The Real Question

One of the major movements in Christian theology today is a move away from belief or doctrine as central to the faith and toward discipleship as the key to the spiritual life.  Harvey Cox, Robin Meyers, Marcus Borg, Diana Butler Bass, John Dominic Crossan, and many others preach that message in one form or another.  In her book Christianity After Religion, Bass says that faith begins not with doctrine but with relationship.  I want to agree with that contention, but my own experience of the matter is a bit different.  Christianity became possible for me only when I discovered an intellectually sound and philosophically defensible alternative to Biblicism, that is, to the belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God that must be taken at face value and read literally.  I have said many times that Paul Tillich's book Dynamics of Faith made it possible for me to be a Christian.  My problem wasn't with doctrine, but it was an intellectual problem nonetheless.  My mind could not, and cannot, accept the claims of religious literalists about their scripture or about their God understood literally or factually; and some wise person once said that the heart cannot believe what the mind cannot accept.  My mind had to be satisfied before I could move into a more complete faith.  So I am nowhere as enthusiastic about discounting the role of the mind in faith as are some of my colleagues.  Robin Meyers, my fellow United Church of Christ pastor, comes to mind in this regard.  The main reason so many people want to do away with doctrine, it seems to me, is that they understand Christian doctrine literally not symbolically.  The problem isn't doctrine per se.  It is doctrine understood literally, then placed at the heart of the faith.

That being said, I recently preached a sermon that makes one of the same points as Bass does in Christianity After Religion, although I hadn't read that part of that book when I wrote the sermon.  The sermon is about intellectual doubt and the real question to ask about the life of faith.  It is based on the story of "Doubting Thomas" in the Gospel of John.  I think this one is rather important, so I'll again violate my practice of not generally putting my sermons on this blog.  Here it is:

The Real Question

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 15, 2012

Scripture:  John 20:19-31

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

                                       

All of you, or most of you anyway, come to Sunday worship here fairly regularly—some more regularly than others, but still, most of you come more or less regularly.  You are all, most of you, friends or members of this Christian church.  I imagine that if I asked each of you if you believe in God and in Jesus Christ most if not all of you would answer yes, I believe in God and in Jesus Christ.  But let me ask you something.  Though you may say that you believe in God and in Jesus Christ, do you sometimes have doubts about that?  Or do you always have doubts about that?  If you do—and frankly I think that if we’re honest we all have to say that we do, at least times—does it bother you that you have doubts?  Do you wish you didn’t?  I suspect that we all wish we didn’t have doubts about God and about Jesus Christ.  In the story of “Doubting Thomas” that we just heard we hear the risen Christ say to Thomas “do not doubt, but believe,” and we feel guilty because of our doubts, don’t we.  At least I know I do.  We wish we didn’t have doubts:  Is God real?  Is Jesus really the Son of God?  Did he really rise from the grave?  We wish we could answer all of those questions with an unqualified yes, but in our hearts we know that, at times at least, we can’t.  We know our hearts and our minds have doubts about those things, and we wish they didn’t.  Those doubt that I am pretty sure all of us have are what I want to talk about this morning.

The first thing I want to say about those doubts that we have is:  Don’t let them bother you.  Having a doubt about something means that we aren’t certain about it, but faith isn’t about certainty.  No less an authority than Paul Tillich, the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, has said that doubt and faith necessarily go together.  Without doubt you have certainty, and faith isn’t about certainty.

Then let me ask you another question.  When you hear Christ say in the story of Thomas “do not doubt, but believe,” what do you understand the words “doubt” and “believe” to mean?  Do you understand “believe” to mean take as fact things you can’t prove to be fact?  If so, you’re in good company.  That’s what most people today take “believe” to mean.  When we say we have religious doubts we probably mean that we can’t always take the things Christianity says about God and about Jesus Christ as true, as factual.  We aren’t sure they are true, that is, factual, so we say that we have doubts.

Well, here’s something that might help.  In the Greek original of John’s Gospel the words that get translated as doubt and believe don’t really have anything to do with taking as true facts that can’t be proved.  In the Greek original of John these words mean more something like “do not be untrusting, but be trusting.”  Throughout the New Testament, the Greek words that get translated as believe, belief, or faith are some form of a Greek word that means to trust, or to be faithful or loyal, more than it means accept questionable facts as true.  That’s really what Jesus is talking about when he tells Thomas, in our English translation, not to doubt but to believe.  He’s saying trust me, be faithful to me, be loyal to me more than he is saying take facts about me to be true.

Now, it certainly does seem that in John’s story Thomas is concerned about the facts of the matter of the risen Christ.  He says he has to see and feel the wounds of Jesus’ crucifixion on the body of the one his friends say is the risen Lord before he will believe it.  He wants information.  He wants to be sure of the facts before he will accept his friends’ claims about Jesus.  Yet, as we have just learned, when Jesus speaks to him he speaks not of facts but of trust, of loyalty, of fidelity.

It seems to me that Jesus is changing the question on Thomas.  I hear Jesus saying to Thomas go ahead and convince yourself of the facts if you must, but that’s not what really matters.  What really matters is your willingness to live trusting God and trusting me.  I hear Jesus saying Thomas my friend, you’ve asked the wrong question.  You’ve asked about facts.  The real question isn’t about facts.  It’s about trust.  It is about loyalty.  It  isn’t about what facts you’ll believe, it’s about to whom you will entrust your life.  Whom will you follow, who is your Lord, me—Jesus—or someone or something else?  Thomas, I believe, was asking the wrong question.

My friends, I’m afraid that we often ask the wrong question too.  We ask: Am I certain of the facts?  We say we need to know that this stuff about Jesus is factually true before we can follow him.  Before we can trust him.  Before we can be loyal to him..  And I am thoroughly convinced that when we approach faith that way we are making the same mistake that Thomas made.  We get it backwards.  We want knowledge before discipleship.  We want truth before commitment.

And really, that’s not how faith works.  Faith actually works the other way around.  The truth of any religious tradition is not, after all, a mental truth, it is an existential one.  It isn’t a truth that we know as much as it is a truth that we live.  The truth of any religious tradition, ours included, can’t be known from the outside.  From the outside we can study what a religious tradition says.  We can learn facts about it, but that’s all.  We cannot learn the truth of it.  The only way to know the truth of a religion is from the inside.  The only way to know the truth of any religion is by practicing it.  By living it.  By trying it out in your own life.  By participating in its worship.  Experiencing its community.  Following its precepts.  It is by doing the religion that we may come to believe the religion.  We may come to accept its factual claims as factual or not, but more importantly we will come to know its truth as our truth, its life as our life, its God as our God.

So let me suggest something.  If your doubts about Christianity are bothering you, try pretending.  Role play being a Christian.  Act the part of being a Christian.  Don’t believe it, live it out.  Don’t get hung up on thinking, enter into the faith heart and soul.  If you will do that, the truth of Christianity will reveal itself to you.  If you will do that you will come to know it’s truth.  Not its factual truth perhaps, but its existential truth.  Not its truth for your head but its truth for your life.

And you may well ask:  How do I do that?  Well, all of you here this morning have already done one of the most significant things you can do to role play being a Christian.  You have come to Christian worship.  Have you ever noticed yourself having less doubt about Christianity when you’re participating in Christian worship than you have at other times?  I have.  That’s because in worship we don’t so much think about the faith, although we may do that as well, as we enact it in prayer, music, and hearing the word.

Which is all very good, but of course we normally come to Christian worship for an hour, or a little bit more, on Sunday morning.  What about the rest of the time?  Well, the rest of the time we can do over and over some of the things we do here on Sunday morning.  We can pray.  We can sing hymns.  We can read the Bible.  If it will help we can use a daily devotional guide like the one our women’s fellowship provides.  If you’re technically oriented you can find a wide variety of devotional aids and meditation guides on line. 

Beyond that, we can serve others.  Service to others is after all the hallmark of the Christian life.  We can volunteer at the food bank or at some other worthwhile organization like Take the Next Step.  And we can practice asking different questions about the choices we make every day, choices about what we buy, for example.  Are our purchases supporting the exploitation of labor or the degradation of the environment somewhere in God’s world?  And our political choices.  Do our political choices further the coming of God’s Kingdom of peace and justice, or do they prop up systems of violence, privilege, and oppression?

In other words, we can put our doubts aside and enter into the  Christian life.  We can practice being Christians.  I can tell you because I’ve done it myself that when we do, the truth of the Christian faith will appear to us.  You won’t think its truth, you will feel its truth.  You won’t think its power, you will feel its power in your life.  You may never arrive at factual certainty about it, but that won’t matter.  It won’t matter because you will know the truth of the faith at a level so much deeper than mere factual certainty.  You will stop asking the wrong question that Thomas asked:  Do I know for sure?  You will start asking the right question to which Jesus pointed Thomas:  Do I trust God?  Do I trust Jesus Christ?  Do I trust my life to the God I know in Jesus Christ?  And you will answer not with your head only but with your whole being:  Yes!  Yes, as Thomas confessed, Jesus is my Lord and my God.  That’s what matters.  That’s what makes all the difference.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Easter Sermon: Oh No! He's Back!

Here's the sermon I gave on Easter, 2012.  I think it says something important about what it really means for us to say Christ is risen.

Oh No!  He’s Back!

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 8, 2012

Scripture:  Mark 16:1-8

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight Oh God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!

We Christians so love to celebrate Easter.  It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian year.  It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian life.  It really is something to celebrate.  Jesus the Christ, the one whom we confess to be our Lord and Savior, was dead; and then somehow he wasn’t.  It wasn’t possible, of course.  It was just true, that’s all.  Jesus Christ rose up from the grave.  The grave couldn’t hold him.  Death couldn’t stop him.  What could be better than that?  Nothing!  Nothing at all could be better than that.  So we celebrate, and rightly so.

But did you notice something about our reading of Mark’s version of the Easter story just now?  Did you notice how it ends?  Mary Magdalene and two other women come to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body with spices according to the burial customs of their time and place.  To their amazement the large stone that had sealed the entrance to the tomb had been rolled away, and a young man dressed in white tells them that Jesus isn’t there, that he is risen.  Then he tells them to go tell the disciples that Jesus, the risen Christ, would see them back in Galilee.  The women see that Jesus’ tomb indeed is empty.  Then Mark says:  “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  Mark 16:8 

Here’s something you need to know about the Gospel of Mark, if you don’t already.  That’s how the Gospel really ends, with the women who witnessed the empty tomb saying nothing to anyone about Jesus being raised from the dead because they were terrified and amazed.  If you look at the end of Mark in any Bible you will see that there are more verses there after Mark 16:8, but it’s real clear that someone else added those verses later.  The way the author of Mark originally told the story it ended with an empty tomb and the women who saw the empty tomb saying nothing to anyone for, as Mark says, “terror and amazement had seized them.”

And here’s another thing about Mark’s Gospel to put alongside that odd story of the women being told to tell of Christ’s resurrection but not doing it.  In Mark’s telling of it, during Jesus’ lifetime Jesus tells several people who have experienced him as the Messiah not to tell anyone, but they do.  Very early in the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus cures a man with a skin disease.  After he does he says to the man “see that you say nothing to anyone….”  But Mark then tells us that the man whom Jesus had cured “went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word….”  Mark 3:43-45  In another story Jesus restores hearing to a man who was deaf.  Mark says that Jesus ordered the man who had had his hearing restored and those who had witnessed the event “to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.”  Mark 7:31-37  In Mark, during Jesus’ life he told people not to say anything about him, but they did.  After he had risen from the grave a heavenly messenger told the women to say that he had risen, but they didn’t.

It’s odd, isn’t it.  We ask why?  Why did people Jesus had healed tell about him though he told them not to but the women at the empty tomb didn’t tell about him though they had been told to do so?  I don’t claim to be certain about why Mark told the story that way, but here’s an explanation that makes sense to me.  Perhaps it will make sense to you too.

People proclaimed Jesus during his lifetime, though they had been told not to, because then, during his life when he was healing people, he was the kind of Messiah they expected, and the Messiah they expected wasn’t scary.  He did good things for people without making any real demands on the people he healed, only that they not tell anyone about it.  He was safe.  He wasn’t scary.  He did wonderful things for people; and his request that they keep quiet about him didn’t make any sense to them, just as it doesn’t make much sense to most of us.  So they talked.  So they proclaimed him to all who would listen.

The women at the empty tomb didn’t proclaim his resurrection although they had been told to proclaim it because, I think, they knew that while the Messiah they expected wasn’t scary, the Messiah they got was.  Mark tells us as much.  He says the women said nothing because “terror and amazement had seized them.”  The amazement part is easy enough to understand.  It isn’t every day someone who is truly dead gets up and walks out of the grave.  The amazement part is easy to get, but terror?  Really?  Terror?  Why terror?  The Greek word that is translated here (in the NRSV) as terror means something like “trembling with fear.”  (In some translations the word is translated as “trembling.”)  The women said nothing because they were too afraid, too shook up, to talk.  That can only have been, it seems to me, because they knew that this Jesus rising from the grave wasn’t just something to celebrate.  It really was something to fear.

Why was it something to fear?  Because it was precisely Jesus who rose from the grave.  Jesus, the one who healed people, yes; but also the one who taught the people a new vision.  A new vision of God as One who demands justice for the poor.  Who demands that we beat our swords into ploughshares and learn war no more.  Who got himself executed as a threat to the Roman Empire—a threat to all empire—with his vision of God’s alternative realm of compassion, justice, and peace.  The women were afraid because they had known Jesus all too well during his life.

And now there could be no more doubt.  God had raised Jesus from the grave.  They knew what that meant.  It meant he really had been the one.  Yes, he had been executed as a common political criminal; and that should have meant he’d been wrong, that they had been wrong, that he wasn’t the promised one they had thought he was.  But now, now he had risen; and that had to mean something.  It had to mean a lot.  It had to mean he truly was the Messiah, God’s chosen and anointed one.  The one who really did show us God in the flesh.  Who really did show us God in a new way, a powerful way, a way that couldn’t be denied any longer.  A way that changed everything.  A way that absolutely demanded a response.  That demanded nothing less than transformation.  Transformation of their lives and transformation of their world.  That meant they couldn’t go on living as before.  They lived in the Roman kingdom to be sure, but now they knew that they had to live the kingdom life of the Kingdom of God, a life very different from life the way the world knows it.  A life that denies the claims of the world and its kingdoms, that subverts the kingdoms of the world by showing life the way God intends it to be as opposed to the way it is in the kingdoms of the world.  No wonder they were scared.  We would have been scared too.

I recently read a suggestion that instead of saying “Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!” today we should be saying “Oh No!  He’s Back!”  (In Robin Meyers book The Underground Church.)  Yes, Christ’s resurrection is great good news.  Yes, Christ’s resurrection is God’s assurance to us that death is not the end.  We’re right when we sing in the great hymn with which we began this service (Christ the Lord is Risen Today) “Where O death is now thy sting?  Where thy victory O grave?”  If that’s all there were to the empty tomb we’d have no reason to be afraid.  We could just celebrate the great gift God has given us in Christ’s resurrection with no second thoughts.

Mary Magdalene and the other women who saw the empty tomb knew better.  They knew that that’s not all there is to Christ’s resurrection.  That’s why they were afraid.  They knew that Christ’s resurrection had turned their world on its head.  Everything was upside down now.  Death had become life.  The executed one had become God’s Messiah, God’s prophet of a new and radically different way of life.  Death had lost its sting, and now they had no more excuses.  Now all the reasons they could give for not following Jesus into the transformed life of the Kingdom of God rang hollow.  Now they knew what they had to do. 

They had to do what we know the earliest Christians in fact did do.  They had to live a different life.  They had to care for the poor.  They had to refuse to worship the Roman Emperor.  Their men had to refuse to serve in the Roman army, or in any army.  They had to proclaim Jesus Christ is Lord!  And they knew that when they did they were also proclaiming “And Caesar isn’t!”  Caesar wasn’t going to like that, and Caesar killed people he didn’t like.  Oh, there was plenty of reason for the women to be afraid.

There is plenty of reason for us to be afraid too, for us to say “Oh No!  He’s Back!” along with our “He is risen!  He is risen indeed!”  There’s plenty of reason for us to be afraid too because all of those things that the women knew Jesus’ resurrection meant for them, Jesus’ resurrection means for us too.  Jesus’ resurrection means life.  It means life beyond this life, but it also means a radically transformed life here and now.  It means that we too have no excuses for not living the life of the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdoms of the world.  It means that we too have no excuses for not living lives of justice and peace.  Lives of working with the Holy Spirit to make the Kingdom of God real on earth.  To live into the prayer we say every Sunday:  Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Like the people Jesus ministered to during his life we may want a safe Messiah who only heals and saves.  The Messiah we got heals and saves to be sure, but he also expects.  He also demands.  He expects and demands a lot.  And that’s scary.  And so we shout Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed! And if we really know what the means we also whisper  Oh No!  He’s Back!  Amen.