Sermon preached at St. Stephen's Church, Rochester, NY on the Fifth Sunday of Easter: Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14
It is quite convenient—what one would call serendipity—for me to be here this morning and to have these particular readings. My biggest project with you currently is working with a Vision Team on a renewed sense of identity and mission for the congregation. We are asking the simple yet profound and vital questions: Who are we? Why are we here? It is “the Vision Thing.”
It happens that the readings today are all about “the Vision Thing” as well.
First off we have our patron Stephen being stoned to death. As this excruciating thing is happening to him he has a vision of heaven, of God’s glory and of Jesus’ presence at the place of honor. There are two important things to note in relation to this vision.
First of all, the stoning was being done by religious people. This tells me that the answer to “the vision thing” is not necessarily to get more religious (by that, I mean mostly “more pious”). Parish Mission Statements or Vision Statements are fairly useless when they simply exude piety. I’m talking about things like “to know Christ and to make him known.” Not that it is not a worthy thing to know Christ and to make him known, but what does it really mean in practical terms? It does not answer the question, “how?” for instance. This parish, given our patron, ought to be cautious about an overemphasis on piety. Stephen was stoned to death by it.
Second of all, Stephen’s vision leads to something very particular: his plea to God that those who are stoning him be forgiven. That may seem like simply the “right thing to do,” and it is certainly that. But in saying it, Stephen has actually changed his mind about these people. One of the reasons they are stoning him is that he has just accused them of being hypocrites since the days of Moses, ending up with murdering God’s Messiah. “You are forever opposing the Holy Spirit…” he says, “you have not kept [the law].” Stephen’s vision turns this condemnation into forgiveness.
Now we move on to the passage from the First Letter of Peter. In it the apostle piles up the images, culminating with the grand and glorious vision
You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Notice again that the vision has consequences. We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, God’s own people, for what? In order that we proclaim the mighty acts of God that have brought us out of darkness into light. And Peter goes on to say a bit more. These mighty acts, this journey from darkness to light, is a journey from not belonging to belonging, from not experiencing a life of mercy to receiving it.
Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
This vision is kind of the bottom line for us. Any vision we have for ourselves has to have this vision as a base. This means that any vision we have of ourselves has to come out of our own sense of who we are as God’s people as opposed to those who hold any other allegiance or are defined by their relationship to someone or something other than God.
Finally there is this morning’s Gospel reading. There are really two distinct visions in this passage. The first, God’s heavenly home where there are many rooms, where each of us has a place to dwell prepared by Jesus himself. Then there is the image of Jesus as “the way, the truth and the life,” through whom we have access to God.
They may seem like contradictory images: heaven with room for many, if not all, a very inclusive image, but then a narrow, exclusive way to that inclusiveness. But does it have to be an exclusive way? After all, it is Jesus who says he is the way, the Jesus who prepares a place for us in the home of God where there is much room. This is Jesus who hung out with the disrespected and outcast, who had compassion for all, and who, in this same Gospel, says that if he is lifted up he will draw all to himself. Perhaps this way is not a narrow, exclusive path, but a wide, inclusive “super highway.”
And the truth about Jesus is a big truth, bigger than we can ever comprehend, bigger than our way of following him. Again, it is Jesus who is this way and truth, not us, not the church.
This vision has consequences as well. We are inviting people on a path that must be deliberately chosen and the choices we must make “exclude” us from other ways of being in the world. Look at the promises of the Baptismal Covenant and you will see a commitment to particular choices that form a particular way of life.
No vision is worth the paper it is printed on if it does not call a person to make choices, which means one of the realities we face—contrary to our instincts—is that some people would choose not to take this path.
What does this passage have to say to us as we discern our vision? I think it says we have to walk the fine line between on the one hand wanting to seem embracing of the culture around us—be inclusive—and on the other hand not being afraid of what makes us distinctive—as Christians and as Episcopalians. Whether or not we know the precise way, truth and life is up for debate. But we do know a way, a truth and a life that we unashamedly offer to others.
So what have we learned about vision?
· It leads to real consequences that sometimes change us. It does not rely on religious platitudes.
· It grows out of our own clear sense that we are God’s people in this place and at this time. As such we are called to do something to proclaim the way to the light.
· It seeks both to embrace the world and define ourselves as distinctive from it, to offer people choices to make to follow a particular path.
Beyond these things I want to say a bit about why we need to do this vision work in the first place. It is really quite simple. If a community such as this wants to do more than survive it must, at the very least, be very clear about who it is and why it is—fundamental questions of identity. That identity, moreover, must be a truly communal one. It cannot come from any one person—clergy or lay—or small group.
Why this emphasis on identity? Because you cannot invite people into something that you know not what it is. It is not enough to just think of yourselves as a friendly church that any right-thinking person would belong to if they were just thinking clearly enough. Every church that exists on the face of the planet thinks that about itself.
And you cannot do mission if you do not know out of which you are doing. Who we are is the true shaper of what we do.
Now I have no doubt that part of what we discover on this “vision quest” will be things we already know, and some of the things this community already does are strong indications of its identity. We are not so much trying to create an identity but uncover it. That’s why we shouldn’t be afraid of this process—it is simply discerning who God has already made us.
And that’s why it is good news, real gospel. God has made us something together and, as the old saying goes, God don’t make junk.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Abundant Community
Sermon preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY: Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-10
There seems to be much bad news for what is often referred to as “mainline Christianity.” That’s folk like us. We seem to be somewhat of an endangered species, particularly those of us in the city. By and large we are aging and shrinking congregations left with enormous monuments of past grandeur. What can we possibly do to survive much less thrive?
We just heard Jesus promise us abundant life. Are our days of abundant life over?
The reality is sobering even for those of us who seem to be holding on, attracting a few people here and there, generally feeling good about ourselves, trying to be open to a new future.
So what’s the answer?
One of the impulses is to look at those churches that are being successful these days and ask what we can do to emulate them. New research shows that would be the wrong impulse for us because those churches live in a different universe from us and we can no more make ourselves like them than the sun can make itself the moon.
So that’s the bad news of this “new research.” Is there any good news?
There is, and it resonates with the readings this morning, particularly the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
The good news is that there are actually a significant number of old mainline, progressive churches out there who are making a comeback and beginning to thrive again. Generally speaking, they are doing so by becoming more of who they are than what someone else is. The path to thriving is something like rediscovering our roots and claiming and practicing those things that we do well, things that are largely gifts of our tradition.
Tradition had a bad name in our churches for a generation or so. It was something from which we needed to get unstuck. “Contemporary” was the word of the day, and it seems to have worked for some, but for almost all of them it has meant casting off or radically downplaying their denominational history. I remember well going to a church growth conference for Episcopalians in the early 1990’s and being told that the one thing we absolutely had to do was downplay that we were Episcopalians. Denominational affiliation just doesn’t play anymore, we were told.
Something felt wrong about that to me back then and now I’m glad I’ve got actual, solid research done by some very capable people that says my instinct was right. We don’t need to cast off who we are, we need to claim it.
Not in a “better than everybody else” kind of way. Snobbery—something we Episcopalians were especially good at in the past—will not serve us. But being unafraid to be who we are will serve us well.
A woman named Diana Butler Bass (Christianity for the Rest of Us) is the principal researcher to whom I am referring. She happens herself to be an Episcopalian, but her research crossed denominational boundaries. What she found was that old mainline progressive churches that were thriving had certain practices in common.
They are for the most part not new-fangled tricks, but old Christian practices, revived for a new day. Three of the main ones are so old that they are present in this oldest description of a Christian community that we have: the first reading this morning.
The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers…all who believed were together and had all things in common...they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts…and day by day the Lord added to their number…
The three ancient Christian practices are hospitality that is a radical openness, generosity that is a radical act of thanksgiving, and a spirituality that is radically communal.
Just that this early community was open and growing is a sign of its hospitality, as well as its strong sense of the common good. In fact, the evidence elsewhere in Acts was that this openness was so culturally unique, so total across all the boundaries of the day that this community became known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”
I would submit that to be a true community of diversity, radical diversity, is still as unique culturally as it once was. Much can be said about the diversity of our culture which would be true, but within that culture we tend to live in sub-cultures with very clearly defined boundaries—back/white, gay/straight, Latino/Anglo, rich/poor, politically conservative/liberal. People’s natural impulse is to be with those who are like them.
Interestingly enough that same Church Growth conference that I mentioned earlier advocated giving in to this impulse. Create like-minded community was its advice. Find a niche population and be what that population needs.
That’s not what we do. Our vision is different. We want to bring disparate people together. That’s our appeal, it is something we highly value, that in order for human community to thrive it needs to be diverse. We are better off together than we are separated.
Not everyone is attracted to this way of living. It can be hard work, and it requires some sacrifice of our own agendas to build a larger one. But this is one thing we have to make clear to the world around us, confidently, boldly: we believe God calls us into community that crosses all boundaries.
And that community is above all things generous in its outlook on life. For the community described in the Acts of the Apostles, that generosity was radical: “they…had all things in common.” That sounds suspiciously like a cult to us or politically and economically something like communism. We’re probably not going to go all the way there.
But what about being a community that is known for its generosity, whose members have a deep sense of gratitude for life and give not as little to the common good as they can get away with, but as much as they can bear and then a little bit more. Stinginess is unknown in such a community. Individuals share their resources for the common life of the community. For us that sometimes means giving to very attractive things that obviously benefit either ourselves or others in need. Most of the time, however, it means giving just as generously to the mundane parts of our common life: the steam heat bill, the sexton’s salary, supplies for the Sunday School. We give generously to these things because we are convinced that we are mutually responsible for them: they are part of our “common good.”
Moreover in a community such as this one, generosity is proclaimed as a way to practice life itself, with radical gratitude for life itself, which is a deliberate turning away from the dominant cultural practices that emphasize the acquiring of more and more things, success measured by wealth, and just good old-fashioned greed. We need to proclaim confidently and boldly that these things are not our way of life. Our way of life is gratitude and generosity.
And lastly there is radical, communal spirituality, centered in the breaking of the bread. The vision is of individuals who gather together week by week because their very lives depend on it. Without the bread they are not whole people. That is why we do it. We do not do it to entertain ourselves or as some spiritual gimmick or fad. We do it because Jesus taught us to and our ancestors have been doing it for two thousand years and it is our experience that it keeps us whole and alive.
“The breaking of bread and the prayers,” the description says. That refers to the community’s commitment to daily prayer, the wisdom of at least a little time in the morning and a little time in the evening to say to God “I love you,” and to hear from God, “I love you too,” to remember those in need, including ourselves, and to feed our imaginations with the stories of our ancestors.
Our spirituality is unabashedly, unashamedly communal. And in that communalism it is both very different from the rampant individualism of the world around us and the spirituality of personal salvation practiced by many of our fellow Christians. We believe that none of us is saved as individuals; we are saved as a community. Our individual relationship with God and our participation in community are so intertwined that we cannot imagine one without the other.
I am describing a community like that first one described in Acts, which wants to know God and the love that is at the heart of God together.
Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, and communal spirituality are our primary values. Those were the practices of the community that emerged following the death and resurrection of Jesus. They are our practices as well and we need to be committed to strengthening them, being able to articulate them to a world that doesn’t really know who we are and what we stand for. In two simple words this can all be summed up using a word Jesus’ uses in the Gospel reading this morning: we are about “abundant community.”
Why do I go to Church? Or the better question, why am I part of a Christian community and this kind of Christian community in particular?
I think there are three simple answers we can give:
Because my life is abundant when I am surrounded both by people who are like me and by people who are different from me.
Because my life is abundant when I am grateful for life and give of myself generously.
Because my life is abundant when I pray in community as people have prayed for thousands of years.
Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, communal spirituality. Abundant community. Let it be, church, let it be. It’s the only way to throw off the bad news and embrace who we are and who we are called to be.
There seems to be much bad news for what is often referred to as “mainline Christianity.” That’s folk like us. We seem to be somewhat of an endangered species, particularly those of us in the city. By and large we are aging and shrinking congregations left with enormous monuments of past grandeur. What can we possibly do to survive much less thrive?
We just heard Jesus promise us abundant life. Are our days of abundant life over?
The reality is sobering even for those of us who seem to be holding on, attracting a few people here and there, generally feeling good about ourselves, trying to be open to a new future.
So what’s the answer?
One of the impulses is to look at those churches that are being successful these days and ask what we can do to emulate them. New research shows that would be the wrong impulse for us because those churches live in a different universe from us and we can no more make ourselves like them than the sun can make itself the moon.
So that’s the bad news of this “new research.” Is there any good news?
There is, and it resonates with the readings this morning, particularly the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
The good news is that there are actually a significant number of old mainline, progressive churches out there who are making a comeback and beginning to thrive again. Generally speaking, they are doing so by becoming more of who they are than what someone else is. The path to thriving is something like rediscovering our roots and claiming and practicing those things that we do well, things that are largely gifts of our tradition.
Tradition had a bad name in our churches for a generation or so. It was something from which we needed to get unstuck. “Contemporary” was the word of the day, and it seems to have worked for some, but for almost all of them it has meant casting off or radically downplaying their denominational history. I remember well going to a church growth conference for Episcopalians in the early 1990’s and being told that the one thing we absolutely had to do was downplay that we were Episcopalians. Denominational affiliation just doesn’t play anymore, we were told.
Something felt wrong about that to me back then and now I’m glad I’ve got actual, solid research done by some very capable people that says my instinct was right. We don’t need to cast off who we are, we need to claim it.
Not in a “better than everybody else” kind of way. Snobbery—something we Episcopalians were especially good at in the past—will not serve us. But being unafraid to be who we are will serve us well.
A woman named Diana Butler Bass (Christianity for the Rest of Us) is the principal researcher to whom I am referring. She happens herself to be an Episcopalian, but her research crossed denominational boundaries. What she found was that old mainline progressive churches that were thriving had certain practices in common.
They are for the most part not new-fangled tricks, but old Christian practices, revived for a new day. Three of the main ones are so old that they are present in this oldest description of a Christian community that we have: the first reading this morning.
The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers…all who believed were together and had all things in common...they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts…and day by day the Lord added to their number…
The three ancient Christian practices are hospitality that is a radical openness, generosity that is a radical act of thanksgiving, and a spirituality that is radically communal.
Just that this early community was open and growing is a sign of its hospitality, as well as its strong sense of the common good. In fact, the evidence elsewhere in Acts was that this openness was so culturally unique, so total across all the boundaries of the day that this community became known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”
I would submit that to be a true community of diversity, radical diversity, is still as unique culturally as it once was. Much can be said about the diversity of our culture which would be true, but within that culture we tend to live in sub-cultures with very clearly defined boundaries—back/white, gay/straight, Latino/Anglo, rich/poor, politically conservative/liberal. People’s natural impulse is to be with those who are like them.
Interestingly enough that same Church Growth conference that I mentioned earlier advocated giving in to this impulse. Create like-minded community was its advice. Find a niche population and be what that population needs.
That’s not what we do. Our vision is different. We want to bring disparate people together. That’s our appeal, it is something we highly value, that in order for human community to thrive it needs to be diverse. We are better off together than we are separated.
Not everyone is attracted to this way of living. It can be hard work, and it requires some sacrifice of our own agendas to build a larger one. But this is one thing we have to make clear to the world around us, confidently, boldly: we believe God calls us into community that crosses all boundaries.
And that community is above all things generous in its outlook on life. For the community described in the Acts of the Apostles, that generosity was radical: “they…had all things in common.” That sounds suspiciously like a cult to us or politically and economically something like communism. We’re probably not going to go all the way there.
But what about being a community that is known for its generosity, whose members have a deep sense of gratitude for life and give not as little to the common good as they can get away with, but as much as they can bear and then a little bit more. Stinginess is unknown in such a community. Individuals share their resources for the common life of the community. For us that sometimes means giving to very attractive things that obviously benefit either ourselves or others in need. Most of the time, however, it means giving just as generously to the mundane parts of our common life: the steam heat bill, the sexton’s salary, supplies for the Sunday School. We give generously to these things because we are convinced that we are mutually responsible for them: they are part of our “common good.”
Moreover in a community such as this one, generosity is proclaimed as a way to practice life itself, with radical gratitude for life itself, which is a deliberate turning away from the dominant cultural practices that emphasize the acquiring of more and more things, success measured by wealth, and just good old-fashioned greed. We need to proclaim confidently and boldly that these things are not our way of life. Our way of life is gratitude and generosity.
And lastly there is radical, communal spirituality, centered in the breaking of the bread. The vision is of individuals who gather together week by week because their very lives depend on it. Without the bread they are not whole people. That is why we do it. We do not do it to entertain ourselves or as some spiritual gimmick or fad. We do it because Jesus taught us to and our ancestors have been doing it for two thousand years and it is our experience that it keeps us whole and alive.
“The breaking of bread and the prayers,” the description says. That refers to the community’s commitment to daily prayer, the wisdom of at least a little time in the morning and a little time in the evening to say to God “I love you,” and to hear from God, “I love you too,” to remember those in need, including ourselves, and to feed our imaginations with the stories of our ancestors.
Our spirituality is unabashedly, unashamedly communal. And in that communalism it is both very different from the rampant individualism of the world around us and the spirituality of personal salvation practiced by many of our fellow Christians. We believe that none of us is saved as individuals; we are saved as a community. Our individual relationship with God and our participation in community are so intertwined that we cannot imagine one without the other.
I am describing a community like that first one described in Acts, which wants to know God and the love that is at the heart of God together.
Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, and communal spirituality are our primary values. Those were the practices of the community that emerged following the death and resurrection of Jesus. They are our practices as well and we need to be committed to strengthening them, being able to articulate them to a world that doesn’t really know who we are and what we stand for. In two simple words this can all be summed up using a word Jesus’ uses in the Gospel reading this morning: we are about “abundant community.”
Why do I go to Church? Or the better question, why am I part of a Christian community and this kind of Christian community in particular?
I think there are three simple answers we can give:
Because my life is abundant when I am surrounded both by people who are like me and by people who are different from me.
Because my life is abundant when I am grateful for life and give of myself generously.
Because my life is abundant when I pray in community as people have prayed for thousands of years.
Radical hospitality, gratitude-driven generosity, communal spirituality. Abundant community. Let it be, church, let it be. It’s the only way to throw off the bad news and embrace who we are and who we are called to be.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Blessed are the Unseeing
Sermon preached on Easter 2: John 20:19-31
Part of why the resurrection is a dilemma for Christians is that we have to be witnesses to something that nobody saw happen. Nobody saw the actual resurrection event. Now, of course, the Gospel records do relate that the disciples and other followers of Jesus saw him after the resurrection, stories like the ones we have this morning. But even then, only followers of Jesus saw him. He did not appear to the general populace.
I’ve always found that a curious fact. Why didn’t Jesus appear to Pilate and Caiaphas, in a kind of “in your face” kind of way? Why not a general appearance, say, in the Temple? Certainly appearances like these would have lent enormously to the credibility of the resurrection. As it is, it is easy for critics to charge that the disciples simply made up these appearances out of their own wishful thinking.
I think if there is an answer it is this: Jesus did not want to depend on the miracle of resurrection for the faith of his followers. Miracles are like money, you give people some, and they always want more. Jesus knew that the future of his followers could not depend on the continued existence of miracles; that was not to be the basis for people to continue to follow his way. Faith was, hope was, and love was.
Our readings this morning bring these three things to the fore.
First, love. The first part of the Gospel reading is all about love, in the guise of forgiveness. Jesus appears to the disciples—with Thomas missing. He says to them not, “What happened?” or “Why did you betray and abandon me?” but “Peace be with you.” He does not say, “Obviously you cannot be trusted.” He says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Given what these disciples had done—all of them cutting and running, one of them going so far as to deny that he even knew Jesus—Jesus’ response to them is remarkable, amazing, astounding. The depth of forgives—love—is simply breathtaking.
Furthermore, their mission is to do exactly the same thing, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven,” and I take the next part as a warning, not a commandment, “if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Jesus gives his disciples the same power of forgiveness and love that he has exercised with them.
Notice as well something he does not tell the disciples to do: tell people about the resurrection itself. The implication is that people will only believe in the resurrection if the disciples act on the message, spreading love and forgiveness to all.
Second of all there is hope. The word “hope” occurs in the first two readings and the psalm. The first reading’s mention is actually a quote from this morning’s psalm (16), “Moreover my flesh shall rest in hope.” And 1 Peter speaks about a “new birth into a living hope.”
For Peter in particular this hope is in spite of any present suffering, something the community to which he writes is experiencing much. “In this [hope] you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.”
The resurrection itself is an act of hope; hope that suffering and even death are not the last word in our lives, that there is something beyond these realities, a reality that is unseen.
This brings us to the biggest concept related to the resurrection: faith. There is no resurrection without faith, pure and simple. This is the whole point of the Thomas story.
The writer tells the Thomas story in order, I believe, to get to his main point: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He is speaking out of the future, as he is writing his Gospel, as the generation of those who did see the resurrected Jesus are rapidly dying off, and the community must increasingly depend upon its faith, rather than its eyewitness.
Peter makes the same point in his letter:
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
There are two great points of faith in the biblical story, points that require pure faith, because there is no way to prove them. The first is at the very beginning, the very existence of a creator. “In the beginning God.” That is a pure faith statement.
The second is the resurrection. Jesus would be the first to say, and does so by strong implication in the Gospel reading this morning, that you cannot believe based on my appearances after the resurrection. You must have faith, and that faith includes what Peter says is the outcome of faith in the resurrection, “the salvation of our souls.”
We are used to thinking that it was the cross that effected our salvation. Jesus died to save us. That is not an untrue statement, but Jesus’ death, as noble as it was, was not enough. Without the resurrection, Jesus’ death is just the death of another hero. Heroes have their followers, but the following always fades over time. There are always new heroes to replace old ones. We call them in our tradition “saints.” Some of them keep being remembered over time; most of the don’t.
The resurrection, however, once believed in, changes everything. It means that Jesus lives in spite of death, that Jesus has conquered the last enemy, which St. Paul rightly says is death (1 Corinthians 15:26). And in that defeat of death lays our salvation, our liberation from fear.
The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of sin; Jesus comes to us with forgiveness. That’s the first part of the Gospel reading. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of suffering, as Peter says in his letter. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of our doubt, as the story of Thomas tells us. And finally, the resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of death, because Jesus has finally and definitively conquered it.
But all this we only get by faith, not by sight. It is not always easy to have this faith, especially in the face of sin and suffering and doubt and death. But that is why we are given the church, an idea that we have to admit has its down side. Jesus, however, gives us the church precisely to keep this love, this hope and this faith together. A community can believe these things and hold on to them even when individuals within that community struggle with them. Any sight we have of the existence of God and the reality of the resurrection is in this community we call the church. And that has been true from the very beginning. Jesus did not appear to Thomas until he rejoined the other disciples, an important detail of the story.
So one definition of the Church, something we could put on a banner and hang outside is “the Unseeing who Believe.” That is who we are, and that is what Jesus means us to be.
Now we do not see. One day we shall. In the meantime we have faith, hope, and love to sustain us.
Part of why the resurrection is a dilemma for Christians is that we have to be witnesses to something that nobody saw happen. Nobody saw the actual resurrection event. Now, of course, the Gospel records do relate that the disciples and other followers of Jesus saw him after the resurrection, stories like the ones we have this morning. But even then, only followers of Jesus saw him. He did not appear to the general populace.
I’ve always found that a curious fact. Why didn’t Jesus appear to Pilate and Caiaphas, in a kind of “in your face” kind of way? Why not a general appearance, say, in the Temple? Certainly appearances like these would have lent enormously to the credibility of the resurrection. As it is, it is easy for critics to charge that the disciples simply made up these appearances out of their own wishful thinking.
I think if there is an answer it is this: Jesus did not want to depend on the miracle of resurrection for the faith of his followers. Miracles are like money, you give people some, and they always want more. Jesus knew that the future of his followers could not depend on the continued existence of miracles; that was not to be the basis for people to continue to follow his way. Faith was, hope was, and love was.
Our readings this morning bring these three things to the fore.
First, love. The first part of the Gospel reading is all about love, in the guise of forgiveness. Jesus appears to the disciples—with Thomas missing. He says to them not, “What happened?” or “Why did you betray and abandon me?” but “Peace be with you.” He does not say, “Obviously you cannot be trusted.” He says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Given what these disciples had done—all of them cutting and running, one of them going so far as to deny that he even knew Jesus—Jesus’ response to them is remarkable, amazing, astounding. The depth of forgives—love—is simply breathtaking.
Furthermore, their mission is to do exactly the same thing, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven,” and I take the next part as a warning, not a commandment, “if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Jesus gives his disciples the same power of forgiveness and love that he has exercised with them.
Notice as well something he does not tell the disciples to do: tell people about the resurrection itself. The implication is that people will only believe in the resurrection if the disciples act on the message, spreading love and forgiveness to all.
Second of all there is hope. The word “hope” occurs in the first two readings and the psalm. The first reading’s mention is actually a quote from this morning’s psalm (16), “Moreover my flesh shall rest in hope.” And 1 Peter speaks about a “new birth into a living hope.”
For Peter in particular this hope is in spite of any present suffering, something the community to which he writes is experiencing much. “In this [hope] you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.”
The resurrection itself is an act of hope; hope that suffering and even death are not the last word in our lives, that there is something beyond these realities, a reality that is unseen.
This brings us to the biggest concept related to the resurrection: faith. There is no resurrection without faith, pure and simple. This is the whole point of the Thomas story.
The writer tells the Thomas story in order, I believe, to get to his main point: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He is speaking out of the future, as he is writing his Gospel, as the generation of those who did see the resurrected Jesus are rapidly dying off, and the community must increasingly depend upon its faith, rather than its eyewitness.
Peter makes the same point in his letter:
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
There are two great points of faith in the biblical story, points that require pure faith, because there is no way to prove them. The first is at the very beginning, the very existence of a creator. “In the beginning God.” That is a pure faith statement.
The second is the resurrection. Jesus would be the first to say, and does so by strong implication in the Gospel reading this morning, that you cannot believe based on my appearances after the resurrection. You must have faith, and that faith includes what Peter says is the outcome of faith in the resurrection, “the salvation of our souls.”
We are used to thinking that it was the cross that effected our salvation. Jesus died to save us. That is not an untrue statement, but Jesus’ death, as noble as it was, was not enough. Without the resurrection, Jesus’ death is just the death of another hero. Heroes have their followers, but the following always fades over time. There are always new heroes to replace old ones. We call them in our tradition “saints.” Some of them keep being remembered over time; most of the don’t.
The resurrection, however, once believed in, changes everything. It means that Jesus lives in spite of death, that Jesus has conquered the last enemy, which St. Paul rightly says is death (1 Corinthians 15:26). And in that defeat of death lays our salvation, our liberation from fear.
The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of sin; Jesus comes to us with forgiveness. That’s the first part of the Gospel reading. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of suffering, as Peter says in his letter. The resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of our doubt, as the story of Thomas tells us. And finally, the resurrection means we do not need to be afraid of death, because Jesus has finally and definitively conquered it.
But all this we only get by faith, not by sight. It is not always easy to have this faith, especially in the face of sin and suffering and doubt and death. But that is why we are given the church, an idea that we have to admit has its down side. Jesus, however, gives us the church precisely to keep this love, this hope and this faith together. A community can believe these things and hold on to them even when individuals within that community struggle with them. Any sight we have of the existence of God and the reality of the resurrection is in this community we call the church. And that has been true from the very beginning. Jesus did not appear to Thomas until he rejoined the other disciples, an important detail of the story.
So one definition of the Church, something we could put on a banner and hang outside is “the Unseeing who Believe.” That is who we are, and that is what Jesus means us to be.
Now we do not see. One day we shall. In the meantime we have faith, hope, and love to sustain us.
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