When Faith Is Difficult
Sermon
Sermons on the Gospel Readings
Series II, Cycle B
We've heard in sermons and Bible study groups that the scriptures become meaningful only when the Bible matches up with our own life stories. Objective knowledge of the Bible is important. We do need to know the stories of Abraham and Sarah, journeying west to a new land. We need to know the story of Moses leading the people from oppression in Egypt and into the promised land. We need to know the stories of the many biblical kings, particularly of Saul, of David, of Solomon. We need to know the messages of the great prophets -- of Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as the messages of Amos, Hosea, and Micah. A Christian needs to know these Old Testament stories.
When we come to the New Testament, we need to know of the Jesus stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then we need to know the thoughts and journeys of the Apostle Paul. Finally, we need to know about that great symbolic story which closes the New Testament -- the book of Revelation. No serious Christian can afford to be unacquainted with these Bible stories and writings. It is quite unlikely that any serious Bible stories will again be taught in the public schools -- if they ever were. A great many who were in school before recent Supreme Court decisions say that Bible reading and prayer were nonexistent in their public school experience. Those who rant against the godless public schools and calling for a return of prayer and Bible reading may be claiming something that never existed. It is quite likely that both the public schools and the cause of prayer and Bible reading may well flourish in their current separation. Non-Christian students and parents would rightly protest that this is an infringement upon their religious freedom. Yet, it is terribly important for children, teenagers, and adult Christians to know the Bible. This puts a heavy burden upon the church's Sunday school, upon preaching, and upon the mid-week classes in the local church. It is the great burden of such a task that makes many of us attempt to shift some of the burden to the public school.
Yet, objective knowledge is only part of the concern. To know just about the marital faithlessness of King David is to miss the point of that story. It is only when we sense that David's story is also our story. We, too, are people of faithlessness -- not necessarily marital unfaithfulness, but faithlessness to all the things we hold dear, things that have shaped and blessed our lives. We are quite faithless to the public needs of our society -- schools and colleges, medical care, roads, bridges, fire and police protection, and homes for the needy. We have sold out to those who encourage us to cut back on taxes for the public needs, and turn our efforts to the market system and its bottom-line mentality. So the stories of the Bible must go beyond factual information and knowledge. They must pull us into these stories so that we see in them our times and ourselves.
Faith Was Difficult For Thomas
Today's lection is about Thomas, one of Jesus' disciples. Apparently he was a faithful follower of Jesus. But Thomas had difficulty believing the reports of Jesus' resurrection. The Sunday following Easter, Jesus appeared to some of his followers who were huddled in a house. They were hoping to escape the scrutiny of those Jews who encouraged Pilate to kill Jesus, and to keep away from the continuing sharp eye of Pilate's henchmen. But Thomas was not with them.
Later when the others told Thomas of Jesus' appearance, Thomas did not believe them. His mind was filled with doubt. He said that unless he saw Jesus with his own eyes and put his hands into the spike wounds from the cross, he could not believe. Then on a later Sunday, they were all gathered in their hideaway home, and this time Thomas was with them. Again, Jesus appeared and Thomas saw Jesus. He put his hands on the wounds from the cross. This encounter resolved the deep doubts of Thomas and he believed in the resurrection of Jesus. Tradition says that Thomas lived in faithfulness, becoming the founder of the Syrian Christian Church, dying a martyr under a shower of arrows. Once his doubts were addressed, he was able to give himself to the gospel without reservation.
As suggested, John's story, like much of scripture moves on two levels. The historical/objective level is what we have just been speaking -- the movement of Thomas from doubt to believer. Yet we have already suggested a deeper level to any story -- secular or sacred. This deeper level is when we sense that the story is telling us about life as we live it today. So what could this deeper, subjective, personal level of the Thomas story be for any of us?
Faith Becomes Difficult In Our Age
One reason for the difficulties of belief is the dominance of science over the last three centuries. Science is a real blessing to all of us. Before science, young children died from all sorts of diseases. Most families buried one or more children from such scourges. Science has given us clean water to drink, has invented air travel, and the many means of communication. Science has been good to us. The problem is that science seems, to many, the only way to truth, leaving so many important questions beyond the means of science. When we ask important, personal questions as -- What about God? Is there a purpose to creation? Why do I do wrong even when I want to do well? Why did my friend die at age 35? Are my death and the death of the cosmos the end of it all?
Science, for all its wonderful gifts, has made faith more difficult. Science has depicted reality as the only workings of matter without any consciousness beyond our own. Even though Sir Isaac Newton was a great scientist with strong religious convictions, most of Newton's successors dropped their religious beliefs as they did their scientific work. To them, God didn't seem necessary as they piled up their impressive scientific triumphs. Later came Charles Darwin, who, though remaining a believer all his life, shaped a tale of the origin and development of life, grounded in the chaos of "natural selection." After Darwin it seemed difficult to believe in a God who was directing the processes of nature and history.
Another outgrowth of science is the rise of historical criticism. Reaching back to the European Renaissance, scholars learned to use the tools of language, text, logic, and history to focus on the scriptures. In doing so, they challenged many of the traditional understandings of scripture. Geology destroyed belief in Creation as a literal seven-day event. Biology undermined belief in the miracles of the Bible. Textual scholarship questioned the tradition that Moses was the author of the Torah -- the so-called five books of Moses. The Gospel of John was declared less historical than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The book of Revelation was no longer seen as some peek at the future. That Paul authored Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, and the Pastoral Epistles was jettisoned. The empty tomb stories in the gospels were now understood as later resurrection stories, and less historical and central than the spiritual resurrection stories.
Certainly the hard sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as the soft sciences of psychology and sociology, have richly blessed our lives. At the same time all the sciences have troubled our journey toward religious belief. We feel like Bess in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, to whom Sportin' Life sings, attacking Bess's childlike faith, "It Ain't Necessarily So." Many of us in these modern times have felt that the underside of science has been singing this song to us as well.
Too often we have allowed science to be the final court of truth. But it is not being scientific to allow science to have the ultimate say-so on ultimate matters. Years ago, William Sullivan, a scientist, wrote a book, The Limitations of Science. He concluded that science is a limited way of truth seeking that cannot answer the deep questions of faith and belief. Some of us have nearly lost our faith because we did not understand this. However, we have come to believe that there are ultimate truths that are beyond the methods of science.
Arthur Eddington, a great twentieth-century physicist put it this way. He said science is like fishing with a six-inch mesh net. When we put this net into the ocean, it only catches fish six inches and longer. All smaller fish slip through the mesh and return to the sea, so we cannot say that there are no fish in the ocean smaller than six inches. We miss all the fish smaller than six inches. Science is like a six-inch mesh fishing net. What science's net catches is impressive. But there are other fish in the sea, just as wonderful and real as those six inches and larger. Yes, faith in our scientific age is more difficult, but we must not think that science catches all the truth by which to live.
Faith Is Always A Struggle
Perhaps we make too much of the difficulty of belief in our modern world. It is possible that believing in the Christian story was difficult from the beginning. Maybe Thomas is not just a symbol of our time -- finding it hard to believe in the gospel. Maybe it was just as difficult for those who first heard the proclamation of the resurrection, or earlier, those who tramped around the villages of Galilee with Jesus. We seem to have some scriptural hints that this was true.
But not all those who witnessed the resurrection became believers. The number of resurrection believers seems quite small. There was no huge number of people who became Christians. Most stuck with their Jewish traditions, or like many in today's world, held no religious beliefs. The resurrection was no instant no-fail success, selling like hot cakes to a gospel-hungry world. Nor does Paul's alternative story of the resurrection win such numbers causing the authorities to become uneasy. That would come later.
Even more difficult to us is how the inner circle of Jesus' followers didn't get it. They found it very difficult to believe his ethic, not at all certain that humility and suffering would bring about any good. They could see no sense of Jesus putting himself in danger by hustling up to Jerusalem at Passover. Even Jesus' mother and immediate family missed the whole point. They even suspected that he might be mentally ill. Nor could anyone initially find it thinkable to believe that out of death -- Jesus' or theirs -- could any good thing come.
So let us moderns not get bogged down in self-pity because of the difficulty in believing. Let us avoid any lament that faith is more difficult in our era than in earlier times. Yes, in some ways, belief is more difficult today, but faith has always been difficult. Faith has never come, then or now, in a form that delivers us from all doubt. Certainty is always out beyond faith's reach. Today there are churches and traditions that tell us that they will help us believe beyond all doubt. Usually they hold up the Bible, telling us that all the answers to the questions of faith are in its pages, but most of us remain unsatisfied with this. We know that faith, as with Thomas, is always a struggle. However, we know that in that honest struggle come those elusive "hints and guesses" suggested by the poet, T. S. Eliot. Surprisingly, "hints and guesses" prove sufficient for us to go at life as Christian believers.
When we come to the New Testament, we need to know of the Jesus stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then we need to know the thoughts and journeys of the Apostle Paul. Finally, we need to know about that great symbolic story which closes the New Testament -- the book of Revelation. No serious Christian can afford to be unacquainted with these Bible stories and writings. It is quite unlikely that any serious Bible stories will again be taught in the public schools -- if they ever were. A great many who were in school before recent Supreme Court decisions say that Bible reading and prayer were nonexistent in their public school experience. Those who rant against the godless public schools and calling for a return of prayer and Bible reading may be claiming something that never existed. It is quite likely that both the public schools and the cause of prayer and Bible reading may well flourish in their current separation. Non-Christian students and parents would rightly protest that this is an infringement upon their religious freedom. Yet, it is terribly important for children, teenagers, and adult Christians to know the Bible. This puts a heavy burden upon the church's Sunday school, upon preaching, and upon the mid-week classes in the local church. It is the great burden of such a task that makes many of us attempt to shift some of the burden to the public school.
Yet, objective knowledge is only part of the concern. To know just about the marital faithlessness of King David is to miss the point of that story. It is only when we sense that David's story is also our story. We, too, are people of faithlessness -- not necessarily marital unfaithfulness, but faithlessness to all the things we hold dear, things that have shaped and blessed our lives. We are quite faithless to the public needs of our society -- schools and colleges, medical care, roads, bridges, fire and police protection, and homes for the needy. We have sold out to those who encourage us to cut back on taxes for the public needs, and turn our efforts to the market system and its bottom-line mentality. So the stories of the Bible must go beyond factual information and knowledge. They must pull us into these stories so that we see in them our times and ourselves.
Faith Was Difficult For Thomas
Today's lection is about Thomas, one of Jesus' disciples. Apparently he was a faithful follower of Jesus. But Thomas had difficulty believing the reports of Jesus' resurrection. The Sunday following Easter, Jesus appeared to some of his followers who were huddled in a house. They were hoping to escape the scrutiny of those Jews who encouraged Pilate to kill Jesus, and to keep away from the continuing sharp eye of Pilate's henchmen. But Thomas was not with them.
Later when the others told Thomas of Jesus' appearance, Thomas did not believe them. His mind was filled with doubt. He said that unless he saw Jesus with his own eyes and put his hands into the spike wounds from the cross, he could not believe. Then on a later Sunday, they were all gathered in their hideaway home, and this time Thomas was with them. Again, Jesus appeared and Thomas saw Jesus. He put his hands on the wounds from the cross. This encounter resolved the deep doubts of Thomas and he believed in the resurrection of Jesus. Tradition says that Thomas lived in faithfulness, becoming the founder of the Syrian Christian Church, dying a martyr under a shower of arrows. Once his doubts were addressed, he was able to give himself to the gospel without reservation.
As suggested, John's story, like much of scripture moves on two levels. The historical/objective level is what we have just been speaking -- the movement of Thomas from doubt to believer. Yet we have already suggested a deeper level to any story -- secular or sacred. This deeper level is when we sense that the story is telling us about life as we live it today. So what could this deeper, subjective, personal level of the Thomas story be for any of us?
Faith Becomes Difficult In Our Age
One reason for the difficulties of belief is the dominance of science over the last three centuries. Science is a real blessing to all of us. Before science, young children died from all sorts of diseases. Most families buried one or more children from such scourges. Science has given us clean water to drink, has invented air travel, and the many means of communication. Science has been good to us. The problem is that science seems, to many, the only way to truth, leaving so many important questions beyond the means of science. When we ask important, personal questions as -- What about God? Is there a purpose to creation? Why do I do wrong even when I want to do well? Why did my friend die at age 35? Are my death and the death of the cosmos the end of it all?
Science, for all its wonderful gifts, has made faith more difficult. Science has depicted reality as the only workings of matter without any consciousness beyond our own. Even though Sir Isaac Newton was a great scientist with strong religious convictions, most of Newton's successors dropped their religious beliefs as they did their scientific work. To them, God didn't seem necessary as they piled up their impressive scientific triumphs. Later came Charles Darwin, who, though remaining a believer all his life, shaped a tale of the origin and development of life, grounded in the chaos of "natural selection." After Darwin it seemed difficult to believe in a God who was directing the processes of nature and history.
Another outgrowth of science is the rise of historical criticism. Reaching back to the European Renaissance, scholars learned to use the tools of language, text, logic, and history to focus on the scriptures. In doing so, they challenged many of the traditional understandings of scripture. Geology destroyed belief in Creation as a literal seven-day event. Biology undermined belief in the miracles of the Bible. Textual scholarship questioned the tradition that Moses was the author of the Torah -- the so-called five books of Moses. The Gospel of John was declared less historical than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The book of Revelation was no longer seen as some peek at the future. That Paul authored Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, and the Pastoral Epistles was jettisoned. The empty tomb stories in the gospels were now understood as later resurrection stories, and less historical and central than the spiritual resurrection stories.
Certainly the hard sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as the soft sciences of psychology and sociology, have richly blessed our lives. At the same time all the sciences have troubled our journey toward religious belief. We feel like Bess in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, to whom Sportin' Life sings, attacking Bess's childlike faith, "It Ain't Necessarily So." Many of us in these modern times have felt that the underside of science has been singing this song to us as well.
Too often we have allowed science to be the final court of truth. But it is not being scientific to allow science to have the ultimate say-so on ultimate matters. Years ago, William Sullivan, a scientist, wrote a book, The Limitations of Science. He concluded that science is a limited way of truth seeking that cannot answer the deep questions of faith and belief. Some of us have nearly lost our faith because we did not understand this. However, we have come to believe that there are ultimate truths that are beyond the methods of science.
Arthur Eddington, a great twentieth-century physicist put it this way. He said science is like fishing with a six-inch mesh net. When we put this net into the ocean, it only catches fish six inches and longer. All smaller fish slip through the mesh and return to the sea, so we cannot say that there are no fish in the ocean smaller than six inches. We miss all the fish smaller than six inches. Science is like a six-inch mesh fishing net. What science's net catches is impressive. But there are other fish in the sea, just as wonderful and real as those six inches and larger. Yes, faith in our scientific age is more difficult, but we must not think that science catches all the truth by which to live.
Faith Is Always A Struggle
Perhaps we make too much of the difficulty of belief in our modern world. It is possible that believing in the Christian story was difficult from the beginning. Maybe Thomas is not just a symbol of our time -- finding it hard to believe in the gospel. Maybe it was just as difficult for those who first heard the proclamation of the resurrection, or earlier, those who tramped around the villages of Galilee with Jesus. We seem to have some scriptural hints that this was true.
But not all those who witnessed the resurrection became believers. The number of resurrection believers seems quite small. There was no huge number of people who became Christians. Most stuck with their Jewish traditions, or like many in today's world, held no religious beliefs. The resurrection was no instant no-fail success, selling like hot cakes to a gospel-hungry world. Nor does Paul's alternative story of the resurrection win such numbers causing the authorities to become uneasy. That would come later.
Even more difficult to us is how the inner circle of Jesus' followers didn't get it. They found it very difficult to believe his ethic, not at all certain that humility and suffering would bring about any good. They could see no sense of Jesus putting himself in danger by hustling up to Jerusalem at Passover. Even Jesus' mother and immediate family missed the whole point. They even suspected that he might be mentally ill. Nor could anyone initially find it thinkable to believe that out of death -- Jesus' or theirs -- could any good thing come.
So let us moderns not get bogged down in self-pity because of the difficulty in believing. Let us avoid any lament that faith is more difficult in our era than in earlier times. Yes, in some ways, belief is more difficult today, but faith has always been difficult. Faith has never come, then or now, in a form that delivers us from all doubt. Certainty is always out beyond faith's reach. Today there are churches and traditions that tell us that they will help us believe beyond all doubt. Usually they hold up the Bible, telling us that all the answers to the questions of faith are in its pages, but most of us remain unsatisfied with this. We know that faith, as with Thomas, is always a struggle. However, we know that in that honest struggle come those elusive "hints and guesses" suggested by the poet, T. S. Eliot. Surprisingly, "hints and guesses" prove sufficient for us to go at life as Christian believers.
