Texts: I Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
Time is short this morning, which reminds me of a line from Alice in Wonderland, where at the Tea Party with the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse, with riddles abounding, she comments sighing wearily, “I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.’
For many people, Easter and the attempts by preachers to add some insight to one of the most puzzling conundrums of all time—the idea of someone raised from the dead—strike them as just a waste of time. Easter also calls to mind Alice’s response to a conversation with a talking white rabbit, a disappearing cat, and the mad hatter: “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Thomas, one of the inner circle of 12 disciples, and later to become the founder of two of the world’s oldest Christian churches, The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church and the Mar Thoma Church of India, St. Thomas is not like Alice at all, nor like any of those people whom we find move from equivocal and open to fanatical if we question their version of the facts. I’m thinking, of course, of those who continue to insist that the president of our country—birth certificate not withstanding—could not be a natural born citizen of our country; or like those who deny the reality of the holocaust, like Iran’s current leader.
Today, by the way, is Yom Hashoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—and, while I’m on the subject of special days, it is also the 8th anniversary of the day when Pres. Bush landed on the deck of that aircraft carrier to announce “mission accomplished” that major American combat operations in Iraq were over. I have no doubt that it is appropriate on the Second Sunday in Easter, to be reminded of human hubris and folly.
Many of us, today, find great comfort in the presence of Thomas, and his words and deeds, in the Gospel story. In the face of the ardent confessions of his fellow disciples who insisted on the resurrection, Thomas doubted, and had no qualms about saying so. How much healthier churches would be if more of them allowed such honesty. Too often social pressure induces people to falsify their own testimony, and folks may be labeled as heretics, or worse, as Judases, if “every day with Jesus is not sweeter than the day before.”
Every year, this text about Thomas comes to us on the second Sunday of Easter, as if to remind us that Thomas’s questioning, seeking, doubting, represents something essential for the life of the church. Matthew too echoes this theme when he reports on the meeting of the disciples with the risen Jesus on the mountain in Galilee. Matthew writes: “When they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
Thomas wants first hand, personal experience of this phantasm of Jesus that appears suddenly though the doors are locked against the outside. John, the writer of this fourth Gospel, clearly wants to tell us, several times over, that the resurrected Christ is not the sort of human body that you and I inhabit. Such bodies do not pass through walls and locked doors. Thomas wants proof that Jesus has arisen from the grave. Jesus, strangely passing through walls and locked doors says to him: “Have you believed because you have seen me?”, and then goes on to say: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Kenneth Carter, a United Methodist pastor writing in last week’s issue of The Christian Century, a magazine whose subtitle is: Thinking Critically, Acting Faithfully, and that was founded by a great member of our own denomination, the Disciples of Christ—Charles Clayton Morrison—suggests that all of John’s signs in his Gospel—from the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, to feeding the multitudes, to giving sight to the blind, and the raising of Lazarus from stinking death—are not meant ever as proofs. Instead, John’s Jesus invites people to follow—with their hearts—which is what “believe in me” means in this Gospel—to give their hearts, souls, strength, mind—their all—to him, and then they would see.
Is that mental gymnastics, believing making something true? Perhaps, but let us not hesitate to acknowledge the truth that we become what we value most in this life.
John’s Jesus, Kenneth Carter writes, goes in the opposite way we usually think: Not “if you see, you might believe,” but “if you believe (and I would correct that from any idea of cognitive intellectual assent, to represent the fuller idea of credo, of giving one’s heart), then you will see.” [Reflections on the lectionary, Sunday, May 1. Kenneth H. Carter, Jr. The Christian Century, April 19, 2011, p. 21]
It’s like I said last week on Easter morning: we don’t see the risen Jesus at all if we just sit around thinking about him; or hang around the graveyard; it is in the going…going the way of Jesus with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength—that Jesus may be found, met, perhaps even touched, as Thomas touched him, and came to confess this Christ as his Lord and his God.
Taking Thomas’s honesty to the reading from I Peter, we might think—at first hearing—that this text offers “pie in the sky” by and by; and not much for this present life, to those who find themselves at odds with the culture around them. Written in the name of the Apostle Peter, it must surely be dated many years after Peter’s death in about 64 CE, and because of the very fine use of the Greek language, probably did not come from the hand of a Galilean fisherman, but perhaps from one of his more educated followers, who lived into the second or third generation after Jesus’ death. The letter is written to communities in Asia Minor whose members appear to be Gentile, Christian, slaves, and women, owned by or married to non-Christian men. It is often seen as a baptismal sermon.
But it, too, like the story of Thomas, reminds us that although they (and we) may not have seen him—that is the risen Christ—they love him. Despite having nothing, in giving their love to Jesus, they receive—by grace—an inheritance that cannot be destroyed by fire, by trial, by decay. They receive this gift of wholeness, a “salvation” ready to be revealed in the last time. Clearly the writer is thinking of the end of time, but I suggest to you that the writer is also suggesting a kind of “progressive revelation” that unfolds for us through the struggles of our efforts to live in the way of Jesus throughout all of our lifetimes, until at the last, it comes clear to us, and we sense that we have all along been able to touch and see the holiness right before us, in our locked rooms, on the roads to villages like Emmaus, in our living now—if we truly mean to try to be like Christ—as aliens in a culture of greed, of every person for themselves. As thinking Christians who wish in our thinking and acting to understand, we now stand outside the circles of religious power which we inhabited a mere 60 years ago. The fundamentalists who seem to want to believe, like Alice, 6 impossible things before breakfast, have, for the nonce, been able to sell their version and to become the majority Christian presence in the world.
We wonder, as we look at our church—which by the way is not dissimilar to many other mainline churches—where the majority of us are over 50, and wonder about the future. Perhaps we should not be making improvements to a building that after all, will someday decay and disappear. We want to hold on to what we have—our reserve funds, for that we can see and touch, those moneys, we may think, can insure our survival. Truth be told, even bricks and mortar, wood and stone, and money are always fungible: all this will one day not persist, imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.
What we have received from our forebears in faith—both from our families, from the previous members of this church, and from those people like Thomas and the discriminated minority Christians of Asia minor to whom I Peter was written—is an inheritance of hope, founded on the trust that there is a power in this universe that transcends matter, that is greater than corporality, that can bridge the abyss of hate and suffering, that intends toward us and the whole creation a love that will not be defeated by death, or decay, or time. It is this truth, this hope, which the resurrected Jesus reveals in brief encounters…as we go with him, as we give him our hearts. This is the inheritance passed on to us by those who have gone before us, and it is this gift that we too must pass on to others. What we do with bricks and mortar, with our wealth—these tangible signs matter, but our hope for a world like the kin_dom of God as Jesus preached about it is the greatest inheritance that we, in our time, may pass on to the future, and that hope must be lived out beyond these walls—in which we may be nurtured and encouraged—in daily encounters with the continuing forces of greed, of hate, of prejudice, of disease and oppression, by showing a different way in our living. So may it be. Amen.
