It was a bitter cold in Bean Blossom in the winter of ‘94…two weeks well below zero. When the weather finally broke, we rejoiced deeply in the signs of spring; the chorus of peepers from the marshes, the white and purple crocus, spring beauties, daffodils, forsythia. And soon after, came the fiery redbud, a voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for holy dogwood, its cruciform white petals, stained like the rusty marks of nails, amid countless tiny leaflets, each the size of a young squirrel‘s ear.

But that spring, something had gone wrong. No leaflets, no blossoms appeared on the beautiful mature dogwood that graced the woods and yard. Through the spring and then the summer, the lifeless gray-brown trunks and bare branches broke our hearts to see…the dogwood were dead and gone. The Extension Service said it was anthracnose…dogwood blight. I still think they just plain froze to death.

Another winter passed into another spring. With it came the clearing of the meadows, to keep the woods at bay for those creatures that make their homes in the open. Sumac and small saplings fell by the score before my brush mower, my mind wandering, until…There, just before me, something catches my eye, brings me up short. Two feet high, slender, elegant stem and branches, each one tipped with tiny green squirrel’s ears. An infant dogwood. New life…Alleluia!

Never in history has a meadow been more carefully mowed. No wandering mind now, but fierce, concentrated, systematic scanning, eye trained for shape and color, discerning from hodge podge vegetation the signature grace, the brilliant green upthrust leaflets, all the tell-tale marks. There’s one… another…And now I’m running, back to the tool shed for Day-Glo orange surveyors’ tape to mark them all, to protect them from the blade. I carried a roll of it all that spring, everywhere I mowed, everywhere I walked…the meadows, the woods. Scanning everywhere for the marks of dogwood resurrection.

By the millennial spring, the young trees had flourished and begun to flower. This spring, they tower over me as I mow around them, reminding myself to loosen the chicken wire collars on the bigger ones down by Bean Blossom Creek, a deterrent to beavers. It’s not a stellar flowering year for our dogwoods, but enough to see the rusty marks in the cruciform petals…and that makes me think of Thomas.

When it was evening on the first day of the week, they say, the disciples gathered, still distraught, newly bewildered by wild stories of an empty tomb. Jesus came and stood alive among his disciples, showed them his hands and his side, the marks of crucifixion, the proof of his violent death…now become the proof of his vibrant life.

But the disciple Thomas was not there when Jesus first came. Later, when the others told him, "We have seen the Lord", he said to them, "Unless I see…and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." A week later they were all together in the house, and this time Thomas was with them. Again, Jesus came and stood among them, gave them his Peace and invited Thomas to see the marks as well, and to feel them. And seeing those terrible, beautiful marks, Thomas’ doubt vanished in an instant. Of all the testimony of all the witnesses, his was the most penetrating, the most exalted and the most definitive: "My Lord and my God!" He saw the marks and so he believed.

For some reason, unfairly, blessed Thomas is better known for doubt than testimony, misunderstood as one without faith, requiring proof to believe in the Resurrection. The Church seems to have forgotten that one week earlier, the others were no less credulous, required no less proof. Like Thomas, they needed to see the marks, Jesus knew. That’s why he made a point of showing them his hands and his side when first he came among them.

I don’t remember when I first heard about the empty tomb, or joined the Easter proclamation “Alleluia, Christ is Risen!” I don’t remember what I thought about it, early on. It was an assumed part of faith, but not much talked about at home or in church. Even there, in those days, the Resurrection seemed more a religious idea…abstract, unexplored, an article of faith, not a matter of experience or testimony. Back then, I had little conscious interest in the marks. But now, I do.

A few months ago, James Cameron released a documentary film about a recently discovered tomb in Jerusalem, in which he claimed to have found the DNA of Jesus. The unstated implication is that there was no empty tomb…no resurrection. The level of outrage provoked by this film in traditional Christian circles might suggest that this was an unprecedented challenge to the central doctrine of the Faith. In fact, it is a challenge nearly as old as our quite resilient Church. The early heresy of Docetism, believing that matter is inherently evil, held that the divine Christ’s physical body was nothing but an illusion. Thus he could not really die, nor could he be resurrected. Islam has its own version of this teaching. And yet, the Church’s faith in resurrection survived…we are still here…still looking for the marks.

Early enemies of the Faith explained away the Resurrection in all sorts of ways: A simple misunder-standing; the disciples mistook a separate unused tomb for the place where Jesus body was had actually been laid. Or, it was all a hoax; the disciples stole the body to make it look like he had been raised from the dead. Then there’s the resuscitation theory; Jesus did not truly die, but entered a deathlike state, only to be revived. Against such skeptism, faith has prevailed. We’re still looking for the rusty marks.

With the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, came the rise of modern biblical scholarship and a new manner of interpretation - less literal, more figurative, less concerned with the historical physical facts of the Resurrection, more passionate about the inward, spiritual reality of the living Christ of faith. Some, like 60’s Bishop James Pike and, more recently, Bishop John Shelby Spong, scandalized the Church by denying the literal physical resurrection of Jesus altogether and insisting that true faith was impossible so long as Christians strain to believe the unbelievable. And yet, we look for the marks.

In this season of Resurrection, here in this place this morning, I imagine that there is represented just about every imaginable variation of belief, every conceivable interpretation of what we could possibly mean when we say “Alleluia, Christ is Risen”. But no matter how we understand it, with the rationality of mind or wildness of heart, do we not all look faithfully for the marks, for some way of knowing that puts doubt to flight, that Christ is alive and present and in residence and involved and in charge? At the altar, we pray “Open our eyes to see you hand at work in the world about us.” Might we also pray, in this time of war and injustice and illness and grief, each and every day, in every place and time, “Open our eyes to see the hands of your Son, bearing the marks of brutal defeat turned to joyous victory”?

The hands that welcome the visitor, the hands that fold the inserts, those that fill the cruets with water and wine and bake the loaves. The hands that carry the Body and Blood to the sick or wield the hammer to build a neighbor a home. The petals of the dogwood, like holy hands of praise, lifted to the sky.

A few springs after that deadly cold winter, I was working outside beneath the largest, most beautiful of the departed dogwoods. Something made me raise my eyes and there, where once stood only a battered trunk in slow decay, were new, supple branches sprouting forth in abundance, each tipped with those tell-tale green squirrel’s ears. It didn’t blossom that spring , or the next, or even the next. But now it does.

Sisters and brothers, let us train our eyes to scan the world around, and discern the signature grace, the tell-tale marks of resurrection life. And let us carry always with us the means to mark them, that others might see them, too. AMEN