“Doubting [Insert Your Name Here]”; John 20:19-31 April 27, 2014, FPC Jesup

“Doubting ______________________________”
                   [Insert Your Name Here]
New Testament Lesson: John 20:19-31
April 27, 2014, First Presbyterian Church of Jesup

Biblical Storyteller, Casey FitzGerald presents John 20:19-31:

Come one come all: the amazing Jesus who walks through doors, lives again (without being a zombie), and walks on water!

 How do we wrap our minds around all the things that we’re told Jesus is capable of? How do we believe in all that Jesus was and continues to be without piecemeal-ing out what is easy to accept from what seems impossible?

In our scripture today we’re told that the disciples hid behind locked doors and Jesus showed up, unbound by strict physics or locked doors. Scripture tells us that the disciples were hiding in fear of the Jews, a strange thought because they themselves were Jewish, as was their Lord, Jesus. Some have even suggested that they were hiding behind that door out of fear of Jesus himself. That they were afraid of how Jesus would confront them after their Maundy Thursday and Good Friday desertions.

Jesus comes into their fear, into their mourning, and says “peace be with you.” As became a pattern throughout his ministry, Jesus was acting in an entirely unexpected way. They were anticipating confrontation, vengeance, at the very least deep sadness. But instead Jesus comes in peace. Peace is an interesting way to respond to people whose inaction caused violence against you. The disciples we certainly shocked by Jesus’ presence and perhaps even more so by his attitude. They were overcome with joy at having him among them again and spread this news to those who did not experience Jesus face to face.

Thomas was not with them. Doubting Thomas, as he’s posthumously nicknamed, heard about Jesus’ post resurrection second hand, from the rest of the disciples. And Thomas responds saying, “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.”

And then a week later the disciples are once again gathered and Jesus appears providing his nail pierced side for Thomas’ examination.

Thomas cries out, “My Lord and my God!” and Jesus responds, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Because of this interaction, Thomas is chided throughout history for his need to see Jesus’ side.

 I’d tend to side more along the lines with author Anne Lamott who wrote, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, its certainty.”[1]

It is a strange and jarring thought, that certainty could be counter to faith. However, faith isn’t faith without the conscious decision to be leaping out into what seems impossible and yet true.

I think Thomas should be commended for his honesty. Who of us is without any doubts? How many times have we all checked out when reciting creeds or prayers? Have you earnestly examined all it is that we say together? Do we believe what we profess?

 Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor from Denver that I feel blessed to have met a few times. She speaks in ways I find helpful about how it is we can all be filled with such doubt and yet still manage to come to church each week and recite the Apostles Creed without having our fingers crossed behind our backs. She says that the importance of worshipping in community is that when we’re unable to believe every bit of what we profess it’s okay, because we’re not trying to believe it on our own. While I might be struggling theologically with one thing and you might be struggling with another, we stand by each other, each reciting and believing on behalf of not only ourselves but also each other. When we find ourselves at the limits of our belief, the community believes for us.

 One of the things that really stuck out for me from the text reading it this time around was the difference between what Thomas is looking for and what the disciples are shown. The disciples are happy to know that Jesus is alive. They are relieved that he is back among them and that he comes professing peace rather than judgment. For Thomas, this is not quite what he was looking for.

Though the disciples are happy he’s alive, Thomas also needs to know that he was dead. He’s not just looking for evidence of Jesus living; he’s looking for evidence of resurrection. Like many literalists we may known in our own lives, Thomas has an intensity to experience resurrection not only with his eyes, but with his touch. Educational theorists will affirm that different people learn in different ways. According to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, Thomas would be categorized as a bodily kinesthetic, visual learner.

By putting his hand in Jesus’ side, the resurrection story becomes more than a story to Thomas, it becomes a reality.  Jesus says to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

 Yes, we are blessed by faith without tangible evidence, but our faith gains a greater depth when we do experience Christ in our midst. We may not ever get the chance to touch Jesus in the flesh, but we all have our own experiences of God in this world: in the intensity of a newborn’s eyes blinking newly into the world, in the great expanses of oceans teeming with life seen and unseen, in the love of one another. We’re all given experiences of God’s presence among us, and our faith is strengthened for them.

It’s important to notice that though Thomas is seen as unbelieving this doesn’t make Jesus mad or frustrated. Rather, Jesus comes to him, provides his exposed side for Thomas’ inspection. Jesus isn’t trying to keep at a distance to test Thomas, but rather makes himself known completely, providing evidence of his death and resurrection. Might Jesus also be seeking to do this for us?

What evidence are you looking for in this world? Or haven’t you bothered to look? What evidence of resurrection have you experienced? How can you share your experiences with God for others to touch and hold near?

In your doubting, may you draw Jesus near, expecting God’s presence and power in this world and beyond. Amen.

Video Shown After Sermon:

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11519-the-opposite-of-faith-is-not-doubt-it-s-certainty

“Broken Bibles, Mended Hearts;” Psalm 119:9-16, 103-105 and John 1:1-14; May 12, 2013, FPC Jesup

“Broken Bibles, Mended Hearts”
Psalm 119:9-16, 103-105 and John 1:1-14
May 12, 2013, First Presbyterian Church of Jesup

When I was in third grade I received my first Bible. This red “Good News Bible,” with my name printed on the inside cover. I remember standing up in the front of the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church of Maumee, Ohio and being handed this brand new fresh Bible. I was so excited, beaming from ear to ear, proud that my church was entrusting me with such a very important gift: the word of God!

And then, after the service I went up to Sunday school, Bible in hand. A friend of mine grabbed mine to check it out and I’ll never forget this moment, she opened it and I heard a distinct ripping noise. I was horrified. I’m not sure if I started crying or not, but I know I thought about it. Here I had this brand new Bible and now it was ripped! It was no longer new. It was no longer special. I was so upset.

Though it is rational to get upset when something you have is ripped, I was upset for the wrong reasons. I wanted my Bible to stay clean and pure, to stay just like I had received it. I thought that this rip meant that I had messed up God’s word! I thought it meant that I was not responsible enough to have such a holy book in my library.

I didn’t understand that though one page was ripped ever so slightly, the words were intact. The importance of this book was intact. God’s promises were intact. The troubling thing with this sort of reaction towards a slight marring of God’s word is that it places the emphasis on the physicality of scripture, as if somehow my copy was the only one, and my “ruining” of this book was messing up God’s message. Thankfully, maintaining scripture was not the sole responsibility of my third grade self.

For thousands of years scripture was transmitted from person to person by storytelling. God’s truth was whispered in back alleys, told over kitchen tables, drawn out in the sand, and shouted from street corners. God’s message of love and hope and redemption and grace and joy can no more be contained to this little red book than God can be contained by our human understanding of God. As a third grader, I didn’t understand that.

I begrudgingly opened my now less than perfect Bible and tried to figure out what it had to say to me. And you know what, even though it was not so perfect in physical appearance it spoke to me a message of grace and truth. It told me that I, Bible-ruining as I may be, was a child of God. It told me that God has a call for my life. It told me that God loved the whole world and that I was a part of making sure that the whole world knew that truth. I was now tasked with whispering this word, writing it in the sand, and shouting it from street corners. These messages of less than perfect disciples and inadequate preachers whom God had tasked with the bringing about of the Kingdom of God leapt off the page and into my heart.

 Over the years, I became less concerned with one individual Bible, and more concerned with my own ability to engage with scripture as a whole. As one translation became not quite as compelling to me, I would get other translations to shake things up in my scripture reading life. I have bought or received different Bibles in different seasons of my life.  I have a Message Translation that I got in high school when scripture seemed too old to be relevant.  I have several Hebrew and Greek Bibles that I used throughout seminary when English translations seemed too new to be accurate. I have study Bibles that I’ve used at different times to help me connect with what different theologians have said about scripture throughout time.

Though each of these versions helped me to read scripture in a new way, they were still pointing to the same God, the same truths, and the same Gospel grace.

Our New Testament lesson today speaks about the enduring timelessness of God’s word throughout time and tradition. It says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” [1]

The word of God is more than the Bible itself, this passage tells us the Word was God. Through the person of Jesus Christ, the living incarnation of God, the holiness of God was lived out in human experience. Through a blameless life and a selfless death Christ lived the Gospel message that love is stronger than hate and life has the final word over death.

The truth of this living word echoes throughout our Biblical texts, breathing life and grace into the written word. When we read this written word we too are welcomed into this eternal story of God’s enduring truth, of the lived reality of grace.

Each and every Bible is a unique sort of book because it is so much more than a work of literature, a book of poetry, or a nice story about the history of people who lived long ago.

Frederick Buechner, a prominent contemporary Presbyterian minister writes about the lasting messiness and importance of scripture in his book, “Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC,” “One way to describe the Bible, written by many different people over a period of three thousand years and more, would be to say that it is a disorderly collection of sixty-odd books which are often tedious, barbaric, obscure, and teem with contradictions and inconsistencies. It is a swarming compost of a book, an Irish stew of poetry and propaganda, law and legalism, myth and murk, history and hysteria. Over the centuries it has become hopelessly associated with tub-thumping evangelism and dreary piety, which superannuated superstition and blue-nosed moralizing, with ecclesiastical authoritarianism and crippling literalism….And yet just because it is a book about both the sublime and the unspeakable, it is a book also about life the way it really is. It is a book about people who at one and the same time can be both believing, innocent and guilty, crusaders and crooks, full of hope and full of despair. In other words, it is a book about us. And it is also a book about God…One way or another, the story we find in the Bible is our own story.”[2]

 Our Psalm today, Psalm 119 gives us instructions on how to take in this amazing story, the story of God and of us. In verses 12-16 it says, “Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth. I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.”

To truly get into God’s word, we need to experience it. We can’t mediate on God’s word if we have not read it. We cannot fix our eyes on God’s way unless we learn about God’s way through scripture.

If I let myself get caught up in that torn page, I would have never actually gotten to the truth of God’s scripture, God’s own message for my life. In a way, it helped me that that page was torn, because once it was already broken into I didn’t feel like anything I could do to it would be ruining it.

 This was also liberating for my own understanding of the condition I needed to be in in order to receive God’s grace. God wants us just as we are, and no tears in our conditions or messes in our lives can keep us from God’s plan for us. God used a messed up Bible to speak healing to my own messy heart.

It is my hope and prayer that these Bibles that our third graders received will not stay in such great condition as they are today. If you really use these Bibles you might take a highlighter or pen to the page to write some of your own thoughts about scripture, these Bibles might get ripped, and eventually the covers might fall off. But as these Bibles disintegrate, you will be strengthened to love as God would have you love, serve as God would have you serve, and to hope in the great good promises of salvation by Jesus Christ; and that is worth so much more than pristine pages and a binding that’s never been broken.

There is a great beauty in the Bibles of people who read scripture from them every single day. They will likely look more run down than anything you’ll find in a bookstore, but in all of their writings, bookmarks, and tears they become a living witness to the faith life of that Christian. Here’s a truth, the worse shape your Bible is in, the better shape your heart is in. (Now of course my lack of focus on any one particular Bible keeps me from showing this in my own life, but I still believe it to be true.)

Presbyterian author, Anne Lamott, writes in her book, “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith” about how to absorb scripture. She writes: “There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts, and not in them?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”[3]

Immersing ourselves in scripture, showing up at church each Sunday to hear God’s word read and preached, reading God’s word before we go to sleep, all of these things may run-down our Bibles, but will help to heal our hearts. May we open our hearts to receive this message of wholeness that God has for us. Amen

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[1] John 1:1-4

[2] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: a Seeker’s Abc, Rev. and expanded [ed.]. ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993), p. 9.

[3] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith (New York: Riverhead Trade, 2006)

“Known;” Psalm 139 and Hebrews 4:12-16; October 14, 2012; FPC Jesup

“Known”
Psalm 139 and Hebrews 4:12-16
October 14, 2012, First Presbyterian Church of Jesup

This week I adopted a dog. His name is Bailey and he’s a sweet little four year old terrier. Anyone who’s had a dog in their lives before will have an idea of why he came to mind as I was reading these scriptures this week. The second verse of our Psalm today sums up a dog’s attitude towards their owner quite well: “You know when I sit down and when I rise up… You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.” Dogs have a way of following your every move. They’re interested in what you’re doing and interested in what your goings on might have to do with them.

And when I read Hebrews’ account of God’s word being like a “two edged sword” and “all must render an account,” I thought of the Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy and company approach the wizard to ask to go home, for courage, for a brain, and for a heart, he angrily bellows “I know why you have come.” The wizard knows their ways, having had watched them all along, and requires that they do as he asks before he will fulfill their desires.

Our two passages today speak of God’s knowledge of us, describing God as knowing us in a way that falls between Bailey’s inquisitive and encouraging attentiveness and the Wizard’s frightening omniscience. God dotes on us with love and examines us with judgment.

Our Psalmist’s relationship with God is one of joy, praising God for being fearfully and wonderfully made. The psalmist speaks of God’s knowledge of him from the very beginning his life, how God knew every detail of him even when he was still in his mother’s womb. In Hebrews chapter 4 God’s Word is described like a sword, separating out soul from spirit, bringing judgment to thought and intention.

In both passages, God is spoken of as knowing every detail of our lives, both good and bad. Whether we take initiative for a relationship with Christ or try to ignore God’s impact on the world, God is still aware of all that we are and what we do. When we open our hearts to God we open our lives to God’s judgment, but also to God’s grace.

Presbyterian pastor, Robert Boyd Munger wrote a sermon called “My Heart, Christ’s Home,” that speaks of welcoming Christ into our lives through the metaphor of welcoming someone into your house. At first he is excited to have Christ in his house. Christ makes the darkness light, builds a fire on the hearth and banishes the chill. Then he tells Jesus, “Lord, I want this heart of mine to be Yours. I want to have You settle down here and be perfectly at home. Everything I have belongs to You. Let me show You around.”

He shows Jesus the house, room by room. As he watches Jesus look at the house he sees things in a different light. In the study, his mind, he realizes there are books, magazines, and pictures he’s not proud of, and asks Christ to help him to be filled with scripture and images of Christ. The dining room is a room of his appetites, his favorites being, “money, academic degrees and stocks, with newspaper articles of fame and fortune as side dishes.” Jesus did not eat of those things, but instead tells him of satisfaction that can be found by fully pursuing God alone.

Jesus continues through the house, asking to go into each room, and he lets him in but becomes more and more reluctant when Jesus wants to be let into his relationships, the work that he does, and the way that he spends his time. Then, they get to the hall closet, the place of hidden things. There’s an odor that emanates from this closet that he is unwilling to deal with, but when he hands Jesus the key, Jesus cleans it out in a moment. Finally, he decides to entirely transfer the deed to his heart to Jesus, in the knowledge that he cannot keep this house of his heart clean on his own.

Just as this man decided to surrender the house that is his heart to Christ, we are called to surrender our lives to Christ. This does not mean that we offer up just the pretty and cleaned up parts of our lives, but that we share all parts of our lives with Christ.

In Psalm 139 the psalmist says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

God is ever present in the world and desires to be ever present in our lives. Even when we strike out on our own, intentionally following darkness, God is still there beside us. When we run away from what God has called us to be and do, God is still there beside us.

Once we are aware of God’s presence in the world, our ignorance or inaction are both acts of disobedience. Through God’s creative act of bring each of us into the world God has placed a call on our lives for a relationship with God’s self.

Galatians 4:8-9 says, “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again?”

When we welcome Christ into our lives, we are inviting both affirmation and judgment.  As we read in Hebrews 4:13: “Before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

There is no hiding from God. God has known us since time began, and will continue to know us through eternity. God delights in who we are, but is not naive to the good and the bad that we allow to occupy our lives. We should be prepared for the correction that comes by fully opening our hearts to Jesus Christ.

Author Anne Lamott writes in her book, “Traveling Mercies,”: “God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay exactly the way we are.”[1]

Christ desires to clean up the house of our hearts, to sweep away all things that are harmful for us. Only when we welcome Christ into our hearts can that sort of cleaning begin.

Hebrews 4:14-15 says, “Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

Author John Burgess points out that as these verses follow the passage we just discussed about being laid bare before God, these verses cause us to “wrestle with the theological tension between God’s word to us and our words to God, between God’s judgment that lays us bare and God’s grace that empowers us to ask help of God in our time of need, between God’s claim on us and our claim on God by virtue of Christ’s saving work…The God who places us under judgment is the very God who loves us and sympathizes with us in every respect.”[2]

Jesus Christ came to earth and experienced deep pain, loss, grief, and struggle. We needn’t be afraid to face God with complete honesty and candor. God can take our anger, cursing, crying, whining, and confessing. When we come to God, especially in our weakness, we express our deep need and desire for God’s grace.

The good news is God doesn’t leave us in our own sinfulness. God brings it to the light and then washes it clean. Through Christ we do not have to assume the punishment for our sins. Christ has already taken on our sins through his death and resurrection. There is nothing we can do to deserve God’s love and nothing that we can do that will stop God from pursuing us. God knows us intimately and yearns for us to know God’s self in the same way. Let us open our hearts with honesty and with joy and receive God’s grace. Amen.

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[1][1] Anne Lamott, “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”

[2] “Hebrews 4:12-16, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 4