Question Skepticism!

Sermon by James W. Crawford

April 14, 1996

John 20:19-31

One wonders on this Sunday after Easter if Thomas doesn't speak for most of us. After all, though we welcome some of you from the vast reaches of North America and beyond, the Easter crowds are dispersed, the choir afflicted with what my mother called "the 24-hour epizootic," the brass ensemble is gone, the timpani carted away, the choir afflicted with what my mother called "the 24-hour epizootic." For a while, perhaps, we captured on Easter Day an exciting alternative to our usual routine and maybe even glimpsed the possibility of a new world. But no longer. The candidates scrap again about taxes, Israelis and Palestinians go about their bombing and slaughtering, Liberia collapses into anarchy, many of us still live with anxiety about our employment and our economic futures. In truth, the Easter promises seem precarious. The affirmations of unconquerable community, the conviction of life inseparable from recreative and transforming love seem but faint echoes now. We are stuck, pre-Easter again, doubting Thomases, immersed in job and family demands, some of us facing health challenges, others of us mired in relationships gone awry, most of us just trying to keep our heads above water.

How believe in a world like this? How bear an Easter hope when so much seems to run against it? As Woody Allen writes about one of his characters in The Condemned:

'No use,' Cloquet reflected. 'I will have to meet my fate alone. There is no God. There is no purpose in life. Nothing lasts. Even the works of the great Shakespeare will disappear when the universe burns out--not such a terrible thought of course, when it comes to plays like Titus Andronicus, but what about the others? No wonder some people commit suicide! Why not end this absurdity? Why go through with this hollow charade called life? Why, except that somewhere within us a voice says, 'Live.' Always, from some inner region, we hear the command, 'Keep living.' Cloquet recognized the voice; it was his insurance salesman. Naturally he thought - Fishbein doesn't want to pay off.

This, in a sense, is where Thomas stands. The death of Jesus makes no sense. It turns his world to absurdity. Cross and tomb dominate. He wonders: Do life and love really have the last word?

I

Well, do they? Do love and life have the last word? I am not going to keep you guessing this morning. I am going to follow the mandate of that bumper sticker I saw last week. It read, "Question skepticism." On a Sunday featuring Doubting Thomas, I like that! And so from the very beginning this morning, I say, Yes! Life and love as the last word constitute the core of our faith. We have testified to that for twenty centuries in face of everything asserting love is evanescent and life snuffed out. Without the conviction life and love have the last word, without the firm commitment to the death of the powers of death on Easter Day we have no church, no reason to meet here on the first day of the week, no promise and hope of a new creation. The Easter event grounds our faith and our hope. It provides the motive for our love and our courage. Without Easter, as Paul says, our faith is in vain, we have nothing.

And what I wish to do this morning is to provide an "Easter Show and Tell" for you. I want to touch on how the wonder of this room testifies to the power of the Easter event. Look around you. We gather in a sanctuary speaking to us of love and life apart from anything we sing together, apart from any prayers we invoke, distinct from anything the preacher says. We refer to the Cross in the center of our sanctuary this way often, but this morning I invite you to look up toward the balcony to your left. There you will see a series of windows illustrating the new creation love shapes for us. They depict what we call the Miracles of the New Testament. Looking at the first one, for instance, the window on the far left, showing Jesus calming the terrible storm at sea threatening to drown the disciples. Think for a moment. Have you ever felt like you and the world are falling apart, that chaos has the upper hand, that no matter how hard you try things just don't come together? Are you a Doubting Thomas because of it, a skeptic as you consider the promises of Easter? I beg you! Question your skepticism. That window showing Christ stilling the storm, bringing calm amid chaos testifies to our Easter faith and hope: Christ forges peace, coherence community.
 

Or the middle one, the wedding at Cana, where our Lord turns water into wine? There is great promise in that marvelous image. For those of us who are Doubting Thomases, stuck in ruts, wondering if any doors can open, if there is light at the end of tunnel, if anything can change for us. That window says, "You'd better believe it!" Question your skepticism, it says. Radical change, as if from water to wine can happen in Christ's good time to all of us. I have never forgotten the story of the person who was asked if he could believe our Lord turned water into wine. He thought for a moment and replied. "Well, in my house Jesus once turned gin into furniture, and that's good enough for me."
 

And those two windows depicting the raising of Jairus' daughter, and of Lazarus, bandaged and stinking, dead four days, marching out of his tomb? What a witness that provides! Against all threats to the meaning of life, all questions as to whether we are given a noble and gracious destiny--and even as we meet here this morning with wreckage of individuals and families in Jackson, Mississippi, massacred because they are Black--compounding hatred and murder--these two windows picturing the death of death illustrate love never letting us go, life in all its freedom and joy asserting itself in face of all that would eat us up and do us in, crush us and leave us for dead.

And there is one window left: the Resurrection window on this end. That is the window that should dominate this room. The Easter event interprets all the others. That window, with its empty tomb, its importuning Mary, bears the weight and glory of our faith. That window says life and love remain unconquerable in face of and through all that would finally do us in. The other events depicted in those windows provide commentary on that pivotal proclamation, "He is not here. He is risen."

And, friends, not exactly a footnote, this great panorama immediately behind me, this Annunciation-Christmas window, affirming the identification of Divine life with our own broken history--the brilliance of this window would be nonexistent but for the certainty that Easter love and life finally sway the future. In other words, no Easter, no Christmas.

But there is more. Over here on your right is the depiction of some parables. The laborers in the vineyard, the ill-prepared bridesmaids, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Sower. Among many other things, these parables demonstrate the way we treat one another in a world understanding human life to be of supreme value. Take for a moment only the Good Samaritan there in the middle. Jesus tells that parable to doubting Thomases, to skeptics who look at this mottled race of ours and who believe people of differing backgrounds, and ethnic roots, diverse races and religions cannot make it together. On the contrary, says the New Testament, such skepticism needs questioning. The world we see in that parable where the Samaritan expresses compassion for his most virulent enemy, the Jew, illustrates a world bound together across all barriers, a Divine presence inviting us into one human family, identifying ourselves no longer primarily by nation, race, class, creed, sexual orientation, ethnic roots, but now a community recreated by love dissolving our little claims on our precious identities. Living together like that means living in community created by resurrection, banking on the triumph of love and life when everything else goes against them, a triumph laying hold on all of us.

II

Do you believe in that triumph? Can you bet your life on it? Do the promises of sanity, coherence, transformation, life, community, love depicted by those windows up there grasp you as truth you can live from? Can you say "yes" to them? Can you?

You see, the Doubting Thomas in and among us is not one who wrestles so much with the apparent intellectual difficulties of the Christian faith. To put it another way, The Doubting Thomas in us does not try to make the facts of faith and the facts of biology coincide. Do dead men rise? Do corpses walk out of tombs? Did Jesus go up? Or down? Or Out? Who knows? The Thomas in us doubts that love and life really have the last word. The Thomas in us is looks out on this world with its share of sadness, tragedy, anger and retaliation and is skeptical of any faith and hope where love finally calls the last shot. I have never forgotten calling on three sisters years ago on New York's West side. In the course of our friendly introductory banter, I told them about our four little children. They appeared shocked! Aghast! "How could you bring four children into a world like this?" they asked harshly. There was Thomas. No hope! Cynicism. The future closed.

Or again, take that forgiving father in the window of the Prodigal son. Have you been injured by someone lately? Has someone taken advantage of you? Have you been accused of something you did not do? Has someone betrayed your confidence, scorned your love, walked out on you, left you in some way abandoned? How do you feel about it? Angry? Yes. Resentful? Yes. Ready to argue your case again and again? Probably. Always baiting your traps, marshaling your arguments, ready to pounce? Some people call that healthy. Perhaps it is. But finally it betrays hopelessness, a self more intent on the righteousness of its own cause rather than the healing of the broken relationship. That is doubt; that is skepticism, when hope and healing are called for.

And this window dominating our chancel, The Annunciation, the angels proclaiming the coming of one who will bring peace on earth. We encounter that promise every Sunday through this window in this church. Talk about bait for Doubting Thomas! Talk about an invitation to skepticism if not outright scoffing! Peace in this world? We have already touched the bloody wounds we have discovered in this morning's headlines, Beirut, Jackson, Monrovia. Peace on earth? Are you kidding? How can we do anything but stand with Thomas in our doubt and skepticism over the promise of peace conveyed in that window?

 Well, by heaven, we Christians had better question skepticism over peace in this troubled world! We need take a risk with Dr. King who nearly 30 years ago, amid the tangle of Viet Nam and the revolts in our cities, reminded us we are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny, that what affects one, affects all indirectly, and we need share the dream that 'war will come to an end, that we will beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks and that we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the chambers of pessimism. It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together and the children of God will shout for joy.'" That is questioning worldly skepticism. That is living for hope against hope.

 And finally, on this Second Sunday of Easter, what drives us to doubt the Easter message conveyed in this window here as much as anything else? Could it be the stark fact of death itself? Does life bear meaning? Is there anything we might call a Divine destiny? Or, as one cynic remarks, is life nothing more than "a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay?" Maybe. But against this doubt, against this skepticism we Christians at Eastertide must ourselves be skeptics. It is a skepticism born of our hope. Henry Nouwen says it best: "If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that he wanted to experience with us the total absurdity of death, then--yes, then there must be hope; then there must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world; then leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and the oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of all things; then indeed we have to wait for the third day."

Against all the world's skepticism, there abides the Easter hope.

Oh, my friends, in this Easter season, when so much seems to run counter to the promise of the Resurrection message, when doubt about ourselves and the nature and destiny of God's world continues to press and discourage us, I beg you doubt your doubt, question your skepticism; I pray you, surrender again and risk all to the grace and service of the living Christ.