Our beliefs are shaped by doubts, by f_lling in th_ gaps

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Easter Sunday

March 31, 2024

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 1:1 - 2:2

John 20:19-31

It seems as if we are all doubting Thomases these days. Or we live in a world of them. What really happened in Baltimore when the ship collided with the bridge? Was that really Kate Middleton breaking the news that she has cancer? Did Name a Person really say this, or was it a faked video? What is even real anymore? Unless I see it with my own eyes, can I believe anything?

But the truth is, a healthy amount of doubt is good for us, and better, perhaps for our relationships. I remember once reading a study about what makes a good therapist. The conclusion was all the usual things: empathy, warmth, listening skills. But one key component was that they were willing to exist with doubt - the doubt that they had everything figured out. They were more likely to doubt they were doing a good job, more likely to wonder whether they were helping. The doubting therapist asked more questions, was more cautious about jumping to conclusions, more patient about allowing the answers to reveal themselves. Those questions led to clearer answers. The patient opened them up to new approaches. Their clients got better more often because of it.

That’s not just the kind of person we might want as a therapist. It’s also the kind we’d want as friend, or parent. Likely, it’s who we’d like to be ourselves. By this definition, doubt sounds a lot like wisdom.

Every year, around this time, I come to Thomas’s defense.  Thomas is the disciple who didn’t meet up with Jesus on the road, who is only now hearing the news of the resurrection and is skeptical about all that happened. When Jesus appears again before the disciples, Thomas wants proof that it all went down as everyone is saying. He wants to touch the wounds on Jesus’s hands. For this he gets the gears from Jesus. “Gee, Thomas,” Jesus says, “glad I won you over. Blessed are all those people who believe in me without insisting on the same proof.”

And so, the English language acquired the phrase, ‘doubting Thomas,” which refers to someone who continues to question even when the facts are laid out before them. That isn’t fair to Thomas – who, once presented with the facts, did indeed come to believe. But we might also ask: What’s wrong with being a doubting Thomas?  Shouldn’t we always leave room for questions however comprehensive the facts seem? After all, as history teaches so well, the facts are often fragile in and of themselves.

Let’s assess what Jesus is saying. He doesn’t actually condemn Thomas; he responds to his request by giving him the test Thomas asks for. And what is he really saying about those other people – who believe without the same evidence – which, I guess, would be us? Are we to presume that those people who came to believe without meeting Jesus never had doubt, never had questions? That’s not logical. Our beliefs are shaped by inquiry, by doubt, by filling in the gaps. Otherwise, they are just thoughts that have been spoon-fed to us. Jesus is acknowledging, however, that believing in an idea is harder when you didn’t experience it yourself. It requires more reflection and introspection. It asks us to look inside ourselves to see what defines us. In this respect the disciples had it easy: they knew Jesus, they had heard him speak, they could build belief on memory. They did not have to rely on someone else’s version of the events, as we do. That we might doubt is not a sin; indeed, it is a strength. Faith is not meant to be lukewarm; it is not a shrug; it is a stance we take in life. And what supports that has to be the hard work of questions.

But let’s go back to those doubting therapists. Yes, they questioned their ability to help their clients. But they didn’t give up on therapy. They used those doubts to improve their approaches, to hone their skills, and to listen more closely. And they began to feel more deeply the pain their clients were feeling, and to see more clearly what they needed. Doubt made them better.

In the same way, doubt improves our relationship with God. I meet plenty of people who want to boast about how their faith is a rock – over time, I have come to see, that too often, it is cement hardened around their feet. Those people tend to be resistant to change, to seeing a larger reality. They don’t like diversity because that makes life complicated; they would rather God was one way – their way. Many others have come to me, often in quiet, and spoken of their doubts: is there a God? Does any of it matter? Why am I here? Those people have taught me many lessons, and I have watched their journeys, carrying their doubt with them to find their truthful view of the world. I don’t think those people ever stop doubting. Doubt doesn’t have an easy answer. What I see happening is that they become more comfortable with their doubt, they even find comfort in not knowing, for certain, the answer. Some questions we ask our entire lives. Some beliefs we hold to like life rafts on an open ocean. Some truths change over time.

That’s the journey we are on with doubting Thomas. We want proof when we can have it, and the faith to go on when we can’t. Thomas went from the room a faithful disciple, and he maintained that belief even when the memory of the wounds of Jesus had faded. We can imagine, that since life is complicated, he encountered, as we do, many other times when his faith in the gospel was tested. He worked through that doubt – as we also should, as we must,

Where does that fit in the conspiracy-fueled, questioning world of today? I guess we have to decide what doubts we want to explore, which questions are worth our time. If we are distracted over here, what are we failing to see over there? I like a good pop culture story as much as anyone - there’s refuge in that. But we can’t stay there: we have to be like Thomas and wrestle with our doubt that truly matters. Be wary of when doubt becomes a tool for the kind of world we don’t want.  

In the end, the questions we have are our own work to do – ideally with God. We can discuss them in community together, we can read in the search for answers, we can pore over the gospel, but it is reflection, and internal conversation – that is prayer – that has always brought me to peace with my doubts. That’s what has taught me to see them as components of faith, not destroyers of belief.

Blind faith, after all, only leads us to stumble as soon as life throws something into our path. The questioning faith of those with eyes wide open to the world allows us to prepare for what lies ahead.

Amen.

What do you see in the tomb?

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Easter Sunday

March 31, 2024

Acts 10:34-43

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Mark 16:1-8

Christ is Risen!

Doesn’t it feel good to say that at last? It has, after all, been a long, weary Lenten season. Grey, wet days. The days seem too short to get everything done. The sun, on those days when it appeared at all, was cold and dull in the sky.

But now – now we can feel the change coming. The days last longer, the colour is coming back to the lawn, the trees are coming back to life. The other morning, I watched a red cardinal and two sparrows playing what looked like tag in my neighbor’s maple tree. Why, BBQ season seems just around the corner! Easter could not arrive at a better time. We are done with bad news: bring out the colored eggs and the lilies. The time for somber thought is over; God wants us to have a party.

But hold on. Have we forgotten something? Have we skipped over a certain chapter of the story? It seems we might have jumped right from grief to joy in an instant – as if we leave Jesus on the cross and turn around, instantly to find him safe again in Heaven. It’s understandable, really. After all, it is bad enough that we have to endure Good Friday, and all the shame that comes from that day. It’s a relief to get to the salvation of Easter. So we rush through that one scene in the middle: we skip over the dark tomb, the place of death where the stone is rolled back, and the women find emptiness. We are relieved when the angel stops them only for a moment and then sends them off again, to spread the Good News. Now that is the part of the story we want to hear. Alleluia! Jesus is Risen!

But…force yourself to look again. Push away the flowers growing by the entrance. Shade your eyes from the sun, bright above your head. Peer inside, past the rolled-away rock, into the shadow: What do you see in the tomb?

If Good Friday is the day when we did nothing – when we allowed, with willful blindness and human weakness, Jesus to suffer on the cross, then Easter – Easter is the day when we must do something. Easter is the moment in every day when we choose to do something for the good of God. We cannot get to that choice by skipping over the part that makes us nervous. In every difficult act, and every hard decision, there is a moment when we must look inside the tomb and decide what we see there. It is the turning point upon which the Easter story hinges. What do you see in the tomb?

The Marys who arrived at its door, who discovered the stone rolled away, panicked when they found it empty. And who could blame them? They must have thought the body of Jesus, already desecrated on the cross, had been stolen. But they paused, and looked deeper at the scene again, because first impressions - first perceptions - do not always tell the whole story. And if ever any place needed a moment of contemplation it was this one. In pausing, they gave the angel the chance to appear, and to explain to them what had happened. They must have looked inside that empty tomb again, considering what the angel told them in clear contradiction of the laws of the world, and they chose to hear what God was saying. It was not in the rising sun of that morning that they learned the truth of the resurrection: it was by looking deep inside the tomb.

So, what do we see there? The tomb, of course, is an analogy for the choices we make – that quiet space before we decide to go left or right. Before we choose to work at a marriage or let it unravel, to forgive or never forget, to go out of our way for someone else or step over the hardship in our path and walk on. We are a society that has become obsessed with happiness – we poll ourselves about it, we calculate the economics of it, we rank which countries have more of it. Every time we do it, we get the same answer. The happiest people are the ones who give the most to charity, no matter what their bank accounts say. The happiest countries are the ones who do the best job of looking after their most needy citizens – even if it means higher taxes for everyone else. Those people and those countries do not skip to the Easter Bunny – they look into the tomb, and they look long and hard. They see the homeless, and the beaten, and the poor, and the broken. They see the shadows in themselves. When humanity so often stumbles into the crime of willful blindness, they choose to face what is wrong, and they decide to do something.

Many times, throughout the Bible, God has spoken through an angelic messenger. But on Easter Sunday, before we hear the angel, God takes us to the tomb. This is no accident. God wants us to look inside and decide what we will choose to see in the shadows. I cannot tell you what that is. It is different for each one of us. And different for us depending on the day and time in our lives. But that moment before the tomb is when we decide whether to hang back with those who did nothing on Good Friday, or to join in doing something on Easter Sunday. And that moment spent peering into the shadow of the tomb doesn’t happen only today: it is how the resurrection speaks to us every day of our lives if we pause long enough to hear the angel.

God understood us better than we understand ourselves. We cannot be happy if we do not come clean with the sadness that exists around us, or inside us – otherwise how can we know what happiness is?

Perhaps, in the shadow of the tomb, you will see how one part of your life is ending. You will recognize the true cost of a careless mistake. You will see where your failure to act led someone to be hurt. That is hard – surely as painful as it must have been for the women who found the broken body of the Messiah gone, unable even to give him a proper burial. But pause for a moment. Look more deeply into the shadow. And Listen. The resurrection of Easter teaches us that there is more to hear: in every ending there is the promise, always, of a new beginning. In that careless mistake there is the opportunity for reparation. In our failure to act, there is the chance to do better the next time. But we get there only if we are brave enough to see what waits for us in the tomb.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Be joyful when you speak those words and know that God guides us from the tomb to forgiveness and love. A place to start over. But don’t miss the true moment of the resurrection. Don’t rush off too quickly. Understand that God has given you a chance to look without fear and doubt inside the tomb – to see the joy that may be hidden in shadow - and to know that you will have the strength to face whatever answer awaits you there. That is the true secret of happiness at Easter.

Amen.

May your eyes be open

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Good Friday

March 29, 2024

Psalm 22

John19: 1-42

This year, a German movie, called Zone of Interest won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. If you have seen it, perhaps, like me, you remain haunted by it. If you have not watched it, I encourage you to brace yourself and do so. If any movie speaks to the theme and events of Good Friday, it is this one. 

At one point, in the movie, the mother of the family, Hedwig, makes this observation: “We’re living how we dreamed we would, with everything on our doorstep.” And yet, both she and we are complicit is what lies on her doorstep: her husband is the celebrated commander of Auschwitz, and Hedwig is raising her children in a fine home with a grand garden, where the air is filled with the screams of the living and the ashes of the dead. 

Listen to the pretty bird, the father says to his son, while the terror of the concentration camp plays on. His young son plays in a pool with a shower head that looks like it may be an extra from the gas chambers; his eldest plays with stones like teeth he picked from the garden; a gardener – a prisoner – puts ashes on a flower bed. Don’t look too closely. Don’t focus your hearing too intently. Don’t let your mind drift.  

When her husband is posted to another location, Hedwig is enraged; “You will have to drag me out of here,” she says, while trainloads of people are being dragged to there. Where is there? We never see. The horror of the movie is that human life is ending on an unimaginable scale, and we are trapped with this family who is complicit in these murders, in this genocide, and refuses to see, refuses to act. We catch a hint at the end that the father feels something: that, as the actor who played him put it, his body tells the truth of what his mind cannot face. But he carries on and returns to his family and his garden and his favourite horse on the edge of nightmare. 

As a German Lutheran, I can tell you, it was not easy for me to watch this movie. And the memory of it lingers with me uneasily still.

But then, this is not a day to feel easy. This is a day when we must acknowledge our guilt. It is a day when we must force ourselves to hear the most tragic and horrifying story of our faith lives – and know that while it happened, while Jesus stumbled to his death, while his hands and feet were hammered into the cross, and while he hung, dying, people did nothing. They were smiling with everything taking place on their doorstep. 

We can ease our own guilt by saying – we were not there, that was before our time. We make ourselves feel better by saying – we would have acted differently. And we can comfort ourselves by quoting the prophecy, by making this God’s plan – that one day a Saviour would come, and die on a cross, that it had to happen this way. 

But that is not the posture of how we should face Good Friday. And, in any event, none of those statements are really true. The fact of Good Friday is this: On the cross, Jesus said: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” But Jesus was simply being kind to us: they knew – and we know – exactly what they were doing. Willful blindness is not the same as being truly blind.

We may not have been there physically, but we were part of it, as surely as we are part of the human race that has committed one act of willful blindness after another, while others died, and injustice was allowed to have its way. Certainly, the soldiers wishing Happy Birthday to their commander could argue willful blindness: Auschwitz was roughly 40 square kilometres and divided into three camps – the first, was the offices; the second part, called Birkenau, contained the gas chamber and crematorium; and the third housed the labour camp. A soldier or a female office worker might say they didn’t know what was happening: but we wouldn’t believe them, would we? After all, where did they think all those people were going? What did they think the smoke was from? Why did Auschwitz exist at all?

And what of the willful blindness when Jesus went to the cross? We lay our blame at the feet of the Pharisees, and Pilate, and the mob – but what of everyone else who was there in Jerusalem in those days? Are we to believe they didn’t know what was happening? That they could have been somehow ignorant of the fact that the most famous man in the city – an innocent man – was walking to his death? Of course, they knew. And they chose, for reasons that probably made sense at the time, to look the other way.

That is the Good Friday story. It is what so often haunts people who live through great wrongdoing: how could I have done nothing? Why did I allow myself to be blind? It is no coincidence, by the way, that the story of Auschwitz fits so well with the story of Good Friday: since the latter was used, so tragically, in part, to justify the former.  The truth is we don’t need to look very hard for examples of humanity’s being blind to tragedy: we allowed women to go their deaths for being witches, we have permitted famines to ravage entire countries, we have allowed religious wars to wipe out families. If there is a human failing that has done more damage than any other, it is not the evildoers themselves. It is those of us who knew better and did nothing.

“Forgive them, father,” Jesus said, “for they know not what they do.” Except, we did know. If this were a Hollywood tale, a brave team of heroes would have organized a rescue party, tackled those Roman soldiers, and saved Jesus from the cross. But this is not Hollywood; and most of the time, in real life, we walk on by – we don’t want to get involved, we don’t want to risk ourselves or our own families. We choose to be blind. It is why we so celebrate the hero who chooses to see– why we love those Hollywood action movies – because we know how rare that is. That is why a movie like Zone of Interest is so hard to watch and stays with us so long. It tells the story of real life. More often than not, no hero saves the day. More often than not, the villain lies within. 

And what of the prophecy? Can we not comfort ourselves by saying Jesus was destined for the cross? Let’s consider that: for I believe that the prophecy was more about us than we like to own up to. The prophecy assumed that we would give in to our baser human weaknesses – that our leaders would be greedy, and Pilate would be duplicitous, the disciples would be cowardly, and the rest of the mob would be weak and allow Jesus to be sacrificed. And then, of all those people in Jerusalem , not one would do anything to stop it. “Forgive them, [God],” Jesus said, “for they know, not what they do.” Except we did know – and God, who has a better understanding of our own human failings than we do ourselves, knew we would not be strong enough to stop it from happening. That is what we must own up to on Good Friday: the most tragic human weakness of willful blindness.

So what, then, does God do? God opens our eyes. God urges us to look at ourselves, to see our weakness, and to accept it. And then God says, I forgive you. Follow me to the cross, and I will heal you. Take my hand and I will show you the truth of the world so that you can make it right. That is the prophecy, the gift of Good Friday: that God opens our eyes, so that we might see Jesus do what we are so often too fearful to do – sacrifice himself for others. And God’s hope is that we will keep those eyes open and turn our guilt and grief into something worthy of the price that was paid.

For humanity also knows that path as well. For every German soldier sunbathing outside the grounds of Auschwitz, there were German citizens who hid their neighbors, and helped them reach safety. For every Westerner who pretended there was no famine and no war in Africa, there were others who went to deliver medicine, who wore the uniform of peace. For every 10 people who drive by a homeless person, there is always someone eventually who will stop.

 “Forgive them, [God], for they know not what they do,” Jesus said. Except we did know. And we do know. If Good Friday, was the day when we did nothing, let it not also be the day that is Good for Nothing. Let us learn the lesson of today: if someone must open their eyes so that salvation is possible and justice is delivered, then may our eyes be open.

Amen.