Sermons

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

This week we get our annual reminder of poor “Doubting Thomas.” In previous sermons on this text I said that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas.

So I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- viz., a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to to say anything definitive about it. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions, and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about something. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt. I happen to believe the deposit of faith is trustworthy because it developed by the direction of the Holy Spirit over the course of hundreds of years. Even if one doesn’t believe that, it seems to me manifestly obvious that I am not as smart as the Church Fathers, and edgelords on the internet sending tweets and making youtube videos are far less circumspect and careful in their analysis than those who wrestled with the finer points of the theology of, say, the Incarnation and the Resurrection within communities of faithful inquiry and Christian practice.

What if, however, we didn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness (or happiness to use the more literal translation of the Greek Μακάριος) of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by the seed of faith, no matter how small, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel.

So must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honestly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

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

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

I looked back at my sermon from the last time we heard this Gospel reading three years ago, and it turns out that it was the first Sunday we were completely locked down due to Covid. In an attempt at levity in the midst of an otherwise very serious sermon I noted that Martha warned Jesus about opening the tomb, saying “Lord, by this time he stinketh”, and speculating that we might say the same thing after we were let out of our homes again, which at that time I said “in a few weeks.” Little did any of us know that it would be months.

In any event, at that time I said we could identify with our Lord’s reaction to the death of his friend Lazarus, encapsulated in what is famously the shortest verse in the bible: Jesus wept. Though we are no longer home-bound, the state of the world today–war, disaster, economic insecurity–should remind us once again that our God is a God who, in Christ, knows and shares all our sorrows.

Consider again this moving account. Jesus’ friend Lazarus has died, yet Jesus knows how this story ends. Just in last week’s Gospel, in which Our Lord says the blind man’s condition allowed God’s power to be made manifest, so does he say of Lazarus’ condition: “This… is for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” Jesus, who tarries two days in Jerusalem upon hearing of his Lazarus’ sickness, knew by the time he had left for Bethany that his friend had died. Upon his arrival he informs Martha that he intends to raise Lazarus from the dead. And yet, upon approaching the tomb, Jesus weeps. He knows Lazarus will live again, yet his grief is no less real.

My friends, none of us knows how God, in his Providence, has determined to use all the crises which afflict his world to his own divine ends. God knows and will transform whatever the power of evil throws at us to mysteriously and miraculously work his own purposes out. Even so, because we have a God who is not only high and lofty, but who has chosen in Christ Jesus to take on our very nature, we also have a God who despite knowing the ultimate triumph of life nonetheless weeps with us in our grief.

But having a God who suffers with us is not sufficient if that’s all we have to say about God. But thank heavens, we also have a God who is in control, and this reality of having a Lord who is both provident and incarnate is, I believe, the only thing that can satisfy the longing of our hearts for hope in the midst of adversity. To put it plainly, I don’t know how one gets through our life without utter despair without Jesus; thank God we have Jesus, who is our help and our salvation.

We must hold these two truths–that God is in control and that Jesus feels for us–together, lest we believe in a God who is powerless or who is distant. This being the case, I have to amend something I know I’ve said in sermons before (not that I was entirely wrong, but rather that this tension means that sometimes the whole truth is obscured). I know I’ve said in sermons before that the miracles of Jesus are presented differently in John’s Gospel than in the so-called “Synoptic Gospels” of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Specifically, while those three Gospels use the Greek word dynamis (or “deed of power”) to refer to the miracles, John uses the word seimon (or “sign”), suggesting that each of the “signs” including the raising of Lazarus–point to a truth about God in Christ beyond the act itself.

Now this is true. The raising of Lazarus has something larger to say about Jesus being the Lord of Life in a larger sense. The healing of the man born blind that we heard last week has something larger to say about Christ’s mission to enlighten all and bring spiritual sight to those formerly blinded by sin. The feeding of the five thousand has something larger to say about Jesus’ promise to feed us always with the bread of heaven. One could go on.

Okay, that’s all true, but reading the signs exclusively as signs can give us the incorrect impression that Jesus merely used these needy people as object lessons rather than seeing their humanity and need for the provision of real practical blessings. We need not make that mistake though, and the reason why is found in the text as clear as day. Jesus did not get up and give a talk on the meaning of his miracle at the wedding in Cana. He simply did it (and got a little irritable in the process, if you recall). The five thousand were genuinely hungry. The blind man was oppressed and Jesus both gave him the promise of salvation and refused to accept the pharisees’ nonsense. And, then, most profoundly, Jesus, knowing he was about to raise him from the dead nonetheless keenly felt the loss of his friend and the grief of Mary and Martha and wept openly.

Thus, we have a God who is both all-powerful and all-loving. As we approach again the great and Holy Days which present to us our Lord’s pain and his glory, his passion and his triumph, let us hold fast to the one who alone shamed the powerful with weakness, who alone disclosed divinity through perfect humanity, who alone can save us.

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

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

One of the problems faced by theologically inclined people like me is that there is always a danger of over-theologizing leading to inaction. This is not to say that theological reflection is not in itself a worthy endeavor, but rather that sometimes other methods are, perhaps counter-intuitively, more direct routes to truth.

Take that age-old problem that we call theodicy- the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? We can spend a lifetime sitting and thinking about how to explain evil and never come to any satisfying conclusion. Indeed, some have done so, and some have even lost their faith in the process.

Or we could set out to bring some comfort to the afflicted, to help the orphan and the widow and the beggar in what small ways we can and eventually come to some satisfying conclusion, not in the form of a theological axiom which one can publish and give lectures about, but in knowing that while evil exists and is hard to explain, one has nonetheless both experienced God’s grace and has done a little, Christ being our helper, to weaken its hold over the most vulnerable.

We see these two approaches—action and reflection—in this morning’s Gospel, and at least in the instance of the man born blind, the former was apparently the proper approach. Here is a man who is in tremendous need, a blind person in those days almost invariably being condemned to a life of panhandling, no other profession being open to one so disabled. And how do the disciples respond? They see the encounter as an opportunity for theological reflection. “Master,” they ask, “who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” There is, of course, in their question a false assumption, namely that misfortune is directly linked to some specific trespass. I have mentioned before from this pulpit something called a deuteronomic view of history, which is the commonly held belief that such a simple connection exists between sin and hardship (or, for that matter, between righteousness and good fortune). We need not revisit this view in great depth again today, except to say that Jesus seems to reject it, but not in the manner we might expect.

Jesus does not take the time to respond to the disciples by presenting an alternative philosophical system; he does not (at least on this occasion) unveil a new definition of weal and woe, offering details of their nature and various causes. Rather, he quickly dismisses the suggestion that somebody’s sin caused the man’s blindness, and then says that there’s work to be done. He moves quickly from reflection to action. “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day;” he says, “the night cometh, when no man can work.”

Now, I’m not saying that good old theological reflection of the sort where one sits down surrounded by dusty books producing weighty texts about theodicy and other theological problems is bad or unnecessary. We’d be as blind as the Pharisees if men and women had not done that work, and the Church would be sorely lacking if everyone adopted an unreflective sort of faith. You see, it’s teaching—doctrine—which produces and permits conviction, and without convictions our efforts are meaningless. In this sense, theological reflection has to precede action if said action is to rise to the status of Christian charity.

What I am saying, though, is that Christian discipleship is as much a matter of the heart as it is a matter of the head, and when the latter crowds out the former our theology can be unmasked as no sort of theology we’d want to publish. Imagine if the disciples had received the kind of answer they presumably wanted from Jesus: a sustained reflection on the problem of evil complete with definitions of terms, Old Testament references, and a few clever bons mots to keep their attention. It would probably be good reading; and the theological dilletante in me wishes this were what happened but the man would have remained blind, and Christ would have been seen as being more interested in theological discourse than in showing the power of God in a tangible way.

What is even more notable here is that a faith sustained by works of charity can enlarge one’s theological perspective. The problem the Pharisees had in this morning’s reading was a dogmatism resulting from what we might consider a lack of love. If the Pharisees had loved their formerly blind brother they would have rejoiced in his being cured, and they might have been able to enlarge their view of God to encompass the work of Christ. As it happened, they cast the formerly blind man out because their small faith could not allow for that which was to them theologically problematic.

We do well, I think, to heed the warning implicit in this story. We are just as capable of falling into uncharitable dogmatism as the Pharisees and we’re just as likely as the disciples to see a suffering brother or sister as a theological conversation starter rather than seeing him as one to whom we might show mercy and loving-kindness, since God has already done so. When we choose to reach out, our own understanding of God’s love is increased. We start seeing that needy person not just as a target for our charity, but as one already gifted, whether he knows it or not, with God’s charity, as one already loved by the one who is love and in whose love we also abide. That is to say, our view of God, our theology, is made more expansive and more truthful when we walk in love, and it may be increased to an even greater degree than the best theological reflection can accomplish.

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