“Faith’s Growing Edge”
Thirty-four years ago our friend Chet was 60 years old and desperately needed open-heart surgery. At that point he had a choice: he could undergo the surgery or he could die. Reluctantly and with great fear he chose the surgery. But try as he did to be confident and optimistic, his body betrayed him the night before the surgery. He broke out into a rash all over his body and the surgery was delayed a few days while the medical team treated the rash and calmed his nerves.
None of us knew what to expect from this surgery that seemed so daring at the time. Chet came through the surgery with flying colors, and his body recovered very quickly. Far slower though was his emotional recovery, as he worried day by day that some false move would end his life. No one ever followed doctor’s orders more fastidiously. He never ate a forbidden food or deviated from his rehab plan. As his next door neighbors, my husband and I sometimes wondered if this older gentleman would outlive us all. Gradually Chet came to believe that the surgery had, indeed, succeeded, that he had a new life.
For me, Chet has been my own personal example of the reality that faith or belief is not a simple or one-dimensional matter. It took a long time for Chet to learn to believe again in himself, in the capacity of his heart and body to take care of him. Sometimes, on good days, he really believed this, and other times he just couldn’t.
Perhaps you are surprised that I use the example of a person’s belief in himself as an example of faith. In fact, I do think that there is often a connection between our faith in God and our faith in ourselves. In the story about Jesus’ appearance to the
disciples and, in particular, to Thomas, we might focus on the aspects of the story which we will never be able to explain or understand fully, the miraculous appearance of Jesus in some kind of bodily form after his death.
But what if we focused instead on the capacity of the disciples to carry on their mission, that is their ability to believe in themselves as Jesus had always encouraged them to do? Then I think the story takes on a different complexion. We might think of it as a story about finding a reason to go on, rediscovering the meaning and purpose of life after experiencing total devastation and defeat. And at that point I think it becomes a story which can be our own story: a story about how we pick up the pieces and go on when it seems unlikely that we will be able to do so.
Susan Andrews writes about her experience in seminary when she considered the “doubting Thomas” of our text to be her primary soul mate. She writes, “Jesus kept appearing to my fellow students within the rich stories of the Christian tradition. But like, Thomas, I never seemed to be there when Jesus arrived. Why?... because the absurdity of the resurrection rumor had sent me away.
I could not see the mark on Jesus’ hands or touch the wound in his side. So I moved down the street to the Unitarians. Their faith made sense with its distant and daring God, its passionate witness for justice, its bold support for inclusive ministry. Yes, theirs was a doing faith, a touchable faith, an energetic faith.
And I didn’t have to sit around waiting for a dead God to reappear. But then a strange thing happened. I found myself restless and filled with sadness. I missed Jesus.
In John’s Gospel, the first appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples is both intense and focused. The scene is set in realistic detail. It is evening of the first day of the week and the doors are locked. The anxious disciples are shut tightly inside. The suspicious world is shut tightly outside. The whole of creation is missing Jesus. Then all of a sudden he appears. A dead God is resurrected. A dead faith is recreated. A dead hope is born again.
Susan Andrews goes on to say, “I remember once seeing such locked up hope. It was coffee hour and a parishioner was fussing with the food table, hunched over and preoccupied despite the hubbub of voices swirling around her. It had been six months since her husband died, and we had yet to touch base in an unhurried way. As soon as I approached her, her eyes welled up with tears. She tried to smile, but the ragged edges of grief carved out her face.
After a few moments she looked around to see if anyone was nearby and then she began to whisper. ‘I had a terrifying experience last week. You’ll probably think I’m nuts, but I have to tell someone. You know,’ she went on, ‘the nights are the worst. I hear noises in the house, and I can’t get used to sleeping in bed alone. It must have been three o’clock in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself back to sleep, when all of a sudden it happened. John came back. He came back and crawled in bed with me. He didn’t say a word. He just appeared—and then faded away. I felt immediate peace and warmth and hope, and now I don’t feel so alone.’ Then glancing up in pink and eager embarrassment, she asked. ‘You don’t think I’m crazy do you?’
And Susan writes, “No, I don’t think she was or is crazy. Instead
she is blessed, blessed with a God who just appears in dreams, in visions, in people, in words, in intuitions. The truth of Easter is that all of humanity is blessed with a God who defies the locks of logic and grief and prejudice and fear, a God who blesses us and then sends us, fresh and filled with hope, back into this difficult world.
Susan’s stories ring just right for me, both her wonderful resistance to a simplistic acceptance and her more mature realization as pastor and person that hope is always reborn in us in ways that we cannot always completely understand. I still recall my own sense of disbelief as I struggled to reconcile my early Sunday school teachings with the questions and doubts I began to experience as a teenager.
One day after teaching first grade Sunday school, (I think I was about 16 years old), I sat in church during the communion service. I was very close to our minister’s family, their favorite babysitter for their children. But as my pastor intoned the words of institution for the sacrament, I remember thinking something like, “Wow, he really believes that!” I was deeply perplexed about everything at that point in my life, but the one thing that helped me to continue to sort things out was that even though I couldn’t believe as he believed at that time, I still knew that he was a sincere and wise person that I admired and trusted. In short, what he believed mattered to me and ultimately made sense when I grew older.
For me, one of the great strengths of our Congregational tradition is the way in which we grant each person the privilege to believe in his or her own way. But I have also come to respect the need for us to take advantage of our being members of a faith community.
I believe that most of us could use a bit of help in the fuller development of our faith understanding. Too often we live very demanding and adult lives and continue to operate out of our Sunday school level understanding.
I also believe that we in the church must make more room for the world of doubt and disbelief. Faith is not synonymous with certainty. It is more about the decision to keep our eyes and minds open. Faith is often treated as a noun, a condition of being, but it is probably better thought of as an action word. I think that one of the great gifts of the church is that we have each other to struggle together and deepen our understanding of the meaning and purposes of life. Here at Dennis Union, we have study groups of various sorts that can challenge our hearts and minds.
This past week I have been reading from a book by J. Phillip Newell about the stages of adult faith development from the perspective of the Celtic tradition. Phillip reflects about the affinity we see between the very young and the very old in life. Or as Job says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.” Think of Simeon and Anna who in the last stage of their lives find themselves praying continually in the Temple. They see the baby Jesus brought to the Temple for the ritual act of circumcision. Simeon takes the baby in his arms and lifting him declares that his own spirit is now ready to take its leave from this earth, for with his own eyes he has now seen the one who is to save Israel. And Anna joins in right away exclaiming that this is the child that all are seeking for the redemption of Jerusalem.
The very old and the very young are often the great carriers of wisdom, the persons who seem to have time in life to ponder
mystery, to preserve a sense of wonder. Ask any parent who has lost a child to cancer, and they will tell you that the child was better able to accept death than the parents could.
Today we live in a culture that doesn’t want to know about death. If you want to boost the sale of food or vitamins, just say the magic word that whatever you are selling will invoke the “fountain of youth” and your sales will be assured. My own sense is that all of us would do well to look our own death in the face. Those who have faced the inevitability of death are the very persons who live life to the fullest.
Phillip Newell cites our cultural tendency to “shield children from the dark side of the Christ story.” “Should we wonder,” he asks, “why later in life the Christian inheritance for so many seems to be lacking?” A mother tells of her little son’s relationship with a neighbor who was dying of cancer. When the man died, the mother’s instinct was to protect the child from the experience of the funeral. Finally she gave in to her son’s persistence. At the funeral, he crossed the room and gazed calmly at the corpse then went straight to the widow and embraced her with a hug. His instincts were more on target than those of the adults present.
I’ll close with references to pastor and poet Henry Van Dyke who served the Newport Congregational Church in the late 19th century and wrote the words to the hymn we know as “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”. He wrote “Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away. Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day.” Today, with our deeper understanding of the human psyche, we can be less afraid of the dark and of our doubt. We can have the courage to wonder, the concern to question, and I think we are strong enough to endure such questioning.
Thomas, in his courage to doubt, most likely gave voice to what was rumbling around in all the disciples. Thanks be to God that our God is strong enough to withstand both our belief and our doubt.
Shalom and Amen.
“Faith’s Growing Edge”
Text: John 20.19-31
Rev. Kathleen S. Henry
Second Sunday of Easter
March 30, 2008
