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And the story of Easter day
continues. John says, “On the evening of that day, the first
day of the week…”
Imagine…just hours later,
really, it is the evening of the day of Resurrection, the
evening of the day which began in a garden, the evening of
the day when Mary saw the Lord, the evening of the first day
of the week. The doors are shut. The disciples are scared to
death, and Jesus comes and stands among them and he says,
“Peace be with you.” He says it three times here, you
notice. My guess is they needed to hear it!
It is an amazing moment, even
more direct than Mary’s brief encounter in the garden. He
shows them his hands…his wrists, really, where the nails had
held his body to the cross. He shows them his side…pierced
to prove to the Romans and the world that he was dead. Good
and dead. Really dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. No coma or swooning
here to explain away his death and the reality of the
resurrection. He challenges them with the great commission
of the new era, “As the Father has sent me, so send I
you.” He breathes on them the promise of power,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.” He sends them with the words
of forgiveness and reconciliation the world so desperately
longs to hear.
But,
John notes, Thomas wasn’t there.
Now you really have to wonder
where he was, don’t you? You can blame him for not coming to
church that Sunday, criticize him for allowing something to
come between him and the fellowship of the disciples,
question his priorities or his excuses.
Was he shopping?
Sleeping in?
Did the dog eat his homework?
Having a bad hair day?
I mean, really, what could have
been more important than to be with the body in the light of
all that had happened in the past week?
And I suppose a preacher could
take a cheap shot at all the folks who showed up last week
who aren’t here to day…”you know, those C and E
Christians”…but what’s the point? I always say, if folks are
only going to come once a year, for heaven’s sake, make it
Easter; and I hope they will make it here!
Whatever the reason, Thomas
missed it. He wasn’t there to experience the joy of the day.
He wasn’t there when Christ appeared. He wasn’t there when
Jesus made himself known, as he promised, wherever two or
three are gathered in his name.
We call him Thomas “the
Doubter,” but the Bible calls him Thomas, the Twin. And, of
course, growing up as the second-born twin brother, I can
identify with that. We had relatives who just called us “The
Twins” because they couldn’t tell us apart. I can remember
being addressed as “Twin,” instead of by name. In Greek, his
name literally means “twin” and many believe he actually
was. In fact, in the Mesopotamian Church there is even a
tradition which says he was the twin of Jesus! Let me say
quickly there is no biblical evidence to support it, and it
was only a thin thread of tradition, but let’s play with
that for a moment. The twin brother of Jesus. Imagine that
for sibling rivalry! How would you like to be the second
born to the Son of God? No question about the fact that
“Momma always liked you best!” I’ve always wondered how
Prince Harry feels when people refer to him and Prince
William as “the heir and the spare.”
But enough of my personal birth
order issues. Back to Thomas. Who knows? Maybe that would
explain why he became the one who doubted, the one who
always had to ask the tough questions, the one who
challenged and confronted, not unlike another biblical twin
Jacob, who was born hanging on to his brother’s heel and was
always known as the “heel-grabber,” always trying to get
what belonged to the first born twin, Isaac.
When Thomas found out about
what had taken place, he laid his cards on the table—perhaps
the most honest of all the disciples, and truly our
contemporary in spirit:
1.
“Unless I see, I will not believe.”
Now just for a moment, put
yourself in his place. In fact, I guess we are in his
place. It is now the next week, the next Sunday, and all he
has been hearing all week is about what happened last
Sunday.
-
Mary,
over and over again, saying, “I’ve seen the Lord.”
-
John
and Peter, telling and retelling the run back and forth
and into the tomb, the location of the grave cloths, the
stench of death and the evidence of new life.
-
Cleopas
and the others who encountered him on the Emmaus Road:
“He was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.”
-
All
that talk about the choirs and the music
-
All
those lilies
-
All
those people
I am sure Thomas had had it up
to here! He must have been ready to shout, “Enough already!
I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to hear any more about
your experience with the Risen Christ. I will not
believe until I see for myself.”
And in that sense, I want to
say, “Right on, Thomas!” Don’t settle for a secondhand
experience. Don’t believe it just because someone else told
you. Ask the questions. Probe the facts. Find out for
yourself. Don’t settle for some weak, puny, second-hand
faith someone passed on like a second-hand something from
the rummage sale. Questioning and doubting, questing and
seeking…it’s all part of the journey of faith.
I have always loved that peppy
little ditty we used to sing at summer camp. Oh, it’s so
much fun to sing, and it seems to affirm the basic truth of
the faith passed on from generation to generation:
Gimme that old time religion
Gimme that old time religion
Gimme that old time religion
It’s good enough for me.
It was good for my mother
It was good for my father
It was good for my mother
And it’s good enough for me.
Nice sentiment, but it’s dead
wrong! Somebody else’s religion is never good enough for
you. It’s got to be your own, first person singular, a
personal faith.
So I think Frederick Buechner
must have been thinking of Thomas when he said, “Doubt is
the ants in the pants of faith.” Our questioning,
searching and discovering lead us to a faith that will last,
a faith we can hold, and a faith which will hold us when the
going gets tough.
Unless I see for myself, I will not believe.
As you know, a group of us will
be visiting Russia and the Baltic states in June. It is
exciting to see the church coming back to life in the former
Soviet Union after years of oppression and struggle. In
Estonia, a small collection of Methodist congregations
managed to survive the communist years. But in Russia, all
was lost—printing presses, literature, Sunday schools and
churches. We literally started to rebuild from scratch. One
of the early leaders of the rebirth of the church was Elena
Stepanovia. She was a professor in a state university and
was asked to deliver lectures on atheism. In order to do so,
she decided she needed to read some of the Christian
literature, and she managed to get hold of a Bible. She read
it. And through the process, she came to faith. Today she is
a District Superintendent in the Russian church. She
represented the interest of educated younger adults in the
Methodist movement. Part of what drew them was the simple
freedom to ask questions, to doubt, to seek and to struggle
with the faith.
So let’s join Thomas. Ask your
questions. Struggle with the balance between the faith of
Genesis and the evidence of evolution, millions of years
versus biblical days. Question the sages and argue with the
prophets. Wrestle with the tension between the unique
Christian witness alongside other world religions. Seek to
know all you can know about God’s activity in the world, and
don’t settle for anything less than a faith which makes
sense.
But…be prepared for a surprise.
Thomas waits. Thomas questions.
Thomas doubts. Then, one week later—today in fact—he is
present in the upper room, and into the haze of his
questions and the maze of doubt, comes the Living Christ,
saying, “Here I am. Touch. See. Feel. Know. Be not
faithless, but believe.” And in that moment, as he reached
out to Jesus, he believed and he saw.
2.
You see, sometimes seeing is believing. But sometimes,
believing is seeing.
Like Thomas, when we finally
come to the end of our searching, there comes the moment
when we take the great leap of faith; when we reach out
beyond our understanding to grasp a truth larger than our
doubts; when, after asking all the questions, we take the
step which leads toward the Risen Christ. And in that
moment, we discover that believing is seeing.
Robin Lovin,
Dean of Perkins School of Theology, says:
Resurrection faith is not true
because you can prove it, like a theorem in your high school
geometry book. It is not true because you’ve mastered it by
trial and error. Resurrection faith is not true even
because the women and the angels say it was so. Resurrection
faith is true because something in this witness to God’s way
of working connects with your own experience in a way that
says, “Yes, of course.”
(Robin Lovin, “Resurrection
Faith,” Perkins School of Theology, April 9, 1997)
Jesus affirms Thomas’s desire to
see in order to believe, but Jesus also affirms belief which
goes before and beyond sight. “Blessed are those who haven’t
seen and still believe.”
As you all know, C.S. Lewis was
an incredible author of fantasy and science fiction, the
Narnia series and all the rest. As a student at Oxford,
however, he became a convinced atheist, a hard-headed
rationalist, and remained so until he was 31. But though it
all he was also an ardent questioner, a seeker after truth,
a doubter in every way. He began studying theology and
exploring the questions. In his autobiography, he writes:
I did not know what I was
letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a
sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. God is,
if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
And in his
clever wit he says:
Amiable
agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.”
To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about
the mouse’s search for the cat.
It seemed everywhere he turned,
something spoke to him of the truth of the Gospel. His
friends like JRR Tolkien challenged his atheism and led him
in the quest of faith. Then the day came. He writes:
The odd thing was that
before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now
appears to have been a wholly free choice. I was going up
Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words, and
almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow
presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something
at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, I was
wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of
armor, as if I were a lobster.
I felt myself being, there and
then, given a free choice. I could open the door or shut it.
I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. I chose to open
the door, to unbuckle, to loosen the reins.
I felt as if I were a man of
snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was
starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle.
My Adversary, God, would not
argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord; I am that I
am; I am.”
And at the end of his search he
was, as the title of his book says, Surprised by Joy. (C.S.
Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pages 224-227)
In his new book entitled The
Soul of Christianity, Houston Smith talks about the
confounding questions of faith and life, the “mystery” at
the heart of the universe. He says:
We are born in mystery, we live
in mystery and we die in mystery. It is not a dead mystery
that bogs down in befuddlement. Religious mystery invites;
it glows, lures, and excites, impelling us to enter its
dazzling darkness ever more deeply. It is such mystery
Timothy had in mind when he told one of his churches, “Great
is the mystery of our faith.”
And then he tells a story of a
friend who shared a conversation piece sitting on the coffee
table. When activated, it displayed a medley of colors that
shifted like a kaleidoscope when a key was pressed. Smith
says one of his daughters exclaimed in delight, “I love it,
and I don’t understand it at all, and that’s why I believe
in God.” (Houston Smith, The Soul of Christianity,
page 32)
After all his searching, all his
questions, all his doubts, Thomas, when confronted with the
mystery of the Risen Christ said, “I love it and I don’t
understand it at all. That’s why I believe. My Lord and my
God. “
Sometimes seeing is believing.
Ah, but better yet, says Jesus, sometimes in the believing,
there is seeing.
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