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March 30, 2008 by Jim McCrea John 20:19-31 As I was preparing to write this sermon, I read a story by Jack Crabtree about a friend of his who had once attended a healing seminar put on by a certain evangelical denomination. The friend was very excited about the seminar because he said that it had allowed him to be a witness to a miracle. When Jack asked him what had happened, his friend answered, "There was a woman there who was born without any toes on one of her feet. This guy prayed for her healing, and right then and there her foot grew toes. It was a real miracle." Jack said, "Really! Now that's an impressive miracle. A little more substantial than getting over a headache." Then he added, "Did you actually see this happen?" His friend replied, "Well, no, I didn't personally. A friend of mine who was at the seminar - he saw it." "Well, did your friend actually see with his own eyes the toes grow on the woman's foot?" The friend wavered, "Well, now that you bring it up, I don't actually know for sure how he knew - I mean, I don't actually know whether he saw it with his own eyes or not - but he must have had a good reason for believing what happened. I can't imagine him telling me that he knew it happened if he didn't have a good reason for believing it himself." That story reminded me of an incident at my niece's church. Just like the previous story, my niece goes to an evangelical church and they, too, had an unexpected miracle happen in their midst one day. The congregation thought so much of the incident that they included video footage of it on their church website. So what happened? A woman who had been going to that church in a wheelchair for a couple of weeks, attended an evening prayer service. The group prayed for her, when she suddenly got up from the wheelchair and began to walk and then literally run around the sanctuary. The congregation was amazed and was thrilled that God had chosen them to work a miracle in that woman's life in their church. It was clear that the members were sincerely impressed and grateful to God. What was less clear is what had actually happened. If you watched the video footage on the church website, all you saw was a young woman walking and then running while off-camera voices were talking in hushed and awed tones about what they had seen. I asked the obvious question, what did they know about this woman? The answer was not much. She had just suddenly appeared one Sunday and came once or twice before her healing occurred. No one seemed to know her outside the confines of the church building so they were simply taking her word that she was paralyzed. And, of course, being a community of faith who wants to look on the good side of people, why wouldn't they believe her? But the truth is that no one could say whether she truly was paralyzed, so they didn't really know whether her rapid transition from being apparently wheel-chair bound to taking a few tentative steps to running at top speed - which took no more than three to five minutes total - had in fact been staged. And, if it had been staged, no one could tell by who staged it - the leaders of the congregation? the woman acting on her own? Or was it truly a miracle healing given by God? There was no doubt that my niece and the voices on that video desperately wanted to believe that it was a true miracle. And for that very reason, they were quick to suspend their disbelief. After all, isn't that the reaction of the man in the ninth chapter of Mark who wanted Jesus to heal his epileptic son? He said, "I believe; help my unbelief!" Who hasn't felt that way at some point or another? If it weren't for poor Thomas, that biblical father probably would have been made the patron saint of doubters. But then I'm sure there are plenty of people in the modern world who could have given either Thomas or that father a run for their money in the race to be the patron saint of doubters. Somehow doubt has been give an undeservedly bad name in the Christian church. Poor Thomas has been stuck with the nickname "Doubting Thomas" for the past 2,000 years. Doubting Thomas is such a well-known phrase that it has even entered the dictionary as a term to describe someone who "is skeptical and refuses to believe something without proof." The truth is that most of us will never make it into the dictionary. In fact, most of us have ambitions no higher than staying off the posters on the Post Office wall. Even so, I suspect that Thomas probably would have preferred to turn down the honor of being a dictionary entry if he had been given the choice. Why should he be stuck with that label for all these centuries when he really didn't do anything the other disciples hadn't already done? Prior to his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus made a point of telling the disciples over and over again that he would come back to life. He said it so many times and in so many different ways that he might have seemed like a broken record - if any of them had known what a record was. But the truth is that - in spite of the numerous miraculous things the disciples had already seen Jesus do - they simply didn't understand or listen to his teaching about resurrection. When Jesus died, the disciples' first reaction was the natural one. They assumed they could be next to die, so they did their best to lurk behind locked doors and make themselves as invisible as possible. When the women came from the tomb and said it was empty, did the disciples immediately think, "Oh, so this is what Jesus was talking about?" Far from it. They wouldn't believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead until they saw it with their own eyes. Remember how Luke put it in last week's gospel lesson? "But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." Those women at the tomb didn't do all that much better, for that matter. Depending on which gospel you choose to read, they had one or more angels appear to them and tell them that Jesus was alive. Now I would have thought that the sudden appearance of an angel would, in and of itself, have its own persuasive power. But apparently not. Only in Luke's gospel do the women trust the words of the angel. Otherwise the women needed to see the risen Christ for themselves, too. Clearly the dictionary could have added Doubting Peter or Doubting John or Doubting Mary or any of a number of others. Thomas just received the honor from Mr. Webster and his linguistic colleagues because Thomas' doubts came later than those of the rest. For some unspecified reason, Thomas wasn't there with the rest when Jesus popped in through locked doors and windows to appear to the others. No one knows why Thomas wasn't there. I suspect he had gone away by himself to grieve Jesus' death. But by doing so, he missed the event that could have melted away his grief. When Thomas finally showed up at the room where the other disciples were hanging out, they did their best to convince him that Jesus was alive. In our translation, verse 25 says, "So the other disciples told him, 'We have seen the Lord.'" But the original Greek says that they kept telling him - over and over and over again for a solid week. Clearly, they had learned that persistence from Jesus himself. And Thomas, just as persistently - just as stubbornly - clings to his belief that their grief had played tricks on their minds. So they balanced there - suspended in that moment of tension, but held together by their mutual love and respect - for a full week. Then Jesus appeared again, honoring Thomas' request for physical proof and leading Thomas to offer the most profound and unconditional statement of faith that appears in any of the gospels when he calls Jesus, "My Lord and my God!" That was the first time anyone ever equated Jesus with God in the flesh. Jesus brings the incident to end by pronouncing a blessing on you and me - that is, on those of us "who have not seen and yet have come to believe." Please note that Jesus doesn't put Thomas down for his doubts. In fact, it is only by going through those doubts that Thomas is able to make that sweeping statement of faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Instead doubt is a sign that someone cares enough to truly search for the truth. God never asks us to suspend our disbelief. God isn't looking for followers who are willing to strain their credulity as some sort of test of faith. God doesn't require us to buy into beliefs about regenerated toes or a mystery woman's claim to suddenly walk again. Both of those stories strain my personal credulity, especially that of the woman who was theoretically healed from paralysis and who then conveniently disappeared, even though you would expect that such a miracle would tightly bind her to that congregation if her healing was real. There's an old saying that sometimes things seem too good to be true. When that's the case, they probably aren't true. The internet is riddled with things like that. Many of them are scams designed to separate the gullible from their money. For example, one scam that is very old - at least by internet standards - involves getting an email from a person who claims to be the widow of a former political leader in Nigeria. She says she needs the help of someone to get her wealth out of Nigeria now that her husband is dead and she is under hostile surveillance by the current government. She then states that she selected you - out of the great mass of people online - because she knows you are a Christian and therefore she can trust you. Unfortunately, you can't trust her - if she even is a she. Anyone foolish enough to reply to that email will end up sending seed money to Nigeria in order to pay the expenses for getting the alleged fortune out of the country. And, of course, the victim will never see any of that fortune or their seed money again. I'm not at all sure why anyone would fall for that scam, especially since it is fairly open in inviting the recipients of the email to commit fraud and it ironically appeals to their Christian ethics while doing so! The truth is that the internet is history's most democratic source of information. By that, I mean that anyone can claim to be an expert on anything. And no one knows who really lurks behind the names or nicknames signed to emails or websites or chat rooms. The result is that there are massive amounts of disinformation on the internet, mixed in with large quantities of valuable and truthful information. The trick is to filter through what you read by using logic and by knowing which websites are trustworthy. That would have helped with an email that was shown to me recently. It was designed to discredit one of the current presidential candidates through a blend of outright lies and distortions. And it was all prefaced by a biblical prophecy intended to imply that that candidate is the anti-Christ. You might have thought that people would have noticed that the alleged prophecy didn't come from the Bible at all. But no. A quick search of the internet shows that hundreds of people have passed on that libelous email without checking any of its so-called facts. If they had instead used their brains to filter the claims of that email or used their web browsers to check a reliable source - like Snopes.com - they wouldn't have been caught up in that scam either. If we are called to be that discerning and careful in our daily lives, why shouldn't we be equally careful in our faith lives? We live 2,000 years after Christ's resurrection, so we don't have the opportunity to apply Thomas' physical tests to Jesus. The only apparent way we can know the truth of the resurrection is to take the word of the first-century eyewitnesses. In that regard, it's instructive just how hard all the disciples were to convince of the reality of the resurrection. They knew - far more clearly than we do - the harsh truth of his death, so they took a tremendous amount of convincing to believe that Jesus had been brought back life. But once they were convinced, their entire outlook changed and they became proud and courageous defenders of the resurrection, willing to give their lives on its behalf. That is important evidence, but it may or may not be persuasive to some people. But the truth is that the early disciples are not our only source of reliable information on the resurrection. If the resurrection is true - and I want to state categorically that it is - then every one of us has the opportunity to have a direct encounter with the Risen Christ just like Thomas and those first disciples did. Jesus said, "Seek and you will find." So if we honestly look for an encounter with Christ, we will find one. And that encounter will both energize and transform us. As Kenneth Caraway once wrote: There is no box
If you make a genuine effort to find Christ, he will come to you and blow the lid off the limitations you're feeling in your life. He will even transform the pain of your personal tragedies into a joyous celebration of life. No one else and nothing else can do that since no one else has his resurrection power. So look for him and celebrate. Amen.
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