How happy I am to see each of you this morning!  In one sense, I’m even happier to see you today, than the crowd of the curious, the corralled, and the cajoled last week.  Today it’s just us, the family.  Last week’s worship was wonderful.  I’m grateful to all who helped to make it so.  It was, as Easters should be, “over the top.”

But life is not always lived at the heights.  Our lives all eventually come back down to “normal.”  We live in the in-between places of a gradually warming springtime and our own hearts hoping for that very warmth.  We live in the normal spaces of the day-to-day.  So we gather today on what the church has come to call ‘Low Sunday.’  And as we do, I’m grateful to be with you because I think there is something special about the church on the Sunday after Easter and something about the people who come this Sunday as well.

I don’t know just how to describe the special bond that unites us as a church today.  Is it community?  Partly that, I suppose.  We come because we want to see the familiar regular Sunday faces, and we know that others will be looking to see us here.  Years ago, I said I would support the church with my presence.  And here I am.

Or are we here out of habit?  Going to church is what I do on a Sunday morning, and if I miss a Sunday something is just out of place for the rest of the week.  I have felt that, and I’ve heard others express something similar.  We’re here because we said we would be.  We’re here because this is what we do on a Sunday morning.

But, I wonder, is something else at stake as well?  An Episcopal priest and author, Fleming Rutledge, named for me the difference between last Sunday, Easter, and today, Low Sunday:  “Why is it,” she asks, “that so many people flock to the churches on Easter Day, … and then don’t return?  …  As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the reason people don’t come back on the Sunday after Easter is that they don’t really believe anything unusual has taken place.  Something nice, maybe; something cheerful and uplifting; but not an honest-to-God resurrection from the dead.”  (The Undoing of Death, page 300.)  What is the difference between today and last week?  Maybe it’s as simple as one word:  belief.

If so, we’re in the right place.  Not because believing is all that easy, for any of us or all of us.  We’re in the right place because, like the first disciples, we all need a bit of help in our believing.  This is nothing new.  John he evangelist, the author of the fourth book of the New Testament, tells his readers near the end of the book that he has written it with one purpose in mind:  that we may believe.  Hear it again, it was in our lesson for this morning:  “Now Jesus did many other sights in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  (John 20:30-31, New Revised Standard Version)   John’s gospel was meant to be read in the early “church,” but he knew that even they’d need a bit of help believing at times.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as he comes to the end of the stories of Jesus’ life, five different times in five verses, John uses some form of the verb, “believe.”

And notice:  John’s invitation to believing is not about pushing us toward a specific creed, as important as creeds are in helping us define who we are.  John isn’t recommending a doctrine, like the doctrine of the trinity, or redemption, or even salvation.  He’s not even giving his church a motto, slogan, or a mission statement, as helpful as each of those can be at times in our church.  Creeds, doctrines, mottoes, slogans, and mission statements have their place, of course. But John’s not inviting us in that direction.

Instead, in this little lesson for ‘Low Sunday,’ we are asked to go deeper into our experience of the risen Christ.  We’re invited simply to know that Jesus is the Christ, the messiah, and our Lord.  How do we know?  We know because, with Thomas, we face our doubts for ourselves, and we come to see the risen Christ for ourselves.

I suppose I’m recommending Easter belief as experience, not as assent to either the theory or the doctrine of resurrection.  I’m inviting us to remember that we believe in a risen Lord because we’ve known Christ’s presence sure, not because we’ve laid aside with the shroud that’s no longer needed on Easter afternoon all our doubts about life, death, and resurrection.

Experiences of resurrection aren’t exactly commonplace, but they form the core of our heart-felt faith.  John’s story for today begins in fear, not faith.  The disciples huddle together in a locked room, quietly trembling, hoping only that the forces that had come for Jesus were not now stalking them.  Against such possibility the doors were bolted.  But suddenly Jesus, not his murderers, stands with them.  As if he can read their minds, the risen Christ speaks first to calm their fears:  “Peace be with you.”  And then, after identifying himself by his wounds, he says it again:  “Peace be with you.”

The fears stirred up by a close encounter with death take that, I suppose:  the calming presence of the risen Christ – or at least a token of hope when death comes calling.  In that momentary experience, another preacher says, “A dead God is resurrected.   A dead faith is re-created.  A dead hope is born again.”  (Susan Andrews, “Jesus Appears,” The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999, and available online at www.religiononline.org or at  www.christiancentury.org)

What makes the difference, of course, is the disciples’ experience of Jesus.  One can live a long life on such an experience.  Thinking back on my own experiences, I realize what Ivey taught me, years ago, in one of my first churches.  One of the saints of a little church near the intra-coastal waterway and not far from the runway of the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, Ivey spent a lot of time loving the living and the dead.  She doted on her son, a local heavy equipment mechanic. And she also fussed over the little plot of ground in the church’s cemetery where her husband, Lefty, lay buried.

One day while I sat with her at her kitchen table, Ivey confided in me that she missed Lefty, still, after all the years since his death.  But she was confident that he was alright, she told me.  In fact she knew he was all right, because Lefty had told her himself.  Seeing my eyes grow big, she explained.  “One afternoon not long after Lefty died,” she said, “I was sitting right here at this table.  I missed him so much.  And I worried about him.  But then, as surely as I see you sitting here, now, I saw him standing right there, in the next room.  He didn’t say anything.  But he smiled at me, and I knew he was fine.  And I knew he wanted me to be fine, too.  And, ever since, I have been.” 

Like the disciples, Ivey was assured by a presence, or, rather, by her own experience of a presence.  At the time she told me about it, I wondered a bit about it.  But it seemed reasonable enough, in its own way.  And I’ve never forgotten it.  That conversation, I suppose, is a kind of resurrection experience for me.  And though Ivey now rests beside Lefty in that little lot in the church cemetery in Socastee, South Carolina, both she and he will live in my heart’s memory.

John hints that we all are a bit like Thomas, the doubter, we need our own experiences with the risen Lord.  Amy Hunter, a poet and lay leader in a church in Massachusetts, says that she relates to Thomas’ desire for proof – the proof of his own vital experience.  Then, Hunter says, “when Thomas gets it, he GETS it.  …  Thomas holds out for an experience of Jesus on his own terms until he finds his terms made foolish by the reality of seeing Jesus.   Thomas has to make his personal connection with Jesus for himself,” Hunter continues.  “Mary can’t experience the resurrected Jesus for the disciples, and the disciples can’t experience Jesus for Thomas.  It is faith, not doubt, that holds out for one’s own experience of Jesus.”  (Amy Hunter, “The Show-Me Disciple,” The Christian Century, March 13-20, 2000, and available at www.religiononline.org and at www.christiancentury.org.)

Why are we here on this Sunday after Easter?  Some might say:  “Because we’ve experienced the living presence of Christ himself.”  And others are here, like Thomas, looking for an experience of faith.  Either reason is fine, just fine. What matters is that we’re here together, and together we’ll share the experiences that God gives, today, and always.

Amen.