SUNDAY 3 APRIL 2005 : The Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2: 14a, 22-32; John 20: 19-31
My Christian faith was forged in a suburban Wellington Presbyterian church. Inevitably, I was influenced by the tone and ethos and theological flavour of my nurturing faith community. With hindsight I can recognise that some of the key people in that community were not the boring, conservative adults the adolescent me thought they were. It turns out, in fact and with hindsight, that they were unashamedly liberal, or what today we might call progressive Christians, in their thinking. It was in that kind of atmosphere that my faith was nurtured ?± an atmosphere which encouraged questioning and debating and exploring religious faith.
I think I must have been about fifteen or sixteen when I first really encountered people of a significantly different theological flavour. In those days, it was the early 1960s, Presbyterians were supposed to be getting friendly with the Methodists, with whom it was proposed we would have some kind of church union. And so I began to encounter people from the local Methodist Bible Class. I found myself rather perplexed. They seemed to look at life and, more importantly, Christian faith, rather differently from the way I had experienced.
For a start, they seemed to know large chunks of the Bible by heart, and were happy to quote them. That's a bit scary for Presbyterians who hadn??t done any memory work. But, even worse, they seemed to think it was all literally true. That was quite off-putting for someone who had been taught in Sunday school and Bible Class by people who thought that asking questions was the norm. They seemed to talk about sin quite a lot, and its ?¨wages?Æ ?± for a while I even wondered if you got paid for sinning! I didn??t, and don??t, recall sin being talked about much in my church. And those Methodists had a fervour, an intensity of spirit, that contrasted with my own, and our Bible Class's, tendency to hang a bit loose in all this religious stuff.
In my mid-teen naivety, I put it down to the fact that they were, after all, Methodists, poor dears, and probably couldn't help it, and that they'd hopefully grow out of it one day. Since then, of course, I've discovered that many Methodists are in fact quite pleasant and rational people, a lot like us really. But even more, I discovered that not all Presbyterians are like those who nurtured my faith in my home church.
A few years later, in the mid-60s, the Principal of our Presbyterian Theological Hall, Lloyd Geering, wrote an article about the resurrection which all seemed pretty common sense to me and many of these key people in my home church, but which reduced other Presbyterians to apoplexy. All hell, as it were, broke loose. At the time I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.
As I look back on my own rather bemused teenage reaction to finding Christians (albeit that they were only Methodists!) who approached faith differently from me, I think I have a better perspective on the reaction to Geering. When one's religious world view has been framed in a particular way ?± one that, for instance, is literalist, and includes a conviction about the physical and historical resurrection of Jesus ?± then it is much, much more than merely bemusing when someone with some stature in the church appears to be denying the very basis of your faith. Not that I think that was what Lloyd Geering was seeking to do at all.
For me, discovering Christians, even Presbyterians, who thought quite differently from me and other people in my home church wasn't a particular challenge. They were just different, for whatever reason, and people are, after all different, so vive la difference. But for someone with a clearly-defined framework of faith, and who is convinced that this and this alone is the faith that we must hold, someone who presents a significantly different perspective is unsettling, threatening and dangerous. For them, part of the essence of Christian faith is that it is not something that can be questioned, or understood in a different kind of way. People needed to believe what had been passed on to them.
The Gospel reading today included the story of Thomas, who has acquired the name "Doubting Thomas", ?´doubting?? in a pejorative sense, because he did not believe what he was told. But why was Thomas ?´doubting??? It seems to me he might be ?´doubting?? because he is a literalist ?± what someone in another context called ?¨a fact fundamentalist?Æ. He will only believe something if it is demonstrably true. He will only believe something if it is beyond question. There is an implied criticism of him for this when, in the story, the risen Christ says "Blessed are those who have not seen yet have come to believe."
Faith does not depend upon what is physical, real and provable. Faith is, to be fair, based on some of that ?± upon reasoned and reasonable assessment of the evidence; but then there is a step into the unknown and the unknowable, a choosing to stake oneself and one's living on that which ultimately can never be proved but which is nevertheless embraced. A key part of that choosing, it seems to me, is accepting that faith is not about solid certainty, about a series of statements that sum up the meaning of things once and for all. Faith, rather, is a journey, a process of discovery. Some years ago in an address at a conference, the Australian writer Patrick White observed: "So many people demand answers that can't be refuted - not realising that this is impossible if the issue is a transcendent one - when the search itself remains the important part."
In the sixth of its eight points about what it means to be a ?´progressive?? Christian, The Centre for Progressive Christianity states: ?¨(We) find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty ?± more value in questioning than in absolutes.?Æ A group in the United States has been developing a study and discussion programme which can be offered as an alternative to the ubiquitous Alpha programmes. Drawing on scholars who we in St Lukes know like Jack Spong, Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and Lloyd Geering, the programme is entitled ?¨Living the Questions?Æ, and one of the quotations in its publicity material is ?¨Wisdom is asking the questions for which there are no answers?Æ.
In the first part of today's Gospel passage, the risen Christ commissioned his followers for mission, for a journey of discipleship. It would be through that mission and on that journey, through that ongoing discipleship, that they would discover again and again the reality of resurrection ?± not as a doctrine to be believed, nor as something which was physically, literally and demonstrably true, but as an ongoing experience which enabled them to rise time and time again above all that life and people threw at them. Thomas, it seems, didn't want a journey, he wanted answers that couldn't be refuted. He got it, and he also got a gentle rebuke.
But the story also makes it clear that reasonable doubts and questions do not disqualify people for discipleship. In fact, it is clear throughout John's gospel that people are led to faith with quite differing experiences and varying degrees of evidence. People are different. Some people need something akin to proof. The personality make-up of some people means they need clear statements of what faith is all about in order to be secure in their faith. The personality make-up of other people is such that they find the answers in the questions, faith through a journey, conviction through questing and exploring way beyond the boundaries of official, handed-down dogma.
I think that one of the saddest things about Christian history, and about the church in our own times, is that there are people who cannot accept differences, and who want to insist upon particular ways of believing as applicable for all people. It is sad that there are those who cannot accept that people to whom questions and challenges come more readily can be as much faithful disciples as those for whom belief is important. It is sad that there are people who cannot accept that an understanding of resurrection which is not based on historical or literal truth can be as valid and as empowering an understanding as their own literal understanding is. It is sad that there are people whose faith is ultimately so based upon dead certainties that they are threatened by those of us who think and belief differently, outside of the square of their fixed certainty.
John, not the gospel writer but John Kendall the infant we baptised this morning, will have his faith forged in this faith community which, I trust, will continue to honour honest exploration, faithful doubt, and committed questing. We cannot tell what shape the Presbyterian Church in general and St Lukes in particular will take when John is at an age to begin seriously asking his own questions, making his own challenges, and deciding whether or not this is the journey he wishes to make his own. We can only hope that St Lukes at least will still offer an openness and breadth of thought that will allow the growing generation to make their own decisions and choices about faith and life with integrity and without coercion. Every generation has to find and develop their own understandings of God and to have their own experiences of God and of faith. Our responsibility as parents, godparents, wider family and a community of faith, to John and the other children in our midst, is to create the atmosphere in which they may explore and experience the sacred for themselves, in their own way.
Personally, I believe that is best done in a church community where there is open dialogue and fruitful debate, where people are unafraid to ask questions and to challenge dogmatism. I believe it is best done in a setting of lives of faith based upon questions and questing, of journeys of exploration to and beyond the boundaries of what is orthodox and traditional. I believe that where there is openness, there will be insight; where there is trust there will be discernment; and where there is honest doubt there will fruitful faith. I believe that radically new possibilities of living and believing are always available to those who choose to follow the way of Jesus Christ and of his God, whether or not they have demonstrable proof of the truth of anything. That is faith ?± setting out on the life-journey in trust and in hope, knowing that one may never find all the answers but knowing that the questions themselves can create new dimensions of understanding and a ?´knowing?? that is beyond the necessity of proof.