Sermons

+In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” So says Blessed Thomas, and for it the popular imagination has turned him into a cliché: “Doubting Thomas”. He has come to epitomize incredulity, and I, at least, have heard sermons which attempt to cast the Apostle as a saint for our own day; the patron saint of modernity and scientism and skepticism.
But is this a fair reading of Thomas? I don’t think so. Such a reading seems to imply one of two equally unfortunate and diametrically opposed conclusions. Either it demonizes the doubter or it unequivocally affirms the doubt. We end up responding to ourselves or to others when doubt arises by saying either “O Doubting Thomas, how couldst thou betray thy Lord” or “God accepts your doubt, so don’t feel obliged to do anything about it.” Jesus didn’t say either of these.

So, let us put ourselves in Blessed Thomas’ shoes for a moment. Why would he not have believed his fellows and gone off rejoicing with them? Perhaps he feared they had fallen victim to magical thinking, to creating an unhealthy fantasy by which they intended to cope with the death of the one whom they loved and called Rabbi and Lord. Maybe he felt that he needed to be the realist of the group, the one to stay above fantasizing so that he could help his brethren come to terms with reality and get on with the lives they had put on hold for three years.

Or, perhaps, he was not prepared to hope. We know that the Beloved Disciple was at the foot of the cross, and it is reasonable to believe that the other Apostles would have seen their Lord’s gruesome death. In the face of such evil and desolation one loses hope. The loss of hope, however, is not entirely passive. We may choose not to hope. We may choose not to hope because experience has shown us that our hopes don’t always get fulfilled. “Don’t get your hopes up!” we tell ourselves and others, because we are so afraid of having our hopes dashed.

T.S. Eliot, after his conversion, wrote an extended poem called “Ash Wednesday”, and its opening lines (which I think I’ve included in a sermon or newsletter article or something before) capture the deadening effect of choosing to lose hope:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive towards such things
(Why should an agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

When we are bereft of hope, we cease to mourn and to strive. We cease to mourn because acknowledging our grief presupposes that things could have been different and can become better. We keep ourselves from imagining a scenario in which God has put the world to rights because we’d rather not be disappointed again. Thus, stoicism is a very subtle form of hopelessness. We cease to strive, also, because we don’t want to get our hopes up. We cease to ask ourselves how it is we are to live as children of the Light, as sons and daughters of the Most High. We become complacent, but at least we’re not in danger of being disappointed.

If my hunch is right, and this is Thomas’ situation, it adds some depth to his response to the other disciples. “I will not believe” discloses not simple skepticism, but an inability to hope for fear of disappointment. He might as well have said, “Don’t bother me with such optimism! I’m already in a pit of despair, but you may well dig it deeper!”

This brings us to that evening one week after the Resurrection. The disciples, this time Thomas among their number, are once again in the house. Jesus appears and, as I already mentioned, His response to Thomas was not what the popular imagination would assume. Jesus says neither “shame on you for not believing” nor “well done, good and faithful scientist, for demanding empirical verification.” No, Jesus’ words to Thomas were quite different. “Put your finger here,” He said, “and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” To this, Thomas responds with the fullest confession of Jesus’ identity and mission in John’s Gospel, and arguably in any Gospel: “My Lord, and My God”, he says. It is nothing less than a fulsome experience of the Risen Lord which makes Thomas finally “get it”. But when he figures it out, his response is spot on.

This is good news for all of us, because we all go through periods in which faith and hope are lacking. What we learn from Thomas’ experience of the Risen Christ is that Jesus may come to us when we least expect Him. God may make Himself known to us even in the pit of despair, pulling us out into a new life, renewed to do His Will in the world. There is good evidence to suggest that Thomas himself went on to evangelize India. In fact, when Western explorers found their way back to the subcontinent after the Middle Ages, they found a vibrant church there, claiming Thomas as their own. We know from today’s reading from Acts that Peter—who himself had been frightened and hopeless and huddled in a locked room—went on to preach to a great multitude in Jerusalem about his experience of the Risen Lord. What we didn’t hear in this morning’s reading, because the lectionary ended a few verses too early, is that about three-thousand people were so moved by Peter’s account that they were baptized that day. Thomas and Peter both show us that when we have experienced Christ dispelling our doubts and fears, we have a task before us, to go out and “proclaim in word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” Jesus tells those men, just pulled out of their own doubt and fear, “As the Father has sent me so I send you.”

But, we may protest, we have not had the benefit of seeing Jesus’ nail-scarred hands ourselves. Jesus said, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” but how are we to do great things for the sake of the Kingdom when even Jesus’ closest friends, the disciples, needed proof of His resurrection? This is a fair question, and the most sufficient response I know of is that of John Henry Newman. Newman said that he believed in the existence of God more than even his own existence, but if he were asked to point to a specific experience or piece of evidence he could not.

My guess is that some of us here have had really rather grand religious experiences. These are to be treasured and acknowledged as God-given. I suspect, however, that most of us fit more in Newman’s category. We may not have put our fingers in Jesus’ hand or our hands in His side, but we still have confidence in the Resurrection of our Lord and a robust sense of hope for our own Resurrection. This confidence is something built up gradually by the practice of holy habits. Through daily prayer and bible study, regular church attendance, acts of charity and loving-kindness that we show to others or that others show to us, and a number of other seemingly small acts; we gain more and more experience of God. He reveals Himself imperceptibly to us, but a lifetime of accumulated devotion adds up. For we who are struggling with faith and hope (as most of us do to some degree or another at some point in our lives) this is very good news. It gives us something to do, a way to pattern our lives so that slowly we too may come to believe and say along with Blessed Thomas, “My Lord, and My God”.

+In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There’s an interesting distinction made in the New Testament of which the preacher should always be aware. It’s between the Greek word διδάσκω, meaning to teach, and the word κηρύσσω, meaning to proclaim. Both can be and sometimes are translated as “preach”, and both are used when Jesus or the Apostles deliver what we would recognize as a sermon, but each implies a different, valid, approach to preaching. Those of you who’ve been regularly subjected to my sermons know that I probably do more of the former than the latter from this pulpit. So, I shall start this morning on familiar ground with some διδάσκω—a little teaching—and then proceed to proclaiming, partly because the latter is a more inspiring way to end a sermon, but mostly because Easter is a day on which the latter just seems more appropriate than the former. More about that in a minute, but first, the didactic portion of this sermon:

There is a reality with which we must come to terms if Easter is to mean anything. That reality is death. It’s a reality that’s hard to face, because we live in such a death denying culture. Many of you know that this point is one of my hobby horses, so here I’ll trot it out again. We don’t think about death; we ignore it until it arrives at our doorstep and somebody in a funny getup like me gives some puffy platitudes to try to numb its sting. We’ve even coöpted religion to help us say that death isn’t a reality.

Well, I’m here to tell you, and on Easter morning of all times, that death is real. And, though death is our enemy, a sad result of the Fall, it’s a good thing it’s real. You see, Easter wouldn’t be anything more than bonnets and bunnies and Cadbury eggs if it weren’t.

The following may shock you, though it is a reality which the Gospels and the Church have always proclaimed— when you’re dead, you’re dead. You see, life eternal is not just some natural process to which we’re somehow predestined by virtue of the way things have always been. There’s not some sort of automatic transmigration of the human soul into either beatitude or gloom, death being some kind of illusion between this experience and that. No death is real, and that makes Christ’s Resurrection and its promise for us mean something. If it weren’t Christ’s Resurrection would have merely been didactic, like this part of my sermon; it would have simply been a lesson that death wasn’t something to fear. A good lesson, but hardly worth getting all dressed up on a Sunday morning for.

But, you see, Christ didn’t just unmask death as an illusion. In the most powerful expression of God’s power ever, at what two nights ago I called the hinge point of history, Christ actually conquered death. He waged a glorious battle against that most sinister of our enemies and left him powerless.

In his Holy Sonnett ‘Death be not proud’ John Donne wrote the following:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Donne having been an Anglican priest (albeit a somewhat naughty one) we shouldn’t be surprised that the poem’s an interesting piece of theology. First it acknowledges the reality of death by addressing it before naming its powerlessness, its incapacity to confound us thanks to Christ’s Resurrection. And while death remains, its sting this day is taken away and it shall, we are promised, ultimately be vanquished entirely, when on the last day we shall be raised incorruptible- not just as some ghosties to play harps on a cloud somewhere, but whole and entire, bodily and perfectly, to enjoy life in a new heaven and a new earth with each other and God in unmediated, perfectly gracious, eternal, loving communion.

This is, in the final analysis, the Good News of Easter, but we can be sure that those who first witnessed the Resurrection didn’t have such lofty theology in mind when they heard the Good News of the Risen Lord. They were most assuredly less interested in the διδάσκω than they were in the κηρύσσω- more excited to share the Good News than they were to reckon all its implications, moral and theological. The women who went to the tomb surely cared less about the doctrine of the eschaton and more about their dead friend, Jesus, who suddenly appeared again when all hope had been lost. Their first reaction to the good news announced by the angels was not to sit down and write the Nicene Creed, but to share with joy that Good News- to tell the others that their dear friend was alive. Peter and the beloved disciple, alone among the Apostles in not entirely dismissing the Good News as an “old wives’ tale,” turned out to be no mean theologians, but they did not stop on the first Easter Morning to ponder the religious implications of the message if it were true- to make sure St. John’s Gospel and the two epistles general of St. Peter would be doctrinally compatible. Rather, they ran to see this wonderful thing that had happened.

You see, there are two different but (I think) equally valid responses we may have to this wonderful news- the theological and the personal; the didactic and the declamatory. We can focus on the teaching, the doctrine, or simply receive with joy the good news and proclaim it to others, to run to the apostles like the women or to the empty tomb like Peter. Both are valid approaches, both are necessary and useful, but, at least on this day, I think we should take our cue from the women and from Peter and John. There will be plenty of time in the next fifty days for you to hear me belabor the finer points of the theology of the Resurrection, but on this day, just rejoice. Simply be glad that your friend and Lord still lives and loves you; that from his throne of glory in heaven, in the most precious sacrament of the Altar, and in our own hearts he is alive and active. If that’s not true, if that’s not really the best news of all time, then we really might as well have slept in this morning. But I, for one, can’t think of anything more thrilling, more life-changing, than what we celebrate today.

And it doesn’t just end with hearing the news and rejoicing, for the Good News of the Resurrection, the triumph of God over death and hell, is a message which compels us to pass it on. This doesn’t necessarily mean standing on Main Street waving floppy King James Bibles in the air and shouting. That’s not our obligation; that’s not even effective in my experience. What is our call and, indeed, what can be our greatest delight, is to share with others in gentle and loving ways the joy that we have found in knowing the risen Lord. For, just as the women at the tomb felt compelled to convey the Good News to the apostles, so too should our exceeding joy—the joy we experience in knowing that our Lord and God and dear friend is alive—compel us to speak and to celebrate. So, let our hearty “alleluias” resound in the streets of this city as powerfully as they do in our own hearts, for

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” We join them today. We join the crowd which jeered our Lord as he took his dying breaths. We join the chief priests who had denied the birthright of Israel by proclaiming Caesar their only king. We join Pilate who finally chose political expediency over the good by overseeing a miscarriage of justice. We join the soldiers who, as so many over the course of human history, had been enthralled by principalities and powers and could take little comfort in claiming they were “just doing their jobs.”

At the hinge point of human history we see the inversion of power and authority. The mob, the soldiers, the governor, and the priests are revealed to be powerless. They choose evil, which St. Augustine tells us is not a thing but a privation of something, the absence of good- a vacuous, pointless, vain nothingness. Their apparent power is shown the be thanatos, the death impulse, the will not to be which destroys the very agency which chose it. That, I think, is what hell is. The powers which slew the Lord of Life, which vainly believed death and nothingness could blot out life and light, simply cease to matter. The scene is, as Shakespeare put into the mouth of Macbeth, “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

What is left? The darkness which comes over the crowd serves to highlight the only thing that matters in this scene, the only thing that is true and lovely on Golgotha: a dying man, his mother, and the disciple whom he loved.

Woman, behold your son.
Behold your mother.

Amidst all the storm and stress, the pain and sorrow, Jesus gives his last lesson, and it’s the only thing that matters.
It reminds me rather of a popular song from the middle of the last century. I’ll call it “the Gospel according to Nat King Cole”:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.

Over and over again, as Jesus approached his ignoble execution he gave one lesson.

Simon, do you love me?
Feed my sheep.

Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

As I mentioned on Sunday, we can argue all day about the historical issues surrounding the crucifixion: Who killed Jesus? How exactly did it happen? We can argue all day about the theological nature of the event: Did Jesus die to save some or all? Did he suffer in our place objectively as a substitute or was it more didactic or are we meant to suss out some more complex metaphor? If you’ve read my Easter letter you know my thoughts on that matter – namely, that our discomfort with Christ as an atoning sacrifice (a propitiation, to use an old-fashioned word) leads us into dangerous territory with regard to the whole Christian Gospel. But, believe it or not, I don’t think that, as important as it is, is the task before us today.

I think the task before us on Good Friday is to look on him whom we have pierced, to place ourselves at the foot of the cross and pay attention. And when we do, what we get is very simple:

Woman, behold your son.
Behold your mother.

The last thing Jesus wanted those whom he loved most to hear, the thing he wanted us to hear at the very end, was “love and care for those whom I love.” Oh how complicated we try to make our faith, sometimes so we can get away with not really loving those whom Jesus loves. It’s just that simple, though. How we delight in making arguments to ourselves that don’t make any sense: I love so-and-so, I just don’t like him and I’m not going to do anything loving for him. Actually, any sentence like that is internally inconsistent. The “I love so-and-so” part of such a statement is clearly a lie.

Love – not warm feelings, not civility, not “bless her heart”-ptyalising pity – honest-to-God love is what Jesus demands of us. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoner, care for the widow and orphan, support the weak, give of your own good for the good of others, don’t discriminate between family and friend and enemy when it comes to being gentle and merciful and gracious. That’s love. We’ve got to learn how to do it, because, my friends, that’s really all we’re here for.

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.