The Scripture reading & sermon begins at 18:05.
This morning I was thrilled to be back with the St Luke’s community in Bellevue. I had the gift of preaching on the first Sunday after Easter—a day when the Church turns to the deeply human and profoundly hopeful story of Thomas.
Often remembered for his doubt, Thomas is, perhaps more truthfully, the disciple who longs for an embodied faith. He doesn’t settle for secondhand resurrection. He wants to see. To touch. To encounter the risen Christ in his own body, in his own experience. And remarkably, Jesus meets him there—not with rebuke, but with wounds.
In this sermon, I explore how the resurrected Jesus does not erase his wounds but carries them forward as signs of love, solidarity, and truth. In a world that often rushes past pain or hides it away, this story invites us to consider another way: that healing, peace, and even faith itself may come not by avoiding wounds, but by attending to them—together.
Consider, who do you let touch your wounds? Not many. It hurts to have one’s wounds touched. The only people we let touch our wounds are those committed to our healing.
What might it mean for us, in our own places and communities, to be people who do not deny suffering but hold it with honesty and hope? What might it look like to participate in the kind of peace Jesus offers—a peace spoken into fear, breathed into locked rooms, and grounded in scarred hands?
This reflection is an invitation to move beyond easy certainty and into a deeper, more relational trust in the living Christ—who still meets us, even now, in the particularity of our lives.
Peace, dwight
