The Risen Christ appeared to the disciples and said, “Peace be with you.” That’s what our texts tell us this morning.( I would need to be given some peace if that happened to me!)

And we are told that he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side. I’ve always been intrigued by that . . . that the resurrected Christ still bears the marks of his suffering. 

“But Thomas . . .. “ Thomas wasn’t there with them. Thomas didn’t see. And he doubted.

I frankly love it that Thomas doubted. I like what Frederick Buechner says about doubt: “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.”

Thomas wanted to touch the hands and touch the wound in his side, and until he did so, he said he would not believe.

Later, as it turned out, Christ offered him that opportunity. But he didn’t take it, or the text doesn’t tell us that he actually touched the wounds. He just seemed to recognize and believe in the risen Christ. He saw something different.

These words were written down close to a hundred years after the resurrection event. Written to a people who had never walked with the teacher Jesus. But those who had, all these years later, were moved by his teachings and changed by his enlightened views.

     Changed to live in very different ways than they had lived. . . ways that were just as revolutionary in that day as they would be in ours . . . as we read in Acts: “having all things in common.”

     I have always liked Thomas. Perhaps because I enjoy people who ask questions, who don’t swallow stuff too easily, without questioning things. I like doubters. There are things, lots of things that need to be doubted.

     This week is a full week as calendars go. For us, it is officially Low Sunday.  Yesterday was Earth Day. And this week we also mark Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance. 

     I heard a little bit of a speech in which  Al Gore was being the doubting Thomas on Earth Day. He was asking if there just might be things other than terrorism that could be a threat to our existence. Things that might be a threat to the environment to which we may want to pay some attention. We certainly do not have all things in common these days, but the earth, the air, and the water . . . those things we do have in common.

It troubles me when Christians do not take seriously their roles as stewards of this lovely planet God created. When people doubt our need to care for this, our home.

     It troubles me even more as a Christian when I hear people raise doubts about whether or not the Holocaust happened.

There is a difference between doubt and denial.

My family is very good at denial. But I am grateful that the Holocaust was not among the things my family denied. There are things in life, moments in time, when our world changes .Moments that divide the before and the after.  Events we remember so vividly. Like the day John Kennedy was shot. And 9/11.  For some, it was when Pearl Harbor was bombed. But  for me, it was when I learned about the Holocaust.

It was right around Easter.

     I was almost twelve; because the Easter Sunday I was confirmed in the Methodist Church was actually my twelfth birthday.

    I was attending confirmation classes, and being the overly responsible kid that I was, I was also reading the grown-ups Lenten study guides, and paying very close attention to the sermons. I loved church, even at an early age. I loved someone else’s grandmother that taught my Sunday school class and the warmth of that small bustling community filled with baby boom children and their young energetic parents.

    The community in which I lived in was all white, but there was a pretty diverse mix in terms of Christian denominations. There were mostly Methodists, but some Presbyterian and Lutheran families, a number of Catholic families, some Baptists, and even an Assembly of God family,  a sprinkling of Pentecostals. There were a few Jewish families, too.  One with a daughter right around my age. The Werner's. I found them exotic.

    We were all friends, for the most part, and there were some interesting discussions about faith, more out of youthful exuberance than anything else. Ignorance did nothing to keep us from being very sure of our stands. I enjoyed learning about other denominations, and other faiths, even if most of what I was learning was misguided.

Brenda Werner was one of my best friends. I loved visiting at her home and learning about the Jewish faith from her parents. I ate matzo ball soup for the first time at the Werner’s. And her mother loved sharing Jewish stories,  traditions,  and food with me.

Brenda was preparing for her Bat Mitzvah, and I was impressed with her studies. We compared notes on what we were learning. She was learning Hebrew. I was memorizing the books of the bible.( I thought I was being cheated. )

     I visited the synagogue with her a number of times, and was embraced in that community with the same kind of warmth I found in my own church.

    One day that spring she had invited me to do something on a day my grandparents were coming to visit, and I had to decline. She then asked me, rather wistfully, about my grandparents, and what it was like to have grandparents. Sad that she had no grandparents, I asked what happened to her grandparents and she told me they had all been killed in the Holocaust.

    I had never heard the word. Or it had never registered. My almost twelve-year-old mind struggled to imagine what kind of thing could kill all four grandparents at once. I knew of hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, and I had read of volcanoes, and earthquakes. I knew of car accidents and train and plane crashes. I had heard about epidemics.  But what, I asked, is a Holocaust?

    She told me . . . she told me about millions of Jews dying in concentration camps and being burned in ovens and what I saw in my mind’s eye was the faces of all those folks in her synagogue and I couldn’t fathom for the life of me why?  And I asked why and the answer was, ‘Because they were Jewish.’

That answer made no sense and so I asked ‘whom?’ Who would do such a thing? And she told me Nazis and I didn’t know what that meant, and I needed more information and I thought I might faint and when she said they were Christians  in Germany --  I saw the faces of the people in my congregation and then I couldn’t stand it anymore. ..  I couldn’t grasp the horror . . I was having a hard time breathing.

    My world was falling apart at the seams . . .reality was not what I had thought .  

    I couldn’t process all  that information. It was too much.

    I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I stared at her for a long, long time . . . and then I turned and ran out of her bedroom, out of her house, across her yard. . Down the street. I ran as fast as I could. .  Trying to outrun those stories, trying to outrun the destruction of my previous reality.

    I ran into my own house, and I must have been screaming because my mother came running from her housekeeping and put her arms around me and let me cry and by that time I had figured out that Brenda must have been lying. She must have made up that dreadful story about Christians killing Jews. I couldn’t understand why, but that was the only thing that made sense. And I blurted this all out to my mother, who held me and calmed me down. But after I was calm, my mother told me that Brenda had not been lying and that what she said happened had indeed happened and she went into her bedroom and she brought out a magazine. It must have been Life or Look or one of those, with pictures. She had it in her closet, the pictures were too much for small children, but she told me I needed to know, and that I was old enough to read the story and see the pictures.

    And there I was, like Thomas, not wanting to believe, but with seeing with my own eyes the wounds of the world, our world, in the faces of those who survived and the mounds of corpses of those who didn’t.

    I felt then, as I do now whenever I think of it . . . that it was like touching the wounds of the human soul.

    There was a certain loss of innocence that went along with that experience. Before that I simply could not believe that human beings were capable of such evil. I couldn’t believe that I was capable of such evil.

    Denial of what was going on let it go on.

Which is why it is important to have a Holocaust Remembrance Day. And which is why those of us who are Christian ought to be honoring that day in our churches. Why we are talking about it today.

Denial doesn’t make things go away. Denial makes things get worse.

Denial empowers evil.

I had hoped that the Holocaust would put an end to genocide. But that, sadly, has not been the case.

There have been other genocides. Most recently, in Rwanda.

I know most of you have seen the movie, Hotel Rwanda. If not, I recommend it. Though it is not an easy movie to view.

The questions that are raised in that movie, the questions that are always raised in these events, are:  How could we let that happen? Where was the rest of the world? Why didn’t someone do something?

I bring this up this morning because of a recent article I read in Sojourners magazine, about what is going on in Darfur. 

“It came from the late Senator Paul Simon. After reflecting on the genocide in Rwanda, he said: "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

That's a powerful statement. It means that we had the power to stop the genocide in Rwanda, but that too many of us chose not to act. It also means that we have the power now to stop the genocide in Darfur if we do choose to act.”

Sojourners is trying to gather 1 million signatures on postcards to be sent to President Bush.

I can be a doubting Thomas here, too. I can doubt that a letter to my representatives in Washington, DC can make a difference. I’ve written lots of letters and I am never sure they do much good. No one is asking me how to run the world!  My representatives must tire of hearing from me.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by all that is going on in the world.

And in my own life.

But if Easter means anything in my life, it means that Jesus’ teachings of love and care for all human beings still has life in it. Still has hope in it. And those teachings that so moved the early church to care deeply for one another’s physical needs, can move me to find a few stamps and write some letters to my representatives that may, just may save some lives.  At the very least, it can’t hurt anyone, and it certainly doesn’t require much of me. What it does do is cut through denial. I can doubt, but I can’t deny.

If Easter means anything, it must mean that we will stand against anti-Semitism and anti-anyone because we can’t let hatred and prejudice call the shots.

    I can’t think of a better way to spend Holocaust Remembrance Day than by taking action to prevent genocide somewhere else in the world.

    Because what we all have in common is our humanity. A gift, a blessing, something to be treasured, honored, and valuable to the world.

I am hoping that when my granddaughter is old enough to learn about the Holocaust, and when we tell her the truth about that dreadful time in human history, that I will also be able to tell her, that we did something to stop genocide in Darfur. And that we will keep standing up again and again to say no to genocide whenever  it would raise it’s ugly head. We stopped it.

    Without a doubt.