Can I Get a Witness? – sermon on April 12, 2015
John 20: 19-31 That Sunday evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you,” he said. As he spoke, he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side. They were filled with joy when they saw the Lord! Again he said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
One of the twelve disciples, Thomas, was not with the others when Jesus came. They told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he replied, “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side.”
Eight days later the disciples were together again, and this time Thomas was with them. The doors were locked; but suddenly, as before, Jesus was standing among them. “Peace be with you,” he said. Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!” “My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed. Then Jesus told him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.”
The disciples saw Jesus do many other miraculous signs in addition to the ones recorded in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name.
1 John 1:1 – 2:5 We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life. This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. He was with God, and then he was revealed to us. We proclaim to you what we have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with God and with the Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.
This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in God at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the sacrifice of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.
If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that God’s word has no place in our hearts.
My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before God. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.
Sermon: Can I Get a Witness? Rev. Doreen Oughton
The scene is a lecture hall at a law school. The professor is at the lectern teaching a class of about 30 students. A man enters the room, right up front, walks slowly toward the lectern. All eyes are on him. He grabs the purse that rests right beside the professor, turns and runs out the door. Though a few students get up out of their seats, and one starts to run after him, the professor encourages them to sit back down while she calls security. She says, “I don’t know if I can even say what he looked like, except for the funny nose.” Security comes, and gets the names of all the witnesses, and interviews each of them, asking for a description of the thief. Any guesses about how they did? It wasn’t a real crime, you see, but a demonstration to these law students about the reality of eyewitness testimony. It is not very reliable, though it carries tremendous weight, if not for others, certainly in our own minds. The student who ran after the “thief” was absolutely certain that there was something strange about his nose, though when show pictures of the perp, his nose was clearly normal. That was part of the experiment – the professor inserting an egregious statement to demonstrate the susceptibility of people to suggestion. There have been many studies and experiments that show consistently that no matter how much we think we know what we have seen, we often are mistaken.
I couldn’t help but think of these convincing studies when I read the two scripture passages this morning, with their emphasis on eyewitness testimony. Thomas returns from some outing – an errand, a visit to family, work.. whatever – only to hear that everyone else there has seen Jesus. This is two days after Jesus was killed on the cross – which none of them witnessed – and laid in the tomb. They have hidden out in this room, probably since the arrest in the Garden Thursday evening. We don’t know what the mood of the group has been, but we might guess that there has been some tension – fear, regret, guilt, maybe anger and recrimination. Maybe Thomas had to get out of there, or maybe he was sent out as a scout to find out if the authorities were after them. But he comes back to a completely different group of people.
They are exuberant, somewhat incredulous. Something beyond their wildest dreams has happened. Jesus came to them. It was really him, bringing to them blessings of peace, commissioning them by the power of the Holy Spirit. But Thomas, he is a man of our times, skeptical of eyewitness testimony, understanding the susceptibility of people to see what they want to see, what they may have been primed to see. And though he doesn’t think others should trust what they saw with their own eyes, he is very quick to put stock in what he might see. His own seeing would convince him. So Jesus returns, and shows Thomas, and asks him to believe. He then says that blessed are those who believe without seeing. The Gospel says that the written record of all that the disciples saw was for the purpose of instilling belief. They saw it, we can believe it.
And so says the letter from John to a community of believers – we saw him, we touched him. Believe us when we tell you the message that he told us. Now don’t even get me started on the accuracy of recalling what someone said! Has anyone played the game Telephone? I bring all this up, friends, not because I want to discourage you from belief. I am not saying “don’t believe what they say – this stuff about Jesus and resurrection is poppycock!” I just want to point out that faith is faith, not a theory to be proven or disproved. And at this point in my faith journey, the point is not to believe in my mind certain statements about Jesus or God – not to have the correct theological concepts. The point is to live my faith. I must have in my mind certain beliefs that guide the way I live, so beliefs are important, but they are not enough – for me, right now.
I believe that God is love and goodness; that Jesus was an embodiment of this love and came to show us who and whose we truly are. I believe that if we model our lives after that of Jesus, as best we can, that we will share in the resurrection – that we will also be raised up out of any trial, any “death,” any separation from God and our true divine nature. I believe all the readings for today – our responsive reading from Psalm 133 and Acts as well as the two readings from John, describe what it looks like to live that way. There is unity and sharing, there is joy. There is vulnerability – wounds that we can put our hands on. There are doubts, yes, and sin – which I understand as separation from God – part of our wandering that is necessary in order to have a homecoming. Our separation can be good when we recognize it, name it, and respond to the invitation to come back – to let Christ “cleanse” us, just as he washed the feet of his closest friends, according to some eyewitnesses.
Friends, I don’t know what the disciples saw, what the gospel writers and letter-writers heard or witnessed. But I do believe that their lives were absolutely transformed by their encounter with the living God in Christ, and that they could not keep such miracles to themselves. They had been blessed and commissioned to carry that transformation, that peace, out into the world. They were faithful in their attempts to preach and teach and heal and save in the name, in the holy shem, of Christ. They were flawed and wounded and vulnerable, susceptible to suggestion. And yet they, by the power of the Holy Spirit, sent to us this incredible gift of faith. And now it is up to us. We must live our faith in a way that gifts it to others. It is not about our eyewitness testimony, but our living witness of the amazing love of God. We do this with humility and vulnerability, not by disguising or hiding our wounds or imperfections, but opening our whole selves all up to the healing and redeeming love of Christ. May it be so.
