STAND OR STEP

April 27, 2014

Easter 2

John 20:19-29

1^st Peter 1:3-9

(prayer)

Last week, on Easter Sunday, during the sermon, I spent a little time summarizing the various resurrection appearances that are detailed in the four biblical gospels.  At the time, I mentioned that we would be looking at the Doubting Thomas story today. 

First of all, let’s give this guy they called “The Twin” a bit of a break.  He was no different than the other disciples in that upper room:  on the Sunday that followed Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary Magdalene came running back to the others twice that morning.  First she reported that the stone had been rolled away: Peter and John went back with her and indeed confirmed her story, but also took a close look inside the tomb and discovered that Jesus’ body was not in there.  The male disciples went back to the city, leaving their female counterpart in the garden - presumably she wanted to grieve alone for a while.

After some time, Mary came running back again, this time buoyant and joyful - she professed that she “had seen the Lord!”  And she told them how she met a man, whom she assumed was the gardener, but when he spoke her name that she knew instantly that it was Jesus, raised from the dead and that he had told her to tell them that Jesus is “ascending to [his] father and their father; to [his] god and their god.”

Mary told them all this, but they didn’t believe her.  Maybe they wanted to, but they certainly didn’t act like they did.  They remained huddled in that room, behind locked doors.  That is not what we would expect from a group whose mentor and rabbi, whose Messiah, had conquered death.

So, when we are tempted to treat Thomas different than the others and label him as a doubter, remember that they were all as doubtful after Mary’s proclamations until Jesus appeared to them as well later that same day.  Thomas had the misfortune of being absent when Jesus came that first Easter evening.

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Last week, as I was going over this list of Gospel resurrection appearances, I mentioned a curious part of Matthew’s narrative:  28:⁸So [the women] left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell [the] disciples. ⁹Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. ¹⁰Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.’ … ¹⁶Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. ¹⁷When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. 

Okay, we can understand that the disciples doubted Mary’s story because they hadn’t seen what she said she saw; and we can understand Thomas’ skepticism because he wasn’t there when other disciples said they saw what they saw, but Matthew’s version of events is hard to fathom - picture that scene - the disciples are up on a Galilean mountain with the Risen Christ physically in their midst; they are worshiping him, in person... and there were still some of them who doubted. 

I guess (the way Matthew tells it), even seeing is not necessarily believing.

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Frankly, I think it is amazing that we are here at all.  It is one of history’s greatest accomplishments... that the story of Jesus survived its first 50 years, given the trouble that Jesus’ closest followers had believing their own colleague's proclamations about Jesus’ resurrection.  I wonder sometimes: how did the church survive to its second and third generations to become 'the church' at all?  Even committed followers of Jesus had trouble believing what their fellow followers experience.  And... even some of the eye witnesses to resurrection, themselves,  didn't believe. 

I mean, if the purpose of the resurrection was to ‘prove Jesus’ power’ or to ‘attest to his divinity’, it was a mild success at best.

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And yet, somehow, once convinced themselves, the believing disciples of Jesus were so convincing in their later proclamations that people who had never met Jesus (in life or death) would come to believe.  That is a miracle, in and of itself.

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Take a look at the picture in the screen [at the top of this post].  Let me propose a back story: she climbed up on to the stump to get a look around from a slightly higher vantage point.  She liked what she could see.  But that is all she could do from the stump.  If she wants to go and experience what she sees ‘out there’, she has to take a step down – a step away from the safety of her perch. 

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After Jesus died, his friends huddled in fear behind locked doors – even the proclamations of familiar visitors telling them that the Lord is Risen could not make them move.  They were afraid to take the next step.  Fair enough, it is easy to step off the stump when you can see where you want to go, but what if you seek the unseen promise?  Can you still step off? 

For everyone (but those relatively few who claimed to have had first-hand experience with the Risen Christ), following Jesus meant taking a step or maybe more accurately... a leap of faith.

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By the time the Gospel of John was written down, Jesus’ resurrection was at least a 60 year old memory - there may have been no one left alive who tell the story from their own experience.  So, we can understand why the author included the phrase: ²⁹... Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.  By the late first century, 'without seeing' was the only way people came to believe.

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If it was hard for Jesus' own disciples to not have their doubts, we should not feel too badly about ours.

The truth is that doubt is not necessary the antithesis of faith.  It is our skeptical habits that help us seek a deeper faith.  Now, some people have the gift of faith and have a sixth sense to be able to believe relatively blindly.

In Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth, the Apostle writes about gifts of the Spirit that exist in the church through different people.  He speaks of things like: wisdom, healing, knowledge (notice it is different from wisdom), the working of miracles, prophecy.  And faith is described as a gift.  We all can have faith.  We all can believe, just like we all can have some knowledge and attain some wisdom, but some people are truly gifted. 

Some people have the gift of faith, but faith is not just available to them.  The rest of us just work harder to find it.

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As western civilizations went through the time of The Enlightenment and the age of The Scientific Revolution, we have gained a healthy respect for exploration and a thirst for knowledge.  We have developed an appreciation for the process of understanding; to that end we accept that there is much mystery - far greater than the sum of our collective knowledge, but we work at converting some of that mystery to knowledge. 

I think that is how many people think about faith: we want to make some inroads into the mystery of our existence.  We want something to hang on to.  We may be prepared not to have 100% assurance, but we want what we believe to make sense given our experiences.  In that way we have some things in common with the original followers of Jesus: we need reasons to believe.

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A few of you may have participated in some of the video study sessions I offered leading up to Easter, when we watched presentations by a number of people on the topic of the Emerging Church of the 21st century.  With speakers like UCC Moderator, Gary Peterson, theologian Dr Phyllis Tickle, CBC science reporter, Bob McDonald and modern-thinking pastors Michael Dowd and Mike Piazza, we heard that the nature of church is evolving because of our increased scientific knowledge and our openness to even greater mystery.

My experience tells me that the 21st century church must assume that people are skeptical of everything - including our traditions, our dogmas, our institutions, our leaders and even our sacred texts.  But we can also assume that people are longing for authentic, meaningful spiritual experiences.

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Phyllis Tickle spoke about the unmistakable historical pattern that about every 500 years, the church re-evaluates its primary source of authority for a new time.  For our first 500 years, the church's authority rested with the traditions of the Apostles, those early church leaders whom claimed to have personal experiences of the Risen Christ.  This was a time of great growth and expansion of Christianity, culminating in it becoming (ironically, given how Jesus died) the official religion of the Roman Empire.  However as the [now] Holy Roman Empire began to fall - in favour of emerging European tribalism and feudalism, the church's authority shifted from the apostolic tradition to the great Creeds.  The era of dogma had begun and the church as an institution began to emerge - in different ways in Eastern and Western Europe, by the way: a fact that came to a head at the end of that second 500 year cycle when the great east-west schism occurred between the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.  In this third era, the authority moves from the institutional dogma to the institutional hierarchy of the church: in the west, specifically, authority rested with The Papacy. 

Now, it is worth pointing out that the 'old' authorities of the apostolic traditions and the creeds still existed and continued to bear some influence, but it is fair to say that from the 12th to 15th centuries, the.  the institutional leaders held the highest authority.  The next evolution of the church grew out of a protest movement against this centralized bureaucratic authority.  Two significant secular contexts had a major impact on this change:

1. an increased populist literacy due to the invention of the printing press (as people began to be able to read and write, and as bibles began to be published in languages other than Latin or Greek, there was less need for to rely solely on an educated clergy to interpret scripture for everyone; and
2. the rise of the nation state.  European tribes were beginning to unify and national identities were emerging.

This protest movement (or Protestant Reformation) lead to many new denominations of Christianity.  The uniqueness of each was largely based on specific interpretations of parts of Scripture.  The Bible would dominate the next 500 year cycle.  As Martin Luther's rallying cry for his branch of Protestantism said: sola scriptura - scripture alone.

If you've been doing the math, you can see that we are up to the 21st century and if the pattern continues, we should be in the midst of another shift in authority.  Phyllis Tickle believes we are.  And I agree with her.

As I said earlier, modern 21st century churches should assume a wide ranging skepticism from modern spiritual seekers, including a critical view of the bible.  As a minister in this time, believe me, it is no longer authoritative to many people to simply argue, "because the Bible says so".  With our scientific minds, people of this time want to go deeper and try to discover why the church believes what it believes - just having church leaders professing it doesn't cut it.  People want to think for themselves.  And that is not possible if there is an insistence on the inerrancy of scripture - that the words of the Bible "in its original manuscripts are totally free from error of any kind; that scripture does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact."

Dr Tickle pointed out three major problems that 'sola scriptura' and inerrancy has experienced in the past century and a half.

1. Slavery - no matter how we try to brush over it, the fact is that the Bible not only accepts and condones slavery, it encourages it.  When Onesimus, a runaway slave meets Paul in prison, the apostle insists the he return to his owner, whom Paul happens to know.  Now, Paul writes a letter to Philemon encouraging him to appreciate the new value that Onesimus can be to him, but there is never any hint that Paul challenges Onesimus' indentured servant status.  Paul's letter is completely based on the assumption that Onesimus is Philemon's property to do with as he pleases.  In the 19th century, as the institution of slavery ended in North America, so did the ability to justify slavery by scripture alone.
2. Gendre equality - We may be prone to smooth over things over with inclusive language, but there can be no denying the fact that the bible comes to us from a very patriarchal context.  Although women played a prominent role in the earliest church communities, by the mid-late first century, letters were being written to tell women to be quiet in church and keep their heads covered.  In the early 20th century, with the help of Canada's famous five (including the United Church's Nellie McClung), Canadian women persons under the law.  In the past 100 years, all throughout the nations of western Christianity women were given the right to vote and increasingly fuller involvement in society.  As presumptive, systemic genre inequality waned, so did the ability to justify patriarchy by scripture alone.
3. Thirdly, we are seeing a similar process emerging with-respect-to Biblical pronouncements against homosexuality as LGBT people are beginning to see equal opportunities in western societies.  Even within many church communities, it is getting very hard justify ecclesiastical homophobia by simply saying "the Bible tells me so".

It's not that the Bible is losing its relevance in the church, but we are evolving into a time when we take our sacred texts extremely seriously, just not literally.  We continue to learn from our scriptures, but we are interested in the deeper meaning: we want to understand the context of the times and experiences they were written under. 

We are experiencing an evolution that John Wesley hinted at in what has become known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.  Wesley concluded that there were essentially four different sources for a person to come to a theological conclusion:

·         Scripture,

·         Tradition,

·         Experience, and

·         Reason.

Now, Wesley held to the primacy of scripture, but it is significant to say that what we come to believe is also influenced by what we have learned from the traditions of the church; what we have learned through our observations and experiences in life in this world; and what our thinking discerns is reasonable.

Within this rubric, we should not be dishearted by our doubts and skepticism: they are part of our path to faith.

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Doubt has always been an important part of a journey of faith.  When we come to a place where we are not sure, we can do one of two things, we can stand still and stay put in this doubt, or we can step into the mystery and try to go deeper into the Spirit.

As we live and move and have our being in this time, we will seek ways to understand mysterious divine presence and influence of God.  We will be guided by the sacred stories passed on to us, by a serious 21st century relationship with scripture and with our own curious nature. 

If we are open to this, we will step off the stump and wander out into the mystery and see what can happen.  And when we find those thin places, those moments of clarity, we will, in part, have our doubts to thank.

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Let us pray,

O Spirit, grant that I may never seek, so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand and to be loved as to love with all my soul.  Amen.

#185VU  "You Tell Me That the Lord is Risen"