Billings Sermon

This is the sermon I preached in the Divinity Hall pulpit on Thursday (where Emerson gave the Divinity School Address!) as part of the 2008 Billings Preaching Prize competition. It is really just a shorter version of a sermon I preached at First Cambridge last April. I made the finals this year, which will be held April 23rd, but I honestly don’t think I’ll win. I’m up against my dear friend Sheila, or as I like to think of her, “the Rev.” She’s a grandmother from Brooklyn, and wow does she have the Spirit!

(Update: Sheila did, in fact, win the Billings Prize, one of Harvard’s oldest awards, for “eloquence in the pulpit.” I am very happy to have been among the finalists, as the finals sermons were all amazing, and filled with God’s Word.)

The Sermon

The standard sermon for the story of Doubting Thomas goes something like this: Poor Thomas, he just didn’t have enough faith. It’s a good thing we have enough faith. Yeah us! Or maybe, I know you’re having a hard time believing the teachings of the church in light of the real world, but don’t be a doubting Thomas. This is not going to be that standard sermon.

Now, let’s imagine for a moment that I’m an author, and the Gospel of John is in manuscript form, and here I am sitting before my editor waiting to hear the magic words: cash advance. But instead what I hear is: “Let’s talk about the motivation of Thomas in the final chapter. I’m not sure you’ve made your case. The man has seen Lazarus raised from the dead, the storm stilled, walking on water, miracle after miracle. Why doesn’t he believe now? It’s just not plausible.”

We probably all feel a bit like my fictional editor. Just because something happened while I was out getting the milk and bread doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. Judas Didymus Thomas has been with these folks, these women and men traveling with and learning from Jesus, for several years. They’ve been through some amazing times together. And they’ve seen miracles, they’ve seen death defeated. So why doubt now?

It probably helps to think a little bit about what was going on when this text was written. Early Christians didn’t know what to believe about Jesus. Christianity was moving towards orthodoxy, but it wasn’t there yet. The authors of the Gospels were deeply involved in a struggle to understand. Jesus mattered, they knew that, but he always seemed to be just beyond their understanding.

One area of conflict was how were they to understand the resurrection? Was the resurrection bodily, with flesh and blood? Or was it a resurrection of spirit. This was a question not just about Jesus, but a question about what it meant to be human. This gospel story affirms the physicality of the resurrection, flesh and blood, stuff you could touch. One hint of the counter-argument can be seen in the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus.

Another struggle was between those who would come to define orthodox Christian belief and those who adopted other understandings of Jesus. The apostles most commonly associated with the heterodox group called the Gnostics were Mary Magdalene and Judas Didymus Thomas. Our text is about confirming that Jesus was resurrected in the body, and it is about deciding whose understanding of the Christ event is correct. That is not to say that these events did not happen. But it helps us to see the humans involved in the gospel story, in the creation of the gospels, in the decisions about which stories were written down and which were not.

So what are we supposed to do with the story of Doubting Thomas? If this text is very much about doctrinal struggles, what can a Christian today learn from it? Well, we can all admit that Thomas comes off looking like a knucklehead. But they all look like knuckleheads. Let’s start with Simon Peter. In the Lucan version of his call, we always skip to the line where Jesus says “I’ll make you a fisher of humans.” We ignore Peter’s first response. “Dude, I’m unrighteous. Go away.” I suspect Peter gets nicknamed Rock not because he is “the Rock of the Church” but because he is about as smart as a box of rocks. Who can forget the three denials? Of course, he gets it right sometimes too.

Then there are James and John, so rowdy that they get nicknamed the Sons of Thunder. I like to think of them as the biblical Bash Brothers. If you’re the right age to know the Mighty Ducks movies, you know what I’m talking about. “Dude, let us be your top two guys?” they ask Jesus. And Jesus’ response? “Dudes, you so do not know what you are asking.”

These guys don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what to believe, the gospels writers tell us that Jesus isn’t even trying to make it clear, because it will become clear on resurrection morning. The preaching and teaching and miracle, the feast in the Upper Room and the murder on the tree, it will be clear. The Holy Spirit will comfort them and inspire them and they will change the world. But they’ll still be a bunch of knuckleheads! Even after the resurrection. After he has assumed a leadership role in the early church, Peter still blunders at Antioch. “Unclean food? What unclean food?” They don’t know what to believe, what to do, how to act. But they do know this. Jesus changes everything!

They tried to explain Jesus in terms of his own Judean religion. They took up term of the Roman Emperor. They used many terms trying to describe who Jesus was, what he did, what he meant. And in the midst of this confusion and this grasping for meaning, they did an amazing thing. They changed the world.

No doubt, the mixture of sheer terror and overwhelming hope of that one weekend in Jerusalem stayed with the apostles, women and men, for the rest of their lives. The confusion, the shock. But they took their evangelion, literally the good proclamation, and they went out there and said this: Jesus changes everything.

Today, the name Jesus is controlled by the neo-Pharisees who have the audacity to speak for God. They’ve reduced Jesus to death insurance, to an excuse for self-righteousness, to a nationalistic warrior. Many of us sit back ashamed of what has been done in the name of Jesus, afraid to speak it in public. Jesus has been co-opted by Empire, by the individualism of the Enlightenment, by the thinly disguised selfishness of our economic system. You don’t have to be a theologian or a biblical scholar to see what is at stake. You don’t even have to be certain. You can be a knucklehead and spread the good news!

When I get up in the morning, a week and three snooze-buttons behind schedule, I can do so knowing this. God is good. Jesus changes everything. Even a knucklehead can get that! Do you know that Jesus loves you? That God is good? Does knowing Jesus change your life? We must be the ones to proclaim it. Jesus lives! Reclaim the name. When others preach hatred and division in the name of Christ, confront them, tell them they are worshipping idols of their own creation. If progressives are silent then Christianity will die a slow irrelevant death.

The world today wants Jesus, a real authentic mysterious Jesus. Easter Jesus is always just beyond our grasp, and that’s okay.

If we prayerfully engage the world, if we bring sacrament and Scripture and love with us into the world, we can change it. We can be the leaven in the loaf, not because we can do it on our own, but because Christ is with us when we are gathered in his name, because the good news is the tree and the empty tomb, because Easter is joyful hope, stunned confusion, it is fear and love , it is life in our amazing God.

We must reach back to that original Easter morning, and tell the world! Change the world. Proclaim the good news. Christ is risen indeed. Jesus changes everything. If Peter with his head of stone, if the Bash Brothers and Thomas and Mary Magdalene, if they could go out and preach, so can we. They didn’t know what they were doing either. They lived in that Easter moment. So can we. So must we. Welcome my knuckleheaded sisters and brothers. Welcome to the joy of life in Christ! Proclaim the name! Jesus the Christ, our salvation. Amen.