Sermon given on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2014
St. Augustine's Episcopal Parish, Tempe, Arizona
Br. Chad-Joseph, OSBCn
Faithfulness
Can I just say that I’ve had a heck
of a couple weeks? I’m a full-time
student in a Master of Divinity program at a Christian institution that doesn’t
take a break for Holy Week. So in
between the four extra services of Holy Week for which I had significant
responsibilities, I was busy reading, writing about, and discussing process
theology, mission and evangelism, and Sufi mysticism . . . not to mention that
the week ended with THE BIGGEST single service of the year that requires significantly
more work to pull off than a typical Sunday. By the end of the Easter Day Mass I hardly had a voice, and
I wanted, after breaking my Lenten fast with a couple good beers, to crawl into
my nice warm bed and sleep for two days.
But then came LAST week, which entailed a whirlwind trip to Denver for
school on Wednesday and Thursday, making Monday and Tuesday anything but
restful as I completed mid-term projects and tried to get a leg up on preparing
for today. Oh, and did I say I
have a young family and my wife works full-time? And hey, look, Fr. Gil’s gone,
and I’m preaching today!
Sometimes it’s really hard to be a white,
middle class, straight, American male, I’ve gotta say. Life can really take its toll. Yeah, I’m never truly hungry, and I
don’t fear for my bodily safety or fear discrimination or that I won’t have a
place for my family to sleep tonight, but sometimes I don’t have time to relax
in front of my favorite episodes.
Yeah, I don’t actually work 80+ hours per week cleaning houses during
the day and office buildings at night so that I can send most of my earnings to
my family in Guatemala, but I haven’t had a proper vacation since last June,
and I’m itching to see the beach or hike in the mountains.
The Gospel reading for today
features the story of “doubting Thomas,” the apostle whom John the Evangelist
throws under the bus while building his case against those who require proof in
order to believe in the Resurrection. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have
come to believe,” declares Jesus at the end of a quite dramatic exchange
between himself and the no-longer-doubting Thomas. I think poor Thomas gets a bad rap, however, not because I
find skepticism virtuous or laudable in and of itself, but because he’s no
worse than the rest of the male apostles, at least according to Luke’s Gospel. After Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary
the mother of James returned from the tomb where they had encountered the two
men in dazzling clothes and told the remaining eleven male apostles that Jesus
had risen, Luke writes about the eleven that “these words seemed to them an
idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Yeah, it’s doubting Thomas,
right, John? Nice try.
Most of the preaching I’ve heard about today’s
Gospel follows the line of St. John’s thought about the nature of faith, about
the role of doubt, and about the place of belief even when we haven’t seen for
ourselves the marks of the nails on the risen body of Jesus. Some say we should be the blessed ones
who have come to believe even though we have not seen. Some say that mature faith embraces
doubt rather than forbidding it. This
line of thinking is important, and there is much to be learned from the
contrast between seeing and not seeing in matters of belief. But by considering these issues only
from the perspective of the male apostles, regarding only their choices and
their actions, it seems to me that our view of the human experience is
distorted by the same lens of privilege through which I just presented my
experience of being overwhelmed over the last couple weeks. While looking through that lens, I fail
to see the untiring network of relational support that makes my life possible,
and, in my case, it is a network of brilliant, kind, generous, faithful women. I would like for us to attempt to move
out from behind that lens this morning.
So, let’s back up a little in the Gospel narrative and ask the question
of belief from a different angle. The
question I would like to consider is this:
What does faithfulness look like when you
have nothing left to believe in?
To find an answer to this question, we
can’t look to any of the men in the story. According to our Gospel today, when they thought all hope
was lost in the wake of Jesus’ execution, they locked themselves behind strong
doors for fear of the authorities.
But one detail on which all four of the canonical Gospels agree in their
accounts of the Resurrection, and there are not many details on which they all agree,
is that the women did not do the same.
Listen to the account found in the Gospel of Mark.
When
the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go
and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had
risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will
roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’
I ask again, what does
faithfulness look like when you have nothing left to believe in? It looks like Mary Magdalene. It looks like Mary the mother of
James. It looks like the other
women, Salome, Joanna, and those left unnamed who didn’t cower behind a locked
door, but who spent their money on spices and awoke early to prepare the body
of a failed Messiah for a proper Jewish burial . . . a failed Messiah whose
crucifixion two days earlier shattered their every hope for the future . . . a failed
Messiah whose death indicated that the beliefs he had nurtured within them
about themselves, about each other, about the world, about God were wrong. And yet still they faithfully observed
the Sabbath, they purchased expensive spices, and, as the sun came up on the
third day, they walked towards what they thought was a dead body on the other
side of an immovable stone. St.
Mark continues:
When
they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been
rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white
robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them,
“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not
here. Look, there is the place
they laid him.
This is what faithfulness
looks like. This is the place
where the very power of the living God to re-create and to transform intersects
with the human experience. We can
talk about the eleven and about Thomas and about how they encountered Jesus or
the news about Jesus and how they believed or didn’t believe, just like I can
talk about my crazy couple weeks and how hard it is to be me right now and all
that it’s teaching me about patience and endurance. But if we want to see the places where God shows up in true
brilliance and surprise, we need to remove the lens that privileges the perspective
of men and look to the margins where faithfulness endures in the face of
heartache and brokenness and exhaustion and hope-shattering failure.
That’s where the real
apostles live.
That’s the place where the
first “Alleluia” enters the world.
Amen.
