Faith Makes Real

It is the first day of the week. We have all come to meet together in this place. The doors are closed. This is not out of fear or to keep anyone out, but our being here in one place with doors closed helps us to define ourselves as a unique community. We are set apart from the world as a special body, bonded together in love and by a common purpose: we are Christians. We are disciples of Christ.

As soon as this sermon is finished, we will all express together our unity of belief in Christ through the words of the Nicene Creed. After the Creed, we will pray together. We will pray for ourselves and we will pray for the world.

Then we will greet one another in the name of Christ as we exchange the peace. We will say to each other the words which express what we feel in our hearts: “Peace be with you!”

This part of the service, the exchange of the Peace, marks a major transition in our liturgy. We move from what has been primarily worship by and through words to worship in the form of shared experience.

We will this day experience together the presence of our Lord.

He will not walk through the door or come down from the sky. His presence with us will be mystical, but it will also be quite real. Through the breaking of the Bread, through our shared communal meal, Christ really will be among us and will come to be in us all. This will be the ultimate expression of our unity as his disciples, we will all be as one in Christ, just as Christ and the Father are one.

Now, you may have noticed that up to this point, I have said not one word about today’s gospel. I have only talked about us . . . here . . . today. But if you think you see some parallels between this story about us as today’s disciples and John’s gospel story about the original disciples on the day of the very first Easter, let me suggest that these parallels, these common threads between the two stories, are not merely coincidental.

So let’s talk about the gospel, or actually, let’s consider gospels, plural. We know that in canon scripture, there are four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four are received by the Church as accurate, reliable, and inspired accounts of the life and ministry of Christ and of his death and resurrection. They all tell the Good News and tell it in truth. But in addition to having left us with a reliable factual record, each gospel writer sought to send a message of hope, encouragement, and direction to his readers.

It is my opinion that in achieving this latter purpose, John’s gospel excels, and it is partly for this reason that the gospel of John is my personal favorite. John wrote for the church, and not just the church of his day, but also for the church of future generations.

In doing this, John had some advantages over the synoptic writers, mainly because his gospel was almost certainly written later than the other three. The date is a little hard to pin down, but was likely around 90 a.d.

While John was probably not separated from the synoptics by more than a decade or two, a lot had happened in that time. It had become obvious that the return of Christ would not be so imminent as once believed. Christians had been expelled from worship in the synagogues and were worshipping in their own places of meeting. And finally, the Church was just beginning to develop structure and to worship liturgically. In fact many scholars believe that by the close of the first century, the basic order of eucharistic worship, apart from the absence of the creed, was much the same as it is in the church today.

So in writing his gospel, John was in a unique position to anticipate and address certain issues and certain needs and concerns of the church in a way which the other gospel writers could not.

In today’s gospel, I think the message to the church, to us, is all about two things: faith and witness.

It is unfortunate that many Christians, when they hear the Thomas story, immediately concentrate upon his doubt. That element is certainly there, but if we focus upon the doubt, we may miss the real point of the story.

When Jesus comes to the gathered disciples the second time, exactly one week after his first Easter appearance, he offers to let Thomas touch his wounds, but Thomas does not need to.

As soon as Thomas sees Jesus and hears his voice, he makes the most remarkable faith statement in the entire New Testament: “My Lord and my God!”

The other disciples, when they had seen Jesus a week earlier on Easter evening, had become believers that Jesus had been raised, that he had been resurrected in a new mystical body, a body no longer bound by time and space, but a real, living, tangible body nonetheless.

Now, having himself seen Jesus, Thomas believed this also, and like the other disciples, he believed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. But through his faith, Thomas made a quantum leap ahead of his fellows, when he became the first and only character in any of the gospels to acknowledge and address Jesus as “My God!”

In fairness, Tomas should be remembered not as the man of doubt, but as an outstanding man of faith. However, before they rediscovered their faith, Thomas and the other disciples had to be “jump started” by a bodily appearance of Jesus. They had to both see and hear Jesus in order to believe.

But through John’s gospel, Jesus speaks directly to his church, to the church of all generations, and says: “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.” This has been called “the greatest of all the beatitudes”.

Although Jesus made multiple post-resurrection appearances, the vast majority of Christians, even in the first century, never had the opportunity to witness the risen Lord with their own eyes. By the mid-second century, all the first hand witnesses were gone.

The church ever since has had to rely only upon the witness recorded in scripture and upon the faith witness of other Christians. But with the aid of the Holy Spirit, this has been enough.

When we come to the altar today, we will not experience Christ through the superficial senses of sight or taste. Those senses will only show us bread and wine. It is through faith, and through faith alone, that we find Christ in the eucharist. When this happens, when our faith allows us to really experience Christ in the Communion gifts, then Christ comes to dwell in us and we in him. Christ becomes alive in us, alive in spirit, and we find new life in him.

In the gospel for today, Jesus breathed upon the disciples, and they received the Spirit. This has to remind us of the creation story, how through his breath, God imparted life to Adam. Breath, life, and spirit are frequently interconnected in scripture.

Through our faith in Christ’s presence today, we will be fed with spiritual food; we will be nourished for new life in Christ. We will become empowered to go from this place, through doors, now open, into the world - - and there, to ourselves become faith witnesses for

Christ . . . Witnesses through what we say, witnesses through what de do, witnesses in love and in service . . . Witnesses who, by God’s grace, can help make the Living Christ real to ourselves and to the world. AMEN.