Faithful, not
Faithless (Easter 2C)
Homily delivered at
Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)
Sunday April 28, 2019
8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Holy Eucharist
The Very Rev. Fr.
Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, give us
believing hearts, and lead us gently away from disbelief. Amen.
In
Lewes Delaware in the early 80s, Elena and I had taken our still growing family
of three children to the beach. After a
long, relaxed day, the sun was about to set.
No one was left on the beach but us.
Elena was sheltering under a blanket; I was reading. We each thought the other was watching the
children, playing in the sand beside us. Elena suddenly said with terror in her
voice, “Where’s Lonnie?” We looked up
and down the beach as far as we could see.
Our four-year old was nowhere to be seen. Panicking, I began to run along the beach in
the direction we had last seen him, trying to spot him on the beach in the
lowering mists and scanning the water: that vast Atlantic only feet from us,
its rising surf just high enough to sweep our little boy off of his feet. The last people we had seen on the beach
looked sketchy at best. Now, in our
imaginations, they seemed like monstrous threats to children. Holding hands, Elena and I prayed, “God
please help us find Lonnie. Please keep
him safe.” Then Elena said, “It’s a
distance to the changing room, but maybe he went to the bathroom without
telling anyone. You know how private he is.”
So I ran back toward the barrier dunes. Just as I got to the boardwalk,
there was Lonnie, walking calming and quietly back from the rest room. I hugged him hard. He seemed puzzled at all
the sudden attention from Mom and Dad. Elena and I were very thankful. Our prayer had been answered. Lonnie was safe and we had found him.
Thinking
about it afterward, we wondered if God had indeed answered our prayer. Maybe
we had gotten frightened needlessly. No
one had bothered Lonnie in the restroom, and he had not lost his way. And he most certainly had not drowned. From his point of view, nothing remarkable
had happened at all. But from ours, we
were still very thankful, and even with our questions, knew that God had
answered our prayer.
It’s
like that a lot with answers to prayers and miracles in our lives: though from inside they seem to be
overwhelming evidence of God’s care and love, from the outside they can be
explained as misunderstandings, the resolution of groundless fears, the normal
working of nature, or, perhaps mere coincidence. Say we
pray for healing from a flu, and get better, about two full days after we
became ill. Was it God’s intervention or
the normal course of a 48-hour virus?
When
I was a boy, I was taught that God heard and answered prayers, and that
miracles just like those in the Bible could happen to us, if we were righteous
enough. But then I grew up. I gained experience. Perhaps God was not so involved in my life;
maybe what I used to think was an answered prayer was just coincidence. We live in an age of science and of
sophistication. Growing up means
absorbing that.
There
were further questions. We had friends
in college whose little baby was afflicted by a horrible congenital disease.
Despite all the efforts of medical science, prayers, anointings, and blessings,
the little boy suffered and died slowly.
Did this mean that God chose to not intervene, and was responsible for
torturing that little child? Why does God answer some prayers and not
others, especially those most desperate and most right? A partisan God, or worse, a capricious one,
is not at all attractive.
I
admit: Doubt is a good thing, something that helps keep us safe from hucksters
and conmen, and from misunderstanding the varied and puzzling sense perceptions
that pour in. God placed doubt in our
hearts, and made it a part of growing up, to help keep us safe. It is part of our survival instinct.
But
we are diminished if we let doubt rob us of our sense of gratitude and
wonder. We may not be as naïve as we
once were, but it is clear that we have lost something in the process. A subtle, annoying voice in the back of my
head now is almost always there, ready to chime in at moments of joy and
thankfulness and say, “An answered prayer?
A miracle? Maybe not so much.” It
discourages me from praying, or at least actually asking God for what I desire
in my heart. I am afraid of having my
heart broken: asking what I desire
deeply, something good and right, and then getting that hope slapped down.
I
admit this by way of confession:
whatever change has happened in my heart, it is not entirely good. I can confess it publicly today without much
embarrassment because I think that most of us have suffered a similar loss as
we became adults. It’s just the way
things are with most of us.
In
today’s Gospel, it is clear that Thomas has suffered such a loss of
innocence: “I won’t believe Jesus has
come back from the dead unless I see it with my own eyes!” It’s really unfair to sum up this story and
the whole of St. Thomas’ life by saying that he, Doubting Thomas, was alone in
this among the disciples. All the other
disciples—bar none—at various times in these stories doubted reports of Jesus’
resurrection, some even doubted even the evidence before their own eyes.
So
in today’s story, Jesus tells all of us, along with Thomas, “do not doubt, but believe.” The Greek text is clearer than our
translation here: do not be apistos, but be pistos—do not be unfaithful but faithful, do not be unbelieving but
believing. Pistos has a broad meaning.
I would translate this as “trusting” as well as “trustworthy.” Apistos,
by contrast, means “distrustful” and “unreliable.”
Be
believing. Be faithful. Be trusting.
There are so many scriptures that play on this theme! Jesus ends most of his parables with “let the
one who has ears, hear!” Without a
disposition of the heart, we are deaf to the voice that matters.
Paul
says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). And because of this faith, he says, we are
not afraid either to live or to die.
Trust and love replace fear.
Jesus
in John’s Gospel says it is how we react to his words, in a trusting or a
rejecting manner, that reveals who and what we are: “I came not to judge, but
to save. It is my word that has already
created a judgment of sorts—how you react to it tells who you are” (John
12).
Most
of the stories of miracles and deeds of wonder in scripture tell things in such
a way that you have to wonder about the hearts of those experiencing such
things but not being transformed by them:
how could the Egyptians, the backsliding Israelites, or the Pharisees
not be wicked when they continue to resist God in the face of such miracles as told?
I
am inclined to think that events in the real human lives lying behind such
stories probably were a bit more ambiguous.
For whatever reason, God made the world in such a way that we are never
forced to believe in him. God wants
willing trust, not coerced obedience. I
suspect this is because forced trust is not really trust; compelled love, not
really love. To be sure, moments occur
that seem overwhelmingly convincing. But
usually this is at the end of a series of small steps in the ambiguous
dark. We draw close to God in faith by
little steps, and God responds once in a great while with a giant step toward
us. But then the moment is gone, and we
are left with our memory. And memory
itself is very ambiguous. Faith often
consists in persisting in our trust and love from those high moments even in
the dark, dry periods that follow.
Having
a believing heart is at the core of being a happy and balanced Christian.
Having a trusting heart is at the core of being trustworthy: honesty breeds
honesty. A believing heart wisely lets the annoying voice raise doubts,
but does not let it rob us of our thanks, trust, and hope. A believing heart persists in openness to the
strange, the unprecedented, and the as yet unseen. It does not belittle the faith of others,
even when this may seem strange or silly.
A believing heart continues to pray, and to act and serve as if all the
good stories are true, even when doubt comes.
A believing heart is a great bulwark against fear. It senses intuitively that there is no
problem so big, no disaster too awful, no corner so dark that God cannot help
us through it and turn things better.
While a believing heart is not belief in magical control of things to
suit ourselves, it cultivates and honors a sense of wonder and magic at the
heart of everything. It recognizes the
love that is beneath and behind all things.
Trusting
God through the dark, expressing thanks through the ambiguity, praying and
asking for help despite our annoying inner voice, and trying to be honest with
God and ourselves through all of this leads us through the doubt and finally
brings us to that light where there is no room for anything but thanks, just
like for Thomas in today’s reading.
In the name of God, Amen
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