In 2007, there was a reality show on MTV that lasted just two seasons. I knew about this because I had just gone through a divorce and my 12-year-old son would come over and wanted to watch this with me late at night. Anyone who knows how hard it is to get a child that age to do anything with you knows that I would stay up late and watch this show with him. It was called SCARRED. The show lasted two seasons, and in it, the producers tracked down kids who had posted videos of themselves doing extreme sports; rollerblading, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding. They were doing extreme sports and they had a scar to prove it. Scarred, each episode, began with a, um, young, uh, youth standing up on the screen saying something like this; ‘My name is Eli. I'm from Brunswick, New Jersey, and this is my star story.’ And then it would go, and we would immediately see Eli and his buddies practicing skateboarding for example, showing the places they like to ride their skateboards, talking about where the skateboard came from, until finally, they showed that one day when Eli was doing something smart, like riding his skateboard down a rail of a whole bunch of steps, he missed the jump at the end, and then we would see blood, bone, squad lights, a hospital, a gurney, moving fast hands, x-rays, bolts, things that hold your legs together when you break them, and ultimately his scar. On the other side, they had five such features per show. I told you I watched these with my young son because this was a bonding experience, but you can imagine, we could have been watching, um, The Chainsaw Murderer, and I would have been less scared watching the show. It was terrifying to me. And he would punctuate our watching by saying, ‘That's go. That's rad. That's… look at him go!’ Bleed, right? Oh, one year later 2008, I took a group of youth, including this same son, to New Orleans for the Jesus Justice and Jazz Youth Gathering. Some of you might remember it. On that first morning that we were there, uh, we were assigned… anyone who's ever been youth gathering heard about it. It's very organized. You have, you know you have colors, and you follow the schedule, and they blow whistles. So, I was assigned to a big room, at 7:30 in the morning, with 500 kids, and too many donuts, and not enough napkins, and no volume control, after riding 23 hours in a bus. There I was and at 8:05 they announced we were going to do an ice breaker .Me ,not yet finished with my first cup of coffee, an ice breaker they said it would be fun. It was horrible. It was like speed dating. They wanted us to… every time the bell rings you're going to stand in front of someone, and you're going to tell them something about yourself, and here's a list of stuff you got to tell. You got to talk really fast. Then when the bell rings 30 seconds later, you got to find someone else and the person that wins the price is the one that gets through the most information from other people. I'm a bit of an introvert. This was not my thing, but I'm also a strategist. So, I had a strategy. I was going to find the quietest, uh, youth in the farthest corner of the room, and I was going to go have my first speed date with that youth, and then sit down on the floor behind them and hope no one noticed. And so I did I. When the bell rang, I made my way to the far corner of the room where there was this awkward looking youth. Of course! They all look awkward, right? That's the age they were awkward. Um youth has red hair, very slender, um, looking, uh, pretty sleepy like me, and, uh, he was in the corner facing the wall. And I thought, oh, his strategy is, don't make eye contact, right? So I went around him and said, ‘We got to do this du….hey, I already know you! You were on SCARRED! And he was! I watched him on the Scarred show and it was the same! His face lit up! He was so excited that I knew that he was famous and really didn't belong in this place, right? And I looked at his scar, again, then all the way down his um arm. And he told me the whole story again and he was the only youth I talked to during our speed dating icebreaker. But I felt so good about it, and blessed that I knew this boy, and I knew his scar, and I knew what he needed to talk about, right? That was God active in my life. One year later, 2009, my youngest son, who had introduced me to SCARRED, limped off the football field where he had been the quarterback, after being under a pile of pretty much every other player on the other team, with a broken ankle. The surgery was relatively easy. He came home with medication, but once he got home, no matter how much uh we attended to his uh recovery with ice and raising the leg and medication, the pain kept doubling every hour. Now ,this is a young man, who has a high tolerance of pain, we ended up taking him back to the emergency. And for 3 days they had a pain team brought in to try to help with his pain, but they could not figure out what the problem was. Finally, his leg was showing um signs of a, I don't really know the name of it, but they were talking about removing his leg. They’re talking about removing his leg and they said we've got 72 hours, and at 73 we have no choice. We have to do this. Um, it, it was one of the most, uh, anxiety producing experiences I've ever been through. I mean I know that there's a lot worse things that happen to people, but this was my baby, right? So it turned out at the 11th hour, actually the 72nd hour of this whole ordeal, that the main surgeon was going home when he turned his car around. It was like a House episode, and said, ‘I got it.’ He had something called ‘compartment syndrome’. Anybody familiar with that? So it's when you're, um, your fascia wraps itself tight like a shrink wrap on your muscle and continues to pull tighter and tighter. Um, he ended up having four surgeries in 10 days, 6 weeks of physical therapy, and to this day has 150 uh stitches on a scar that goes up in the back of his leg. And they saved that leg. Medicine, right? It may leave us scarred, but oh, the good that it does. Oh, the lives that it can extend. When he was 18 years old, he had Fear No Evil tattooed in the middle of his calf and right over that scar, which he took from the 23rd Psalm. That's right. Fear no evil. Um, of course, it took me another 10 years to stop asking to see his scar. I always wanted to make sure is it still together? Do we need to go back to the hospital? His patience wore thin with me on that. Scars are evidence that prove a story. They mark a trauma. They remind us, this really happened. I really went through this. You really went through this. Many of our scars mark our bodies, and frankly, if you ever want to get a whole bunch of youth talking, start a scar-story-circle, right? They just can't resist it. Everyone remembers the scar conversation, um, in Jaws, right? Everybody remembers that they just can't because there something about a scar that takes you back to when you got it, and enables you to marvel that you made it through to the other side, and you are still here. To God be the glory! It marks a trauma of something that we went through. I wonder if this story we read today about Thomas, in which we always focus on his doubt it seems, or his lack of faith, or his need for evidence. I wonder if this could also be a story about Jesus, who needed to show his scars to Thomas as much as Thomas needed to see them. Anyone who has ever gone through trauma knows you, you, you need to talk about it. You need to show the scar. You need someone else to affirm you, that this happened. You went through this, and you're still traumatized, and that scar is still raw, and sometimes we ask about that scar 10 years later, right? Uh, I realize, uh, I'm a writer, and I've been reading through my journals since, uh, that I kept during 2020, and I've realized by observing people, lately, that we are just starting to tell our scar stories from 2020 from what happened when Covid happened. At first, it was too raw. We couldn't really talk about it except in very vague terms. We might say something like, did you see them singing in Italy, right? Did you did you hear about, about them taking, uh, bagels to the ER for all the surgeons and the nurses. Um, did, did you know, do you understand how to isolate? We might say that we haven't really told the scar stories of what it was like to live through a global pandemic and to lose people. Even if you didn't know anyone, personally, we lost millions of people, in a very short time. I turned to one of my pages in the journal recently and the only, only, thing I had written on this one day was ‘they closed Italy today’. That hits different now, right? At the time, I was just trying to write down what was happening. I looked at that and I thought, that's right. They closed Italy, and then they started closing other countries, and then we worried the people couldn't get home on airplanes. Remember, it's time for us, I think, to start telling our scar stories. Whether they are about what happened the last four years in Covid, um, acts of racism we have lived through. I'm engaged in anti-racism training, right now, that is put on through the BRICK team; our anti-racism team through the synod. Today, is my third day and we are doing some holy storytelling about systemic racism and how deeply ingrained white supremacy is, and I am hearing some scar stories. Maybe, Jesus needed to show his scar to Thomas as much as Thomas needed to see them, and maybe, he was what we call, modeling behavior, for the rest of us, to not be ashamed of our scars, to not be ashamed to talk about them, and to look at them, and to even touch them, and remember that they mark something that very real that we went through. And thanks be to God something very real that we lived through, right? And when I was putting all this together, I kept imagining Jesus needing to tell this story just as much as Thomas needed to hear it. And I imagine, what if Jesus had walked into that room, and said, ‘My name is Jesus of Nazareth and this is my scar story.’