Of Bricks and Springs

A sermon for the second Sunday in Eastertide given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on April, 15 2012.

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1:1-2:2

John 20:19-31

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’

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“We always said that Tom Ryle should have been a preacher.

Every Sunday he was the first one into church and the last one out.

He even had himself a special seat with his name on to it right up front by the pulpit.

When people came in late, Tom would turn round in his seat and stare at em.

One Sunday, the Reverend Foggs preached an unusually inspiring sermon about how Christ walked upon the waters.

After the service, Tom headed straight for Decker's pond and ran right into it – clear up to his neck in the water.

Some people come by and asked him how the water was.

He replied not bad, not bad at all – I took two or three steps afore I went down.”

--transcribed from Bert and I... (CD) by Marshall Dodge and Bob Bryan

Let us turn to our gospel reading -- the story of the famous “Doubting Thomas.”

I like Thomas. I can certainly understand what he might have been thinking when he said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

This man had just gone through a traumatic experience along with the other disciples and friends and family of the crucified Jesus.

Now the disciples want him to believe that Jesus appeared to them, alive again.

Thomas has a lot of pain and pain gets in the way of feeling that the world is good, that there might be a bright turn in events.

Thomas is probably not an idiot either: dead people don’t rise.

What’s more, the only reason the others believe is because they have seen. So we can’t be too hard on Thomas for his stubborn refusal to believe without evidence.

Of course when Thomas does see, he is extreme in his praise: ‘My Lord and my God!’

We are a people of extremes. We need to see and without seeing we will remain solid doubters, skeptics.

We are a people of extremes: either complete doubt or complete sight.

We want to be either confident that what we believe is true beyond the shadow of a doubt or else...

we might as well be fishing.

So I think Jesus’ words should disturb us moderns:

‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’

“blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

we don’t want to believe without seeing. that not only seems foolish it goes against every hard-headed experience-strong inclination in our stubborn New Hampshire minds.

don’t try to fool me. don’t try to sell me anything. i won’t buy unless it makes sense. otherwise i’ll save my time. i’ll save my money.

we live in extremes. we live in the world of seeing is believing.

and then we hear Jesus’s words: “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

what is Jesus saying here? how are we supposed to take this?

i want to look at Jesus’ words with the help of Pastor Rob Bell of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In his 2005 book Velvet Elvis,* Bell has take a fresh look at what it means to believe.

He uses two pictures: one is a brick wall and the other is a trampoline.

Bell thinks the Christian faith is like jumping on a trampoline.

The point of Christian belief is not belief. The point is the life that God through Jesus Messiah has called us to live, the light that God has called us to make known in a world beset with darkness.

Jesus our shepherd directs us to the waters of peace and the pastures that are green...

Earlier in the gospel of John we read,“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Rob Bell thinks the abundant life that Jesus calls us to live out is like jumping on a trampoline.

He recognizes that if we are going to jump, we need the trampoline, we need the springs that make up the trampoline.

he writes:

“when we jump we begin to see the need for springs. the springs help make sense of these deeper realities that drive how we live everyday. The springs aren’t God. The springs aren’t Jesus. The springs are statements or beliefs about our faith that help give words to the depth that we are experiencing in our jumping. I would call these the doctrines of the Christian faith.” (Bell 22)

What we believe, what sustains our faith, the doctrines, the truths are the springs of the trampoline.

they aren’t the point. they aren’t what makes up the Christian life, but they sustain the ability of the individual and the community to continue on jumping, to continue on coming to know God, living the life that God has called us to, moving forward in the journey.

You don’t have to know and be certain of all of the things that are in the faith, in the historic creeds in order to know the grace of God and enter into the story of God’s salvation.

In fact, when you find a spring that doesn’t make sense, like the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is one being and three persons, take the spring out and look it over, “discuss it, probe it, question it. It stretches and it flexes” (Bell 22).

“In fact,” Bell writes, “its stretch and flex are what make it so effective. It is firmly attached to the frame and the [trampoline] mat, yet it has room to move. And it has brought a fuller, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God. Once again, the springs aren’t God. They have emerged over time as people have discussed and studied and experienced and reflected on their growing understanding of who God is. Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations” (Bell 22-23)

So why do we feel so guilty when we doubt? Why do we feel like we should be certain?

We’ve been duped into thinking that the point is having all our theological and philosophical ducks in a row.

We’ve been guilted by past generations that we have to silence, suppress, shut down all doubt, all question, all uncertainty.

These voices have been raised against fearful attacks against the truth of Christian claims. In the face of changes in our understanding about the world, people have felt threatened and tried to defend an older way of seeing the world. Galileo was threatened torture unless he recanted what he had written about his new understanding of the universe -- that the earth moved around the sun rather than vice versa. Why? Because the new understanding seemed to contradict how things had been understood.

Galileo had taken the spring out of the trampoline, the one called “geo-centrism” and rethought it in light of new evidence, stretched it, flexed it.

He found that the Bible makes reference to the sun moving around the earth but was able to rethink what this might mean and see that the writers who wrote about the sun’s movement were poetically expressing what they experienced. It had a poetic reality, a poetic truth.

Stretching the spring did not cause the whole faith to crumble. It gave a deeper more complex way of reading the Bible, of understanding human and divine perspectives.

But for the people who opposed Galileo, belief and unbelief was not like a trampoline.

For them, the Christian faith is a brick wall. If you take one brick out, the integrity of the whole structure is threatened.

For them, faith was sight. Faith was certainty. A strong and tall brick wall that it is our job to preserve and protect.

We continue on in history with both perspectives. Springs and bricks.

Bell calls the defensive posture “Brickianity”

There is a natural defensiveness in Brickianity. If you question this belief of mine, if your science of heliocentrism challenges my geocentrism, rather than adapting, rather than allowing that spring to be reunderstood, flexed in a new way, I will defend my older understanding. My understanding is the point, I am not a Christian if I am not certain. My faith is not real if it is not founded on absolute and unquestionable facts.

This will to certainty is not a will to truth. To want certainty is to want a system that will never completely represent what is true and real. To want certainty is to want control over the universe. We aren’t call to have control over truth, we are called to follow the one who is True and trust that we will be led into all truth.

As I said earlier, we are a people of extremes. We need to see and without seeing we will remain solid doubters, skeptics. We are a people of extremes: either complete doubt or complete sight.

And both skepticism and seeing are two sides of the brick wall. The wall that has been fought over. Both want to either have certainty that something is true without a shadow of a doubt or throw it in the trash.

But Jesus says, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

Seeing is certainty and certainty is something that we moderns long for in our changing and uncertain times.

But what if God doesn’t want us to be certain? What if God wants us to live with questions? What if the questions give us a kind of humility and hospitality to truth that we can’t have with certainty?

We are not called to be those who see with certainty. We are called to be those who jump on the trampoline, those who enter into the journey of the new life with an openness to how God will reveal this new life to us everyday.

A final point I want to make relates to the understanding of faith that we have.

Brickianity has triumphed in the definition of belief in our modern world. Belief for moderns means certainty.

But Luther never understood faith this way.

Faith was never something we do. Faith was not something we achieve or some tool for fighting a war of ideas or cultures or religions.

Rather, faith is our recognition of our inability to be perfect, our inability to live up to the standards we see all around us, our inability to have the perspective and knowledge that belongs to God alone, our inability to be in control of our lives.

And what is Brickianity if it isn’t an attempt to have a God-like perspective, to presume to know everything beyond a shadow of a doubt and to demonize as unfaithful as spiritual failures those who dared to question that certainty in any one of its major points.

We’ve turned faith into works if we make it necessary that we believe x,y, and z in order to be a Christian, in order to be a follower of Christ.

Rather, belief is a clinging to God, a clinging to God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, God’s love.

To let God be God that we might enjoy God’s mercy and light.

To be honest about who we are in all our limitations that we might exalt in the God who created a universe that is ultimately a mystery even to our brightest physicists.

It is a clinging to God like a rock in the sea of our doubts. Not trying to deny the sea, but trusting God in the midst of it.

God is not offended at our doubts, God is not angry at our questions. God knows that we are but humans with the perspective of humans, and he understands all the reasons why in this modern world we may find things to doubt, things to question in the faith that has been handed down to us.

To feel guilty for doubting, for questioning is to exist in the world where we have to be right, we have to have control over truth.

‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’

To presume to have certainty -- to have to “see” in order to believe. That is pride -- humility lives by the grace of God.

As Hamlet says “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Christianity does not depend on the strength of our belief as if we were a kind of Atlas holding up the heavens. Christianity is a trampoline on which we jump.

To use another image, Christian faith is a house in which we dwell, We can point to different things and say “how does that work?” and there’s a trust that someone back somewhere at sometime asked a similar question and if they didn’t find an answer maybe we won’t and that’s ok. Because coming to know God is a process of coming to know how little we do know.

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Matt 11:28-30)

Christ calls us to follow him in the way of the easy yoke and the light burden. Come as you are, come with questions, come with doubts, just come. This house in which we dwell is a large house and there is much to explore as we journey together.

God will show us much if we are honest with ourselves and hospitable to truth whereever it may be found.

“blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

blessed are we when we give up the pretense to see

and rather rest in God’s sight, believing that God accepts us as we are, that no works, no achievement, no certainty is required. Only honest acceptance of our limitations that we might know the richness of God’s love and acceptance of us as we are.

blessed are they that don’t presume to have certainty and control, but rest in the God who is beyond all words of description and beyond all systems of definition.

As the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans:

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!

‘For who has known the mind of the Lord?

Or who has been his counsellor?’

‘Or who has given a gift to him,

to receive a gift in return?’

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.

(Romans 11:33)

*Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Zondervan, 2005).