Lectionary texts:
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31
All of today's lectionary texts, in Acts, 1 Peter and John, relate to the problem of doubt and belief in relation to the resurrection. Namely, do we believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead? The more I reflected on the texts, the more strongly I felt that I could neither do the texts justice, nor do justice to the faith and experience of the earliest Christians, nor be particularly honest if I satisfied myself to reflect on the resurrection in some metaphorical sense without addressing the question that the texts themselves demand: Did Jesus rise from the dead in some real, physical, literal sense, and if so, what does it mean to us?
A reflection on the nature and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus needs to begin with the acknowledgment that without the resurrection, the Christian faith could not exist. If Christians had only the teachings of Jesus, it seems unlikely that we should be anything but progressive Jews, since most of what Jesus taught was anticipated by prophets like Isaiah and Amos, and by Jewish teachers like Hillel. Nor does the Christian faith exist because of Jesus' death. For in a real sense, the death of Jesus negated the most fervent hopes of his earliest followers. The witness of Jesus' rising again after his death was and is the heart of the faith that claims Jesus' name. It was around the witnesses of Jesus' resurrection that the earliest Christian communities gathered. It was in the interpretation of Jesus' resurrection that the theology which we think of as distinctly Christian developed.
Although much has been made of "the traditions of the empty tomb," the stories that have most captured the faith and hope of Christians over the centuries are the stories that explicitly tell of a living, flesh-and-blood Christ walking with, talking to, touching, eating and drinking with, and teaching his disciples. The New Testament contains numerous accounts of appearances of Christ: to the two Marys and the eleven apostles in Matthew chapter 28; to Mary Magdalene, to the two disciples on the road, and to the eleven in Mark chapter 16; on the road to Emmaus and to the eleven in Luke chapter 24; to Mary Magdalene, to the ten disciples gathered in a room, and then to "doubting" Thomas, in John chapter 20; to seven disciples in the fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee in John chapter 21; and to "the 500" and to James, mentioned in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.
Some church historians have attributed Christianity's phenomenal success in the first and second centuries to the fact that the early Christian apostles could offer personal eye witnesses of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Early Christians apparently believed that such an eye-witness of Jesus' resurrection was a prerequisite for being an apostle. When a new apostle was appointed to take the place of Judas, as recorded in Acts chapter one, the other disciples deliberately chose from among those "who have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us... to be a witness with us of his resurrection." Though Paul was not among those who knew Jesus in mortal life, his primary claim to be numbered among the apostles was his own eye witness of the resurrected Jesus in the blinding light on the road to Damascus, the story of which is told in Acts chapter 9, and which Paul frequently cited to justify his ministry.
The tradition in which I was raised, Mormonism, was founded by a man who claimed to have seen the living Christ in the flesh, and is led by a prophet and twelve apostles who were, even in these latter days, supposed to have been eye witnesses of the living, bodily resurrection of Christ.1 I grew up a few miles away from the "Sacred Grove" in Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith claimed to have encountered the living Jesus. In my own personal journey of faith since leaving the Mormon Church, I was touched at a critical juncture by an Episcopal priest who had had his own Damascus-road-like encounter. The Reverend David Works told me how Jesus appeared to him in a blinding light in a jail cell, convincing him to give his life to God. His testimony literally helped save my life, by giving me hope in the universality and immediacy of God's grace. David Works always used to tell me how the Christian faith was nothing without its witness of the "bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."
And yet, despite this insistence on a physical eye witness of the resurrected Jesus that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith, the next thing it is necessary to acknowledge is that the vast majority of Christians -- all but a unique handful -- must live their faith with no such eye witness. I have had many mystical experiences in my life, some quite dramatic. But I have never seen the resurrected Jesus. I assume that most folks here today have not either, though I don't deny the possibility. What faith most of us have must make do without such a personal eye witness.
It is to this central reality of Christian faith that all of today's lectionary texts are addressed. The Acts 2 text provides a model of how faith comes into being through someone else's witness. In this text, Peter tells the "men of Israel" of Jesus, whom "God raised up, whereof we [apostles] all are witnesses."2 Confronted with this eye witness testimony, the text continues, "Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said... 'Men and brethren, what shall we do?'" Peter's answer? "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ." "And they that gladly received his word were baptized."
While the Acts text models the use of the resurrection witness as a missionary tool, the 1 Peter text explains the nature of faith. Because faith is grounded in the unseen, it will naturally be tested. So Peter encourages the saints by reminding them of the joy their faith brings them, even though "now for a season... ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations." Today's 1 Peter text reminds the faithful of the preciousness of their faith in the "appearing of Jesus Christ: whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls." [Emphasis is mine.]
The third text, in John, specifically addresses the problem of doubt. Growing up in a community where faith was the norm, we tended to view Thomas as the misfit apostle, the one who couldn't believe, the apostle of little faith. But in fairness to Thomas, he was the only one of the eleven apostles who didn't actually get to see Jesus in the first place! Most of the new testament accounts portray announcements of Jesus' resurrection encountering skepticism. In reality, doubt is the norm. It is the condition of the world. And this story is meant to model an unconventional response to doubt. "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed," says Jesus. The writer of John drives this point home to us the readers by concluding the story: "But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name." [Emphasis is mine.] The purpose of the story, as Elaine Pagels describes so eloquently in Beyond Belief, is to teach Christians to rely not on one's own personal witness, but on the witness of others.3
This is the nature of faith for the vast majority of Christians in the world: the affirmation of the mystery of Jesus' resurrection as literal truth, as something real that took place, that had eye witnesses, that was documented. And the simultaneous affirmation that we must hold to this mystery without having witnessed it ourselves. That we must take it on faith.
Like many in this congregation, I struggle with this kind of affirmation. I have learned to be deeply mistrustful of individuals who make claims of authority based on some mysterious unseen for which I must take their word in order to be saved. It is not that I, in principle, have trouble believing in something miraculous. Just because modern science can't explain the resurrection doesn't mean that it didn't happen. The problem I have is not the what, it's the where we go from there. The problem I have is that so many Christians take that belief to dark, violent places.
Like Thomas, I want to see. But unlike Thomas, it is not the prints in the hands and the feet, the scar in the side that I want to see and touch. It is not the physical body of Jesus that I need to see. Show me the grace that flows from your belief, and I too will believe. Show me that belief in the resurrection must lead us to greater love and and more unconditional compassion. Show me that it is not exclusive, that it does not demean those who are different, or those who cannot or will not believe. Show me that it is not authoritarian, that it does not require me to leave my brain at the door of the church, that it does not make me a bigot. Show me that it doesn't make me feel like I need to amend the constitution to keep somebody else from having rights. Show me the signs and I will believe. Not the signs of the nails, but the signs of true grace and compassion.
Mysteries such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead are in their very nature unbelievable. They draw us out of ourselves because we do not have the resources or knowledge in ourselves to comprehend or hold them. We might say this type of faith disempowers the believer, it decenters us. To embrace this kind of faith means trying to hold things that are beyond our grasp.
To conservative Christians, a believer being disempowered and decentered is a good thing. They will say, there is no power in ourselves, only in God. We should be decentered in relation to God. But the problem is that a decentered believer is so easily abused and manipulated, so easily turned into a pawn of someone else's agenda, so easily engaged into crusades that spread pain, death and destruction instead of life and love. Too often, believing without seeing turns into believing in spite of seeing. We see this in the current war against scientific truth that is being waged in schools and legislatures across our nation. We see the fruit of this kind of faith in gay and lesbian people being denied full civil rights, or even brutalized and murdered; in abortion clinics being bombed; in planes being highjacked and flown into the World Trade Center. In his book Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer documents how devout Mormons are more likely to be duped by con artists than other Americans, partly because of their tendency to believe, especially when someone knows the right catch phrases and triggers to use. He also documents strings of brutal kidnappings and murders committed in the 1970s and 1980s by fundamentalist Mormons who were not crazy, but who simply believed that God had commanded them to take the lives of unbelievers.
Liberal Christians do not have those kinds of problems. We don't surrender our minds or our souls very easily to charlatans or to wild mysticism. But we have immunized ourselves by demystifying the mysteries and demanding a faith that is believable. We're not sure those "eye witness" accounts of the resurrection described in the Bible are so much eye witness accounts as parables of the church or of the renewal of our souls. We don't deny the resurrection, but we don't make belief in it a requirement. In fact we cringe at any requirement to believe in the unbelievable. And yet, this leaves us incapable of moving beyond or outside of ourselves. It encourages us to remain safely within the realm of what we think is possible. And this becomes true of how far we are willing to go even for those things we are sure of. It puts limits on how much we are willing to sacrifice to move the world away from the mundane probable and closer to the divine possible.
But a more important problem with demanding a faith that is believable, is that not all things which are real are believable. The problem with demanding a faith in which you can remain centered within yourself is that life is constantly decentering us. Thinking that we can grasp or hold all things within ourselves is at best an illusion. Why is it that so many of us naturally turn to God in times of crisis? Why is it that prayers so naturally fall from so many of our lips when we are facing some catastrophic loss? Because crises knock us off of our center. They remind us that we cannot cope on our own, that we do not have the resources in ourselves. We are incomplete. Whatever our spiritual center is, it is not in here, inside of us. So it must be somewhere out there, outside.
Close friends have often asked me why I remain in the church. I struggle with faith. I'm not sure belief in God is healthy. And yet, here I am in a church community that I have been a part of for more than ten years, preaching about the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
I am here, in Lyndale Church, in part because in those moments when I recognize that I am not my own spiritual center, when I recognize that I cannot contain all the great truths in myself, when I recognize that truth surpasses me, I need you. In the passing of the peace, in the reading of scripture, in the preaching, in the beautiful stained glass windows where I sometimes lose myself in contemplation during the preaching, in the music, in the choir singing, in the dance and movement, in the prayers of the people, in the communion to which all are welcome there are opportunities to find a divine center that is not just in me and me alone. In this church's witness for justice, in our marching in the Gay Pride parade, in our hospitality through Families Moving Forward, we have an opportunity to find a center that is not just me and me alone. I am not sure if it is enough, but we have to start our path first by embracing the opportunities we have.
So what about the mystery of the resurrection? I don't know. I cannot deny it, because I don't know enough to say that it cannot have happened. The writers of Acts and 1 Peter and John all affirm that there were witnesses who saw it, and in a very real sense we exist as a Christian community on the strength of that alone. But all I can say is that if there were eye-witnesses I was not -- I am not -- one of them. And without the eye witness, without the proof, I am not sure I should believe. In this I am not asking any more than Thomas, and maybe that makes me less blessed than those who can believe without proof. But I believe that we have the right to demand an eye-witness, for if belief in the witness of others is at the heart of our faith, the eye-witness itself is at the heart of the heart of our faith. We should not let anyone make us think less of ourselves for insisting on it.
To this I must add that the example of most people who are blessed "to believe and not see" is not encouraging to me. Throughout my life, those people who have been most consistently loving, who have been most able to open up to me unconditionally, those who have most concretely demonstrated compassion for others with no strings attached are people who have serious reservations about God; who find organized religion difficult to stomache; who are atheists or agnostics or doubters or are indifferent to religion. Those who have been most obnnoxious, most judgmental, most cruel and hateful and intolerant, most insensitive, most incapable of listening or understanding or opening up are also the most believing and the most devout. I certainly know many who believe devoutly in the great mysteries and who have kindness in their hearts, but I have always sensed there are limits. There is only so much kindness, only so much love, only so much compassion. It only goes so far. Especially if you are somehow outside the boundaries of what they believe God permits; for example, if you are a gay man like me. In general I have found that you have to be without religious devotion to forget about the limits and just love, plainly and unconditionally.
I believe our calling is to love first and ask questions later. Our faith needs to open us up, not close us off. It needs to invite us to step out and to surpass limits, not stay confined within them. It needs to invite us into fellowship, not leave us alone in ourselves. If we need to doubt in order to live that kind of love, so be it.
This is how I believe in the resurrection. I let my heart be open with love, with faith. Just open. Like Thomas, I am waiting to see.
Amen.
Notes
3. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of St. Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003).