I was sitting here last Sunday - on Easter - and I was looking out over the tremendous crowds of people - you know, between the sunrise, 8 o'clock and 10:00 o'clock services more than 900 people worshiped with us last week - and I was thinking about how wonderful this is! How exciting that we share in a ministry that has the potential to reach so many people! And how blessed we are to have the resources we do - this beautiful sanctuary, fantastic musicians and choirs, and a truly exciting future as the Lord helps us put into tangible form a sacred dream for the new Christian Life Center.

What an amazing thing to be part of a church like this, with talented people from all over the world, and tremendous resources for impacting our world in Jesus' name! Someone recently asked me, "What more could you ever want in a church?" Well, having most recently served a church that had a couple of bowling alleys located in it, I can think of ONE thing! But on the whole, you have to admit, we are a blessed congregation.

Not so that other church on Easter Sunday.

You know the one I'm talking about. That tiny, broken-down, poor-excuse-for-a-church hidden away deep in the bowels of the city. No organ, no piano, no choir. Not even a sign out in front with the minister's name on it. Of course, that really doesn't matter since the church doesn't even have a minister and they have absolutely no interest in letting people know the church is there!

It's the most miserable conglomeration of Christians ever to take upon itself the name "church". Its a picture of the church at its very worst, and I'm sure none of us fine respectable Christian people would ever even give a moment's thought to joining it.

It's the church John writes about in today's reading from the 20^th chapter of the Gospel.

Now, these are the disciples of Jesus, mind you! They've been with Jesus for three years. Heard the word direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Saw firsthand the signs, and the miracles, and the mighty works. These are the people who Jesus has been preparing to take over his work once he's gone. Over and over, he's taught them about loving each other, about being strong in the faith, about standing up for the right, about being witnesses to the Lord.

But here they are, on Easter Sunday, cowering in the dark like a bunch of scared little rats in a roomful of hungry cats.

Some church!

The lights are out! The doors are locked! The members are grumbling with each other! In fact, the loudest conversation of all in that church on Easter Day - recorded for posterity by one who was there - is not even about the reasons they ought to have faith, but about reasons to doubt the resurrection of Jesus.

How different from our church. No beautiful sanctuary. No pulpit. No choir. Even more sadly, there is no vision, no mission, no conviction, no nothing.

I wish we could help these poor folks of the First Christian Church of Jerusalem. Maybe, if there was such a thing as a Time Machine, we could warp back through history and tell them how it was done here at Tellico. Maybe they could find a local Yacht Club that would lend them space to get started! Maybe they could run a people search on the internet and locate one of the ancestors of Carl Burke to become their founding pastor.

Better still, maybe we could give them a copy of Kennon Callahan's great book, "Ten Keys To An Effective Church". Or maybe just a synopsis of the results of many modern day studies that reveal the top five ingredients that make a great church great. You know what they are: great friendliness, great preaching, great music, a great kids' program, and, of course, acres and acres of free parking.

Unfortunately, Time Machines are not yet perfected.

So here's a sad story about a church that has absolutely nothing going for it.

Well, except for one thing. Did you catch it in the story?

That first Easter night, the risen Jesus somehow passes through that locked door and stands among them.

"Peace be with you," Jesus says.

And perhaps that wonderful intrusion by the living Christ is as close as any church ever gets to truly being a church.

You know, one of the most difficult lessons I've had to learn over my years in ministry is that sometimes, all our planning, all our organizing, all our attempts to quantify and manage the life of the church can easily become the modern equivalent to the disciples' locked doors. Oh, we plan the service, write the sermon, proofread the bulletin, and make sure everything is nailed down and completely under control. During the week, we meet in committees and plan our programs, we analyze our finances, and structure our mission.

But without the presence we are not the church, and we fall short of who we can be!

Jesus came and stood among them. And suddenly, everything changed. What they were not was transformed into what they could become. And the little First Church of Jerusalem became the mother church that gave birth to all Christian churches, including this one here in Tellico nearly two thousand years later.

Without the presence we are nothing! With the presence everything becomes possible!

So how do you open the door to the presence of the risen Christ?

I'd say that first of all, you need to learn to trust in the grace of God.

Will Willimon up at Duke University tells about the first church he served. It was over in Suwanee, Georgia, and on his inaugural Sunday he arrived to find a large chain and padlock on the door. It had been put there by the local Sheriff.

Well, Will knocked on a few doors in the neighborhood, asking why the Sheriff had padlocked the church. One of the neighbors had the answer.

"Well, things got kind of out of hand at the board meetin' last week," he said.. "Folks got so mad they started rippin' up carpet, draggin' out the pews they'd given in memory of their mothers. It got bad. Real bad. Finally, the Sheriff come out and put that there lock on the door till the new preacher can come and settle us down."

Dr. Willimon says that volatility sort of typified his time with that congregation. He'd drive out there each week, hoping beyond hope there'd be a miraculous snowstorm or an earthquake or SOMETHING that would save him from having to be there at that so-called church. The one year that Will spent there seemed like a lifetime. He tried everything. He worked hard, he planned, he taught, he pleaded with the people, but there was no response. The arguments, the pettiness, the fights in the parking lot after meetings were more than he could take. He was glad, finally, to leave it all behind.

But a couple of years later, Will Willimon ran into a young man at Emory University. The man told him something interesting. He was now serving that same church in Suwanee, Georgia.

"They still remember you out there," the young man said.

"Yes, I'm sure they do, and I remember them, too!" said Willimon.

"Remarkable bunch of people," the fellow said.

"Yeah, remarkable," sighed Dean Willimon.

"Their ministry to the community has been a wonder," the young man continued. "Why that little church is now supporting, in one way or another, more than a dozen of the really needy families around the neighborhood. They're running a free day care center, which is going just great, and the church has become truly interracial. I haven't seen a church like it in all of North Georgia."

Will Willimon couldn't believe his ears! This couldn't be that awful, hateful, powerless church he'd once served! "What happened?" he asked.

"I don't know," said the young pastor. "One Sunday, things just sort of came together. It wasn't anything in particular. Its just that, when the service that day was over, we all seemed to sense that Jesus had truly been there and touched us. We knew he loved us and had plans for us. Things pretty much took off after that!"

Will Willimon says he thinks he knows what happened.

That little church was intruded upon. Someone greater than any member or any minister knocked the lock off that door, kicked it wide open and offered them what Jesus brought the disciples that first Easter night: peace...the Holy Spirit...mission...and forgiveness. And now they are truly a church.

This is grace, and grace is God's doing.

You can't manufacture grace. All you can ever do is pray for it. And trust that God will somehow let grace seep into our churches, into our families, and into our lives. Dear friends, today pray that God's grace will intrude into your life, your family, this service, these people, this church and our community.

The risen Christ has the power to step through our locked doors. This is grace! And along with it comes the gift of forgiveness. Oh, I believe that one of the most important teachings of this passage in John 20 is about a kind of forgiveness that can change peoples' lives, but that most of us pay little attention too.

Did you notice how Jesus said to the people in the room that night, "If you forgive the sins of any... they are forgiven...."

Now, this is not the same forgiveness that you or I might offer to someone who has inflicted an injury upon us. This is different! Here, Jesus gives his church the authority to offer forgiveness to those who are separated from God...those who are lost to God and don't know how to find him, those who live apart from God and don't want to find him, those who hide from God in hurt and doubt and guilt behind closed doors.

And if you want to see this forgiveness at work, just take a look at the story! Here is a room full of distraught souls. They are not unlike ourselves or the members of our families, or other people we meet. Wrestling with the confusion, hurt and turmoil of life, they are locked behind closed doors! They are full of fear, John tells us, and they are angry. They have much more doubt than they have belief.

Do you see how far away from God they are?

So what does Jesus do? He does for them what they cannot do for themselves. They are spiritually unable to unlock that door and let God come in.

So Jesus steps past the lock...through the doors...and into their lives!

And this is a picture of what forgiveness is like!

You see, you and I are called to bring the presence of God into the locked places of peoples' lives.

In John 20, we learn that Jesus brought God into that dark room by both his presence and his words. He came to be with them in the darkness they were experiencing, and there, he spoke to them about God's love.

I think the times in my life I have been most powerfully touched by the grace of God, have been those moments when someone cared enough about me to enter the very pain I was experiencing just to love me and be there for me. They didn't judge me, didn't lecture me, didn't try to fix me. They were just there for me. These days, our Stephen Ministers are discovering in very real situations how powerful this can be for others, and how God is able to use our presence in the life of another as a means of healing.

There are people in your life right now who desperately need a Christian presence to be there for them. And you have the power, Jesus teaches, to penetrate the locks and bars of the doors behind which people languish and suffer. And when you are there, in the dark room of another's life, you bring the presence of God.

This is "real-life" forgiveness - bringing together people and God. But not only is your presence important, so are your words.

The words we speak can so often become a bridge between God and another person. When I was growing up, my mother used to introduce a lot of "God-talk" to family conversations. She was not afraid to tell us about how she felt God was leading her to live in a particular situation. She openly told us that God cared about us. My mom was not reluctant to observe how she thought God was at work in our lives. She frequently encouraged us to pray about our problems, and to consider what we thought Jesus would do in that situation, and to simply "just trust the Lord with that."

For her efforts, we used to tease her mercilessly about being a religious fanatic, and warn her that she was about to "go off the deep end." Our family was far too sophisticated to fully appreciate any of her verbal witnessing to her faith.

But one day, when I was a sophomore in college, experiencing my own personal version of "the dark night of the soul", the words I most remembered were my mother's words about God's love for me, about turning to him in prayer, about trusting the Lord. And those words became like a key that opened the door to God.

Using words to bear witness to God can bring forgiveness.

In his book Living Life on Purpose, Greg Anderson shares the story of one man's journey to joy:

His wife had left him and he was completely depressed. He had lost faith in himself, in other people, even in God. He found no joy in living.

One rainy morning this man went to a small neighborhood restaurant for breakfast. Although many people were at the diner, no one was speaking to anyone else. Our miserable friend hunched over the counter, feeling all alone, stirring his coffee with a spoon. In one of the small booths along the window was a young mother with a little girl. They had just been served their food when the little girl broke the sad silence by almost shouting, "Momma, aren't we gonna say our prayers here?"

Well, the waitress who had just served their breakfast turned around and said, "Sure, honey, we can pray here. Why don't you lead us? You say the prayer for us." Then the little girl stood up on her chair, looked out at the rest of the people in the restaurant and said a loud voice, "Bow your heads."

Surprisingly, one by one, the heads went down. Then the little girl bowed her own head, folded her hands, and prayed with great passion, "God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food. Amen."

That prayer changed the entire atmosphere in that restaurant. People began to talk with one another. There was laughter. The waitress beamed and said, "We should do this every morning."

"All of a sudden," said our friend, the man whose life was in such disarray, "my whole frame of mind started to improve. From that little girl's words, I started to thank God for all that I did have and stopped complaining about all I didn't have. I started to choose happiness."

A word well-spoken. A presence in a troubled time. And grace.

These are the Easter gifts Jesus gives us to share with our families and all those we meet.

Dear friends, go this week and share the gifts. Help God open many closed doors!