Belief

John 20:19-31

It was evening on Easter Day, the first day of the week, when a friend sent me a link to an interview in The New York Times with the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary. 

It appears that Nicholas Kristof of the Times makes a habit of asking religious figures about what’s necessary for Christian faith. For Easter this year, he brought his problems with “the literal flesh-and-blood resurrection” of Jesus to this interview, asked for approval to disbelieve it, and succeeded in getting a respected Christian teacher to appear to deny the literal truth of resurrection, call the doctrine of the Virgin Birth bizarre, and suggest that love is all you need.

A bit of experience on the interview side of articles about Ash Wednesday has left me generally as skeptical about the perspectives and unconscious biases of religion reporters as Kristof could ever be about the literal resurrection. I suspect there’s more nuance and heft to both the faith of the interviewee and the content of the interview itself than actually appears in print.

The result, though, was an Easter Sunday article that dismisses and diminishes concerns about the reality of Easter itself. This has been a popular approach to the most dramatic claims of the gospels for about a generation in liberal Christian circles: Don’t worry about it if you don’t believe in resurrection. Something happened, but you don’t have to imagine an actual dead person was physically alive again. Look for the love and don’t strain your logic. 

That’s been a comfort to many people who love their faith and don’t want to feel credulous and gullible. To people who want miracles to be possible without leaving the security of science and logic; who want to believe in Jesus but not in dubious fiction. To people like Nicholas Kristof, and many of us, who live in a world that tells us that belief is intellectually dangerous. Belief in God is okay. But not literal resurrection. Believing in something that can’t possibly be factual makes us gullible, stupid, and ridiculous. Or closed-minded and intolerant. (Cardinal sins.)

An understanding of the resurrection of Jesus that says “Something happened, but real dead people don’t really return to supernatural life,” is appealing to people who want their faith to be safe from their doubts, and has been popular for years. It’s no surprise to me that it appeared in The New York Times on Easter Day.

But don’t ever confuse that kind of faith and doubt with Thomas, called the Twin. Don’t confuse the New York Times kind of questions about the “reality” of resurrection with the passionate demands of Thomas, one of Jesus’ closest disciples.

Unlike the modern doubter who wants faith to be safe from the ridiculous and impossible, Thomas wants to throw himself into the impossible, improbable physical reality of resurrection. He wants to get his fingers messy with the literal truth of the ridiculous claim his friends are making. He wants to believe not with his brain alone, but with his whole body.

 “Until I see the marks, until I jam my finger into the nail holes and the wound in his side, I will never believe this,” he says when his friends tell him they’ve seen Jesus, alive after death. It’s strong, active language. He’s not intellectually unsure if this is possible, or worried about a mass hallucination among his friends. He’s demanding a visceral, active share in the reality that’s about to change the world. 

I’m sure he already believes that “something happened” when his friends tell him “We have seen the Lord.” I’m sure he can see the change in their faces, hear in their voices that Jesus’ promises of resurrection have become real for them. He’s just unwilling to commit his whole self to anything less than the full, vital, messy, powerful experience of resurrection face to face. He doesn’t want to be convincied, he wants to be commited.  He wants transformation of life; a commitment of wholehearted, whole-being trust.

And he gets it. We know he gets it when we hear his response to the sight of the wounded, dead and living, impossibly physical Jesus.

“My Lord and my God!” he says.

From the beginning, everyone knows that Jesus is close with God, but Thomas is the only one in John’s story who says out loud without any hesitation that Jesus IS GOD. 

My Lord; my God, he says, claiming this for himself. And that’s it. That’s his commitment of entire trust. That’s belief. 

And that’s what Jesus came for, actually. Why he came to Thomas that one day in Jerusalem; why he came among us in the first place. From very early in his ministry and teaching, Jesus has been telling us – telling anyone who will listen – that he is come so that everyone may believe, and, believing, have life.

Jesus teaches his disciples, and us, that he comes not to convince us of facts about God, but to invite us to stake our whole trust on the living reality of God. And that kind of believing – the whole-self experience of God’s real presence, and the natural upwelling of awe and trust and commitment in response – that kind of believing is, in and of itself, the experience of eternal life. Here and now and always. 

Because when you experience the reality of God with your whole self, death cannot separate you from God. You can’t fear death anymore, because death can’t threaten you. You can’t fall victim to the fear and prejudice that shoot up synagogues and mosques and bomb or burn churches; evil and hate have a harder time getting hold of your heart. You can’t fear doubt anymore, either, because this belief is trust that comes from being loved beyond our ability to imagine, and doubt simply can’t get any traction on that freedom. Not even when you’re perfectly convinced that virgin birth is a logical impossibility and that dead people will never walk up to you and invite you to feel their bloody hands.

It does worry me, sometimes that I don’t know how to explain it; that I’m not sure how to describe to you today the experiential nature of belief, the way commitment is truer than logic, that being loved infinitely is eternal life in the here and now.
It worries me because I want this same experience of belief for you, and I am very sure that Jesus wants this for you, too.

So I spent a lot of time this week trying to think of when it was in my life that I encountered this reality of God – when it was that I had Thomas’ experience of vivid, visceral, personal encounter with God – so I could share it with you. 

And I can’t remember one. I don’t have a story about anything that I myself have seen and touched, to offer for you to see and touch.

Maybe you have had that experience. But all I have is Thomas’ story. 

This story, Thomas’ story, the whole Jesus story, has been written, John tells us, so that we who don’t have the chance to stick our personal fingers in the side of the physical Jesus can have belief. That we who only hear the story can also have the life-giving, life-itself trust in the truth and power and presence and doubt-resistant reality of God that Thomas has.

“Blessed are they who have not seen, and have come to believe,” Jesus says to Thomas, and he’s talking about us. About you and me. 

Blessed are they, we, in Moorestown, in South Jersey, around the globe, who are miles and centuries removed from the chance to see and touch this real resurrection, blessed by Jesus’ insistence that we too, reading this story, really do get to trust the real presence of God deep in our guts, even if we never touch the wounds. 

That we, too, get to have the life-giving commitment Thomas gives voice to: My Lord and my God – the awe and trust and commitment that embrace and delight in the genuine reality of something that can’t physically be real. 

Belief so deep it can’t be tricked or gulled by a skeptical world,
so complete it can’t be closed or intolerant, 

so joyful it can’t be hurt by ridicule or dimmed by our own equally real questions and doubts.

So no, Nicholas Kristof, you don’t have to believe in the “literal flesh-and-blood resurrection”. 

But why wouldn’t you want to? 

It’s the only belief that doubt can’t hurt, and death can’t defeat, that is life itself. I know I want that. Don’t you?

Where Resurrection Becomes Real

John 20:1-18

Why are you weeping?

You, yes, you, right here.
Why are you weeping?  What’s the hole in your heart?

Oh, I know you’re not weeping right now. Most of us, if not all of us, are here in simple celebration, ready for the joy that returns with Alleluias and bright music and blooming lilies (and plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies) today.

I’m here for the same reasons. I love Easter; I love joy. I am ready to celebrate.

And it’s always a little ironic that the story at the center of our celebration, the story of our joy, is a story that’s rooted in grief and loss and fear.

We come this morning in bright daylight, knowing we will celebrate. Mary comes to the tomb in the dark, wrapped in loneliness, knowing the depth of her grief. And there she discovers new loss, anxious fear. The grave is open. They’ve taken the Lord and we don’t know where they put him.

She alerts the other disciples; they come and go, encounter wonder and confusion, and then it’s just Mary, again, alone with her grief and anxiety, loss and worry. Mary being asked, repeatedly, why are you weeping?

Oh, come on, angels. Seriously, Jesus?

Messengers of God and actual God, of course you know why Mary’s weeping. She keeps saying it: They’ve taken him away, and I don’t know where he’s gone.

She’s understandably upset. You would be, too, if the body of your dearest friend was stolen from the grave. I mean, I cry over a misplaced novel or unpaired socks when I’m grieving the death of someone I love. You know why she’s crying. We all know.

But there’s undoubtedly a reason that people in this story – no, that God in this story keeps asking Mary why she’s weeping; who she’s looking for.

God knows what we’re looking for. But sometimes we don’t.

And until we know what we are most truly looking for, we aren’t able to recognize it, to receive it, when we find it.

Mary cries over her double loss, about how the body of Jesus, the focus of her grief, has been taken away from her after his life has been taken.

But she’s not just looking for a body. She longs more deeply for Jesus himself, weeps for all the ways he brought her closer to God, filled her with love and expectation. She wants his promises to be real.

And finally Jesus breaks it open for her. Mary, he says, calling her by name, knowing her, and at last she knows what, who, she’s really looking for - “My Teacher!” she says – and she recognizes resurrection; recognizes God, come to meet her, to be what and who she has been longing for all along.

Last year I spent a week in Israel. As we set out, the leader asked our group what we wanted to get out of the trip, what we were looking for. And I didn’t know.

So I told myself and the group that I was starting out with an open mind, not looking for anything in particular, ready to be surprised.

And that worked pretty well until the last day. A day when the cascading effects of a six-hour flight delay out of Newark meant that we were going to drop one of the final sites on our itinerary, and I…well, actually, I started to cry.

I felt like something precious had been taken from me; that I’d lost my chance at… something.
Entirely to my surprise, I was suddenly anxious, oddly grieving, and uncertain what it all meant. Our Israeli tour guide spotted my quiet distress, it turned out, and so, early the next morning, on our way out of Jerusalem, we stopped at the Garden Tomb.

Now, there are at least three sites in Jerusalem, maybe more, that have claims to be the burial place of Jesus. We’d already been to one, but the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - holy, beautiful, crowded – didn’t feel like a tomb to me.

Gradually, I was coming to realize that what I was looking for – in Israel, and in my life – was the rawness of the place, the experience, where resurrection becomes real.  

Now, I did not see the risen Jesus when we finally went to the Garden Tomb. I did weep, just a little bit. Nobody divinely called my name, no angels appeared.

But we celebrated communion there – our mixed group of every kind of Christian, several Muslims, Jews, and Hindus – and God was vibrantly present.

I stood in front of the tomb as tourists and pilgrims went in and out, and felt the wonder I imagine the disciples felt at the absence of the body of Jesus.

I felt the sense of awe that Mary must have felt when she reached out her hand to the risen Lord in sudden recognition. It felt raw and real on my skin and in my heart, and I had found, after all, what I had been weeping for.

In the slow dawning of my recognition that I was really, deeply, looking for resurrection to be real, it began to be, for me.

I don’t know – none of us do – exactly how the disciples felt that first Easter morning, or what Mary actually did when she met Jesus at the tomb. But I read the story today, and I know that John wants me to learn that when we encounter resurrection, doubt gives way to wonder. When we encounter resurrection, that resistant realism many of us are blessed with gives way to delight in the unknown and unknowable.

I believe John wants us, with Mary, to feel awe replace our anxiety, whatever our own anxieties may be. To lose our life-draining fears and worries, great and small, in that indescribable sense of God’s powerful presence. To know that we want resurrection to be real for us, and to feel it fresh and raw on our skin and in our hearts.

I believe that Jesus wants us to know why we are weeping – not because God doesn’t already know the exact extent of the griefs and worries, hopes and dreams that make us vulnerable – but so that we can hear in our own hearts the deep, often buried, desire for God to be real. For resurrection to matter in a very ordinary and practical world. For love to be stronger than death. 

We don’t always know we want that.

Most of the time, I’m a lot more aware of my anxiety about the health of a friend, my hopes for the life of this congregation, or a longing for a perfectly cooked hamburger and crispy fries than I am of my deepest yearning for the raw experience of God.
You might be anxious about your work or your own health, caught up in your hopes for a family member, in your longing for a cure for cancer, or an hour of peace and quiet, and not used to hearing your own deep desire for the reality of resurrection and the living proof of God.

But I believe that Jesus wants us – in the midst of the joy and celebration today, and in the deep and lonely grief of our losses when they come – to open up the deepest longings of our hearts so that God can fulfill them. Wants us to know what we weep for so that we can experience for ourselves how very real resurrection is.
And I believe that we pull out all the stops of celebration today – shout our Alleluias, drench the church in lilies and light, share feasts today with friends and family – to remind ourselves that our deepest, heart-breaking longings are above all else, the door to holy joy.

Alleluia!

Unbreakable

Luke 23:44-49

This isn’t how Jesus was supposed to die.

At least not according to the practices of Rome, or the intent of the chief priests and Temple lawyers who were trying to get rid of Jesus.

As far as they were concerned, Jesus is supposed to die alone and abandoned, a bitter embarrassment to his friends, and especially his followers. Crucifixion, in Roman rule and culture, was supposed to erase the one crucified, to obliterate not just their life, but their relationships and reputation.

But that’s not what happens here.

No, here, at the end of the hours of darkness, at the peak of the cross and at his final breath, Jesus is actually surrounded by witnesses, attended by friends, and completely at one with God.
Jesus, dying on the cross, right in the middle of grief and suffering, is the absolute opposite of abandoned or alone. We hear it when he says: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

Father, he says, addressing God as he always does, the way he taught us to do, with intimate confidence.

Into your hands I commend my spirit, he says: quoting directly from the 31^st Psalm with its expression of trust, refuge and relationship.

He does not die alone, abandoned. He dies in total confidence, trust, and committed purpose, upheld and protected and whole in the hands of God.

I’d like to die like that, when I have to. (Well, honestly I’d like to slip quietly away in my sleep, because that seems easiest.) But if I’m awake for it – if I see death coming – I want to be able to die like that, my spirit shouting out confidence, throwing myself into the hand of God in trust and commitment and expectation.

And I think Jesus wants that for us, too. Wants it so much that he uses the moment of his death to inspire us to live like that. To live confidently and completely committed into the hands of God.

You can’t miss that, if you’re there at the cross – or here at the cross, today. Because the people who were there for the most part, knew the scripture Jesus was quoting.

They knew Psalm 31, which may have been used at times as a bedtime prayer, an anchor for the day and for rest.

In you, O Lord, I seek refuge;

do not let me ever be put to shame;

in your righteousness deliver me.

Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily.

Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me.

You are indeed my rock and my fortress;

for your name's sake lead me and guide me,

take me out of the net that is hidden for me,

for you are my refuge.

Into your hand I commit my spirit;

you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.

They knew how the words of the Psalm go on weaving back and forth from fear and pleas for rescue to complete trust and commitment to God’s purpose; from grief and anger and pain to confident assurance and overwhelming love.

They would have heard, in Jesus’ few words proclaimed out loud, that in every very real pain and sorrow and anger and loss that Jesus suffered on or before the cross there is also confident assurance of God’s presence, protection, and salvation.

And they respond to that.
Luke puts the recognition of this truth into the mouth of a centurion, a servant of Rome:
“Truly, this was a righteous man,” he says.

An innocent man, some translations say. Dikaios, righteous: one whose way of thinking, feeling, and acting is wholly conformed to the will of God. One whose soul and self and spirit cannot be separated from God’s purpose or God’s self.

Psalm 31 is a song, of the righteous life: the life that turns to God, over and over and over, in trust and commitment, obedience and confidence, in every single trouble or fear or anger or loss. This song of refuge utterly refuses to let us stay abandoned or alone, no matter what fear or force or pain can do to separate us from God, or to separate God from us.

Jerusalem recognizes this in Jesus, as they hear him speak from the cross. The crowd – the watching multitudes – respond not in words, but in actions, “beating their breasts” in mourning and self-reproach. Far from Jesus being abandoned as an embarrassment to the people who wanted to follow him, the uncertain crowds now acknowledge their relationship with Jesus, showing open grief and regret at his death.

Rome has failed.

The chief priests and Temple professionals have failed.
They’ve used their power and influence, every trick of the system, to isolate Jesus, to divide his followers and friends from him, erase his influence, break his power and his confidence in God.

And Jesus is unbroken.

In this death that was meant to break and divide, to erase and abandon, Jesus is recommitted to God in a commitment that has never wavered. Jesus is reconnected to God’s people, and God’s people are reconnected to Jesus, brought with him into that refuge where sorrow and pain, terror and loneliness and lies are all disarmed by God’s protection, deliverance, and steadfast love.

That’s good news.

Really, really good news, here at the end of a long, dark deathwatch.

The power of the state, the powers of envy and fear, have done everything they can to break Jesus, and have only shown him to be more connected, stronger and more whole than ever.

So nothing we can do – nothing – can break Jesus either.

God can not be broken.

God’s love is the only unbreakable thing in the universe.

So you and I cannot break Jesus, either. Not with neglect, or ignorance, or doubt. Not with anger, or despair, or participation in ongoing evil of the world.

The sorrows that threaten to break us; the loneliness of feeling out of step with the world, with our loved ones, or with God that tell us we’re already broken; the burdens of the sins we’ve committed and the work we’ve left undone that tell us we’ll never be able to put ourselves back together – none of that can break Jesus either.

Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.
As Jesus proclaims his utter commitment and trust, he invites us into the same.

Jesus invites us to commit ourselves wholly, entirely, into the hands of God, letting go of every other purpose and direction, every other shred of protection or self-sufficiency we’ve ever tried to grasp. To entrust every bit of our soul and spirit, our best and our worst, to God’s care, protection, and direction.
Because that is how we, too, become unbreakable. How we become enfolded in and filled up with the indestructible strength of divine love.

I know I would find it a lot easier to commit myself that completely at the point of death, the way we hear Jesus do today, than in the middle of everyday life. Because even with the assurance of God’s unbreakable love, it’s hard – so hard – to consciously give up my claims to control, all the mildly or seriously selfish habits and tricks I’ve taught myself to protect my heart from risk, and my definite preference for trusting mostly myself – or some few carefully selected others – to get things right.

But in the words of his last breath, in his unbreakable love at the moment of his death, Jesus is calling us to live unbreakably.

Jesus invites us to live every day with a trust that lets us risk new places and relationships we don’t feel ready for, confident that we will find God’s love in what’s new and strange. To take down the protective barriers that define anyone else as opponents – at the office or on Facebook, in our families or neighborhoods, in the politics of the day or the nightly news. To love generously, joyfully, freely, even those who you know will never love you back, or those whom I’m afraid I’m going to lose.

It’s living like that, after all, that has made Jesus unbreakable, pouring out love and trust, radiating deep, unshakable, renewable connection in spite of everything that pain and betrayal and sorrow can do in the failed attempt to erase him, to separate him from us, and us from him, and all of us from the love of God.

And if – no, when – you and I enter into that trust, when we throw ourselves entirely into the hands of God, then we become unbreakable, too.

When we leap or fall completely into the hands of God, we can never ever be completely alone, never lose our selves to loneliness, never break by being abandoned.

When we commit ourselves entirely to God’s care and purpose, we can’t be defeated by our own failures, or the failures of others.

When we trust God with complete assurance of protection, fear cannot force us to betray others, or ourselves.

Wrapped in and filled up with the unbreakable love of God, we are free to love without fear of grief, and to grieve our losses and our pain honestly, never separated from the love we have for one another, and the love God has for us. For us each and all.

The love and trust that refuses to die at the hands of the powers of separation and division, refuses to be silenced by death itself, invites us, every one of us who hears, to live in the power of that unbreakable love and trust:

today, at the foot of the cross,

tomorrow, in the silence of the tomb,

soon, in the world-changing upheaval of resurrection,

and always, in our most daily, ordinary lives, fragile but finally unbreakable.