and as those unruly Galileans get going, teaching and baptizing their way into the world, their message reaches all the way to here. 2. Start Here And Hear To Start Here is the place to start. And I mean that in two ways: first, we have to acknowledge the geographical presence of people here; and second, we have to let them in. We have to hear what the local people in our community have to say. Dalton Conley has a book out, called Elsewhere USA, and the premise of the book is that we’ve created a society in which people are always elsewhere. Either they e-mail or twitter or call people who are somewhere else, or they physically will get the car, hop on the plane and go there. Elsewhere is always better than here, and consequently the people who are immediately surrounding us become a means for us to get somewhere else. Now, let me offer this brief theological leap. If, in fact, Jesus has been raised from the dead, and if in fact he showed up in a specific place at a specific time in history, then each and every place where he is proclaimed—each and every place—becomes holy. And if a place becomes holy in Christ, we have to pay attention to it. Thomas Merton describes a moment when he stood at the corner of Fourth and Walnut streets in Louisville, KY. Walnut has since been re-named, Muhammad Ali Street. But in 1959, he writes, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved these people, that they were mine and I theirs… It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation… Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more greed” (Conjectures Of A Bystander, p. 158). You see, it all starts here. And for us today HERE is the meadow, next to a creek, next to a highway, running north and south, around which are scattered houses and businesses. Who are the men, women and children who come in and out of these buildings? Today, we declare that first and foremost, they are loved by God. And that nothing they say or do can expunge that identity from them. Plus, we are incomplete without them. You and I, by the grace of God, are on a journey of discovery. The purpose of the journey will be to discover who we really are, and the people of this place will help us. “Christ plays in ten thousand places/lovely in limbs and in the features of faces.” Gerald Manley Hopkins writes these poetic words as a way of describing the experience of HERE, but also the movement to THERE. 3. Go There While Remembering Here Jesus, as you recall, has this bizarre encounter with Thomas. Thomas had doubted, and so when Jesus returned he instructed him to put his finger in the wounds that had been inflicted upon him in his death. Those wounds are still there. But then, listen to what Jesus says next: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe…” A missionary to Kenya, named Vincent Donovan, went to live among the Maasai people. He went there to tell them the story of the crucified and resurrected Jesus, but what he discovered as he traveled from the United States to east Africa is that he and the Maasai are changed together. After years of preaching and teaching with hardly any tangible results or real converts, an elder of the tribe told Donovan that they did not search for him as a priest to come to them. The priest actually followed them into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where their cattle were, into the hills where they took their cattle for water, into their villages and into their homes. Donovan told them about God and how the Massai must search for him. But then, something strange happened. The elder said that it was not the Maasai who had searched for God, but God who had searched for the Maasai. Donovan took that conversation to heart. And later he met up with a young warrior who had spent three lonely days perched at the top of a volcanic mountain where the lava simmered. The young warrior, named Sikii, had gone out to that remote place to see God, but nothing happened. Dejected he returned to the village as if coming home empty-handed from a hunt. He had nothing to show and nothing to tell his people. And that’s when Donovan, inspired by his earlier conversation, spoke up. He said, “you have been searched for Engai… All this time he has been searching for you. He has hungered for you… We are not the lion looking for God. God is the lion looking for us. Believe me, the lion is God (p. 239). Now, I’m telling you this story about Vincent Donovan and the Maasai because of what I believe God is doing with Latah Valley. Today—with the eleven disciples from Galilee we have heard the message. That message, being heard by us here, must be lived out with the people in this specific area. But then, as we live out the gospel here, God also sends us there, and there and there.