Easy for You; Hard for Me First Baptist Richmond, April 8, 2018 The Second Sunday of Easter John 20:19-31 When my children were younger they used to watch Sesame Street on television and sometimes, just to keep them company, I would watch with them. You know Sesame Street, right? Big Bird, Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, and a lot of really good, really simple lessons for children. Like the time a little boy ran up the steps onto a stage and sat down in a chair. Right behind him came a man on crutches, his legs in heavy braces, struggling up the steps. When he finally took his seat, put down his crutches and unlocked his braces he looked at the little boy and said, What s easy for you is hard for me. And then the little boy picked up a violin and began to saw away at the strings, playing Mary had a Little Lamb very, very badly. And then the man with the crutches picked up a violin, and that s when I recognized him as Itzhak Perlman, possibly the greatest violinist in the world. He picked up his bow and ripped off a few breathtaking measures of a complicated piece of music. When he was finished the little boy said, What s easy for you is hard for me. That was the end of the lesson, but it was a good one, not only for my children, but also for me. Because there was one Easter Sunday, near the beginning of my ministry, when I preached on the resurrection of the body and at the end of the sermon I said, Believe it or not, this is the orthodox Christian position, and everything else is just... heresy! Believing in the resurrection of the body is easy for me, and I may have been showing off a little when I said in that sermon that someday on the other side of death I look 1
forward to putting real arms around those people I have loved and lost, feeling my eyes fill up with tears of joy; when I said that I look forward to gazing on the face of the risen Lord, seeing the wounds in his hands and his side, and hearing my name on his lips. I wasn t just being sentimental when I said it. I really do believe those things, but then I have always been a believer. My mother tells me that when I was six years old and she was expecting one of my little brothers she confessed to me her fear that he might be born on Christmas day. That would be terrible, she said, because there she would be, in the hospital, and there we would be, trying to have Christmas at home without her. According to my mother that s when I shrugged my shoulders and said, Just trust God. That s what I always do! She must have taken my advice. She was at home with us all day on Christmas, trusting God, enjoying the festivities. My brother Gray was born the very next day, on December 26. But what was easy for me was hard for her. Part of the reason it s easy for me, I think, is that I spend a good bit of time in the right side of my brain. Scientists these days are beginning to doubt the old evidence about right and left brain theory, but I grew up hearing that the right side of the brain is less rational, more intuitive than the left side which is more logical and analytical. The left brain likes to break things down into their individual parts; the right brain likes to take those parts and see what it can build out of them. The left brain often excels at things like math and science; the right brain at things like poetry and art. It doesn t mean that one side of the brain is better than the other, but like that little boy who could run up the steps and the man who could play the violin they are different: what s easy for one is hard for the other. If there is a hemisphere of the brain that is best suited for believing, I 2
think it would be the right one. The left brain can probably do it, just as I when I am forced can do math, but it might feel a little bit like walking up the steps on crutches. So, here s the question I ve been working toward from the beginning of this sermon: what does the church do with those who have a hard time believing? When I work out at the Jewish Community Center, where I am a member, there are some people who can lift a hundred pounds over their head and many more who cannot. What s easy for some is hard for others. But all those people are members of the Center. No one is excluded on the basis of ability. So, what about the church? In a room full of people who refer to themselves as believers, where many are able to believe easily and naturally, is there any room for someone who still has some doubts? I m sure that there have always been people who were more left-brained than right, but those people really had their heyday in the last half of the last millennium. There were all those discoveries in math and science, all that breaking down of a big world into its many, fascinating individual parts. Those periods of history we refer to as the Renaissance and the Reformation took place in those years and it seemed as if people were just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. In 1835 a German scholar named David Friedrich Strauss published a book called The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, which applied the tools of modern historical criticism to the Bible. Strauss was trying to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith by removing all those layers of myth and legend that had built up over the years. In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which suggested that the earth, rather than being a few thousand years old as the Bible taught, was actually millions of years old, allowing for the slow, stately evolution of all things. 3
Bruce Bawer says that the effect of evolution and the higher criticism on many American Protestants can be summarized in one word: panic. Literal-minded believers were terrified by a set of scientific and scholarly propositions that implicitly denied much 1 of the truth of scripture and seemed to threaten to topple the old time religion. P0F P They began to build churches whose walls, so to speak, were high and strong enough to 2 protect them from a world full of ambiguity and doubt. P1F P By th the end of the 19P P century those Christians who embraced the new ideas were known as modernists or liberals and those who rejected them were known as fundamentalists, a distinction that continues to this day. In 1895 a group of antimodernist ministers gathered at the Niagara Bible Conference to affirm their belief in the inerrancy of Scripture and insist that any real Christian would have to believe in 1. Christ s divinity, 2. his virgin birth, 3. his bodily resurrection, 4. his second coming, and 5. the doctrine of substitutionary 3 atonement.p2f P If you can t believe those things, the fundamentalists would say, then you are not really a Christian. You don t belong in the church. Get out! Which is what they would have said to Thomas. It wasn t that Thomas didn t believe in Jesus. He believed all right. He was the one who had said to the other disciples, when Jesus was getting ready to go back into enemy territory, Let us go, that we may die with him. He was willing to do anything for him, willing to lay down his life for him. I would guess that when Jesus died on that cross that day something in Thomas died, too. I have often imagined that it wasn t because Thomas didn t care about Jesus that he wasn t in that room with the others on the 1 Bruce Bawer, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997). p. 85. 2 Ibid., p. 87. 3 Bawer, Stealing Jesus, p. 88. 4
evening of that first Easter, but that he cared so much. People grieve in different ways. Is it possible that while the others needed to be together Thomas needed to be alone? Whatever the reason, he wasn t there. He didn t see Jesus standing there, didn t hear him say, Peace be with you, didn t feel that warm breath on his face, or hear those words, As the Father has sent me, so send I you. He missed the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus and when the others tried to tell him about it later, falling all over themselves in their excitement, he said, No. I don t believe it. I won t believe it. I m not going to let my heart be broken twice. But it s true, Thomas, the others insisted. He was here. We saw him! Until I see him, Thomas persisted, Until I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the marks, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe. Which means that Thomas was an unbeliever. He still believed in Jesus, but he did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Fundamentalism would say that he was not a real Christian, that it wasn t enough to believe in Jesus in some kind of vague, fuzzy, sort of way. You needed to have a faith that was solid and real, something you could sink your teeth into! It wouldn t do any good to have a church full of people who questioned their faith, who were only Christianity curious. No! If the church was going to stand up against the onslaught of liberalism, modernism, secular humanism, it was going to require some believers with rock-solid faith. No room in the church for the doubting Thomases of our time. But thank God there was room then. In today s Gospel lesson John tells us that a week after Easter the disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. I think I could preach a whole sermon on that phrase: Thomas was with them. Even 5
though he didn t believe in the resurrection he was with them. It s a miracle on both sides: on Thomas s side because he was willing to be with people who believed something he didn t, who had experienced something he hadn t; but it was a miracle on the disciples side that they let Thomas the unbeliever stay with them. They had given their eyewitness account of the resurrection, and yet Thomas refused to believe. Even so, they refused to put him out of the fellowship. Because who knows when an unbeliever might become a believer? Who knows when someone who has said, stubbornly, I will not believe will change his tune to My Lord and My God? Who knows when Jesus himself will walk into the room in an effort to make believers out of unbelievers, and for that reason, if no other, it s important to make room for unbelievers in the church. John tells us that a week later his disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them. Thomas was with them. Thomas was with them. The doors were locked for fear of the religious authorities but not for fear of the unbelievers. Thomas was with them when Jesus himself came and stood among them. And what became clear was that he hadn t come for them, but for him for Thomas. Suppose Thomas hadn t been there? Suppose the others had told him that because he didn t believe in the bodily resurrection he didn t have any place in the church? Suppose there was never any room for doubt in our faith? Where would you be, and where would I be? Inside or outside of those locked doors? And speaking of locked doors, when I was at First Baptist Church in Washington, DC, we did everything we could to make our building accessible. We did it partly because one of our members, Gordon, worked for the government and because his job 6
was to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act, but it wasn t the government we were trying to please: it was Gordon. Gordon had cerebral palsy, he came to church in a motorized wheelchair, but he didn t want to be left of anything. He talked through a computer attached to his chair, and he said some funny things. He once programmed an entire sit-down comedy routine into his computer that began with the line, Hello, my name is Gordon, and I get much better parking places than you. Gordon would just sit there and grin while everybody cracked up. When we went on our Sunday Funday outings after church Gordon would zoom ahead of us in his motorized wheelchair, get on the Metro, and beat us to whatever museum or event we were headed to. He would be waiting when we got there, with that same big grin on his face. When he was ordained as a deacon we made sure that he had a way to participate in the serving of communion. And when he got married we built a ramp so he could roll up the chancel steps and join his bride at the altar. In those years we put in a wheelchair lift in the stairwell, and sliding glass doors on the front and back of the building. We wanted to make sure that if Itzhak Perlman ever came to First Baptist he could get into the church. But even more we wanted to make sure that Gordon could get in and out, up and down, easily. He was one of us. We didn t want him to be left out of anything. When we finished the renovations we put one of those little decals on the outside doors, with a symbol of a wheelchair that proudly proclaims: this church is accessible! I wish we could put a symbol on the door of every church, some small image or icon of Thomas that would tell the world This church is accessible to those who have some doubts. Because you never know when Jesus is 7
going to show up. You never know when someone who has been struggling with doubt for a long, long time might look on that face and say, My Lord and my God! Jim Somerville 8