Last Sunday we gathered at an empty tomb and began building something together. TOGETHER was Easter’s word, the first word in our new post-Easter series What the Spirit Builds. This week we stay with the disciples in that same upper room, and the Spirit gives us a second word: OPEN.
The tomb was opened. Now the room needs to be opened too. That is the movement of Divine Mercy Sunday, and it is the movement of the entire season from here to Pentecost.
The Readings: A Room Full of Locked Doors
John’s Gospel places us one week after the resurrection. The disciples are still behind locked doors. They have heard the reports. Thomas has pushed back honestly. And Jesus comes again, walks through walls that fear has built, and stands among them a second time.
His first words have not changed: Peace be with you. He offers Thomas his wounds to touch. Thomas responds with the highest confession in the entire Gospel: My Lord and my God. And then Jesus names something that will carry all the way to Pentecost and beyond: blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
Therefore, he said to them again: Peace to you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them. And he said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit. —John 20:21-22 (CPDV)
The Acts reading shows us what happens when a community actually receives that breath and lets it work. They devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. They sold what they owned and gave to anyone who had need. They ate together with gladness. They held everything in common and their numbers grew daily. The locked room has become an open table.
First Peter grounds all of this theologically. We have been born anew into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The trials are real. The grief is real. But the hope is more permanent than any of it, because it rests not on circumstances but on the one who walked out of the tomb.
OPEN: This Week’s Word
The doors in John 20 are locked out of fear. That detail matters. Fear is the most reliable door-closer there is. It locks out the stranger, the foreigner, the person whose presence complicates our safety. It locks out the neighbor whose need might cost us something. It locks out the truth that would require us to change.
We are living in a political moment in the United States that is being run on the fuel of locked doors. Borders sealed. Families separated. Courts and processes that are supposed to be open becoming unavailable in practice to the most vulnerable. The message being sent to immigrant communities, to LGBTQIA+ people, to the poor, is consistent: there is no door open for you here.
The Spirit that blew through that upper room in Jerusalem opens doors. Not carelessly, not naively, but with the same deliberate mercy with which Jesus walked through a locked door to reach Thomas in his doubt. The community in Acts 2 did not wait until the world was safe before opening up. They opened because they had received the breath of the risen Christ, and that breath does not leave doors shut.
And all who believed were together, and they held all things in common. They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing to each, just as any had need. —Acts 2:44-45 (CPDV)
At Saint Francis Parish and Outreach, open doors are not a metaphor. They are a practice. Our doors are open to the immigrant neighbor living in fear in Augusta. They are open to the person the Church has turned away somewhere else. They are open to the doubter who, like Thomas, needs to say out loud what they cannot yet believe. The Spirit does not ask us to open doors we have the power to lock. The Spirit asks us to stop locking them.
What the Spirit Builds: The Series
We are walking together through nine words between Easter and Pentecost. Each week one word anchors our preaching and reflection, drawn from the lectionary and from the life we share as a parish. Here is the full arc:
TOGETHER April 5 — Easter Sunday
OPEN April 12 — Divine Mercy Sunday ◄ this week
WALK April 19
TEND April 26
BELONG May 3
SPEAK May 10
SENT May 17
WAIT May 24
BURN Pentecost
These are not abstract categories. They are descriptions of what the Spirit actually does in communities that say yes to resurrection. They are also, each of them, a quiet counter-testimony to what fear builds. Fear locks doors. The Spirit opens them. Fear isolates. The Spirit gathers. Fear silences. The Spirit speaks. We will follow that arc together all the way to Pentecost.
Come and see what the Spirit is building. We are glad the door is open and you are here.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
