John 20: 24-26; Acts 4: 34, 35

The pendulum of faith

Nowhere do we see the swing of faith more as between Easter and the second Sunday of the Easter season of the Church.  Easter is our high point of hopefulness and faith, a finger in the eye of all things negative.  It is because of Easter that the underlying sentiment of Christian faith is positive, the optimism that in the end all will be good.   It comes out of the fear of the women Gail talked about last week.  Their fear remnds us , as Martha Spong writes (Christian Century, April 1, 2015) that “the good news of Christ’s resurrection is not simply reliable news to be taken for granted.  It is a truth so shocking that even the first people to hear it, people who hear it on the spot where it happened cannot imagine how to tell anyone else.” Then comes Thomas, that great killjoy of the Bible who waves off everything that has just happened.  Of course Thomas is misunderstood.  Martha Spong implies Thomas is like her dog who had a wound on his paw.  On the vet’s orders the dog had to spend time with his paw in a bowl of iodine and water.  The dog doesn’t get that this is good for him and will make him better.  So the dog knocks over the bowl and rushes off.  Thomas knocks everything people has just experienced.   Thomas is just a very visual and science minded person.  “Show me and I’ll believe,” he cries out. But Scientist can get really excited and Thomas was, later.  He was excited the way you see scientists salivate when they talk about all the things the Large Hadron Collider under the ground on the Swiss-French border is going to reveal in the years to come: the secrets of dark matter and a whole bunch of new dimensions to particles and the universe  we do not even know about. Is Jesus scolding Thomas for not believing. Perhaps is more a kind of disappointment.  But we can assume Jesus understands that faith doesn’t always work, and that when we, temporarily, run out of faith, there are other ways God can get our attention.

Sometimes faith doesn’t work, friends. Sometimes it runs dry and we can’t tap into it, like the land we live on these days. There isn’t much to tap into. The aquifers are dry and pretty soon no wells can be drilled until new water comes from the sky.

I was vegetating on the couch last Sunday and came across a cartoon movie called “The Rise of the Guardians.” It is the story of Jack Frost finding his identity and mission, although I am not sure how the movie ended. He meets Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman.  Those three are still happy, because people don’t believe in them anymore.  They make fun of Jack Frost who really has no role in people’s life other than to make them cold and give them winter sports. But the one they all fear and loathe is the Boogeyman. They find the Boogeyman stealing teeth from the Tooth fairy’s Tooth palace, because he is angry.  He is angry because people stopped believing somewhere around the Middle Ages.

Friends, we need to understand that there are times when our faith is low, when the pendulum swings from faith to doubt, from joy to depression.  When does that happen for you?  I can give you an example, that when I see or hear something about religious cults, it sometimes makes me want to get as far away from religion as possible.  It is because what those groups are doing is so manipulative and demeaning, controlling people with such power in the name of faith.  It alienates me. This is just an example. There are all kinds of ways in which faith gets squeezed and choked.  One another way is when the people of religious community get petty or conniving or territorial.  It chokes off faith for a lot of people.

In Acts we learn how the Church should live and operate, not by controlling and manipulating or conniving, but by taking care of people, making sure people have what they need to flourish.  The people of Acts really believe in the Church in these verses.  They are the Church at its best.

Friends, perhaps Jesus is worried for Thomas, worried that there are many like Thomas, and maybe you and I are like him, whose faith depends on having life go exactly the way we want it to.  We won’t believe until things go our way, unless we see all the signs of God’s work.  But in fact life is messy and the Church is messy.  We make a mess of our relationships and congregations make a mess of things sometimes.  But we have to keep our paw in that bowl with water in iodine so we can get better, we have to keep believing, we have to be open to believing that God’s grace will work in our lives, that it will find a way, even though we cannot grasp it. We have to be open to believing the Church as a whole will be okay, as stunning a notion as it may be. Thanks be to God!