The Most Awkward Breakfast in History.

Easter 3, Year C

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

Psalm 30

So there was this one time I did something wrong.  And I knew that my dad knew about it.  I found out he knew on a Friday.  We then went on a previously planned weekend trip, just me and him.  And here’s the thing.  He did not mention the thing I did wrong to me at all until the last hour of the drive home at the end of the weekend.  I had to sit there for two days, knowing that he knew.  And he knew that I knew that he knew.  That entire weekend, I was waiting for the hammer to drop.  It was terrible.  I’m pretty sure the waiting was also intentional on his part.  If I remember correctly, I think the waiting served as my punishment.

Can you remember a time where you had done something wrong, and you knew you were caught?

That gut-tightening feeling when the truth comes to light, and you have to face up to what you did?

And you are waiting for the hard conversation with those whom you may have injured or disappointed?

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Every time I read this story of Peter and Jesus on the sea shore, I remember the feeling of waiting for the hammer to drop.  For the wrong to be addressed.  I think this is a story of one of the most awkward breakfasts in history.  How often do you get to eat breakfast with the tortured and murdered man you personally betrayed and deserted to suffer his fate alone?  And who has come back to life?

For Peter, there goes any chance of hiding his deed.  There goes any hope of spinning the story he would tell to everyone else that he had done what he could, but it just was not enough to save Jesus.  Peter already had to sit with the other frightened disciples, stewing in the shame of his three-fold denial of Jesus after vowing to never desert him.  None of them were innocent of desertion, but Peter’s denial stands out.  The chief follower of Jesus became the chief deserter.

Peter, at this breakfast, will need to face his past. 

I mentioned on Maundy Thursday—the Thursday before the Easter celebration—the night before Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, the night he foretells Peter’s desertion and denial—that memory and remembrance has particular meaning in a Christian context.

We—all of us—are held in the memory and care of God.

All of our pains, all of our joys.  All of our wounds, all of our woundings of others.

We follow a God who carries the weight and memory of every pain and trauma and joy and mundane moment of existence.

To God, no one is forgotten.  No injury is overlooked.

At the very least, we count our injuries, too, don’t we?

[Do we count our injuries of others with as much care?]

It would be easy and understandable for Jesus at this point, on the shore of Galilee, to say that the betrayal and denial of Peter is enough to prove Peter is unworthy of the task Jesus would give him.  It would be understandable for Jesus to say the severity of the betrayal of the Son of God Himself is too much to overlook, and that Peter is no longer worthy.  Instead, Peter deserves to be cast away.

When we recoil from our injuries, do we not say something similar?

[Do we not say that those who injure us are now unworthy to be called a friend?]

But this is not the nature of God, or Jesus.

Now, on the other side of the resurrection, Jesus is fulfilling the mission he was given.  Earlier in the same Gospel of John, Jesus tells us that the will of God was that Jesus would not lose any of those he was given, but that he raise them up—that he comes not to condemn but to save.[1]  This applies not only to the disciples, but to the whole world; yet, in Jesus’s appearances after the resurrection, he comes to the disciples to reconstitute the community that he had formed.  He comes back to gather the scattered sheep that God had given him.  He comes back to show the disciples that there is resurrection—the ability to stand with dignity restored—and a loving power beyond desertion, and betrayal, and the worst violence that the world can do.

And so, even though it would have been easy for Jesus to write off Thomas—remember last week? Doubting Thomas?—Jesus comes back to give Thomas exactly what was needed to bring him back into fold—an experience of the risen Christ, in the flesh.  Thomas had to have that experience, because before Jesus and his entourage even arrive in Jerusalem in advance of the crucifixion; it was known that going there would mean death.  And Thomas, in his first recorded sentence in the Gospels, said that they should “go and die with him [Jesus].”[2] Both Thomas and Peter have particular betrayals and desertions recorded in scripture that had to be redeemed. 

And here, in our gospel passage this morning, Jesus is returning to give Peter what he needs—redemption of his past as a denier.

You see, salvation is not simply a matter of saving one’s soul.  The whole self is the concern and theatre of God’s saving work, and the past of the self is included in the scope of God’s saving purpose.[3] 

Our memories and our reactions to our memories make us and shape us.  Our memories—our experiences—shape our understanding of who we are and how we will react to what we see before us.  The shames, the guilts, and the injuries we suffer constrict us.    They make us more reticent to reach out to others—with the exception of when we might seek revenge on those who hurt us, or we inflict pain on others in an effort to drown out our own agony.  Often they compel us to seek shelter in the darkness rather than risk exposure in the light.   We’d rather hide our failures, which may also include attempts to push them out of our own memories.

But the disciples—and we—are confronted by the risen Christ, whose body also bears the wounds of his suffering; and yet he comes to us offering and urging forgiveness and communion.

Christ returns to us as a victim who offers victory through resurrection, not through hiding, silent suffering, or violence.  He continuously shows that there is a power beyond the worst that the world can muster—a power from God grounded in love and healing. 

The healing Jesus offers is free, but it is not cheap.  The price is our willingness to confront the actions and injuries behind our shame and guilt we live in— by either the acts we have done, or the things that have been done to us. 

And in this passage, on the shore of Galilee, Jesus confronts Peter with the memory of his wrongdoing.  An interesting detail that the English translation obscures is that the fire Jesus lights is the same kind of fire around which Peter warmed himself when he denied Christ.  The Greek word for the charcoal fire is anthrakia, and it only appears in the Bible twice:  in the story of Peter’s betrayal, and this moment of his reckoning.  John drives home that this is the moment of reconciling Peter’s denial.  Peter has to bear the full weight of his denial.  He has to experience the hurt of the denial, represented by being asked three times about the true nature of his love.

If Peter is to be called again, if he can again become a true apostle, the “Peter” that he is in the purpose of Jesus rather than the Simon who runs back into the cozy obscurity of an ordinary and hidden life, his desertion and betrayal—his failure—must be truthfully confronted, lived through again and brought to a good end.[4]  Only after this fullness of reconciliation can Peter know himself as truly forgiven; and only then can Jesus fully commission Peter as the new shepherd of the flock.  Only then can Peter find his past transfigured from shame to hope as he witnesses that the power and graceful mercy and love of God can redeem his earlier weaknesses.

If you are still with me at this point, here is why this matters in Christian life.

Even if it is well-intentioned, the famous saying that one should “forgive and forget” is not quite what the Christian faith adheres to.

God carries the memories of the whole universe at all times.

We carry memories too, even as much as we would rather forget or hide some of them.

But they are remembered because our faith rests in God who promises that death and destruction and evil will not finally hold sway.

And we follow a God who invites us to glory with him in the moments when the tragic is redeemed and turned by love into joyful remembrance of God’s healing presence.

Or when a wrong is truthfully faced and reconciliation is offered in exchange for hatred.

We remember because God gave us memory and calls us to be witnesses to the wonders love makes possible.

If the phrase “forgive and forget” has a Christian resonance, it comes not from the notion that wrongdoing is forgotten, as though justice is not important.  It comes from an experience of God that allows us to move beyond a wrongdoing in such a way that death and hatred has no hold on us because we instead cling to love and hope and the power of resurrection—the ability to stand with dignity restored.

Every time Christ appears to the disciples after the resurrection, he heals the memory of the disciple’s betrayal.  The memory of the disciple’s shame and guilt—their memory of the betrayal—is not canceled out or forgotten by Jesus showing up and by his “being okay”--as though the crucixion and death were 'not that bad' since Jesus is back--but because the truth is that God will set all to right in due time.  And our memories of pain, ours and others, are the points of our lives where Christ the Risen Victim invites himself and us to heal memory—to transform our injuries and our failures and our betrayals and our desertions into stories of redemption and grace. 

How might you need to experience Christ’s healing of injury or shame or guilt in your life?

How will you accept his invitation to meet him in that interior space where the heart is open, and no secrets are hid? 

How might a community of believers model that healing and reconciliation in the world around us?

---

[1] This promise is mentioned at Jn 6:39, 17:12, and 18:8-9.  While it refers to the disciples in particular, it can be generalized as Jesus’s mission to the whole world; Jesus has been given the mission to overthrow “the ruler of this world” (cf. Jn 12:31 and 16:11) because he was sent not to condemn the world but to save it (cf. Jn. 3:16-17, 8:11, 8:15, 12:47).

[2] John 11:1-16 (particularly v.16).  It is not particularly clear if Thomas means to die with Lazarus or Jesus, but it is clear that following Jesus to Lazarus could mean their deaths as it puts them in proximity to the authorities looking for ways to silence Jesus.

[3] This sentence follows closely Rowan Williams Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 23.

[4] Borrowing heavily from Williams, 28-29.

Sermon: "Who are we that we might hinder God?"

St. Matthew's, Chandler AZ Sixth Sunday of Easter

Year B

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

"The student looked up from the Gospel reading and said "Thomas is a punk!"[1]

She used considerably stronger language.

Tuesday nights at the ministry house on campus were our community’s opportunity to gather for a meal and worship; and while I would occasionally give a sermon or a reflection, I most often left the space for an impromptu Bible Study on the texts for the coming Sunday.  I might have some interesting tidbit about the text or a comment about some theme, but I most often asked those gathered questions like:

What phrases struck them in a strong way?
What new ideas did the text inspire them to think about?
What is God doing in this passage and how are we called to respond to that action?

I am always interested to see where people might take these questions, and I knew we were doing something right when we got to a place of an unvarnished, raw, reaction to something in the text—be it a testimony to God’s action in one’s life in a way strikingly similar to the biblical situation, a disagreement with something in the Bible, or an outburst about one of the people in the passage we had just read.  Those raw reactions make me sit up and take notice; they make something of the divine come alive within me.  God acts frequently in the midst of disruptions, and casting aspersions on the disciples we are told in subtle ways by the tradition to emulate or see ourselves as like isn’t the way smooth bible studies are supposed to go, but whoo-boy God shows up in those moments.  I also have the type of personality that responds to sass with sass.  You can find God there too, it turns out. 

And to be fair, the student is right. Thomas is a punk—and I swear that I’m not recycling a sermon on Thomas—but think about it.  We talk about Thomas as though the only thing he’s known for is that he doubted.  First of all, all the disciples doubted the resurrection until Jesus showed up in the locked room.  We remember Thomas like he somehow different from them.  

But that’s not even the worst thing Thomas did.  Before Jesus and his entourage even arrive in Jerusalem before the crucifixion, it was known that going there will mean death because the religious leaders were looking to kill them.  And Thomas said, in his first sentence in the Gospels, that they should “go and die with him.”[2]  Sounds pretty brave, right?  

But guess who does not end up on a cross with Jesus?  If Jesus was the passive-aggressive type, you can imagine that the last words from the cross could have been, “Gee, who said they would follow me all the way to my death, and who is nowhere to be found?  Thomas and Peter.”  So, Thomas didn’t follow through with his promise.  

He punked out on Jesus.  

Thomas is a punk.

But here is where the student seemed to have the real problem.  Jesus’ forgiveness of Thomas and the other disciples came too easily.  Jesus just shows up and forgives.  And Thomas gets exactly what he asks for:  to see Jesus again in the flesh. 

Jesus could have just said, “If Thomas won’t believe the other disciples, then tough for him.  Out he goes, the unbeliever.” And, if you’ll remember, the disciples had received the Holy Spirit at this point from Jesus, and they keep the unbelieving Thomas around for a week in the same house.[3]  That’s a long time to keep someone who disagrees with you around when you do not have a smartphone to distract you.  The disciples as bearers of the Holy Spirit and Jesus could have just written Thomas off, but they do not.  They stay with Thomas and the truth is revealed to him (even though he was a punk).

See, here’s the thing:  we are so used to conditions being put on love, on affections, on friendship, on religious life, on all of our interactions, that witnessing the indiscriminate love God has for us and for others is often difficult—even offensive—to us.  The forgiveness and love of God is given to us freely, and because of this, we sometimes think it comes to too easily. 

Father Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest, once wrote a prayer that encapsulated the difficulty of living with the reality of God’s freely-given love and grace.  He said:

“Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.”[4]

The ironic thing about this prayer is that even though it shows how we may grasp at something—anything—we can control about the relationship we have to God, this is the one prayer God will never answer.  This love and grace God gives us is outrageous, but to allow us to carve out a space of our very own, to pretend that we can continue to struggle in this world on our own, God will not allow that.  To do so would be abandonment, and God will never do that. Nor will God respect our claims to set the conditions of the love God offers to us or to others. 

This is the sixth Sunday after Easter.  And all throughout this Easter season our readings have been pointing us to the nature of this love that God has for us—our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, from the Gospel of John, and from especially from the first Epistle of John, which is in part a treatise on love.  Through Jesus’s resurrection appearances, we see a love that reconstitutes broken relationships, a love that pursues even when we think the object of God’s love is unworthy, even if that object of God’s love is one’s self. 

Though the Acts of the Apostles, we see the Holy Spirit constantly a few steps ahead of the disciples, showing them that Ethiopian eunuchs and Roman gentiles are within God’s grasp and loving purpose.  All the disciples can do is breathlessly make official the radical, barrier-breaking movements of God’s equal regard for all.  All the while the disciples--Peter especially--have to get over the revulsions engrained in them for profane animals and profane persons.  After the baptism we heard about today from Acts, Peter has to return to Jerusalem and explain to the offended disciples what happened, about which he said, “If God gave [those gentiles] the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’[5]

The image of love scripture gives us is as wonderful as it is terrifying.  Assenting to it as a philosophical proposition—maybe that is possible. But how do we accept it?  Our relationships, our acquaintances, our common lives, our economics, all of these have a sense of quid pro quo so firmly rooted in them that it is so hard to imagine something so freely given and so unearned that also sometimes seems invisible.  

But there is also something attractive about this love.  Something that calls us to experience a reality greater than the one we see around us.  Something beyond the mundane, something that ignites holy desire and pushes us beyond our limits.  Something that strikes us a freely given but demands so much.  Others sense that attraction; even if it isn’t always clear that Christians act according to it.  Will we share what we know of such a mystery?

Beloved of God,

Who are we that we might hinder God?

Who might we prefer to set God’s love as conditional for?

Is it a particular person?

Is it a group of folks?

Is it yourself?

Where might the Holy Spirit be calling on each of us to break a boundary on God’s love we would rather keep in place?

---

[1] Of the many definitions for ‘punk,’ in this context the word refers to a cowardly individual.

[2] John 11:1-16 (particularly v.16).

[3] At least in John (20:21-22).

[4] Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace.

[5] Acts 11:17.

Jesus Came to Thomas Anyway, part II: The Underlying Theology

I preached on Thomas this past weekend, and lo and behold, many other of my seminarian colleagues did as well; there is an old joke that seminarians and curates can always count on preaching Thomas, the transfiguration, and the trinity.  It has been wonderful these past two weeks to hear about the different directions people took.  It's also obvious that preachers make choices, and they are the type of choices that frustrate any attempt to say that biblical texts mean only one thing. Community matters as well.  The sermon I preached at St. Paul's on the Green was a sermon for that community; if I wrote a sermon for All Saint's Episcopal Church in Mobile, AL or St. Augustine's in Tempe, it may have looked much different.

Even before I preached my sermon, and definitely after I preached it, a couple of things came to mind.  First, I just make an initial observation that the two 'major' sermons I've preached at St. Paul's have both made reference to doubt, questioning, disbelief, or my time outside of the church.  My preaching in other places has not done this.  I doubt all of my sermons at St. Paul's will make mention of these themes, but I have found it personally helpful to show that a healthy life of faith is also one that can admit to times of trouble and question; this does not show weakness.  When properly done, an honest appraisal or openness of one's life of faith shows integrity.*  There have been people for whom such integrity coming from the pulpit has been helpful.  Second, preaching on the subject of doubt in the life of the community is difficult, and requires more than one sermon.  It is always becoming clearer to me that preaching involves making choices and sometimes relying more on one's underlying theology than one may be comfortable with. 

In some ways what follows is an exercise in laying bare my own underlying theology.  And I will begin by asking why admitting doubt is a good thing in a Christian context.  This will mean taking some educated guesses as to why people think doubt is a bad thing, and some replies.  Then we need to look at doubt itself because the term means a few different things, not all of them bad.  Third, I'll come back around to why the community matters.   

I opened the sermon by saying that I have been haunted by the phrase "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe (Jn 20:29)."  I’ve always heard this phrase as a condemnation.  This passage is easily used as a bludgeon; and a person can use this bludgeon on herself, or someone can use it on her.  If one have doubts or questions, one may be left with the sense that Jesus is no longer talking to Thomas, but in one's mind's eye, Jesus turns points his finger, revokes his blessing, and one is no longer welcome or worthy to stand among those who believe.  A person in doubt or with questions can then experience church as something of an exercise in endurance, abuse, and uselessness; where the obviously more righteous and believing people gather.

..."Or," thinks the doubter, "they are all wearing a facade of faith; the hypocrites."

Relationships corrode at this point.  Since others may not admit doubt, the person with questions loses the sense that the community will understand them.   The person in doubt can no longer be honest, which is unhealthy. One can only stay in that type of situation for so long.

The community can further make the person with questions uncomfortable.  Pastors can take the story of Thomas as an opportunity to preach that the congregation needs to stay faithful with an implicit 'or else.'  This creates a further sense of isolation for the person in doubt.  "I'm on thin ice with God, if there is a God."

The community may go so far as to promote itself to an instrument of God's judgment, and pronounce the penalties of disbelief.  The community by its actions or its preaching may, in effect, say to the doubter that God will no longer listen to them until their faith is increased.  

Why would a community do this?  The most charitable guess I can make is that the community thinks this is what faithful living means, and that complete submission to God is paramount and required for God to be gracious.   When I am less charitable, I think some communities fear doubt and questions as "contamination."  These communities cannot handle someone who disrupts the narrative.  Sometimes it's just a spiritually immature snobbery.

There are biblical texts for this sort of exclusivism.  The passage above may be one, but as I notice in my sermon, to pronounce a blessing does not automatically come with a curse.  We still have to make sense of the fact that Thomas, in his disbelief, spends an entire week with the rest of the disciples. They do not make Thomas leave.  They do not berate Thomas.  They stay in relationship to Thomas and Thomas also stays with them.  Then a week later, Jesus, who could have written Thomas off in his unbelief, returns.

Blessed may be the one who believes yet has not seen, but Jesus shows a grace by the personal encounter that demonstrates that he will go to great lengths to make himself—and God—known to all.  And it is in this personal return of Jesus to Thomas that we see the point of the encounter.  We start of see the nature of God in Jesus, who is the expression of God’s love in the flesh.  A love that continues and is not simply bound to how much love the disciples can return to God.  This is the love of a God who desires and yearns to be in relationship; and in relationship, to open the eyes of the disciples to the way the world should be.  This is why the disciples, after having received the Holy Spirit, do not turn Thomas out of the community.

 This theological understanding should serve as a reminder to the community of their own proper role in the life of faith and doubt.   

But what about those in the community who look down on those without faith, some of whom may even desire that there be an accounting that leaves some condemned?  And what about those who think that the community is too easy on those who do not believe?  There are a few replies.  One reply that is biblically grounded is to look to the story of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32).  The story might be familiar.  A man has two sons, one gets his half of the inheritance early and squanders it, his father welcomes him back when he returns.  A metaphor for God and us (and much, much more to be said about that at some point).  What is less well known is the latter part of the story:

  ‘Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” ’(Lk 15:25-32

The other son feels slighted by his father's generosity.  Have you ever experienced something like this?  When someone you know was forgiven way too easily while you did everything right?  It's a difficult thing to see.  Yet, it is also how God works.  When communities forget the lesson of God's abundant love and grace, and set themselves up as the older brother, we do a disservice to God and to those who experience doubt and questions.

To stay in the parable:  imagine what would happen if the the older brother met the younger brother first, and said that 'the father' cares nothing for him.  The younger brother turns around and leaves, with no moorings to what gave him meaning and hope in the past.  So too, the church that does not seriously consider how best to stay in relationship to one who doubts or questions drives people away from God.

Finally, it is also probably common for churches to be gentle with people who question or doubt for a short time, but then the patience runs out.  Personally, this seems like a symptom of an impatience with the lack of control one can exert over the will of the other when we should instead trust that God is doing work through us in God's good time [but this isn't to say that skillful pastoral care is important].  We are called to hold open the space for an experience of the holy and name it when we see it.

Suppose one finds a community in which it is safe to admit doubt, and one finds a community in which one can still experience love and belonging after admitting doubt, what does one do about the doubt? There are spiritual perils here; but there are bright sides to both of these experiences, and a mature community can help.  Indeed communities need these experiences to mature. Doubt is often the crowbar God uses to pry through old ideas and comfortable ways of being to expose an entry into a deeper place in one's soul.**

Now, there are probably more than two classes of doubt/questionings of the faith, but I'm going to limit myself to two.  The first is the questioning of tenets of the faith.  In terms of questioning of the tenets of faith, it is always worth the community's time to ask whether the presentation of the faith is in a language that people can find intelligible.  The immature community may say "why don't you get this? We will repeat it to you again and again until you can repeat it back to us."  The immature community may then say, "we tried, but something is wrong with you."  The mature community stops, and considers. Does our language even work here...in this time and place?  The community of faith should be continually seeking to discover the proclamation of the Gospel in a way it needs to be heard by the context in which the community finds itself.  This does not guarantee success in convincing people about the truth of the Christian Way, but the community should never forget that, as the faith passed on through the generations, each generation needs to find its own voice and way of expressing its experience of God.  The mature community will also let people who wish to be in relationship stay in relationship.

The other form doubt and questioning can come in is the loss of the sense of God's presence.   In mystical theology, saints and theologians have known since early times that the Christian walk means a time of 'spiritual dryness.' More liberating than the freedom to admit doubt is the knowledge that Christians have experienced doubt as a specific part of the life of faith for a long, long time.  The loss of the historical memory and appreciation of tradition in American Christianity, and particularly the mystical tradition (especially in some parts of the mainline), means that the spiritual resources available to the community in times of doubt and questions are impoverished.  I wonder how many people experience this stage of the development of their faith and cannot find a community or the resources to push through to the other side.  But one needs a community that values the spiritual maturity and vulnerability to allow people to admit to questions before it can help people through the "dark nights of the soul."

I know this post is getting long, but bear with me as I take a quick detour through The Christian Way, in a very, very brief form.

Christian mystics have different numbers of stages to the pinnacle of Christian life, which mirrors Christ's life of loving regard for all. (See the Rule of Benedict, Chapter 7, the steps of humility in which one goes from the fear of God to a perfect love which casts out all fear; St. Bernard of Clairveaux's On Loving God, which details the Christian's move from loving one's self, to selfish love, to loving God as God, to finally loving one's self in God; and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola).  I'll mention three rough stages: the illuminative, the trying/dark night, and the unitive/contemplative/stable.

Christian mystics often speak of illumination or conversion as the awakening to God by which people come to experience the love of God.  This can happen before or after a profession of faith.  This is the part of the life of faith that feels like a honeymoon.  Everything is roses, fervor, warmth, liveliness, and elation.  In very traditional terms, this is the experience of God which awakens people to the gulf between God and themselves in terms of holiness and goodness.  This stage may also jump-start the turn of the persons god-given gift of desire to the good, and the long process of growing into the fullness of Christ begins.

Then come the rough times; the fervor dies down, the warmth one experienced at doing good goes away.  God may seem far away, hidden.  Christians experience conflict and testing.  In traditional terms, this is sometimes called purgation and purification.  The true motives of our actions and beliefs are revealed--Do we seek heavenly reward or do we really love God and neighbor?  God is leading a person to the latter.  The paradox is that God is as close to the person in this stage as the first.   A person may experience this process and label parts of it, particularly the second stage, as doubt and questioning, and the trouble is that immature Christian communities see this and get nervous.  They think the conversion "didn't take."  Communities can fail people in this stage.  This is also precisely when community is so important.

Finally, there is the unitive/contemplative/stable stage, where the person gains a clarity about their life in God and continue in growing into the fullness God created him or her to be.  Discernment and humility typically characterize this stage, and contemplation becomes action embodied as second nature.  BUT, this is not a linear progression; folks sometimes cycle back through the dark night.  This is where, as I said above, doubt and questions represent God's way of calling us deeper.  The life we live is too small for the soul God is reworking.

Back to Communities. The Christian tradition has acknowledged that God is present to people even in their doubts and questions, or in the initial seeking of God. This is true even when Christians feel uncomfortable around people who do not believe the same way that they do (this is a sign of spiritual immaturity, which can be remedied by seeking God's face in the 'other').  But, the entire point of the church is to offer God’s welcome and to not hold back the good things of God from anyone. The Church acknowledges that all belong with God regardless of whether or not one believes, and the Church exists so it can be a place in which believers and nonbelievers can experience Christ together.  And even if some Christians feel a bit funny about caring for people who are so different, God calls us into this experience of walking through life in the light of a radical love.  We are called into relationship with God and the world, which is to be characterized by an indiscriminate loving regard-- for God, neighbor, and stranger.  Doubter and Questioner.

If a community has a choice between entertaining a doubt/question or distancing itself from those who have doubts and questions, the greater sin is to distance people.  When a community distances itself, the community forgets that a more profound fact about God can be found in a question, not an exclamation.

_________________________________
*By 'properly done,' I mean that a pastor is not using the sermon as a moment of purely private reflection and personal pastoral care.  Pastors encounter the Biblical text on behalf of the community, and the community should be reflected in that work.  Also, the core of the Gospel is hope in the midst of trouble; if the pastor snuffs any sense of hope, the gospel is not being preached.
**I think I owe Hal Roark for this phrasing.

Jesus Came to Thomas Anyway...

Sermon Easter 2 Year B
Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

I have been sitting with this story of “Doubting Thomas” all week.  It has been rather uncomfortable.  I’ve been a bit haunted by the phrase "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

I’ve always heard this phrase as a condemnation.  Perhaps someone has told you that the story of “doubting Thomas” is a warning against losing your faith.  Perhaps you have heard this passage used as a bludgeon; that if you have doubts and questions, then Jesus revokes his blessing, and you are no longer welcome or worthy to stand among those who believe.

But there is something not quite right about that interpretation.

It led me to this question:

Why does Jesus not simply tell the disciples to let Thomas know that he is risen—and if Thomas does not believe, well, tough for him?

Put another way:

If Jesus said that a blessing is on those who have not seen and yet believe, why does Jesus even bother to come and give Thomas what Thomas asked for— a physical experience of the resurrection?

Another question comes up for me, and this brings up a matter for the community:

If belief is so important, why do the disciples keep Thomas around—the disbeliever that he is—sheltering him for a week before Jesus shows up again?

These questions gives me pause, and it forces me to pay more attention to what Jesus is doing before I try to figure out what he is saying.  And as I look at Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in this Gospel, it becomes clearer that Jesus so desires to reconstitute the community he formed that he is willing to go to great lengths to do it, and entertain his own disciples’ disbelief and questions.  By Jesus’ own radical love for his disciples in the midst of their own disbelief, Jesus shows us how we are to experience our community life.

To look at the story again, we opened the reading with the disciples hiding behind a locked door.  Mary Magdalene had seen Jesus and told the disciples.  John and Peter ran to the tomb.  John believed, but we don’t know if Peter or any of the disciples did.  In the other Gospels they do not.  So, we have disciples, who are NOT out preaching the resurrection, but are hiding and are not sure what has happened to the body of Jesus. While Thomas sometimes gets a bad reputation, none of the disciples look too good here.

Jesus comes to them in the room, and the disciples knew him from two things:  his word of peace and his wounds.  They celebrate.  Jesus gives them the Holy Spirit, a sign of his power residing within them.  They are now a people sent, just as God sent Jesus into the world.

Later, Thomas comes in.  They tell him what happened.  He does not believe them.  He, being a realist, wants proof.  Even then, in times some would consider less enlightened, the dead do not rise.  The word of the disciples is not good enough.

Now here is something interesting.

Thomas, in his disbelief, spends an entire week with the rest of the disciples. 

They having received the Holy Spirit, share in Jesus’ mission and life.

They do not make Thomas leave.

They do not berate Thomas.

They stay in relationship to Thomas.

Thomas also stays with them.

Then a week later, Jesus, who could have written Thomas off in his unbelief, returns.

And it is in this personal return of Jesus to Thomas that we see the point of the encounter.  We start of see the nature of God in Jesus, who is the expression of God’s love in the flesh.  A love that continues and is not simply bound to how much love the disciples can return to God.  This is the love of a God who desires and yearns to be in relationship; and in relationship, to open the eyes of the disciples to the way the world should be.  This is why the disciples, after having received the Holy Spirit, do not turn Thomas out of the community.

Last Sunday Father Nicholas mentioned that the resurrection is less understood as something to be reasoned through and argued for.  It is something to be experienced.  Even the disciples had to see the resurrection and touch the formerly broken body of Jesus before they could believe it. 

Now we come to that pesky statement about seeing and believing.  Blessed may be the one who believes yet has not seen, but Jesus shows a grace by the personal encounter that demonstrates that he will go to great lengths to make himself—and God—known to all.  The disciples belonged with God before their belief was a matter settled.  Thomas belonged with Jesus before his belief was settled.  So too, we are not left condemned.  In our weakness and uncertainty, doubt and questions, God’s grace reaches even further to meet us.

God calls us into this experience of walking through life in the light of a radical love.  We are not simply called into a philosophical school (though we have this) of propositions to be defended, but into a relationship with God and the world, which is to be characterized by an indiscriminate loving regard-- for God, neighbor, and stranger. 

Now, after Christ’s ascension, we are still offered the experience of God who abides in us.  From the spark of the divine image of God we all share, we encounter God in all who we meet.  As a community of resurrection, we remember that Jesus bore witness to life after terrible woundings and death, showing the disciples his own pierced hands, feet, and side.  We likewise receive the Good News from God and from one another that life and love and goodness are possible in the most trying of times, and that there is a community willing

to bear the image of God into the world…to walk alongside others in pain, through to the other side of what may feel like our own personal tombs.

 

We experience God in worship, music, prayer, and contemplation.  Like the disciples, the community of God found here, by the power of the Spirit, is called to hold open the space where an experience of God in Christ is possible, and every possible opportunity to experience God is open to all. 

From the front door to the font,

from the pews to the altar,

from the bread and wine to our healing stations during Communion. 

The welcome further continues in the ministry of conversation we participate in when we are not in this sanctuary but eating and drinking together at meals, at coffee hour, or in study.  

Christ beckons, and the divine lure calls.

We call what we do here ‘radical hospitality,’ but the best kept secret of modern Christianity is that this hospitality is in many ways traditional. It is the lifeblood of the Way of Jesus. Saint Benedict of Nursia, who wrote one of the most influential rules of life for monasteries in the 6th century, advised that communities welcome all visitors as though they were Christ, and that those who came to the community belonged with the community—and were considered guests sent from God-- regardless of whether or not they were believers. Celtic Christians, well into the medieval period, kept similar monastic practices, allowing all to enter and stay and experience the life of the Christian community before a person had to commit to a series of propositions.  You could belong before you believed.

This community offers God’s welcome and does not hold back the good things of God from anyone.  This community acknowledges that all belong here regardless of whether or not one believes, and exists so it can be a place in which believers and nonbelievers can experience Christ together.  And our questions, our doubts, will be met by the grace of God.