Second Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 12, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of hope, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Many of you know that one of my life projects has to do with increasing literacy, particularly Biblical literacy among progressive Christians, who have tended to cede the Bible to more conservative Christians. For example, I want people to understand that what we call “The Bible” is actually more like a library or an anthology than a book. The anthology contains more than a dozen different kinds of literature – and each kind of literature has different rules and built-in assumptions for understanding it. For instance, one would read biography differently from reading a sermon or an editorial. One would read legislation differently from poetry or a song. It helps to know what type of literature one is reading in order to understand what it might mean or how to apply it to our lives. Unfortunately, figuring out the genre is often complicated by many centuries and many miles of distance, and further complicated by modern inventions – inventions such as the English language, punctuation, customs of printing, etc.

John Dominic Crossan has this idea that he calls reading the Bible vertically and horizontally. Reading vertically is reading books in the Bible from start to finish. (I do not recommend that, by the way.) Reading horizontally is reading parallel narratives side-by-side, like creation stories or Gospel stories to compare and contrast. Then there’s what seems to me to be reading the Bible diagonally – or on a slant. That’s what we often have when we take passages from three different books – like Acts of the Apostles, the first letter of John and the Gospel of John, and read them together.

The slant happens when well-intentioned people want to organize a worship service around themes or seasons and pick readings that support the theme. It’s the eighth day of Easter. The flowers are still pretty fresh, the music is very upbeat – there are a number of good Easter hymns left to be sung. And the Gospel lesson for the second Sunday in Easter is always: “you should believe it even if you haven’t seen it.” (It being resurrection.) I will say that the slant has improved with the Episcopal Church’s use of the Revised Common Lectionary. Not many years ago, our Gospel lesson was paired with a couple of verses from Isaiah. That slant pairing took a song about the rebirth and renewal of a nation that considered itself to be dead, and made it sound like a proof text for the resurrection of individual bodies. So I find the replacement text from Acts to be a great improvement, even if it is completely unbelievable! The idea that the whole group of Jesus followers were ever of one heart and soul is some powerful nostalgia. Nevertheless, the idea that all assets were held in common and there was not a needy person among them is a fine vision of the goal of Christian community – one that I strive to meet.

Our second reading is from First John. First John is a letter – but more like a sermon than a newsy correspondence. It’s a polemic – a passionate argument. So for our second lesson, we have the beginning of a preaching rant that will get to the main point that if you have Jesus, you have life. If you don’t have Jesus, you do not have life. And the penultimate point in this argument is that Jesus didn’t just seem real, he was real. This is an argument that is probably responding to growing interest around the end of the first century in the idea that Jesus was superhuman – that he wasn’t really born and didn’t really die – that he wasn’t really and fully human. This 1^st John preacher is asserting that Jesus was really born and he really died.

This matters because if Jesus’ feet never really touched the ground, how on earth can anyone follow? (How can we who are truly human, follow someone who was superhuman?) Denying the humanity of Jesus is dangerous in that it lets us off the hook – it greatly restricts our accountability to God and to one another. Actually, denying the humanity of any person is dangerous. For example, denying the humanity of people who commit crimes usually means that their human rights and our obligation to treat them with dignity do not apply. The refrain throughout John’s letters is love. Love is what it’s all about – love for God and love for one another. If you have Love, you are a child of God, you love God’s child Jesus, you have abundant life. That’s all there is to it, the preacher is saying. It’s circular – and it seems like you can enter the circle at any point. Loving Jesus means loving God and that means loving one another and that means having life. Having life means loving God and that means loving one another and that means loving Jesus. It is the only way according to the writer of John.

Of all the Gospel lessons that get read in church on Sundays, the only one that gets read every year without fail in the 3 year lectionary cycle, is this one that we just heard. There are 5 written accounts of Jesus resurrection that made it into our canon of scripture – accounts that have significant “factual” discrepancies — and within those narratives, about a dozen appearance stories, but it’s this story that gets read every year on the Sunday after Easter, no matter what. And then it gets listed as the first choice for a reading on Pentecost – only a month and a half from now! The effect is that this appearance story becomes THE appearance story – and too often, the heavy-handed moral of the story is that a faithful Christian does not have doubts.

If I asked you to tell me what you know about Thomas in the Bible, you’d likely say “doubting Thomas” – because that’s what we’ve been taught to call this story – the story of doubting Thomas. And “doubting Thomas” is often meant as an indictment rather than a compliment. It’s certainly not flattering to be called a “doubting Thomas.” But I’d say, along with theologian Paul Tillich, among others, that doubt is not the opposite of faith, rather it is essential to faith. In his book, Dynamics of Faith, Tillich wrote that “Doubt is implicit in every act of faith …it is always present as an element of faith…serious doubt is [in fact] confirmation of faith.” It’s a sign of real engagement – of commitment. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. This may surprise you: those of us with a lot of uncertainty are the faithful!

Our English translation of this passage uses the word “doubt,” for the Greek word “apistos.” Apistos is the opposite of pistos. (Like asymmetry and symmetry.) The primary meaning of pistos is trust, so apistos is “without trust.” And the verb in the sentence is “become.” The command that Jesus gives here is not about skepticism or doubt; rather it is about becoming untrusting vs. trusting. Jesus says “do not become untrusting, but trusting.” Become trusting.

I had a dear friend who, about a twenty years ago, was searching for a faith community. She had searched in a variety of places – Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, Christian communities. I invited her to come to church with me. She did – and over time, began to get involved in the Episcopal parish where I was a member. She felt that there was plenty of theological elbow room – that she was welcome to attend services and participate in the life of the community even though she wasn’t a Christian. She even began to teach Church School as part of a teaching team. I was the Church School Coordinator and for me, being Christian didn’t seem like an important pre-requisite for teaching. The Church School teachers met about once a month with the coordinators and clergy to grapple with the material that was going to be presented to the children and youth because we wrote our own curriculum.

I’ll never forget the meeting that we had right after Easter one year. As part of the introduction to the material, I asked each person in the room to tell what they thought the resurrection of Jesus meant. One by one, each person told what they thought or felt about meaning of the resurrection – and what they think “happened” after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the meeting, my friend pulled me aside and said, incredulously, “No-one believes in the resurrection! I thought to be a Christian, you had to believe in the resurrection” “What?” I said. “Everyone believes in the resurrection!” She said, “no-one in that room said that they believed that the physical body of Jesus was alive after it had been dead.” “That’s resuscitation,” I said, “not resurrection!”

Trusting in resurrection is not about belief in resuscitation of a corpse. It’s about something completely different. Trusting in resurrection is faith (not certainty, but faith) that God vindicated Jesus after his humiliating crucifixion – that Jesus’ life work was not for naught, and it did not end with his death. Trusting in resurrection is an assertion that Jesus lives and that Jesus is Lord – that the Love and Life of God is bigger than death, even the most brutal execution. That’s the message that all the resurrection accounts have in common. The “evidence” of trusting the resurrection of Jesus is the coming – the continual coming into being of the Church, not the other way around.

In the Gospel of John’s resurrection narrative, Jesus says “do not become untrusting, but trusting.” Become trusting. And in response, Thomas utters the most complete and powerful confession in the whole Gospel: “My Lord and my God.” Thomas confesses to seeing God revealed in Jesus, not because he has touched Jesus, but because Jesus has graciously offered himself. Jesus has given Thomas what he needs for faith, as he has done so many times in the Gospel of John. This is a story about accepting grace – accepting what God freely bestows and what we sorely need.

We can imagine ourselves as being like Thomas – long on demands and short on trust. That’s not hard. But if we focus on Thomas, we risk losing track of the center of this story. The center of this story is Jesus, not Thomas. And it’s a story of hope and promise – not of judgment and reprimand.[1] (Gail O’Day) This is a story about the experience the grace of God in Jesus – without limit and without measure. This is a story about Jesus breathing new life into a community of faith in the midst of grief and fear. This is a story of reassurance about Jesus repeatedly making himself available to his followers, those who saw him and those who did not see him. Become trusting. Become trusting that the Love and Life of God are bigger than fear and death and you will be open to a whole new world of possibility. Trust in the resurrection of Jesus that through trusting you may have life in his name.

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