Proof of life
Commentary
Object:
One of my good friends died last year. He had reached a good age and was mostly ready
to go. In fact, he once told me he had more lives than the proverbial cat's nine. On too
many occasions, because of cancer and accidents and blood diseases, doctors had written
him off. Yet, like the Energizer bunny, he kept going and going and going....
But in the year before his death he knew the end was coming. He joked about it one day, telling me that several of his friends had recently conversed about death. One said that when he was gone, he hoped people would say nice things at his funeral about how he was a truly godly man and always tried to do the right thing. Another chimed in that he hoped people would mention how much he loved his family and was a friend on which others could count. Then they looked at my buddy, and he felt obligated to offer his own thoughts about what he wanted people to say at his funeral. He said, "When people come by my casket I hope they look at me and say, 'Oh my! He just moved!' "
None of us wants to die. Yet all of us face that prospect as a 100% certainty. Only the life insurance company actuaries bet on how distant death is in our journeys, but they never deny its coming. As people say, "You can always count on death and taxes!"
Except that after Easter you can't count on death any more. Jesus reversed the natural course of events and shattered our pre-conceived notions about terminations. Jesus came back to life. Now everything changes. Now we have to face that prospect as well. And that rearranges all our thoughts about life and personal responsibilities and death and eternity.
In today's continuation of Easter passages, Peter preaches a powerful sermon about Jesus' resurrection, and then reflects on its unquestionable significance later in his life. And John helps us to deal with our own doubts about it all as he parks us next to good old Thomas in the uncertain lane of life.
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Peter's first major sermon in Jerusalem following the coming of the Holy Spirit in power was a powerful testimony about Jesus. Few are the speeches that any of us can remember, but now and again a person will rise to address the crowds with passion and purpose in such a way that all see things in a completely new manner. Such was Peter's great Pentecost sermon.
What made it so memorable were two things. First, he drove a barbed point directly to the hearts of his listeners. He refused to coddle or play nice about the awful thing that had recently happened, for which many right there were responsible. They had lynched a man. They had executed an innocent neighbor. They had killed Jesus. But Peter tempered his accusations by backing them together into the larger redemptive purposes of God. The deed was terrible, yes, but it was precisely the thing that collapsed vindictiveness in upon itself and renewed the ground as a holy healing place for all to stand forgiven. No one who was there that day could help but feel both the pang of being found out and declared a murderer, and yet, in the same moment, acquitted and welcomed into a new fellowship of the forgiven. Grandfathers would be telling the story to the tykes bouncing on their knees for generations to come.
Second, Peter talked about the resurrection of Jesus. This is the definitive and irreducible element of Christian doctrine. Jesus came back from the dead. It is the wonder at the heart of our worship and the theme of all our music.
Robert Ingersoll had spent his life caustically denying God and defying God's power. After he died, the funeral invitations went out according to his instructions. They carried this pathetic line: "There will be no singing." It was precisely the resurrection of both Jesus and those who love Jesus that he was denying.
It is no wonder that Ingersoll was no friend to Christianity. Music grows naturally in the heart of the child of God. A friend once asked Franz Joseph Haydn why his church music was always so full of gladness. "I cannot make it otherwise," he replied. "I write according to the thoughts I feel. When I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen!"
In one congregation where I served for a time, a young woman used to join her friends at our Sunday morning gatherings. She was a nursing student, full of zest, the life of every party. But she was bored at our worship services. She would settle in at the edge of the bench and yawn through the whole message. When everybody stood to sing, she'd stand and look around, just waiting for it all to be finished.
I'll never forget one Sunday morning, however. It was Easter. When we started singing, she beamed! Her face shone as she made music as energetically as anyone else. I made sure I found her after worship.
"What happened, Chris?" I said. "You're different today!"
Chris told me about her family. Her parents had been divorced years before. Things were bad between her mom and dad. They hurt each other a lot and never forgave each other.
Then her dad got cancer. He had died the week before. Chris and her mom had flown out to see him just before the end. He told them he was a Christian. He told them he was sorry for all the grief he had put them through. He told them about how Jesus had forgiven him. He told them about the cross of Good Friday. When they started to cry together, he told them about Easter Sunday.
Suddenly, it all made sense to Chris. That was why she was singing today! Jesus touched her father's life, and now Chris knew God's love, too.
It's the same way with us, isn't it, especially in the season of Easter? We need to express those things that move us deeply. And we must know that others feel the same way we do. Praise is the language of shared appreciation. It says as much about those who praise as it does about those who are praised. It tells of the values of our souls, and it speaks of the character of our hearts. To praise is to understand, to know, to appreciate, to find camaraderie, to deepen mutual delight.
This is what Peter realized when the Holy Spirit overwhelmed him that first Pentecost. He was finally able to give full expression of praise to the God he had always known, but now understood in a new way. Jesus, his friend, his master, his redeemer, his king, his high priest, had died to bring reconciliation, and had risen to restore power. When Peter preached, everyone understood. Something very great had happened, and nothing would ever be the same again.
1 Peter 1:3-9
If Acts 2 gives the powerful speech of a young Peter, blazing the new trail of the apostolic witness of the church, 1 Peter reveals him as the mature ambassador of the faith. Peter has lost none of his passion. His words fairly tumble out with excitement, praise, and hope. This is a great passage to read again and again in the weeks following Easter.
Peter's short introduction to this letter about suffering and faithful living fairly takes in the whole sweep of biblical revelation. The Bible begins with God creating a wonderful universe, which has, at its heart, a garden prepared for women and men to enjoy as a home with their children. Around them the natural order shimmers in loveliness, and God comes daily as a marvelous friend and conversationalist and partner. Quickly, however, the story tells about the intrusion of evil and the damage that explodes around Eden. In a few short strokes, Earth becomes a battlefield in a galactic civil war, and every child is plagued by nightmares of monsters and bogeymen who tear the goodness out of life.
The human race becomes homeless in its home. We are aliens in our own environment and increasingly disconnected from God. This is the starting point for Peter's message, but it is not the end.
It is precisely in that context of alienation that the Bible moves on to talk about a homeland for God's children. In Old Testament times it was the promised land of Canaan. Later, came the word of the prophets, God's people would neither be slaves in Egypt nor exiles in Babylon, but home again with God. More recently in Peter's own life, shaped by the teachings of Jesus, these promises were projected further. For those who are part of the new family of God in the New Testament church, the promised land is found in part among Christian communities scattered throughout the nations of our world. Mostly, though, it still awaits its fullest expression in the kingdom yet to come. Sometimes we call it heaven, sometimes paradise. In fact, Peter, in his second letter, would tell us that it is the new creation, where we finally come home to ourselves and our culture, and most of all, to our God.
But that homecoming was already on Peter's mind in this passage. We still live in the compromised world of sin and stress and scandal. But the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of our faith guarantee a future of unbridled expectation in which we will join our risen brother in all the glories of eternity. For Peter this was the great missionary message of the church.
The story of the Bible is not first of all a bland tale of pious peace or a study in theological ethics. Rather, it is a rescue story, always told best in the first person. Jesus came from home looking through the streets and alleys of earth's slums for me! For you! Exactly! So Peter's words to us today.
John 20:19-31
Doubting Thomas. Forever labeled as a skeptic. Yet John's picture of him is actually far brighter than that with which history has generally masked him. For instance, back in John 11, of the twelve, Thomas alone was so committed to staying with Jesus no matter what the cost, that while the others waffled at whether they should tramp into enemy territory with Jesus in order to attend the funeral of Lazarus, Thomas boldly declared, "Let's go and die with him."
Again, in John 14, as Jesus cryptically talked about leaving his disciples very soon, and going to a place that they should know about, Thomas had the refreshing candor to ask straight up, "Where are you going?" Thomas was a practical man of deep convictions. He did not fumble about on flights of fancy, nor engage in esoteric gossip about academic speculations. His was a solid soul, with feet planted firmly on the ground.
It is precisely for that reason that Thomas' wrestling with uncertainties is instructive. One Chinese word-symbol for "doubt" is a caricature of a person with each foot in a different canoe. If the waters are calm and the canoes are tied securely, it is possible for the person to stand like that indefinitely. But if those canoes are adrift on the swelling tides of the sea or scrambling down the whitewaters of a raging torrent, someone positioned so precariously would topple quickly. Certainly for Thomas, in the troubled times following Jesus' crucifixion, the waters were anything but calm.
Cecil Beaton pictures it well in his short story "The Settee." Violet and Dorothy prowl an antique shop and find a marvelous, old, French-style, long, wooden bench called a settee. Dorothy thinks it is "Louis-Seize" and, therefore, extremely valuable. When she finds that she can get it for a very inexpensive price, she convinces Violet to allow her to buy it as a gift for Violet.
Of course, the value of the piece weighs heavily in Dorothy's mind, and soon she begins to dream of ways to get it back for herself. After all, she was the one who found it in the first place. Sharing her obsession with family friend, Colonel Coddington, they scheme together to trick Violet into surrendering custody of the piece by declaring it a worthless imitation.
The tables are turned, however, when Colonel Coddington inspects the supposed antique and declares that it is, in fact, only a cheap copy of the famous Louis-Sieze style, and certainly not valuable at all. Dorothy's greed and obsession deflate rapidly.
The next day, she laughingly relates the whole tale to George. Then the roller coaster ride begins all over again as George informs Dorothy that the Colonel's ability to appraise anything is sheer quackery, and he wouldn't know art from imitation. George, who has seen the settee, knows that it is, indeed, a rare and valuable piece. After all, he himself owns an antique shop where a bench twin to Violet's sits in the window with a huge price tag. Dorothy's obsessive greed is fired anew, and passionate covetousness surges through her veins.
There Beaton ends the story, allowing Dorothy's mood-swings to rip apart her heart. She is the epitome of a "double-minded" person of the kind that Thomas portrays in his own convoluted existence: hearing this (resurrection) from his friends, yet believing that (Jesus' irreversible death) at the same time.
Obviously, in Beaton's tale, a remedy might readily be found. Dorothy needed only to contract the services of a bona fide antique appraiser in order to sort fact from fantasy. Once she knew the actual sticker price, the doubt of two-mindedness would be resolved and she could devise further plots and strategies to deal with Violet in a Beaton-esque sequel.
So, too, with Thomas' doubt. He only needed to see Jesus' face, and touch Jesus' wounds, and hear Jesus' voice, and then he would have the confirmation needed to swing his doubts up and over the fence of faith. But John tells this story at precisely this point in his gospel for a very good reason. Most of us don't get the opportunity for physical confirmation that Thomas had. The deeper doubt that we wrestle with is not so easily settled. Although it operates in a fashion similar to Dorothy's devious dualism, there is no human expert available to sift truth from lies and firmly pin faith securely to the mast of heaven's sail.
The seas always roll, in life's journey, and the pounding waves beg their share of the soul's cargo. And those of us who have experienced significant doubts in the uncharted waters of our voyage find these verses in John's gospel a little harsh and quite intimidating. We are among those who have not seen, and yet we are expected to believe.
Without the larger context of grace binding the fraying edges of our souls, more ships of self would visit Davy Jones' locker than would reach the haven of rest. Fortunately, the one who stilled the storms on the Sea of Galilee is able yet to tame the troubling tides for those who cry out in winter's night. This is why John included the marvelous struggles of Thomas and closed his record of Jesus with other snippets of personal testimony.
Application
While Christmas preparations carry our culture along for weeks (and even months) and churches can linger in the doldrums of self-castigating Lent, the power and celebration of Easter seems somehow harder to maintain. Yet, Easter is the centerpiece of our Christian testimony. It was the heart of the early Christian preaching. It is the core of Christian theology. Somehow these mighty passages of Easter faith must ring and resonate for longer than just Easter Sunday.
If last Sunday's message focused on the facts of Jesus' resurrection, today would be a good day to mine more fully the ongoing power of Easter as Peter preached it in both the gospel and epistle lessons for today. Now the theme is not so much that Jesus came back to life, but the implications of Jesus' resurrection for our understanding of who we are and whose we are, both before our eventual deaths, and also beyond.
Alternative Application
John 20:19-31. The gospel reading about Thomas is always a good point of contact to deal with the pervasive challenges of doubt. Certainly it is true that many Christians are single-minded and clearly aware of the brilliant sunshine of God's love, rarely deviating from paths of focused faith and purposeful existence. Yet, while some folks have a "summery" sort of spirituality, according to Martin Marty in his devotional reflections on the psalms, many of us know only or often A Cry of Absence (Harper & Row, 1983). For those who wrestle often the blasts of chilling doubt and wrestle for direction under gray and forbidding skies, the Absence of God seems more apparent than his Presence. John Crowe Ransom put it this way:
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going;
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
When the Absence of God shouts louder than the divine Presence, few who feel faith can escape the winds of doubt. Yet the experiences of Thomas are there for us to remember. There have been moments of absolute brilliance and forthright confirmation of the things of our faith. Perhaps, even, these words will challenge those of us with wintry spirits to take a second look at our perennial insecurities of faith.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 16
This psalm is a beautiful utterance of loyalty. More than that, it is a profession of oneness, of unity, of an almost sublime acceptance of God's sovereignty in one's life. The quality shown here is a melding of submission and adoration. And in this comes the acceptance of limitations in life.
"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places." How incredible it is to sense one's limitations and accept them. This is no easy thing. We are weaned on the expectation that we will go beyond our limitations. Bursting boundaries and borders is the accepted means of "getting ahead" for most of us. The ambitious among us chafe at boundaries and resist those who would set them. It brings to mind an advertising campaign for one of the major automakers. The leading phrase that touted the product line was, "No boundaries." Frankly, that is a dangerous assumption. Boundaries are everywhere. We find them even in natural law. If one jumps off a cliff, gravity takes over and you fall. It's a boundary. If we dump tons of polluting gases into the air, global warming will happen. It's a boundary. Human relationships are made stronger with healthy and clear boundaries.
Boundaries, in fact, are a hallmark of human existence, and with God such boundaries exist. God gives us "counsel," and "instruction," and shows us the way to go. Choosing God as our sovereign, as our Lord, means that we no longer go our own way. It means that we have chosen a path. It is for us, "the path of life."
Within these holy property lines the people of God can find security, for at the root of it all is the trust we place in God. We accept the boundaries because we trust. And, because we trust we find security and peace; strength and inner joy.
It is as the psalm suggests. "We have a goodly heritage." It is a heritage of faithfulness, of fealty to the one who created us -- the one who came so that we might have life ... and that in incredible abundance.
And yes, this heritage has pleasant boundaries. They are borders that make clear our identity. They are the surveyor's marks that tell us we are on the right path. And they are lines that we choose not to cross because we have chosen to trust in God's counsel and to keep "the Lord ever before us."
But in the year before his death he knew the end was coming. He joked about it one day, telling me that several of his friends had recently conversed about death. One said that when he was gone, he hoped people would say nice things at his funeral about how he was a truly godly man and always tried to do the right thing. Another chimed in that he hoped people would mention how much he loved his family and was a friend on which others could count. Then they looked at my buddy, and he felt obligated to offer his own thoughts about what he wanted people to say at his funeral. He said, "When people come by my casket I hope they look at me and say, 'Oh my! He just moved!' "
None of us wants to die. Yet all of us face that prospect as a 100% certainty. Only the life insurance company actuaries bet on how distant death is in our journeys, but they never deny its coming. As people say, "You can always count on death and taxes!"
Except that after Easter you can't count on death any more. Jesus reversed the natural course of events and shattered our pre-conceived notions about terminations. Jesus came back to life. Now everything changes. Now we have to face that prospect as well. And that rearranges all our thoughts about life and personal responsibilities and death and eternity.
In today's continuation of Easter passages, Peter preaches a powerful sermon about Jesus' resurrection, and then reflects on its unquestionable significance later in his life. And John helps us to deal with our own doubts about it all as he parks us next to good old Thomas in the uncertain lane of life.
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Peter's first major sermon in Jerusalem following the coming of the Holy Spirit in power was a powerful testimony about Jesus. Few are the speeches that any of us can remember, but now and again a person will rise to address the crowds with passion and purpose in such a way that all see things in a completely new manner. Such was Peter's great Pentecost sermon.
What made it so memorable were two things. First, he drove a barbed point directly to the hearts of his listeners. He refused to coddle or play nice about the awful thing that had recently happened, for which many right there were responsible. They had lynched a man. They had executed an innocent neighbor. They had killed Jesus. But Peter tempered his accusations by backing them together into the larger redemptive purposes of God. The deed was terrible, yes, but it was precisely the thing that collapsed vindictiveness in upon itself and renewed the ground as a holy healing place for all to stand forgiven. No one who was there that day could help but feel both the pang of being found out and declared a murderer, and yet, in the same moment, acquitted and welcomed into a new fellowship of the forgiven. Grandfathers would be telling the story to the tykes bouncing on their knees for generations to come.
Second, Peter talked about the resurrection of Jesus. This is the definitive and irreducible element of Christian doctrine. Jesus came back from the dead. It is the wonder at the heart of our worship and the theme of all our music.
Robert Ingersoll had spent his life caustically denying God and defying God's power. After he died, the funeral invitations went out according to his instructions. They carried this pathetic line: "There will be no singing." It was precisely the resurrection of both Jesus and those who love Jesus that he was denying.
It is no wonder that Ingersoll was no friend to Christianity. Music grows naturally in the heart of the child of God. A friend once asked Franz Joseph Haydn why his church music was always so full of gladness. "I cannot make it otherwise," he replied. "I write according to the thoughts I feel. When I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen!"
In one congregation where I served for a time, a young woman used to join her friends at our Sunday morning gatherings. She was a nursing student, full of zest, the life of every party. But she was bored at our worship services. She would settle in at the edge of the bench and yawn through the whole message. When everybody stood to sing, she'd stand and look around, just waiting for it all to be finished.
I'll never forget one Sunday morning, however. It was Easter. When we started singing, she beamed! Her face shone as she made music as energetically as anyone else. I made sure I found her after worship.
"What happened, Chris?" I said. "You're different today!"
Chris told me about her family. Her parents had been divorced years before. Things were bad between her mom and dad. They hurt each other a lot and never forgave each other.
Then her dad got cancer. He had died the week before. Chris and her mom had flown out to see him just before the end. He told them he was a Christian. He told them he was sorry for all the grief he had put them through. He told them about how Jesus had forgiven him. He told them about the cross of Good Friday. When they started to cry together, he told them about Easter Sunday.
Suddenly, it all made sense to Chris. That was why she was singing today! Jesus touched her father's life, and now Chris knew God's love, too.
It's the same way with us, isn't it, especially in the season of Easter? We need to express those things that move us deeply. And we must know that others feel the same way we do. Praise is the language of shared appreciation. It says as much about those who praise as it does about those who are praised. It tells of the values of our souls, and it speaks of the character of our hearts. To praise is to understand, to know, to appreciate, to find camaraderie, to deepen mutual delight.
This is what Peter realized when the Holy Spirit overwhelmed him that first Pentecost. He was finally able to give full expression of praise to the God he had always known, but now understood in a new way. Jesus, his friend, his master, his redeemer, his king, his high priest, had died to bring reconciliation, and had risen to restore power. When Peter preached, everyone understood. Something very great had happened, and nothing would ever be the same again.
1 Peter 1:3-9
If Acts 2 gives the powerful speech of a young Peter, blazing the new trail of the apostolic witness of the church, 1 Peter reveals him as the mature ambassador of the faith. Peter has lost none of his passion. His words fairly tumble out with excitement, praise, and hope. This is a great passage to read again and again in the weeks following Easter.
Peter's short introduction to this letter about suffering and faithful living fairly takes in the whole sweep of biblical revelation. The Bible begins with God creating a wonderful universe, which has, at its heart, a garden prepared for women and men to enjoy as a home with their children. Around them the natural order shimmers in loveliness, and God comes daily as a marvelous friend and conversationalist and partner. Quickly, however, the story tells about the intrusion of evil and the damage that explodes around Eden. In a few short strokes, Earth becomes a battlefield in a galactic civil war, and every child is plagued by nightmares of monsters and bogeymen who tear the goodness out of life.
The human race becomes homeless in its home. We are aliens in our own environment and increasingly disconnected from God. This is the starting point for Peter's message, but it is not the end.
It is precisely in that context of alienation that the Bible moves on to talk about a homeland for God's children. In Old Testament times it was the promised land of Canaan. Later, came the word of the prophets, God's people would neither be slaves in Egypt nor exiles in Babylon, but home again with God. More recently in Peter's own life, shaped by the teachings of Jesus, these promises were projected further. For those who are part of the new family of God in the New Testament church, the promised land is found in part among Christian communities scattered throughout the nations of our world. Mostly, though, it still awaits its fullest expression in the kingdom yet to come. Sometimes we call it heaven, sometimes paradise. In fact, Peter, in his second letter, would tell us that it is the new creation, where we finally come home to ourselves and our culture, and most of all, to our God.
But that homecoming was already on Peter's mind in this passage. We still live in the compromised world of sin and stress and scandal. But the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of our faith guarantee a future of unbridled expectation in which we will join our risen brother in all the glories of eternity. For Peter this was the great missionary message of the church.
The story of the Bible is not first of all a bland tale of pious peace or a study in theological ethics. Rather, it is a rescue story, always told best in the first person. Jesus came from home looking through the streets and alleys of earth's slums for me! For you! Exactly! So Peter's words to us today.
John 20:19-31
Doubting Thomas. Forever labeled as a skeptic. Yet John's picture of him is actually far brighter than that with which history has generally masked him. For instance, back in John 11, of the twelve, Thomas alone was so committed to staying with Jesus no matter what the cost, that while the others waffled at whether they should tramp into enemy territory with Jesus in order to attend the funeral of Lazarus, Thomas boldly declared, "Let's go and die with him."
Again, in John 14, as Jesus cryptically talked about leaving his disciples very soon, and going to a place that they should know about, Thomas had the refreshing candor to ask straight up, "Where are you going?" Thomas was a practical man of deep convictions. He did not fumble about on flights of fancy, nor engage in esoteric gossip about academic speculations. His was a solid soul, with feet planted firmly on the ground.
It is precisely for that reason that Thomas' wrestling with uncertainties is instructive. One Chinese word-symbol for "doubt" is a caricature of a person with each foot in a different canoe. If the waters are calm and the canoes are tied securely, it is possible for the person to stand like that indefinitely. But if those canoes are adrift on the swelling tides of the sea or scrambling down the whitewaters of a raging torrent, someone positioned so precariously would topple quickly. Certainly for Thomas, in the troubled times following Jesus' crucifixion, the waters were anything but calm.
Cecil Beaton pictures it well in his short story "The Settee." Violet and Dorothy prowl an antique shop and find a marvelous, old, French-style, long, wooden bench called a settee. Dorothy thinks it is "Louis-Seize" and, therefore, extremely valuable. When she finds that she can get it for a very inexpensive price, she convinces Violet to allow her to buy it as a gift for Violet.
Of course, the value of the piece weighs heavily in Dorothy's mind, and soon she begins to dream of ways to get it back for herself. After all, she was the one who found it in the first place. Sharing her obsession with family friend, Colonel Coddington, they scheme together to trick Violet into surrendering custody of the piece by declaring it a worthless imitation.
The tables are turned, however, when Colonel Coddington inspects the supposed antique and declares that it is, in fact, only a cheap copy of the famous Louis-Sieze style, and certainly not valuable at all. Dorothy's greed and obsession deflate rapidly.
The next day, she laughingly relates the whole tale to George. Then the roller coaster ride begins all over again as George informs Dorothy that the Colonel's ability to appraise anything is sheer quackery, and he wouldn't know art from imitation. George, who has seen the settee, knows that it is, indeed, a rare and valuable piece. After all, he himself owns an antique shop where a bench twin to Violet's sits in the window with a huge price tag. Dorothy's obsessive greed is fired anew, and passionate covetousness surges through her veins.
There Beaton ends the story, allowing Dorothy's mood-swings to rip apart her heart. She is the epitome of a "double-minded" person of the kind that Thomas portrays in his own convoluted existence: hearing this (resurrection) from his friends, yet believing that (Jesus' irreversible death) at the same time.
Obviously, in Beaton's tale, a remedy might readily be found. Dorothy needed only to contract the services of a bona fide antique appraiser in order to sort fact from fantasy. Once she knew the actual sticker price, the doubt of two-mindedness would be resolved and she could devise further plots and strategies to deal with Violet in a Beaton-esque sequel.
So, too, with Thomas' doubt. He only needed to see Jesus' face, and touch Jesus' wounds, and hear Jesus' voice, and then he would have the confirmation needed to swing his doubts up and over the fence of faith. But John tells this story at precisely this point in his gospel for a very good reason. Most of us don't get the opportunity for physical confirmation that Thomas had. The deeper doubt that we wrestle with is not so easily settled. Although it operates in a fashion similar to Dorothy's devious dualism, there is no human expert available to sift truth from lies and firmly pin faith securely to the mast of heaven's sail.
The seas always roll, in life's journey, and the pounding waves beg their share of the soul's cargo. And those of us who have experienced significant doubts in the uncharted waters of our voyage find these verses in John's gospel a little harsh and quite intimidating. We are among those who have not seen, and yet we are expected to believe.
Without the larger context of grace binding the fraying edges of our souls, more ships of self would visit Davy Jones' locker than would reach the haven of rest. Fortunately, the one who stilled the storms on the Sea of Galilee is able yet to tame the troubling tides for those who cry out in winter's night. This is why John included the marvelous struggles of Thomas and closed his record of Jesus with other snippets of personal testimony.
Application
While Christmas preparations carry our culture along for weeks (and even months) and churches can linger in the doldrums of self-castigating Lent, the power and celebration of Easter seems somehow harder to maintain. Yet, Easter is the centerpiece of our Christian testimony. It was the heart of the early Christian preaching. It is the core of Christian theology. Somehow these mighty passages of Easter faith must ring and resonate for longer than just Easter Sunday.
If last Sunday's message focused on the facts of Jesus' resurrection, today would be a good day to mine more fully the ongoing power of Easter as Peter preached it in both the gospel and epistle lessons for today. Now the theme is not so much that Jesus came back to life, but the implications of Jesus' resurrection for our understanding of who we are and whose we are, both before our eventual deaths, and also beyond.
Alternative Application
John 20:19-31. The gospel reading about Thomas is always a good point of contact to deal with the pervasive challenges of doubt. Certainly it is true that many Christians are single-minded and clearly aware of the brilliant sunshine of God's love, rarely deviating from paths of focused faith and purposeful existence. Yet, while some folks have a "summery" sort of spirituality, according to Martin Marty in his devotional reflections on the psalms, many of us know only or often A Cry of Absence (Harper & Row, 1983). For those who wrestle often the blasts of chilling doubt and wrestle for direction under gray and forbidding skies, the Absence of God seems more apparent than his Presence. John Crowe Ransom put it this way:
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going;
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
When the Absence of God shouts louder than the divine Presence, few who feel faith can escape the winds of doubt. Yet the experiences of Thomas are there for us to remember. There have been moments of absolute brilliance and forthright confirmation of the things of our faith. Perhaps, even, these words will challenge those of us with wintry spirits to take a second look at our perennial insecurities of faith.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 16
This psalm is a beautiful utterance of loyalty. More than that, it is a profession of oneness, of unity, of an almost sublime acceptance of God's sovereignty in one's life. The quality shown here is a melding of submission and adoration. And in this comes the acceptance of limitations in life.
"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places." How incredible it is to sense one's limitations and accept them. This is no easy thing. We are weaned on the expectation that we will go beyond our limitations. Bursting boundaries and borders is the accepted means of "getting ahead" for most of us. The ambitious among us chafe at boundaries and resist those who would set them. It brings to mind an advertising campaign for one of the major automakers. The leading phrase that touted the product line was, "No boundaries." Frankly, that is a dangerous assumption. Boundaries are everywhere. We find them even in natural law. If one jumps off a cliff, gravity takes over and you fall. It's a boundary. If we dump tons of polluting gases into the air, global warming will happen. It's a boundary. Human relationships are made stronger with healthy and clear boundaries.
Boundaries, in fact, are a hallmark of human existence, and with God such boundaries exist. God gives us "counsel," and "instruction," and shows us the way to go. Choosing God as our sovereign, as our Lord, means that we no longer go our own way. It means that we have chosen a path. It is for us, "the path of life."
Within these holy property lines the people of God can find security, for at the root of it all is the trust we place in God. We accept the boundaries because we trust. And, because we trust we find security and peace; strength and inner joy.
It is as the psalm suggests. "We have a goodly heritage." It is a heritage of faithfulness, of fealty to the one who created us -- the one who came so that we might have life ... and that in incredible abundance.
And yes, this heritage has pleasant boundaries. They are borders that make clear our identity. They are the surveyor's marks that tell us we are on the right path. And they are lines that we choose not to cross because we have chosen to trust in God's counsel and to keep "the Lord ever before us."
