***Before we continue with our regularly scheduled sermon, we bring you this public service announcement. The gospels, and John’s in particular, have been used for centuries to perpetuate the false assertion that “The Jews” killed Jesus, and there is, of course, a horrific collection of history that comes directly from that false assertion being used as a justification for “revenge”. Just to be clear – the Greek word Ioudaios , found in the line, “…where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews…” and many other places in John’s gospel is better translated as “Judeans” than “Jews”. The description is one of geography as much as religion. The “Jews”did not kill Jesus. The empire did. We continue now with your regularly scheduled sermon…***
So this is the place where I’m supposed to talk about doubt and faith and Thomas. The problem is that I don’t have anything against Thomas. I actually have a lot of doubt, and I don’t think that doubt and faith are opposites. In fact, I think that they are partners. We shouldn’t disparage Thomas with this title “doubter”, as if that were a bad thing. He’s just a realist. I happen to think that he’s not cowering in the upper room with the rest of the disciples for Jesus’ first appearance because he’s got stuff to do. He’s trying to figure out what comes next because his “faith” was never in some “pie in the sky”, vague idealism, it was set in reality. Feed the poor, care for the weak, practice being peaceful.
So when the disciples come with this account of seeing Jesus, Thomas doesn’t just doubt them, he doesn’t believe. As David Lose says in his commentary, “I suspect that his demand to see and feel the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands is less a request for proof than it is mocking the disciple’s claim. He makes that demand, in other words, because he knows it will never happen; it’s a request as absurd, even ridiculous, as what his friends are claiming.” What changes then when Thomas confronts the risen Christ is not his doubt or his realism. He is still a realist. What changes is his perception of what is real, his awareness of what is actually possible…his capacity to understand what it is that God can do.
Our perception is our reality. That’s what both religion and science tell us. In the field of theology we often call this our “hermeneutic”, the “lens” through which we see the world. Reality defined by our perception. Science describes this by studying firing synapses, electromagnetic waves and biochemical reactions in our bodies. When that lens changes, our reality changes.
I will suggest to you this morning that we not only need, but are in the midst of possibility for such change. What we have borne witness to over the past couple of weeks is a very visible, and vocal, display of an extreme. The group that has been protesting us is so extreme that they are disapproved by many groups who share their values, but reject their methods. So what we see is the edge of an issue, and part of my struggle with this protest, and with protest in general, is that it is not relational. There is no room for dialogue, save the dialogue of “we give up” or “OK, OK, we’ll meet your demands.” And while there are certainly times in which relationship is so fractured that protest is the only option left, we too often move to protest very quickly and with a lot of investment in it’s efficacy. Protest rarely works unless it is part of a larger effort, a piece of a relational process in which power is being developed, engaged and used.
We often live very sheltered lives. These past two weeks has given me an opportunity to have a good talk with my children – several good talks, in fact – and what I have reminded them is that they live in a bubble. Their church experience is not like most of their friends’ church experience. Even when they engage in “unity youth” events, they are doing so with very like-minded people. I know that I mostly surround myself with people who, by and large, agree with me. With the exception of family, it’s what I suspect we all do. It is socially natural. Only now you can reinforce that with news, radio, TV, social media, all kinds of input can come from primarily one direction. And what we have disabled by retreating to our corners and encasing ourselves in our own bubbles is our sense of moderation. It’s a good word. Moderation. It means that like Thomas we are able to hold two things at the same time – our ideals and the reality of the situation. Thomas, like the other disciples, thought the dream was dead. Jesus was hung on a tree and all of those promises and hopes were shattered. But he also saw the reality. He had “lost” according to all the indicators of his time, but something else pushed him forward.
For the past few weeks here at Fellowship we have also been engaged in what are called “house meetings” in the language of community organizing. A house meeting is a small collection of 6-8 people, with a group leader, gathered to address a simple question. In this first round, the question was – what is the single biggest thing that impacts you and your family? A house meeting is designed to get people talking and to hear stories for what community organizing has discovered is that only when we have a narrative to go along with our idealism, do we have the framework for change. That narrative changes our reality because it changes our lens…it lets us know that the world is more than just what we can see, or touch or fell…or what we already know.
Once we put a face on an issue, once we hear the reality of how our idealism affects an individual, or a family, that idealism, the “purity” of our position, dies…and something else is reborn. The reality of social change is that it has always come via such stories. The civil and voting rights acts didn’t come from the protests alone, but from people realizing that injustice actually impacted real people all around them. The incredible movement that we have seen in LGBTQ rights in this country has been from people being willing to share their stories AND from the creation of safe places to do so. Whether it is creating these kinds of “circles of trust” in house meetings or websites like Redefy, which gives young people a space to air their views and describe their experiences dealing with prejudice, we have to know that ideals like embracing acceptance or growing tolerance, creating justice or enabling an active community for all people takes our own stories…our own faces. It takes the risk of relationship.
I have said and will continue to say that my opposition to our protesters here is not on the “why”. I understand that there can be differences of opinion, especially from a complex book like the Bible, on issues of reproduction and sexuality. My opposition is on the “how”. Our “how” really matters. In fact, since much of Christian practice is based in the command of Jesus to love our neighbors, how we engage in conflict with our neighbors is very important. It must be done with love. And love is not whatever you want it to be. Love asks us to always consider the other, whomever that other might be, and our faithfulness, not our ideology or politics, asks us to be compassionate, even when that compassion must be forced through gritted teeth.
We have so given in to the puniness of a “left versus right” binary that we have ceased to bring love, the ultimate compromiser, into the field of vision. We have not made good, moral arguments about the validity of our positions, instead resorting to what constitutes public discourse on difficult matters these days – something more like 5-year olds fighting than anything else.
What generates such love? What instills in us the possibility of compassion? It comes from stories. It comes from hearing one another’s stories. It comes from some deep understanding that we really are all people dealing with life, making decisions the best we can with the information we have at hand…and all through the lenses with which we see the world. That’s our reality. And part of our task as Christians, part of our faithful task as followers of Jesus is to do what he did. To stand at the well and listen to the story of the foreign woman who is unclean, the one who is walled off from us by our social constructs…and have your mind changed. To preach that the point of being faithful is not adherence to the rules, but learning how to be loving…and for that little nugget of wisdom to be pointed first and foremost at ourselves.
This may be the spiritual challenge of our time. How do we disagree and still love? How do we govern from a place of uncertainty? How do we live faithfully? This is, of course, the challenge of all other times and places, too. But we have a significant difference. If we cannot work out these things…if power really does continue to get defined as Rome defined it upon Jesus’ body, then we have even more serious issues. Because we can destroy the world. A piece at a time, like with dirty bombs or terror attacks, or in one fell swoop. We can even destroy it, at least effectively, by our lack of relationship to our environment. That’s how serious I think this awareness shift is for us.
Thomas is a prototype for us in this story. He is bound by his physical reality, but the story asks us to see beyond that. ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ Belief here is not about giving in to something unseen— like the Red Queen’s six impossible things before breakfast in Alice in Wonderland. No, belief is about something more than our ideals. It is a verb – pistis in Greek, something we do. It is about perspective. It is found in developing and trusting our intuitions and insights into the promises of the Christ enough that we act on them. It means giving up our desire to be “right” in favor of being loving. It means seeking a story, and having ears to heat. It means trusting God with a mostly unspectacular renunciation of violence and retaliation as we seek to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger. That is the “un-power” of the resurrection. God’s great “Yes” to the Jesus plan, the only thing that really leads to peace. That’s what the resurrection is really about and why we must do far more than believe in it in some mysterious way. We must live it. And we start right here at this table where everyone is welcome, with all of their story…not as a statement of hospitality, but as an act of resurrection, right here, right now.
Come to the table.