Creekside Church Sermon of April 6, 1997 "Signed With a Scar" John 20:19-31	Rev. David Bibbee
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Once surgery is over, the anesthetic is worn off, and the patient is on the way to recovery, there often comes a very personal, very vulnerable moment when they drop their guard and ask the pastor, "Do you want to see my incision?" It doesn't matter if I want to or not. Before I can respond, there it is. I remember in the early years that I sometimes got weak knees and had to swallow hard. I used to think they were showing off. But now I realize that those scars become identifying marks that attest to what a person has been through.

It was Easter evening. Jesus was alive and Mary Magdalene told the disciples so, but they remained in hiding behind a bolted door. Then Jesus somehow slipped into the room of distraught, now terrified disciples. Like Mary, they didn't recognize him at first. It wasn't until he showed his hands and side that they knew him. The wounds were Jesus' identifying mark. The wonder of the resurrection alone wasn't convincing enough...it took the scars to convince them.

Thomas wasn't there at the time. When they told him what had happened, he didn't believe it. The Missouri side of Thomas, the "you'll have to show me" side, came out. "I've got to put my finger in the nail holes before I'll believe." The fact that his friends were with Jesus and yet remained behind locked doors didn't help the claim, either. But a week later Jesus appeared again. He bid them "Peace." and held out his hands to Thomas. "Put your finger here, Thomas. Don't doubt. Believe." Thomas didn't have to touch. He saw the scars and he knew.

I find it compelling to note that Jesus' resurrected presence wasn't totally convincing. It is more than curious that the wounds inflicted before Jesus' death, became the marks he carried after his resurrection. This week I received an ad from a company selling Christian T-shirts with eye catching art and messages. One had the words before and after on the front. The before picture was of a beaten, bruised, bloody Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. The after was a radiant, resurrected Jesus, situated on a cloud with hands outstretched and nary a nick upon them. Not a sign of what he had gone through.

The gospels want to tell us something about Jesus. That the fact that the resurrected Jesus bore scars, not only identifies him as the Christ. They are also the source of our healing. And what's more, the scars we carry can become a source of healing for others.

The cross wasn't a mere formality on the way to the resurrection. Jesus was flesh and blood. He knew the heartaches and longings we know. He felt the pain of rejection. He died as we all will die. It didn't just SEEM so. He had the scars to prove it, and by the wounds we are healed. Because he went before us, we can go through it too.

I chanced upon a verse which helps get at the truth I want to share. It goes: "We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong less to what flatters than to what scars." We can put it another way--what has a more decisive impact upon your life...a degree earned, a title conferred, an award bestowed, or an experience that cut to the quick, or an unexpected upheaval that changed your life in an instant?

The good times are to be savored, but the wounds are what shape us. There is more to be learned from someone who bears the scars of life than from one who has coasted through unscathed. On Good Friday, Dick Dunn delivered a powerful sermon. Dick is the chaplain at Elkhart General. He took us back to the day he cried out to God to deliver him from his addiction to alcohol and drugs, and how from that time of deep darkness, God led him to become a minister to addicted persons. As Dick shared his story of how inspiration from the crucified Christ had healed him, sharing the wounds from his own life drew the congregation to him.

Conventional thinking says it takes someone who is healthy and whole to help someone who is sick. Yet Christianity claims the opposite...that it is precisely in our weakest, most wounded times that we are open to the power that is beyond us. I want you to think for a moment of someone whose brokenness helped make you a more whole person. Let me see if I can help by sharing something written by a nurse named Donna from my first church. She titled it, "Vision."

Two girls walked down the street, stop, look a moment and go on their way with a giggle as have all the others. He's just an old man. Probably just a pan handling con artist. But who cares? He's just a blind old man. What use could he possibly be to sighted people. He doesn't seem to mind how cold the weather or how little his cup holds. He's there each day, silently holding out his cup for any who will take a pencil and donate. I walk silently up to him. As I walk I gaze into his beautiful, sightless eyes and see many things. Behind the softness I see the hurt and rejection others fail to recognize.

No words pass between us, yet strangely enough he knows. He knows I gaze upon him and as if by a miracle, his eyes meet mine. As the coins fall into the cup, he touches me and says, "Bless you." I walk away and wonder just who is helping whom and who is really blind.

When they saw the scars, they knew it was Jesus. Only he would take love to that extreme and show that we are most like him not in what flatters, but through what scars. Did anyone come to mind whose wounds have helped heal you? I think about Paul Robinson. Paul was President at Bethany Seminary for twenty-five years, and it was perhaps the best preacher the Brethren produced in this century. I was blessed to have worked for one year on an internship with Paul. I think I learned the most and was inspired most near the end of that year...a time when Paul had been brought low. His best sermons did not come as he stood strong, tall, and confident in the pulpit, but when he preached reflectively and humbly from a wheelchair. Diabetic neuropathy rendered his legs useless. "This is not what I had planned for the rest of my life," he preached. "But Christ has promised to go with us through every dark valley because he went through it himself. He knows the pain, the sorrows, and the sufferings we must bear, and because he went through it, he'll see us through it too."

I will always remember those words. When God raised Jesus, the scars remained. That's how we know him. As we sang in our last hymn, "Rich wounds yet visible above, in beauty glorified." Every week we bring our own wounds to church. Some are visible. Many are not, but we all bring them. We do not go out of our way looking for trouble. Live long enough and trouble will find you, and mark you. Or as someone put it, "Time wounds all heels." Sometimes we are able to say where it hurts to whoever will listen, but sometimes, like the disciples, we huddle behind a bolted door, coping as best we can on our own.

Our faith doesn't deny the pain. We don't even say that it's Gods will for there to be pain in our lives. We do say that God uses the occasion of pain to work for a larger purpose in the lives of those who love him, and who don't give into despair. I discovered some wise words which underscore what I'm trying to say:

We are never more alive to life than when it hurts;
Never more aware of our powerlessness to save ourselves...

Never more aware of at least the possibility of a power beyond
ourselves to save us and heal us, if we only open ourselves to it.

When life never seemed so bleak, when the night never seemed so long or dark, he came to them. Jesus Christ came to the disciples and with scars which for them was the sign by which they would be healed and be strong.

I have learned that when I am wounded and weak, I must seek people who are strong and spiritually attuned and who got that way by being broken themselves. They have the scars to prove it. They show the simple truth that a person's life, like a bone, can grow stronger precisely at the place where it is broken.

It's incredible, isn't it, to realize that those the world considers weak and could care less about; the washed up, the down and out, the broken, the failures, the ones who go through life with a limp--they are the ones in whom Jesus is at work incognito to bring others to hope and healing. Henri Nouwen called them the "wounded healers". Who can help except someone who has been in the same place and known the same pain, or as my recovering alcoholic friend says it, "I can only share my sufferings with someone else who has suffered." "But how do you know they've suffered?" I ask. "It's in their eyes. I can't explain it...but there's a certain look, and you know."

It was a look that Thomas recognized...not at first, but then the hands gave it away. We are never more alive than when we hurt, and maybe never more able to recognize how he comes. And with that, let me offer you this parable:

It was raining in the forest. It had been raining for days, and all the birds and animals were drenched. The eagle, too, was drenched, and his spirits dampened as well, for his mate lay with a chill, a victim of the constant rain. There was no way to keep her dry, and the eagle looked on with despair as her life slowly drained away. His tears mingled with the rain when she died.

It was raining in the forest. The eagle could not stand the rain. It brought back memories too painful for him to bear. He rose up from the trees, hoping in flight to escape his thoughts. Higher and higher he climbed until finally he broke through the dark clouds into the dazzling sunlight that lay beyond. As the warm sun dried his wings, he suddenly realized that the healing sun had been there all the time his mate had needed it. The pain of knowledge learned too late was more than he could stand, and there were tears for the sun to dry.

It was raining in the forest. It had been raining for days and all the birds and animals were drenched. The rabbit, too, was drenched, and her spirits dampened as well, for her child lay with a chill, a victim of the constant rain. She poured out her sad tale to all who would listen, but the other creatures, too, were victims of rain, and none could help.

An eagle happened by, and the rabbit began to tell her tale to him. But she had barely started speaking when the eagle suddenly lifted the rabbits dying child unto his wings and began to circle up into the dark and stormy clouds on an errand he did not take time to explain.

And he who suffered and has the scars to prove it, he comes to you, that you will be born on healing wings and believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. (John 20: 31)

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