September 14, 2025 - Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Healing: Acceptance and Reframing

September 14, 2025  Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
John 20:24-29
“Healing: Acceptance and Reframing”
Douglas T. King

Every scar tells a story.  I have a scar on my thigh from a Boy Scout, bushwhacking camping trip that involved a very large buck knife. I remember being taken to a rural emergency room. While the doctor was sewing me up, he dropped his surgical tools on the floor.  Not a confidence booster for me.  In my memory he just picked up the tools off of the sketchy floor and kept right on sewing, but I am assuming the storyteller in me has added that for dramatic effect.  My mother had a scar on her nose from when her older siblings decided it would be fun to sit her on a garbage can lid and send her sledding down the stairs in their house.
 
I believe everyone has at least one good scar story.  Heck, even the Bible has a good scar story.  In the gospel of John we just heard of the risen Christ appearing to the disciples.  One might expect him to arrive in a blaze of radiating perfection.  After all he has demonstrated his divinity by defeating death.  Would he not return in a form that was beyond any hint of his prior mortal limitations?  But when he returns a second time, we learn a vital and essential element of who he is.  He still has evidence of the wounds of crucifixion.  He is still scarred.  He may be immortal.  He may be God.  But he has not lost the aftermath of the suffering he experienced in this life.

When Thomas asks to see his scars it is to ensure that the mortal Jesus he knew has not been lost in the midst of being resurrected.  He needs to know that the man with whom he journeyed down dusty roads, and grew hungry and tired beside still exists and still understands his pain.  Jesus Christ has not forgotten what it means to suffer and to move beyond suffering.  

Scars are valuable reminders of what we have survived and how we have continued to journey forward.  And thank God for that.  None of us journeys through this life without scars.  For many of us we carry them on our bodies.  For all of us, there are other kinds of scars, remnants of past hurts we carry in our hearts.  These are all part of the human experience, of living in the midst of our mortal limitations.
 
Today is the second sermon of the healing series Melissa and I are preaching.  On the cover of our bulletin this morning we have two bits of poetic verse, one from the poet, Robert Frost, and one from the songwriter and novelist, Leonard Cohen.  Both of these speak to our human condition and what comes along with it.  

Robert Frost wrote,
“A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth”

Frost, with his traditional economy of language, names the reality that if the price of the opportunity to live and breathe and experience the many gifts of existence is that we will also experience hurt and healing, it is well worth the cost.  

In his song, Anthem, Leonard Cohen goes beyond Frost’s acknowledgement of the inevitability of suffering to what it provides us beyond the gift of existence.  

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in”

There are several ways to hear this text.  I hear it in this way.  As mortals we are ever broken and imperfect in one way or another.  And in that imperfection grace is invited into our lives.  Our woundedness, and the scars left behind, give us the opportunity to recognize our need for God and God’s healing grace.  When we are reminded of our vulnerability we are invited to turn to the only one who can truly heal us.
 
In his book, Aflame, Pico Iyer notes that “the word blessing comes from the French blessure.  The word for wound.” This does not encourage us to seek out suffering.  What it does do is enlighten us that when we face the inevitable bumps and bruises that come with living, these are opportunities to grow in who we are and in our relationship with the divine.  Many of us remember the famous quote from Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

In our culture that loves to celebrate perfection, we could be embarrassed by our scars, by the events in our lives that have left their mark upon us.  But our scars are evidence that we have been damaged but not defeated.  We may not be the same person as before we were hurt but that does not mean we do not step forward beyond the point where we are hurt.  And in that stepping forward have the opportunity to be a better person, a stronger person, a more faithful person.  

We are called to be people of the resurrection.  The resurrection does not promise us that we will avoid all suffering.  It does not promise us that we will never die.  What it does promise us is that we are being inexorably led by God’s grace beyond our suffering, beyond death itself.  The risen Christ has set a path for us that leads us through suffering, through even death.  And the scars he bears are a reminder of the journey he has taken.  Christ’s scars tell a story of a love without limits that leads us to healing.  They are a reminder of what has been endured and what has healed or is in the process of being healed.  They are a reminder of the journey he was willing to walk out of devotion for us.
 
The writer Ashok Subramanian wrote, “There is no story without scars.”  As resurrection people the story our scars tell us is that we are following Jesus on the way to final victory.  Just as he carried those scars back to the eternal loving embrace of the divine, so shall we.
 
Cormac McCarthy, in his novel, All the Pretty Horses, writes, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”  Yes, and they do more than that.  They tell us of the reality of the future.  In knowing that Christ carried his scars beyond death and into everlasting life, our scars have the power to remind us of the reality that we too are destined for everlasting life.

We are a broken people.  It is the nature of our human limitations.  We carry scars from tripping and falling physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  But the lasting effects of all the ways we have been wounded in this life are not a source of shame for ourselves or for others.  They remind us to be gentle with ourselves and all those who cross our paths for they too carry their own scars.  They illuminate the struggles we have survived and continue to seek to move beyond.  They serve to show us that, one and all, we indeed need the wounded Christ whose grace continues to lead us forward in the midst of our imperfection.  That is how the light gets in.  Scars are the price of admission for our mortal existence and a sign to where we are being led.   And they are not too high a price to pay if they allow us to be the children of God.  

Thanks be to God.  Amen.