To Be a Pilgrim.... (Midweek)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

April 29, 2015

“To be a pilgrim…. “

 

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote [sweet showers]

The droghte [drought] of Marche hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich [such] licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 

Inspired hath in every holt [wood] and heath

The tendre croppes [young shoots] and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his half cours y-ronne [has left Aries in mid-April]

And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the night with open ye,

 (So priketh hem nature in hir corages: [hearts]  

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes, [to seek foreign strands]

To ferne halwes [distant saints], couthe [known] in sondry londes [different lands]. 

 

Thus begins Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a series of stories put on the lips of a motley group of pilgrims set for the tomb of Thomas Becket in holy pilgrimage.  I am leaving this Saturday on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Nazareth, attending the international conference of my religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests.  SCP is an order for clergy in the Anglican tradition who root their spiritual lives in the sacraments and seek inclusiveness in the Church.  The 10 day conference is set up as a pilgrimage, with visits to the holy sites and liturgies throughout the day.  

 

Pilgrimage is an ancient spiritual practice in almost all religious traditions that uses walking meditation as its chief form of prayer.  Several of our parishioners, past and present, have walked the 500 mile long Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain (one is currently walking it as I write).  Many have been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Canterbury as well.  The use of the Labyrinth as a walking meditation was originally intended to serve as a reasonable alternative practice for those unable to travel to distant holy sites. 

 

Changing one’s setting changes one’s view of things; submitting to the inconveniences of travel and opening oneself to the newness of strange things, people, and places is an essential part of this practice. I will be rooming with an Australian priest; most of the pilgrims are from the Church of England.

 

I pray that I will be open to the spirit and find renewal and new focus in making this trip.  I invite all of you to make similar efforts at “stretching” yourselves by the practice of pilgrimage, if only a practice of walking the Labyrinth quietly and reflectively on a regular basis, or periodically meditating on the place in your heart and memory where you have felt safest and most loved.   Such a practice is powerful indeed. 

 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

 

A Good Shepherd (Easter 4B)

 

A Good Shepherd

Easter 4B
26 April 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

One of the great blessings of saying or singing Daily Morning and Evening Prayer is that you get to know the Psalter well.  The daily prayer office, after all, is based on the monastic Liturgy of the Hours or Breviary, and the main part of this prayer practice is the recitation of the entire Psalter each month.    This last week I was struck by the words in the Psalm appointed for Tuesday morning, Psalm 26 (vv. 3-5):

… I have walked faithfully with you [O God].

I have not sat with the worthless,
nor do I consort with the deceitful.

I have hated the company of evildoers; 

 I will not sit down with the wicked.

Jesus’ opponents probably quoted these very verses when they criticized him for being “a glutton, a drunkard, a friend of traitorous swindlers and sinners” (Luke 7:34).   They rejected his practice of open table fellowship with the marginalized: he could not be righteous, since he mixed with the wrong sort of people.  He replied to them by saying that “traitorous swindlers and whores go into the Kingdom of God before you do” (Matthew 21:31). 

I have been following the discussion going on in our country about marriage equality.  Some of my more politically conservative friends and family members have said to me that they cannot support same sex marriage even by so much as baking a celebratory cake for them.  To do so for them would be endorsing what they believed the Bible teaches is gross wickedness.  One asked pointedly, “What would Jesus do—bake a cake for a gay wedding, a cake that celebrates sin?”   

What would Jesus do?   Hmmmmm.  I am not sure that such a question is very helpful, since we usually just create an image of Jesus doing what we think we should do.  But if you take such a question seriously, you have to remember that turning over tables in the temple and chasing people out with a whip is in the realm of possibility.   As is having dinners and parties with whores, drunks, and crooks, and ignoring the religious righteous people who criticize you for it.  I told my friend that I suspected Jesus would indeed bake such a cake, though, again, this may be just me creating an image of Jesus doing what I think we should do. 

The problem, of course, is that the Bible teaches all sorts of things, often at odds with each other.  No matter what, you have to start picking and choosing which verses you are going to use to interpret the others.   Some people calling themselves Christians and styling themselves as biblical literalists point to a mere six “clobber” passages in the Bible that they think condemn same sex love per se.  They take these as a center and limit the scope of Jesus’ grace and welcome in other passages accordingly.   I tend to look at the passages of Jesus reaching out to people condemned by society for a guide here, and see those six passages in light of the larger truth of God’s love and welcome.

I think this is what Jesus himself did.  Instead of those “keep away from the wicked,” and “hate and avoid sinner” passages of the Psalter, Jesus took as his center for understanding life its other passages that talked about the love of God for all his creatures.   And he tried to define wickedness in the way this very psalm did:  people whose “hands are full of evil plots and bribes” (26:10).  I find it very interesting that Jesus gave the cold shoulder and tongue lashings only to the brutal oppressors of others, not to those failing to measure up to some purity code.    He won’t even say a word to Herod Antipas, and says little to Pilate. 

Jesus comes upon obscure passages in the Psalms that give glimpses of God, and interprets all the harsher, nastier descriptions of God in light of them. He reads:  “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine (Psalm 50:9-11).  He knows all the bird….  this minor detail and others like it buried in the Psalms and Isaiah become for Jesus a center point that spins off other ideas and reflections about God.   Jesus ends up saying things like, “God counts the sparrows, so how could he not know about you?” “God cares for the wild flowers and the birds, how could he not care for you?”  “God has compassion and equanimity, sending the blessing of rain and sunshine on both good and bad alike.”  He ends up thinking that joy, good, and justice are contagious, not impurity and wickedness. 

Do you avoid reading the Bible because it offends your sensibilities?  Or do you read only the “good parts?”   Or do you read it with an open mind, realizing that some parts correct and remedy other ones, and that the general drift is one toward forgiveness, nonviolence, kindness and compassion?  Again, one of the blessings of Daily Morning and Evening Prayer is that you actually read the Bible, both the “good” parts and the “bad.” 

When you read the Bible, does it lead you to the loving and compassionate God that Jesus called Abba or Papa?  Does it convince you that violence is evil, and that justice and compassion are basic requirements for human life?  Or does it lead to you to a condemning, jealous, vicious, and violent deity, distant and inhuman? 

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.  The readings are about the love of God for us his creatures, and the love of Jesus for those put under his care.  The image is of a good shepherd, one who loves those he cares for to the point of risking his own life. 

It is not an image of an accountant, keeping track on a ledger all the little lambs, and who is in the flock and who is out.  It is not a powerful defender of property, some Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone he-man armed with incredibly deadly weaponry to fend off all attackers, wolves, and false sheep.  In today’s passages, we see a loving shepherd, not a powerful gatekeeper; a loving shepherd, not a hero that will win through force and violence.  

And here’s the thing:  the passage from John says that the good shepherd is loving and cares not only about the sheep already fenced in his secure pasture.  This good shepherd has “other sheep, not of this fold.”  And he cares for them too.   That means our conceptions of us and them—who’s  Christian and who’s pagan, who’s orthodox and who’s a heretic, or who’s righteous and who’s wicked—must go by the boards.  There are more people in Jesus’ care that we in our tribalism and self-interest can conceive of.   And Jesus loves them, and died for them too.  A good shepherd.  

Some of you may have noticed that in the Eucharistic prayer I make a slight modification to the phrase in the Prayer Book, “this is my Blood of the New Covenant which was shed for you and for many,” I often say “shed for you and for all.”  This alternate language is authorized by the Episcopal Church:  it is how the phrase shows up in Enriching our Worship.  The language here comes from the Greek of the Last Supper story in Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus says, “this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24).   The use of Greek word polloi “many” here is the Gospel writer’s effort to represent an Aramaic word that Jesus would have used, that has the sense of “the many” without necessarily having the limitation of being only part of a whole.  The point is that Jesus died for a multitude, not for a few.   

Jesus’ death was for all of humanity, not just part of it. In Mark 10:45 (Matthew 20:28), Jesus says, “the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many.” But 1 Timothy 2:6 explains that this multitude is not just part of creation:  “Christ Jesus… gave himself as a ransom for all.”   And remember John 1:29, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin (singular!) of the world!”  So I use the word “all” here in the prayer to avoid giving you the misunderstanding that the “many” referred to here is intended to suggest that some are excluded from Jesus’ grace.  Again, he is a good shepherd, and he has other sheep who are not in this flock.   

This week, I invite us to look at how we use scripture, and what images we use of God and Jesus.  What do they tell us about us?  Are we stingy with God?  Do we think God is stingy?  Is our view one of abundance and generosity, or one of crabbed scarcity?    Do we try to break open scripture, like Jesus breaking it open for his disciples when he breaks open the bread at an inn on the road to Emmaus, even as we break open our own hearts?  

Jesus is a good shepherd.  And there are sheep put in his charge that are not in any pastures we recognize as ours.  But he’s still a good shepherd.    Not just for a few, but for all.  

Thanks be to God. 

Things Get Broken (mid-week)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

April 22, 2015

Things get Broken

 

I have a lot of small tasks mounting up on my to-do list at home: in addition to the garden, most are repair of small things that have gotten broken or are showing signs of wear. This cabinet door hinge needs to be rehung; that clothes hanging rack needs to be reattached to the wall. Things were all great, but now they seem with increased rapidity to get broken and need fixing. And they must be fixed properly, just making it look fixed while not addressing the broken part (stripped screws, broken wood base) will only make the matter worse in a few days.  I guess it is a day-to-day example of the scientific principle of entropy: things tend toward disorder and dispersion of energy. 

 

In our relationships, and in our spiritual life, we also need to fight entropy. Things get broken, and they need to be fixed. This might be a bit more time just listening to each other, or maybe letting someone else have her way, or perhaps more meditation and prayer. Since today is Earth Day, I might note that repairing the atmosphere or the biosphere is one of the great challenges and callings of our day. 

 

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has as its fraction anthem (the hymn sung when the Eucharist Host is broken) a song “How Easily Things get Broken.” 

 

Healing and reconciliation is the message of Easter and of the Holy Eucharist.  It starts with small repair jobs, done properly. 

 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+

 

Hungry Jesus (Easter 3B)

“Hungry Jesus”

Easter 3B

19 April 2015; 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Choral Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading is one of the many luminous Gospel stories about Jesus being seen alive and well, more than he had ever been before, by his friends, after his death on the cross.  This one takes place Easter evening, just after two of the disciples had dinner with a stranger on the road to Emmaus, a stranger who opened the scriptures to them, explained what had happened in the last few days, and whom they suddenly had recognized as Jesus “in the breaking of the bread.”  The two return to Jerusalem, tell the other disciples, and as they are talking, Jesus again appears.  And again, he asks for a meal:  “Do you have anything here to eat?” 

Hungry Jesus!  One would think that with a perfected resurrection body, you would be the source of your own energy, with no need for food.  But here you are, asking for meal after meal, like a growing adolescent with a serious case of the munchies.   First bread and wine with scriptural discussion.  Now, broiled fish and more scriptures.    Incarnation has God being made fully human.  Resurrection has a fully human person being made God, but one who remains in real ways fully human.  Resurrected Jesus is hungry, yearns, and still has scars on his body. 

Perhaps this is Luke’s way of telling us that this apparition is no ghost.  Jesus is fully alive, with the vim and vigor of the young man they had known before his death, with his appetites, hungers, and yearning, intact.   

I suspect, though, that something deeper is at work here than just trying to underscore the corporeal nature of Christ’s resurrection.  The disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize him by how he breaks the bread—a clear reference to the Eucharist.  Later in the evening, in today’s story, Jesus appears and the disciples and their companions are terrified.  Jesus reassures them that he is not a ghost, that it is truly him.  Then, as a way of consoling them and reassuring them, he expresses his hunger.  He eats fish, the very food item he had used with bread at the feeding of the 5000, an item he had used as an image for his desire, his hunger, for his disciples to go out and catch people, just like fish!

Hungry Jesus!  In your glorified state, you are not self-sufficient.  You need sustenance, yearn for it, and the companionship that goes with it.  You want companions, people you can share bread with—cum panem.   Remember that the group here is the disciples and their companions. 

There is an important doctrine being taught here. 

Sometimes people suggest that the resurrection “undoes” the passion and crucifixion, and somehow undoes the scandal of Jesus’ mortality.  But here Jesus shows them the wounds still in his body as a sign that it is truly him—the resurrection has not erased the harm, the suffering.  And Jesus shows them his hunger: he is not a polar opposite of what he had been: once dead now alive, once mortal now God, once earthly now heavenly.  No.  He is in a real sense a continuation of the Jesus they had always known:  Jesus the party animal, who turned water into wine, dined with whores and crooks, and welcomed all with a smile and open arms. 

Hunger is part of being human.  It has a way of making us feel more alive, by sharpening our sense of need.    In China, I heard the story of how hunger changes our perception.  During the 1900 Boxer Uprising and the subsequent 8 nations’ occupation of Beijing, the Imperial Court fled to Xian.  While en route, there was little food for the normally pampered royal family.  The Empress Dowager, Cixi, was given the only food that could be scavenged: peasant food from local famers too poor to buy wheat buns or rice, the rough corn cakes called nest heads, or wotou because they were cone shaped by being cooked while stuck on sticks, rough fare indeed.   She was so ravenous, she loved them.  Once safely ensconced back in the Forbidden City in Beijing, she asked for them again because she had such fond memories of their luscious flavor.  The cook was terrified—he knew that if he gave rough peasant food to the Empress now sated again on a daily diet of delicacies, she would find them tasteless and horrid, and order his head chopped off for poor work performance!  So he came up with a small dainty pastry made of sugar, ground almonds, butter and hazelnuts, shaped to look like a little wotou.  Xiao wowotous are served to this day in restaurants specializing in Imperial cuisine.  Cicero made the same point in his quip, “Hunger is the best spice.”  Things taste better when you’re hungry.   

  

Hungry Jesus!  You’re fully alive, and really enjoying that bread and wine, that bit of roast fish, after three days without meals in the tomb!

And it’s not just about physical hunger.  Hunger is a symbol for all our desire, all our yearning.  We are hungry creatures.  St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being.  Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.”   In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy.  There is a hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God. 

This most basic and important need in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now.   In sacramental theology, it is re-presented by bread and wine.   

This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana.  It is the Christian doctrine closest to the idea of gratifying desire in secular hedonism.  But in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, through the negation of what it means to be human.  And in hedonism, the sating of desire means its end, at least for the moment.  But in Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire.   The presence of God both satisfies our hunger while it stimulates our appetite.

The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns, one I hope is sung at my funeral, one in the 1948 hymnal but not the 1982 one:

Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.

... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.

“Do you have anything to eat?” Hungry Jesus asks for food, invites companions.  Jesus is hungry for us to share with him.  God yearns for us.  Creator seeks creature just as we creatures have a yearning for God.   The great neo-Platonist theologian known to tradition as Dionysius the Areopagite, the proto-mystic of the church who inspired the desert fathers and mothers and the Benedictines later on, in his writing On the Names of God, at one point gives God the name, “Yearning.” 

The idea is expressed in hymn 516, by Italian mystic Bianco da Siena:

Come down, O love divine, seek Thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.

O let it freely burn, ‘til earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. …

And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace, till he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.

Hungry Jesus tells us it’s OK to be hungry, to yearn.  Hungry Jesus bids us offer him food, and offers to share food with us.  Hungry Jesus appears to us in the faces of all who hunger, whom we must feed.  As St. John Chrysostom taught, “If you are not able to find Christ in the beggar at the Church door, you will not find him in the chalice.” 

Yearning.  Satisfaction. Companionship. Ever-growing yearning.  Hunger.   Eat this bread, drink this wine.

Thanks be to God. Amen.  

Faith and Resurrection (Midweek)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Faith and Living as Resurrection People

April 15, 2015  

 

“Am I a bad person if I don’t believe these Easter stories?”  “How much of the Creed must I believe?”  Parishioners at different times have asked me these questions.  I try always to remind them that the Creed is aspirational,

a statement of hope and where our concerns lie, not a loyalty oath or measure of worthiness. In this beautiful season of Spring and Eastertide, it is important to remember a couple of basic things about what faith and belief are. 

 

Faith is not about explaining stuff. Faith is not about defining things. It is not about techniques to control things or on how to get ahead. It is about trust, about openness. It is an orientation of the heart, not a content of opinions or positions we subscribe to, or even rules of technical mastery or of success. 

 

When we say “I believe in God,” we are not saying, “I am of the opinion that an entity referred to as God exists.” The word believe, though it now usually means “hold as true,” actually is related to the old Germanic word for heart, Lieb, and it means “give my heart to.” As Professor Marcus Borg often said, we might better use the word “belove” rather than “believe.”  

 

“I believe in God” actually means something like, “I trust God,” or even, “within God, in relationship with God, I love for all I’m worth.”   

 

This is clear when we look at one of the other lines of the Creed, “I believe in the … Church.” We are not saying, “I believe the Church exists,” but rather, within the context of the Church, within the embrace of its loving community, I love for all I’m worth.” 

 

How can we believe in God, especially when God, both in history and in many of our personal lives, has been so misused as a tool of control and abuse?  

 

Faith is about wonder. It is about trust. It is about hope, having an ultimate optimism that all will finally be well, despite the risk, horror, and darkness that seem to be so much a part of life. It is not wish fulfillment, as Freud tried to explain.   The orientation of the heart we call faith or belief, is tied up part and parcel with story, narrative, song and ritual. It is a transcendental way of processing our life experience and giving us a sense of meaning and value.  

 

The fact is, metaphor is the basic idiom of the language of faith. One of the great Theologians of the Church said it was “the analogy of being.” These stories we tell are ways not to explain how things happen, but point beyond the how and details or process to meaning, to the ultimate “why.” 

 

Incarnation and resurrection: two sides of the same coin. Light shines in the darkness, God takes on all that it means to be human, including dying unjustly. And then, against all expectations, the dead Jesus comes to newer, fuller, more lively life. These images point to the basic experience we have of God rescuing us from all that is the matter, whether ignorance, loneliness, failings, guilt, addictions or obsessions, or ill health.

 

This does not mean that faith language is not true, or doesn’t say what it seems to say. It means that if we reduce it to mere proposition or opinion, and take it merely as literal, it ceases to be the language of faith. It loses the wonder. It becomes a dead thing, stale, and utterly unable to move us or give us hope. No surprise that literalistic or overly dogmatized readings of faith language generally repel people and turn them away from the hope that is God.  

 

Our basic hope in the meaning and sense of human life is expressed in the acclamation: “Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!” 

 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Experience, Faith, and Doubt (Easter 2 B)

“Experience, Faith, & Doubt”
Second Sunday of Easter (Year B)
12 April 2015

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.
Homily Delivered Trinity Parish Church, Ashland, Oregon

8 a.m. Said Mass
Acts 2:14a, 22-32 ; 1 Peter 1:3-9 ; John 20:19-31 ; Psalm 16

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

 take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter.  In the Eastern Church it is called Thomas Sunday. The Gospel reading tells us the story of how St. Thomas came to faith in the risen Lord.   In the West we know him as “Doubting Thomas,” the one who said, "I won’t believe it until I touch it!”  But the Eastern Church remembers Thomas for his confession "My Lord and my God," and says he was the first to publicly proclaim the two natures of Christ: human and divine.  His story tells us about experience, faith, and doubt, and should be a model for all us seekers. 

It really is unfair to call Thomas a doubter among the other disciples.  Just look and see how many doubters are in these stories of the resurrection appearances. 
 
Women disciples in Mark’s Gospel see an angel at the tomb, but run away “trembling with astonishment” and tell no one about it “because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8).    In Luke, as the women come back, they remember words that Jesus had said to them while he was alive, and this gives them the confidence to announce what the angel has said.  But the apostles take it as “an idle tale,” and they do not believe the women (Luke 24:10-11).   In Matthew, when Jesus appears to the disciples after their return to Galilee, “they saw him and worshipped him, but some doubted” (Matt. 28:17).

In Luke, like in today’s Gospel from John, the disciples gather together late evening on Easter Sunday.  Jesus appears to them, but where John says simply that the disciples (absent Thomas) “were glad when they saw the Lord” (John 20:20), Luke tells more:  the ten other disciples cannot believe their eyes, and think that maybe they are seeing a ghost.  Jesus replies, “see my hands and feet, it’s really me; touch me and see, for a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:39).  They still “disbelieve from joy” (Luke 24:41).  It is only when Jesus eats a bit of roast fish that they can believe their eyes (Luke 24:42-43). 

So when Thomas says, “unless I touch the wounds, I won’t believe,” he is no more a doubter than any of the other disciples, or than any of us. 

And that’s the thing about these stories:  they not only retell what happened long ago.  In all of them, we are the disciples, unable to believe what has happened, the love of God, the life of God, just too good to be true.  Jesus’ death, his abandonment on the cross, and his pitiful burial—this all seemed to prove the falseness of the hopeful message Jesus brought.  And so when he shows up again, they doubt their eyes.   

That’s what lies behind the disbelief, the doubting, the not recognizing Jesus in these stories.  We are letting our disappointing experience with life tell us what actually is possible, and so we simply won’t believe the Easter proclamation. 

Yet when Jesus comes the next Sunday evening, it turns out that Thomas doesn’t need to touch Jesus to accept his resurrection after all.  He takes one look, falls to his knees, and declares, “My Lord and My God.”   Fr. Raymond Brown says this is the “Christological high point of the Gospel of John.”  And the Gospel of John is the Christological highpoint of the Bible. 

No wonder the Eastern Church praises Thomas as a model of faith.   The doctrine of the two natures of Christ would not become clear to the Church for another 200 years.  But Thomas’ confession is at its core:  when you look at the face of Jesus you look upon the face of God; if you have seen Jesus you have seen God.  

It is the very fact that Thomas was skeptical that allows him to make the affirmation.  Thomas knows that in this world, dead men do not walk about alive and well once they’ve died.  So it must be God at work in front of him, though he still recognizes the person he knew as his friend Jesus.  So he must simply confess, “My Lord, My God.”

We shouldn’t be ashamed of or feel guilty for doubt today.  Doubt is a healthy part of faith, of integrating the teachings and tradition into our personal lives, of making these stories our own.  

That is why I for one am so happy that we have an active “Seekers’ Forum” here at Trinity, a group that encourages questions, embraces doubt as a heuristic tool, and says it’s okay to wonder aloud about stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense. 

That’s why I for one am happy that the Church in our age seems to be going through what Diana Butler Bass calls an awakening, a shifting of gears and ways of thinking and living, where  how we can trust matters more than what opinions we subscribe to, where what practices we embrace and follow matter more than the ticking off of obedience to this rule or that on a little or a large list, and where who we belong to and who belongs to us matters more than the organizational labels and titles applied to them. 

I think we often get this story wrong:  when Jesus says “Blessed are you Thomas, because you believed when you saw; but more blessed still are they who do not see and still believe,” we think that this means he is encouraging mindless acceptance of someone else’s word on something and belittling getting our own experience and understanding on it.    Not so.  When Jesus says “believe” here, he means, “give your heart to,” “be faithful,” or “trust.”   Thomas is blessed because he trusts after experience.  Jesus adds that those who can manage trust even before experience, that is, those whose basic default position is trust and openness, have a deeper form of blessedness.

But that doesn’t mean blind submission to authority should trump reason and heuristic use of doubt.  It doesn’t mean that personal testimony and experience are less valuable than taking someone else’s word.   Having one’s own experience, and knowing and understanding mystery and beauty through personal knowledge is a profound real kind of understanding.  Believing someone else’s word for something is a pale imitation.

But note in the story, Thomas does not actually feel the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side before he gives himself up to trusting the beauty before him.  Jesus appears, says “Peace to you,” and immediately says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands and take your hand and push it into my side. Stop being faithless, and be faithful.”  In response, Thomas does not perform his manual inspection, he simply replies with his “My Lord and my God!”  This, despite Thomas’ earlier stout declaration of what he needed to believe.   

There appears to be two kinds of disbelief:  one a heuristic one, one to help find truth yet unknown, and one an obstinate one, trying to avoid truth.  The word doubt has these overtones:  doubt can mean deny stolidly or it can mean wonder, question oneself. 

As soon as Thomas sees Jesus, he knows, he trusts, and throws himself to his knees.    The issue is the openness of heart, despite the thresholds we throw up. 

Sometimes knowing something by experience can close us to openness and change.   Pain and hurt usually shut us down, and make it hard to trust.  I suspect that is what is at work in Thomas’ earlier “doubt.”  He has been fed a line one too many times, and he knows that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  So he won’t believe the word of the others.  But his distrust is not of Jesus, so when he sees him again, he throws his heuristic scruples out the window. 

It is openness of heart where blessedness lies, where God can grab hold of us and change us, and it is this that trumps experience.   And it in itself is deep, moving experience.     

Earlier in John’s Gospel, Thomas told Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way [to follow you]?”  To this Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.  If you know me, you will know my Father also.  (John 14:1-7)   In today’s story, when Thomas says, “My Lord and my God,” it is clear that he now knows the Father and sees him through Jesus.   

Thanks be to God.    

In the name of God, Amen.