Opening to Faith
John 20:19-35[1]
There was a time when you could simply take a lot of things
on faith. It may seem crazy now, but it was simply the way life worked. You
knew who you could trust, and when they said they would do something, you took
their word for it. Again, it was just the way things worked. When you heard
something on the news you believed it. When you read something in the paper,
you took it for the truth. Of course, there were always people out there who
were trying to sell you something. Hopefully, you could recognize them coming
so you had a chance to withhold judgment until they proved themselves reliable.
Faith was an important part of the way life worked.
These days, it seems that we have to question everyone. The
old warning, caveat emptor, or “let the buyer beware,” doesn’t go far
enough. These days we should probably say caveat auditor, or “let the
listener beware”! It seems like nothing you hear these days is “on the level.”
Partly that’s because a lot of those who do the talking in our world use their
words to manipulate us. And partly it’s because too many of those who do the
talking in our world don’t even try to line up their lives with their words. It
feels like expecting most people you meet to be “what you see is what you get”
is quaint at best, and naïve at worst. And all of this leaves us feeling more
skeptical and suspicious than trusting. It makes it hard to take much of this
life “on faith.”
One of the things I like about the way the Gospels tell the
story of Jesus’ resurrection is the way they all show how hard it was for his
own disciples to believe it. We might expect that Jesus’ hand-picked
apprentices would have leaped at the chance to believe that Jesus had risen
from the dead. But that just wasn’t something they could even begin to
comprehend. They didn’t have any kind of framework to understand the words, let
alone to grasp the concept. Some of them believed that there would be a general
resurrection at the end of history. But none of them had even the faintest hint
of a notion that they would see Jesus alive only days after they had seen him
die.
When we take full account of their doubts, we might wonder
what it was that enabled them to believe. In their case, the answer is that the
risen, living Jesus presented himself to them! He met with them, he ate with
them, he talked with them. Some in our day have tried to dismiss this as some
kind of group hallucination. While it’s true that those who know how to work a
crowd can make people believe just about anything, that’s not what happened in
this case. One feature of the story of Jesus’ resurrection is that he appeared
to different people at different times. As in our Gospel lesson for today, not
everyone was there every time Jesus met with his disciples.
Of course, when we turn to the question of our faith in the
risen and living Jesus, it gets a little more complicated. We’re among those
who “have not seen” Jesus (Jn 20:29), and yet we are called to believe in him. For
us the question is how we can put our faith in the risen and living Jesus
without ever having had the experience of actually seeing him as his disciples
did. There are a lot of reasons why we believe. For some of us, we were raised
in the faith. For others it’s a matter of relying on the teachings of the
Bible. For others, it’s about the influence of someone who was an example for
us. For many of us, it’s a combination of some or all of those factors.
I think at the end of the day, all of us face the decision
of what we’re going to base our lives on. You could say that’s a kind of faith.
Whether it’s facts and figures, or money, or the “good life,” or family, or religion,
the ability to trust that what you believe is true is always based on a choice.
The question we all face is where we will choose to place our faith.
Unfortunately, many of us have discovered that when we place our faith in the
people and things in this life, we can be sorely disappointed. We’ve placed our
faith in people and things that really couldn’t deliver what we were hoping to
get from that faith. And when what you can see disappoints us, it makes it even
harder for us to put our faith in the risen and living Jesus, whom we haven’t
seen.
I’m not going to pretend it’s easy to do that day in and day out. There are some days when life seems so frustrating, so discouraging, that it’s difficult if not impossible to put our faith in a person we’ve never seen. But I think it comes back to that decision about what we’re going to base our lives on. And we may have to make the decision to put our faith in the risen and living Jesus day by day. We may have to make that decision moment by moment.[2]
For me, it boils down to the fact that in the depth of my being, in my heart and soul, in that place where all pretense is stripped away and it’s only me and reality, the hope and faith that there is a God who loves us all, always has and always will, simply rings true.[3] That’s where I start. It’s not that I understand it all. Rather, believing that God is always faithful, that God loves us no matter what, helps me open my heart and put my faith in the risen and living Jesus. That’s a choice I make day by day, and sometimes moment by moment.
[1] © 2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/16/2023 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 33: faith always “needs to be
sustained from moment to moment, from decision to decision, by the renewal,
reinvention, and repetition of faith.”
[3] Cf. Caputo, On Religion, 7-10: he says that matters of faith take
us out of “the manageable prospects of the present, beyond the sphere in which
we have some mastery,” and into “the sphere of the impossible, of something
whose possibility we just cannot conceive” where “only the great passions of
faith and love and hope will see us through,”
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