April 15, 2007 - Something they're not telling us

Second Sunday of Easter
15 April 2007
John 20.19-31
Peace be with you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

Jeff died a year and a half ago in a car accident on the way home from work. The next day his wife Liz called me. I was out of town. When I got home, we planned Jeff’s funeral. Jeff had grown up in the church where I was the pastor but was going off to college just as I arrived, so I actually got to know Jeff and Liz when they counseled with me in preparation for marriage. There was something about him, some sensitive and thoughtful quality, that made me feel always close to him, even though I only saw him when they were in town to visit family, usually the holidays.

But now I was counseling Liz by herself, and it is always the main challenge just then to bring forth from a bereaved heart just what it is that would be most true, most hopeful and most comforting to say about the loved one who had just passed into God’s eternal care. Jeff was in his late 20’s, and it is hardest for someone so young. I asked Liz about this sense of connectedness I felt with Jeff. Did Jeff feel it, too? Did she know what I meant?

Liz knew exactly what I meant, but it was hard for her to describe. It had something to do with thinking that they kept meaning to belong to a church, but they only felt connected themselves when they were in church with that pastor who married them. Maybe that comes from the personal involvement, I guessed, and Liz supposed that had something to do with it. There was something else, though.

“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Jeff never thought there wasn’t a God, but when we went into churches together, I could tell there was something not right for him. What Jeff used to say about being in church was, ‘There’s something they’re not telling us.’”

That was all I needed to hear.

I have loved and admired Jeff in the way I have loved and admired Thomas the Doubter. These were people who had a deep capacity for belief in truth and a tireless faculty for examining its veracity. In the spirit of full disclosure, it is only fair to tell you that I am one of these people, too. I feel great tenderness for my fellow travelers, for I know what those whose lives and power are threatened by truth are willing to do to suppress the questions of those who simply want to discover and confirm what in this life is so.

Thomas got the usual treatment. From the very beginning, Thomas’ eagerness to be sure about the presence of Christ in the upper room has been treated with scorn, even if, in the case of John’s gospel, the gentlest of scorn. John has Jesus asking Thomas, “Do you believe because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The comparison leaves Thomas looking, well, barely adequate. We are left to conclude that if he had real faith, he would never have asked to validate his deepest hope. Ever since, people have called him Doubting Thomas. It is never a compliment.

But it’s a compliment from me. I think Thomas was the disciple with a healthy, independent mind—and a sturdy soul.. Thomas had the capacity to wonder. He had a drive for clarity and the courage to establish the truth, however it looked and whatever the cost. Thomas will forever be our example of one who stands before God and expects answers to the tough questions in a crisis. In the days of crisis following the cross, the death of hope, Thomas knew how important it was to base his hope in something real.

Thomas demanded to examine the unvarnished truth and was prepared to accept the results. If Jesus didn’t pass the believability test, Thomas was willing to know that and move on to base his faith in God some other way. Because of Thomas, the other disciples were able to wake up the next morning without considering the possibility that their minds had tricked them. If Thomas had failed to doubt, others could not have been certain, but because of him they were. Nobody ever thanked him. So let me say it for the record: “Thank you, Thomas, for your doubt.”

The interesting thing is that Jesus didn’t seem to mind the examination. He willingly submitted to it. Whatever Thomas asked to do, Jesus invited. Jesus never seems to feel insulted. So think about that. When people get mad today at the doubters of the world, who are they trying to protect? Apparently, not God.

Christ does not seem to mind doubt. Christ actually engages doubt. If we think of Christ as God, which Christians do, we have to suppose that God is interested in all our questions. God is not afraid to be tested. God is not insulted at being asked. God does not avoid a challenge. As deities go, God is eminently self-possessed. There isn’t an experiment devised by the human mind that God feels unable to pass. There isn’t a philosophical system that God cannot survive without our help.

So why do some people get so edgy about the questions people ask about God? Why do they have apoplexy when someone challenges the facts as reported in the Bible? Let’s grant for the moment that the Bible is God’s favorite book. If God doesn’t mind someone poking at his mortal wounds to see if they’re real, does it make sense to insist, say, that it would offend God to compare the first chapter of Genesis to a text book on biology? If God doesn’t feel insecure about being examined by sincere examiners, why should we feel insecure?

It may be the question of our security, or insecurity, that’s behind it all. Some people feel insecure at the notion that the truth we’ve long believed in might be, on further examination, incomplete—or even, in places, mistaken. They feel uncomfortable that the details on which they have based their faith may be up for revision. If God didn’t create the universe in six days, then what else in the Bible might be inaccurate? Some times this insecurity gets so bad that some of these people want to make sure that everybody will have to believe in the details they believe in, and they get themselves elected to school boards so they can force teachers to tell our children only what they want our children to know. Now, they feel insecure, and the thing the rest of us must understand is that all they want is to feel sure. Who can blame them? They feel conflicted, and they want to feel peace. No blame.

So I want to affirm at the outset one part of the Bible that I take to be literal, unchangeable truth. When Jesus says, “Peace be with you,” I think he means that we all of us are meant to reach in our soul a state of peace. Absolutely, without reservation, literally. If someone wants to feel at peace, and the way he can feel it is to believe that Genesis 1 is science and evolution is poppycock, then God bless him and grant him peace. Jesus wants him to have peace, and that’s good enough for me. Amen.

Then there are people like Thomas and Jeff and me. We like believing in good things, which you can see from our personal histories. I, all my life, loved and trusted and waited for the good thing called Santa Claus, who, now as a grandfather, I still take to be a good thing. Also, one day, while still a child, something about Santa Claus didn’t add up for me. Something happened for me, I suspect, like the day our daughter Emily comes to her mother and says, “Mom, is Santa Claus real? Tell me the truth.” If a kid just asks the question, you’re not sure what the best answer is. Maybe she wants reassurance; maybe she wants a straight answer. When she also insists on the “truth,” she’s ready for it, even if there’s some disappointment.

I’m like this. Thomas was like this. Jeff was like this. People like us have readily believed in the Jesus we first met in the cradle at Bethlehem. When we sang Martin Luther’s song about it, we believed that no crying he made. We have been further inspired by Jesus’ teaching and moved by his compassion. We enjoy our solidarity with all the many believers in life and in history that have followed Jesus, and we have committed our lives to the kind of faith in him that changes who we are and that is part of the salvation of the world. At one point, though, we revised an early belief about Jesus the non-crying infant. That didn’t add up, and we changed that belief about Jesus.

Here’s the point. When evidence presents itself that doesn’t go along with what we’d been expecting, we have new questions at just the places where others prefer the old answers. We want, no less than anyone, to have the same enchantment with God we once felt, but it occurs to us that our hearts don’t feel enchantment when our minds see a disconnect with reality. We want the truth.

For people like Thomas, Jeff and me, the truth of God and the universe may be unchanged and unchanging, but our minds are always accommodating to the vastness of the truth of God and the universe. We don’t believe that everything that can be known was already known by the time the last i of the Bible was dotted. We do seek peace, too. We seek the peace of Christ with all the longing and hope the most literal reader of scripture seeks the peace of Christ with, but the literalist’s peace is not our peace. We find peace through the questions, not instead of them.

We experience the Spirit of God in our seeking and would lose our own spirit if we stopped. Feeling confident about things is relaxing, but wondering about things is life-giving. We are like Voltaire, when he said, “Doubt is uncomfortable; certainty is ridiculous.” We’re willing to live with the discomfort, because there’s an even greater discomfort than the discomfort of doubt that unsettles us.

We feel like that influential contemporary poet-philosopher from just down the road in Buffalo, Ani DiFranco:

you can doubt anything
if you think about it long enough
cause what happened always adjusts to fit
what happened after that

Faithful doubters have a suspiciousness about how easy it is to adjust what is remembered to what happened after that. American memory adjusted what happened to the Indians according to what happened to the Indians after that. Slave owners adjusted what God thought about slaves according to what happened to slaves after they bought them. History—including religious history, including Christian history—has adjusted what happened to fit what happened after one side won and the other side lost.

I don’t think my current happy life ever needed to depend on the atrocities committed against innocent people, but I am in fact enjoying to this day benefits from my forebears’ atrocious exploits. If I can see it coming, I don’t ever want to be a willing contributor to such acts against other people, and therefore I doubt some of what the now dominant view forbids me to question. It would be safer for my status if I weren’t like this, but it is safer for my soul when I am. Therefore, even if others lose their peace because of my questions, I doubt. Even when they rage and assail my peace, I doubt. I could not have the peace of Christ if I failed to doubt. I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye.

And just there is a kind of peace. It may not be your kind of peace. Or maybe it really is, but you have been too discouraged to seek it. If that is so, remember that Jesus keeps saying, “Peace be with you,” including the peace that happens when your faith prods you to wonder. Wonder leads you into life. If when you became a parent, you were awed by the wonder of the infant you were holding, you followed your wonder deeply into the unfolding life of that child. All wonder is like that. It is to be enjoyed in its moment, of course, but faithfulness to wonder means following it more deeply into life than what you already understand.

Our very words teach us that doubt is part of wonder. If you stood in wonder at holding that child, you might have said of that moment, “I can’t believe it!” That doesn’t mean that you dismiss what is before you, but it does mean that everything you have ever experienced has not prepared you for the wonder and power of that moment. We express wonder in terms of doubt, because we know that how we explain the world must in some way be enlarged and deepened in order for us to fully participate in the mystery. Far from the denial of mystery, doubt is often the doorway to it. From Einstein to Bach to St. Francis to Paul to Jesus to Isaiah to Moses, the imaginations that have disclosed life’s holy mysteries have had to let go of such certainties as could resist doubt only so long. The memorable people of history began their work on the understanding that, as young Jeff once said, there’s something they’re not telling us.

So if you find peace in wonder, if you find peace in deeper truth than the truth you know so far, if you find peace in following where Christ is leading at least as much as the peace you’ve found with Christ so far, then doubt may be a state of grace for you. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says three times in the twelve verses that describe two brief visits with his disciples. It is the beginning of life after the life which the cross has ended. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says, perhaps for reassurance, but perhaps also as a goal for them to live toward. The one disciple who does something about what Jesus says is Thomas, and Jesus satisfies Thomas and brings him peace. God will do that for you. If you ask.

Amen.