Southern Mallee Cooperative Parish

Sunday 19 April 2009

Scripture:  John 20:19-29

A couple of years ago, Jenny and I had the privilege of attending a conference of theological educators in Dallas Texas. This was the third such conference we had attended, one in Chicago, one in Toronto, all of them COLD. We had got to know some Canadian colleagues really well and found that they, like us, were a bit intimidated by the great majority of Americans at the conferences. So that we could talk about the Yankees, the Canadians and Aussies went out for dinner together on a cold, wet night (here, Victoria was in meltdown in 40° heat). We walked a couple of blocks where we caught the Dallas equivalent of the Melbourne City Circle tram to go to the restaurant. We were boarding this complimentary transportation when I said to myself and to those within earshot, ‘This looks just like a W Class tram’, whereupon the conductor said, ‘This IS a W Class tram, all the way from Mel-bawrn Aus-tral-ee-ya’ to which I thought, ‘Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!’ I can’t believe I got so excited stumbling across a W Class tram in the heartland of the biggest state in the USofA, but I did. The W Class is the classic Melbourne tram that you see in paintings of the Paris end of Collins Street, and to find it right in the heart of Dallas just blew me away.

I have a profound appreciation of W Class trams that goes all the way back to 1952 when I was a newly arrived migrant from Scotland living in Pascoe Vale. My mum would take my cello to work in the city on Thursdays and I would bus and tram into town after school, pick up my cello at the little dress shop where she worked as a seamstress, and tram back to the Conservatorium of Music for my cello lesson. In those days there was a conductor on the tram and he, or sometimes she, would wriggle, push and squeeze their way from one end of the tram to the other dispensing small, flimsy paper tickets from their leather bag, on which they would clip the time and the number of the tram stop. On the reverse side of those small, flimsy paper tickets was printed a word of wisdom, a thought for the day, and for some reason or other, despite the ravages wrought by time upon my memory cells, one of those words of wisdom from a small, flimsy tram ticket has never left me. It is a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson:

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Faith and doubt, this odd couple that bicker inside us like Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau, seemingly pulling apart our inner tranquillity and assurance, and yet with neither of them able to gain absolute ascendance over the other in our grapple to understand our existence and the place of God in our experience.

Thomas the doubter

The Gospel reading for today includes that wonderfully evocative Resurrection passage from John’s Gospel in which faith and doubt are apparently contrasted:

1. Firstly there is the Gospel writer John’s representation of the giving of the Spirit in which Jesus appears in the midst of the frightened disciples, behind locked doors, and says ‘Peace be with you’ – Shalom!  He shows them the wounds in his hands and side and repeats:

‘Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me so send I you’.

Then Jesus breathes on them and blesses them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’. A beautiful image of tranquillity and gift and commission.

Luke’s version of the coming of the Spirit is accompanied by strong wind and tongues of fire, a violent and instantaneous transformation which drives the followers of Jesus into the streets to preach and speak in tongues. John’s version of the same experience is much more gentle and less confronting.

2. And then there is the story of Thomas, in which he is apparently portrayed as a second class disciple because he needed evidence before he would believe, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe’. It doesn’t sound unreasonable to me, after all when Jesus appeared to the disciples, he showed them his hands and his side. A week later Jesus appears again and this time Thomas is present. ‘Peace be with you. Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe’.

There are three words translated as ‘doubt’ in the NRSV: distazow in Matthew 14 generally interpreted as our common understanding of doubt – ‘I’m not sure about that’; diakrinow in Matt 21 and Mk 11 which means to separate or judge – do not doubt (don’t be critical) and you can tell this mountain to jump into the sea and it will happen; and finally in John 21 apistos – this is no intellectual questioning or critical analysis, this is about a crisis, not of belief, but of faith, and they are very different entities. Jesus is counselling Thomas not to be faithless (as the KJV translates it), for apistos is the long slippery slide into cynicism and despair.

Thomas the doubting – or was it faithless – disciple, was not the first person to express doubt about someone else’s perception of reality, nor will he be the last. Without honest doubt of the distazow or diakrinow variety, without the persistent and perceptive questioning of received wisdom and tradition, how will the new light and truth that God has yet to break forth from his Word be discovered? Truth about slavery, truth about the rightful place of women in leadership, truth about inalienable human rights for all people, truth about the meaning of salvation for communities as well as individuals, truth about the complex interaction between body chemistry, mood and behaviour that affect how we feel about God.

For many of us Saint Thomas is a patron saint for all people of faith who are prepared to walk the fine line between belief and doubt in the pursuit of truth, and in so doing risk being labelled as ‘faith-less’. But remember that Thomas was the disciple who said to the others when Jesus prepared to go to Bethany where Lazarus lay dead, ‘Let us also go that we may die with him’. These are not the words of a faithless man, but they are the words of a man who harbours deep questions about the wisdom of his leader’s intentions. And that’s ok.

I guess we could say that Thomas is the man of science, ‘If I can’t see it and touch it and measure it, I won’t believe it’

Wrestling with doubt

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Frank Rees, in his book ‘Wrestling with Doubt’, refers to Val Webb’s experience of growing up in a conservative religious environment in which there was zero tolerance of doubt. Faith was about believing the doctrines taught from the pulpit which purported to be derived from Scripture. A genuine Christian would never question, strong faith never doubts. But then Val’s experiences forced a separation between ‘faith’, or ‘belief’ as it had been defined in her formation, and ‘reality’ as she experienced it in every day life.

When she articulated her doubts about the received wisdom and tradition of her community, she experienced three responses: isolation, exclusion, and repudiation. And yet is that not also the story of the Gospel? Jesus questioned the tradition, spoke truth to power to use the Quaker 18^th Century charge, was isolated by the religious community, excluded and repudiated in the most violent manner imaginable. 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Our young people are quite right to ask deep questions of our traditions and our church culture. That is the kind of doubt that leads to new life, new energy and new insights into the meaning of faith. They are not saved by believing the right things, but by faithing the right actions. Salvation came to the disciples, less through the teaching of Jesus – the Gospels show us that they usually misunderstood what Jesus was saying, and the Acts of the Apostles show us that they often disagreed with each other about the interpretation of Christian faith. Salvation came to the disciples through being with Jesus even when they didn’t understand his teaching, and through having the Spirit of Jesus breathed into them even when they didn’t comprehend his resurrection.

Each generation must discover the living Christ through listening and learning, but also through challenging, doubting, questioning, and experiencing Jesus for themselves.

Living with change

Jenny and I had a most interesting dinner with a couple of her cousins and their families, including children, last week. Our generation were saying how frustrating we found modern worship services, particularly the music which we found repetitive, untheological, loud and unsingable. We bemoaned the fact that church meetings are no longer Baptist where we gather together to keep talking till we discern the mind of God.

A niece who is a delightful young woman, very active in the church, with a dynamic faith, said, ‘That’s all irrelevant to my generation’. It was a bit of a conversation stopper, but it reminded me of the old saying that faith is caught not taught, and ultimately it is caught when the risen Jesus breathes the Spirit into us and something new grasps us and gives us new energy and new vision.

But some things don’t change: ‘As the Father sent me, so I am sending you. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any they are retained.’

The culture of church can take on a thousand different forms, but if people are being freed from their guilt and their sins are being forgiven, the Spirit of Jesus is present. We can be like Thomas and question in our hearts whether Christ is truly risen and present in another congregation or another tradition, even another faith. In my life time I recall well-meaning people genuinely questioning whether  a person could be a Roman Catholic and a Christian.

‘Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe Thomas’. In other words let us trust that Jesus is alive and active in the world even if we can’t see him in our own experience. The temptation when everything around us is changing and the old familiar trappings of faith – grand hymns, fine sermons, familiar truths – are no longer visible, is that we not only doubt that Jesus is alive in the new forms, but we can so easily slide into cynicism and alienation, even bitterness.

That is when we need to hear again, the gentle voice of Jesus, ‘Peace be with you’ . That is when we need to let go of our sense of belonging to another place and another time and another world; to let go and allow the Spirit of Jesus to breath peace and gentleness into our lives, and to confess again, ‘My Lord and my God’.

I think you can probably tell that I am preaching to myself. I have been profoundly blessed by God through the old forms of church – Billy Graham, Youth for Christ, local Baptist church life, Wesley hymns. Perhaps the wisdom of age is to let go of the need for spiritual stimulation, to trust the world to God, and to rest in the God-breathed peace that Christ offers to believers and doubters alike.

Change and decay in all around I see,

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Peace be with you