SERMON - Easter 2

Acts 5. 27-32;

Revelation 1.4-8;

John 20.19-31

DOUBT! What a thing

THOMAS doubted, but so did they all. According to last Sunday’s Gospel, all the disciples dismissed the women’s tale of an empty tomb as nonsense (Luke 24.11). It was just Thomas’s bad luck not to have been there when Jesus appeared to the others. But, even if his doubts were no deeper than those of the rest, Thomas will always remain “Doubting Thomas”. For those of us who find it all very difficult, he will always be our patron saint.

“I never have had one doubt,” wrote John Henry Newman, reflecting on the “perfect peace and contentment” he had enjoyed since his admission into “the one fold of Christ”

Evangelicals make much of “assurance”. “Blessed assurance,” they sing, “Jesus is mine.” The same Evangelical confidence rings out in Timothy Dudley-Smith’s great hymn, “Thine be the glory”. “No more we doubt thee,” we sing, and while we sing it, we mean it!

Some of my friends tell me that I shouldn’t have any doubts. They tell me that it will make me unstable (it’s a bit late to warn me about that).

So there appear to be TWO ways to live faith – either in the belief that I won’t have any doubts at all, or in the belief that doubt is bad and damaging.

There is, however, another way! From this perspective, doubt is not the enemy of faith. Certainty is the enemy. It is all about holding both your beliefs and doubts with integrity.

The prophets of this third way were two poets, Tennyson in the 19th century and R. S. Thomas in the last. The profound insight of Tennyson’s In Memoriam is that uncertainty and religious commitment are not incompatible. Doubt and faith can and do coexist.

Tennyson knew that “calm despair and wild unrest” can be “tenants of a single breast” – as he said.

There lives more faith in
honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half
the creeds. (he said that as well)

It is impossible to be certain, but it is possible, as Job did, to turn in the right direction.

I stretch lame hands of faith,
and grope,
And gather dust and chaff,
and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger
hope.

For R. S. Thomas, faith and doubt are inseparable. Prayer becomes:

. . . leaning far out
over an immense depth, letting
your name go and waiting,
somewhere between faith
and doubt,
for the echoes of its arrival.

“Waiting”

For R. S. Thomas, too, questioned whether prayer actually works

He is that great void
we must enter, calling
to one another on the way
in the direction from which
he blows.

“Migrants”

St. Thomas — is granted, as were the others, the opportunity to see and touch the risen Lord. Jesus says to him: “Be unbelieving no longer.” (Thus, correctly, the Revised English Bible; the New Revised Standard Version’s “Do not doubt” is a mistranslation.)

This is an invitation to trust and obey — not a promise of certainty. Thomas’s response is to worship the risen Lord. Does that conclude his doubting? Possibly, but if we are half as complicated creatures as it seems we are, maybe, on many a Monday morning, he is still “Doubting Thomas”.

And on this second Sunday of Easter, we can see the aftermath of the great festival of Easter – it took weeks to arrive, and it departed quickly – but do we REALLY understand what it really means?

I read in the newspaper that the press officer at Somerfield got in trouble in Holy Week for getting the theology behind her company’s seasonal campaign a bit mixed up. The unfortunate employee first put out a press release saying that the supermarket’s range of Easter eggs and other seasonal products was part of the traditional celebration at this time of Christ’s birthday. She quickly amended it to say that the eggs represented Christ’s rebirth, before a final version vaguely guessed that it might have something to do with death and resurrection.

To be fair, of all the Easter mysteries we observe this this one may be the hardest to unravel: why we commemorate the death and resurrection of the most important figure in human history with bunny rabbits that lay chocolate eggs in spring gardens.

To be fairer still, despite the stick she took for it, her changing explanation was not such a bad stab at interpreting the significance of the Easter story. Of course Christians believe the central point about the Triduum — the three sacred days that began last night with the Holy Thursday commemoration of the Last Supper and conclude triumphantly on Easter Sunday — is that it marks both a death and a rebirth.

And just as sure as you can’t have Easter Day without Good Friday, you also can’t have a Christian Festival without a great deal of confusion.

As the world marches onward to a more secular understanding of the mysteries of faith, Christians are being left behind in the struggle for a platform to explain the importance of our faith. No Wonder Christians doubt! If only I could persuade them that doubting is not the end of the world (or even the end of faith), it is merely part of the journey!

DOUBT! What a thing

If I had one wish, I don’t think I would wish to have ‘no doubt’. I don’t think I would wish to get a letter from God, explaining everything about life, love, war, justice, relationships, money, greed, guilt, happiness, hatred and all the other things.

I think that part of the Technicolor journey through life is all about looking for certainties, and not actually finding them. It is all about us considering, thinking, praying, hoping – these are the processes that have given us the greatest music, art, literature and poetry in the history of humanity.

So what about St. Thomas the Apostle? Well, many of the ancient texts are attributed to him. It seems that after a shaky start, he really set about moving forward in the ‘building the church’ stakes. It is reported that he witnessed the assumption of Mary into heaven; he then left to spread the Gospel.

Reports have him evangelising Syria and Persia, then he travelled as far as Western India, then to Southern India. Indeed the various denominations of modern Saint Thomas Christians ascribe their unwritten tradition to the end of the 2nd century and believe that Thomas landed at Maliankara in AD 52

In great controversy, it is held that St. Thomas then travelled to Paraguay, Peru, and Ecuador to evangelise the Mesoamerican civilisations there.

I couldn’t even begin to speak about the writings of Thomas, and the generations of Christians who have grown up in all corners of the world in Churches and Traditions dedicated to St. Thomas.

If this is the product of DOUBT, then I will be praying for that.

Sermon - Easter Day

Easter Day 2007

Alleluia He is Risen – He is risen indeed Alleluia!

And he is risen because we have been through Holy Week and experienced the agony and suffering, we have felt the anguish of being betrayed, and we have done our best to walk alongside him on the journey to the cross.

I read in the newspaper this week that the press officer at Somerfield got in trouble this week for getting the theology behind her company’s seasonal campaign a bit mixed up. The unfortunate employee first put out a press release saying that the supermarket’s range of Easter eggs and other seasonal products was part of the traditional celebration at this time of Christ’s birthday. She quickly amended it to say that the eggs represented Christ’s rebirth, before a final version vaguely guessed that it might have something to do with death and resurrection.

To be fair, of all the Easter mysteries we observe this weekend this one may be the hardest to unravel: why we commemorate the death and resurrection of the most important figure in human history with bunny rabbits that lay chocolate eggs in spring gardens.

To be fairer still, despite the stick she took for it, her changing explanation was not such a bad stab at interpreting the significance of the Easter story. Of course Christians believe the central point about the Triduum — the three sacred days that began last night with the Holy Thursday commemoration of the Last Supper and conclude triumphantly on Sunday — is that it marks both a death and a rebirth.

And just as sure as you can’t have Easter Day without Good Friday, you also can’t have a Christian Festival without a great deal of confusion.

As the world marches onward to a more secular understanding of the mysteries of faith, Christians are being left behind in the struggle for a platform to explain the importance of our faith.

If we are not careful, it will all get mixed up with the DaVinci Code, the Gospel according to Judas and the Simpsons – you could almost guess that the next ‘big’ thing would be the discovery of the tomb of Jesus couldn’t you?

As a church we need to be resurrected, and not just ‘rebranded’ as the advertising people might say…

Resurrection should be the experience of the Church and of the people of God. When St Augustine said 'We are an Easter people'. He wasn't just saying that we are a people who define ourselves in terms of an historical event. We may do that to some extent. We may see Easter as a defining moment in the life of the Christian Church.

But being an Easter people means that resurrection is part of our life experience, part of who we are, part of what it means to be us. Easter celebrates how Jesus dies and rises in each of us, in our personal lives, in family, church, parish, community. It celebrates how Jesus dies and rises in our daily work, in our home life, in our relationships, in the joys and sorrows of the world.

In a world where so many people die in hopelessness, where people are poisoned by cynicism and defeated by disillusionment we have to tell our story, we have to sing our song. 'We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song' concludes Augustine.

I like that idea very much “'We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song”.

Yesterday, another young person was murdered in London, bringing the total to at least half a dozen in the last few weeks. The continuing violence in Iraq means that when we hear phrases like, “one hundred killed in a car bomb” we are starting to become desensitised to the absolute atrocity of war. It’s just another day. When we see pictures of our own dead soldiers smiling at us from the front pages of the newspapers we know that all is not well.

For many people in the world today, being an Easter people must be suspended, because they are still living in Good Friday. The news that ‘death is swallowed up in Christ’ and ‘I was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore’ might be a little premature.

In the Gospel reading we have the account of the resurrection from Luke. The women who followed Jesus came to the tomb with the spices they had prepared. The body was gone and the stone rolled away. Angels tell them that He has risen – “why do you look for the living among the dead” they say.

And that is our task, to look for the living among the dead. To sit with the spiritually dying; those worn down by life; the oppressed, the abused, the lonely, the depressed and the scared, praying for their resurrection, and ours.

If we are an Easter people, we are called to act as Christ did – to be within and without the world. To be WITHIN the world – interested an concerned, working towards a better tomorrow for all God’s children. Using all resources we can beg or borrow to make changes. Being WITHOUT the world – not caring what our faith does to our personal reputation or standing in the community. Not worrying about the petty persecutions and remarks we might endure.

As we look for the living among the dead we know that as surely as day follows night, we will find Jesus, and we will find ourselves.

Alleluia He is Risen – He is risen indeed Alleluia!

So where do we find the clues to the real mission? Where do we find the start of our journey?

The Lord appears to women, who were looked down upon at the time, and that is why the disciples do not believe them. Peter runs to verify what Mary has reported. All he finds in the tomb are the linen cloths.

The proclamation of LIFE starts with those who are marginalized, mistreated and despised.

Most of the disciples were in hiding or travelling to Galilee – at Easter time I always give the disciples a hard time, usually suggesting that they were stupid, cowardly and forgetful – their plans had been dashed when Jesus was crucified, so I suppose they were thrown into confusion. They hadn’t listened as well as they should have, but who is going to concentrate on the details when some bloke is performing miracles? After Jesus was killed, they weren’t going to hang around to see what would happen.

The clue here is to think, about what you have seen, and where you think God might have been at work in your life. Look back and ask the questions, you will get answers.

Seriously though, today could be your resurrection. Today you might find your life. Today you could have NEW LIFE.

Today, this glorious Easter Day is not just another Day for millions of Christians throughout the world – in places where people are weighed down with famine, disease and war. Where the people are exploited by unjust regimes and the power of multinational companies that strip their lands bare for the sake of profit – Easter day is the day when they FULLY UNDERSTAND the importance of NEW LIFE.

If we think of the disciples, even though they were told what would happen, and that everything would be fine, they still fell into a despair. Even the women, who were happy to stay with Jesus, and even care for His body, were surprised when they realised that he had been raised from the dead. And that’s how it is for Christians. It is hard for us to be optimistic about our faith and the Church.

This year – as we celebrate Easter once again – we should make a commitment to new life. The chance to change and be more like God wants us to be.

(That is what is signified in this EASTER (paschal) candle – new life through the light of Christ in our lives, and the life of our community)

This is our objective starting again on this Easter Day – to do all we can to share that hope with others – being optimists in the face of adversity – being convinced that GOD – in His good time – will put all things right. Being bearers of PROMISES and not just HOPE.

But today! Enjoy a day off – and thank GOD for the gift of LIFE – given FREELY to us in the resurrection of His Son.