Seeing is Believing?
Psalm
150; John 20:19-29
A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie
University
Congregational United
“ Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” John 20:29:b
There are two reasons why it is important to hear the words of both readings on this Sunday after Easter. How can we do anything but praise God in the wake of the resurrection of Jesus? But at the same time, how can we believe in the resurrection, something so utterly unbelievable? It is sort of good news/bad news. That’s where we find ourselves on this Sunday is it not? The crowds have gone. Those of us who remain, remain with these two things. The events of Easter fill us with the need to praise, to be released from ourselves. The events of Easter are, at the same time, so unbelievable, that we struggle to understand their role in the life of faith.
So it was with Thomas, our spiritual ancestor. His doubt is our doubt. We need to be convinced—that’s part of what it means to be human. So this sermon needs to be framed by the need to praise God, by Thomas’s doubt and by the challenge of Jesus: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
In our world, we confuse seeing and believing. Two people are talking. One says to the other, “do you believe in infant baptism?” The other says, “believe it, hell, I’ve seen it!” What is funny is the confusion with the word “believe.” The first person uses “believe” to mean “do you think it is a good idea?” In our church, we think infant baptism is a good idea. So we could say, we believe in infant baptism. But the second person heard it not as “do you think it is a good idea.” He heard it as “do you think it exists?” Therefore his response. So the problem in this joke has to do with the meaning of belief. In our tradition, all that starts with Thomas.
Belief, as it relates to faith, is an experience of being able to hold mystery in a way that is meaningful. For example, if we say, we believe in God, we are saying that the great mystery of God has meaning for us. Some would say that God doesn’t exist. What is really meant there is that the idea of God doesn’t hold meaning. We live in a time when it is particularly difficult to identify that which holds meaning.
Think about your life for a moment. How is it that during the course of a day, you think about what has meaning for you? If you are at all typical, there are not many moments to ponder meaning. Hopes, definitely. Fears, no question about it. But meaning—well that happens when it happens. But, at the same time, we all want to know more about faith and how it might give meaning to our lives. So here are four things to consider on this Sunday after Easter.
First, for the most part, faith is something that begins with Jesus. So Thomas isn’t a lone weakling struggling to understand. He was the one who named the truth about himself—he needed to touch to believe, that is to find meaning. Having faith, as Jesus suggested, is a matter of having something not seen hold meaning. As we are heirs to Thomas’s doubt, we find ourselves in an authentic struggle, the struggle to understand how faith provides meaning.
Second, since Thomas, we have come to learn that doubt is an authentic part of the life of faith. How, indeed, can we know faith if we haven’t had the experience of doubt? Paul Tillich was adamant that doubt is an integral part of the life of faith. We do experience cycles: we have faith, we have doubt, we find ourselves somewhere in between. That is why we welcome everyone on Sunday morning, believers, seekers, doubters—these are authentic places to be even though the church as a system holds belief. We who are individual members of it move around between faith and doubt.
Third, there are several different ways to “see.” We can actually visually “see” something. But “see” can also mean “understand.” So when Mary Magdalene reports to the others that she has “seen” the Lord what does she mean? Mostly we imagine she has actually “seen” the figure of Jesus. But, it could also mean, that she now understands what Jesus was about. In other words, she experienced an event of the soul; she was transformed by what Jesus said and did.
Fourth, one of the purposes of the church is to provide a place where we can honestly struggle with faith as a way to find meaning in that which we cannot see—literally and figuratively. God helps us and we help each other.
When it comes to meaning and faith, perspective is needed
to see meaning and to inspire faith. Here are two illustrations of moments when
meaning is found through perspective. In John Cheever’s
novel O What a Paradise It Seems, an older man goes home to the small
town where he grew up and he goes ice skating on the local pond. As he is swinging down the ice, he has this
experience of homecoming. He describes
it as being in a place where his name is known and loved. Home is that place where we belong and
because we belong, we find meaning in it.
We come to worship to find that place where we belong—among other
things. In 1965,
I had been working in
Both these illustrations are pauses in busy and difficult lives. They are like punctuation inserted into a run-on sentence. More than that, they are Sabbath moments. In order for us to move beyond the point where we need to be convinced as Thomas did, we need these Sabbath moments that can not only punctuate our lives, they can center us and help us find meaning. They can deepen and strengthen our faith. They can help to teach us the importance of praise as is Psalm 150 and the importance of the struggle for faith as in the story of Thomas. They can help us to hold mystery in a world where mystery has almost disappeared. They can transform us and make us new. And we need to be transformed to be able to do God’s work.
May God help us and be with us. Amen.