Despite the fact that pastors rather jadedly refer to the Sunday after Easter as “low Sunday,” I rather like this Sunday. Because on this Sunday, I get to worship with people who heard the Resurrection unashamedly proclaimed and then actually came back! We are not only Easter church-goers, we are Easter People.

But I also enjoy the chance to talk with people who are quite open about their skepticism, too. And I can tell you that in my travels, I don’t often find folks who doubt that Jesus of Nazareth existed. I don’t find a great many who disbelieve that he performed miracles. What most unbelieving people question is actually more disturbing: their doubt is aimed at you and me. It’s the Church that they doubt. They are unconvinced that the Church is the living witness to Christ among the nations. Church is OK for those who need it, sure, but to these it seems silly that the community of believers is the actual, living, breathing Body of Christ at large in the world. So they say things like “I’m a very spiritual person. I just don’t go to church. I used to go, but I got tired of the politicking, the money grubbing, the scandals, the infighting. I’m happier worshiping God in my own way.” Have you ever encountered someone like that? Let’s be honest - have you ever been someone like that? (I have.)

On Easter Sunday, a record 380 people here at St. Mark’s were called to belief in the Resurrection of Christ, requiring what I called imagination and boldness. Our focus was the Resurrection - but it may just be that that’s not as big a faith hurdle compared with our focus today: I propose we consider belief in the Church. The same Church that at times makes headlines for the worst of reasons, engages in politics, stewardship drives, and yes, occasional recreational infighting. The Church that millions of Americans (including thousands living within a few miles of here) find irrelevant and quite beyond belief.

Let’s consider the birth of the Church. John offers an account of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance to his disciples. It is still Easter Sunday, the same day Mary Magdalene brought the disciples the confounding news that she has encountered Jesus outside what was once his tomb. You might think that news like this would propel Peter and the others to run back to the tomb. But it doesn’t.

In what we might call an inauspicious beginning to what will be “Church,” the disciples have holed up in a shuttered, locked room. They are busy counting coins to see if they have enough bribe money to get away, busy arguing about the best escape route to avoid Roman soldiers, busy whispering “did you hear that?!” to each other. Their only concern, in the wake of Jesus’ death, is their own personal well-being. The fact that I can imagine myself doing precisely the same thing, faced with the same circumstances, doesn’t change the truth: they are not witnesses. They are not messengers of hope and joy. They have no intention to spread the news of Christ’s promise of life. What they are doing is their best to save their skins! But being hidden away in a building is being no Church at all.

Into this sealed room walks Jesus, bearing on his body the wounds of the cross. We don’t know how he got in. He simply walked in among them, very much alive and in the flesh, and then offered them exactly what he promised them three days before: peace. Peace be with you. Strange words from a man who bears on his body the evidence of the worst people can do. But he is there, and he even comes back for Thomas. Jesus is concerned about every last one - that’s the kind of shepherd he is.

Then Jesus does a very odd thing: he tells them he is sending them out, and he breathes on them. As a child, I thought that sounded rather impolite. He breathes on them? He came all the way back from the dead for that? If I were Jesus, I reasoned, I’d go back and stroll into the court of the high priest and his buddies: “Hey, fellas - remember me? You want to go another round, perhaps?” But Jesus walks among the apostles, gives them his word of peace, pronounces that he is sending them out, and breathes on them.

Here we break from the tale to note the significant fact that this Greek verb, “to breathe upon,” appears only one time in the entire New Testament, right here. But in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, the word also appears in two other places. In Ezekiel 37, when the prophet is surveying that field of dry, dead bones, he is told to prophesy, so that the Spirit of God will breathe upon the dead, and they will live. That is just what happens. “The headbone’s connected to the neckbone,” and before you know it, an army stands there, full of the life-breath of God. You see, the Hebrew word for breath, wind, and spirit is the same. The breath of God to the Hebrews is the life-giving Holy Spirit. When God breathes, life happens.

Of course, you’ve already heard the other mention of breathing on someone: when God molded the first human being, Adam, and blew breath into his lungs. The creation of life from ordinary stuff - mud. It doesn’t get any plainer than mud. Over the centuries, people have thought that this was a rather silly creation myth from a primitive people. But recently, astrophysicists have been telling us that we are made up of atoms, of matter from all over the universe. Those cells in your body - what’s in them was once part of the stars. We’re cosmic dust. But we’re also made in the image of God, Who has breathed the Spirit of life into our lungs. Maybe that story about mud and breath wasn’t so primitive after all.

Jesus breathes upon the disciples, in a kind of preliminary Pentecost. Or perhaps for John, this is Pentecost - the gift of the Holy Spirit to the believing community. Almighty God once stooped on the riverbank to breathe life into the first human: behind those barricaded doors, Jesus is the creative power of God at work again. He breathes the Spirit of Truth and Life into these faltering, frightened fellows who have clustered together. What we are seeing is a new beginning. What we are witnessing is a second chance at a new creation - Eden by invitation.

What do you think? Could Jesus create something new by merely breathing on it? Not likely. Only if he were God. To return to our original question (how believable is the Church?), consider this. Even the most jaded skeptic has trouble explaining how life could come about in the universe by dumb, random luck. Of the millions of galaxies out there, it boggles both mind and supercomputer to explain how in that sterile, cold, inert expanse, life could begin. Oh, but there may well have been water on Mars, we say. Great. Add that to dirt, you might even get mud. But life, and indeed the astonishing web of life we see around us - that’s quite another matter.

That God breathed life into our kind, we who are both Divine image and earthly clay, that’s a small leap of faith for millions of people. But that Jesus breathed life into the Church as a new creation, a new possibility for right relationship to the Creator, something lost virtually since the beginning, that is a bit much! Is the Church really all that...or just a bunch of wishful do-gooders, like the Kiwanis but with steeples?

You know, there are some best-selling authors who have suggested that the resurrected Jesus did not appear to the disciples in the locked room, or at any other time. Why? Because he was dead! And the Church, well, we just made up the rest, they say. Let us explore that thesis for a moment. Peter, sick with his three-fold denial, Philip, who boasted he was ready to die with Jesus but ran like all the others, John, sullen and ashamed in the shadowed room, the air growing thin and foul - how did they start believing in this Resurrection myth, do you suppose? “Hey fellows, I am just completely in denial about Jesus’ death. I’m in the second stage of grief, I guess.” “You know, Peter, I don’t feel as if he’s dead. It’s almost like he’s here with us!” “Wow, it is like he’s here with us! Let’s say he is and make it so by the power of positive thinking!” Would that get you out of a locked room into a hostile world, full of mallets and nails? I don’t think so. Now that stretches the bounds of credibility!

The evidence for the living Christ, at large and at work in the world, is, and always has been, his Church. Into the community of believers, Jesus breathed the life-giving Spirit that could open locked doors, level walls, and overcome mighty empires. You want to know what Jesus is like? Find yourself a faithful, problem-plagued, struggling church. Love your church. Breathe in the grace of God that is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. It’s a breath of fresh air in a stifling world. Breathe deep the Spirit in every hymn you sing, every Scripture you hear, every saint you greet. And then get out there, and exhale. Because being hidden away in a building is being no church at all! Breathe in. Breathe out.

(And peace be with you.)