ThisWeeksSermon, The 2d Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009 "It's okay to call me Thomas."

[Jerry Brooks]

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What’s in a name?
I’ve often given thought to the idea that the names we’re given at birth affect how we turn out in life.
Name your daughter Charity and she would live out a life of generosity.
Or name her Joy or Felicity and she would spread gladness and cheerfulness wherever she went.
Or a boy named Geronimo would always lead the charge.
Ernest, with a name like that, it wouldn’t be surprising that he live a life of dedication and commitment.
My middle name is Gerald, but to my family, always Jerry.
If they’d called me Woody or Steve or Zak, something really masculine and sporty, I believe I might have been able to hit a baseball, catch a football.
I would have wanted to shoot a gun.
It was a curse, I thought.
I went by a name that could just as well have been a girl’s name.
Jerry, spelled differently of course, but still Jerry.
But that was only half of it, half of the name curse.
My first name is Thomas.
And I want to tell you that growing up in a fundamentalist Sunday school, when this morning’s story of doubting Thomas insisting on physical proof of resurrection, when this story came up, I figured I was doubly cursed.
Not only was I predestined never to do well in competitive sports, I was predestined to disbelieve, and as a boy I did question everything.
It fit.
Even then, in Sunday school, I was a doubter.
I remember saying I believed.
But I really didn’t.
Summing it up in two sentences
I was very sick for a couple of days this past week.
Chills and goosebumps, hot showers and extra layers of bedding at night, to get warm, then again lapsing into a humid jungle of night sweats.
Weird nocturnal fixations would wake me up, and then morph into a kind of hallucinatory reality that stayed with me when I was awake.
For a day and a half, no matter how hard I tried, I could not figure out whether it was Friday or Saturday, and I didn’t have the energy to go out and pick up the newspaper in the driveway, to find out.
I knew I would never make it to church today.
And even if I could, how could I prepare a sermon in time.
Impossible.
What I decided I could do, in my hallucinatory haze, would be to point at the proposition that I ended up printing on the front covers of today’s service booklets.
My plan was to simply read that premise.
And then go and sit down.
Doubt is not the opposite of faith.
Certainty is.
Actually, I think the premise speaks for itself.
Bible-waving Christians are certain that they have it right, handed down from on high, dictated by God.
It’s in The Book.
Dogma-spewing Christians are just as certain they have the Truth, infallibly passed on from generation to generation.
If that’s true, with such certainty, there’s really no need for what Paul Tillich calls “a leap of faith.”
Certainty is the opposite of faith.
Basing your faith on what the church taught
The gospels proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead.
The tomb couldn’t hold him.
That proclamation became the essence of the preaching of the early church.
We recite it in our liturgy every Sunday
Christ has died
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
It’s enshrined in the gospels.
The writers tell of Jesus making prophetic predictions about his own future.
If you base your faith on the Christ of the gospels, you’re actually basing your faith on what the early church taught about Christ.
Take the gospels seriously
I suggest that it’s very important to take the gospels very seriously.
But never take them literally.
They were written about the experiences that friends and followers had with the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
They were written two or more generations after the life of Jesus.
They were written in a language that Jesus didn’t even understand.
Not Jesus, not his disciples, none of them could read or write New Testament Koine Greek.
I can, but they couldn’t.
There’s no way that the gospels, written in a language no longer spoken, can be regarded as literally accurate.
But it’s my opinion that they don’t have to literally accurate.
They don’t have to be in order to allow us insight into the meaning of Jesus, insight gained by looking at the portrait of Jesus that each gospel writer painted.
Another thing to remember:
The gospels are not independent sources, except for John, today’s writer.
Mark was the first to write, and Matthew incorporated about 90 percent of Mark, adding some additional innovative details.
Luke incorporated about 50 percent of Mark.
John’s the one who started fresh and contradicts Mark’s theology.
For Mark, God’s kingdom was “at hand,” available, reach out, take it.
For John, it’s more about believing certain things.
That haunting memorized Bible verse from my childhood, God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that anyone who believes it will be guaranteed eternal life.
I wanted to believe.
But I had trouble sustaining belief.
My friend Meredyth and I were talking not long ago about how many times we were “re-saved” as children, to make sure that recurring doubts had not undone our guarantee of eternal life.
Salvation was a very scary thing for me.
I was sent to church, but my parents didn’t go.
My parents were not “believers,” and so they of course, according to John 3:16, would not enjoy eternal life.
It worried me.
It worried me a lot.
Want a Bible study program
If you’re interested in Bible study, you can do it on your own.
Read the gospels in the order in which they were written.
First Mark, then Matthew, then Luke, then John.
Look for what Matthew and Luke copied from Mark, and look for what they left out.
There’s a helpful website that lets you see the gospels side-by-side.
http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/
You can see the four gospels laid out in four columns.
If there are parallels among them, you’re offered clickable icons that line up the content for you.
Seriously look at what they add, and ask the question, Why did they add it?.
Look at them as interpretive paintings, not objective photographs.
No need to ask, “Did this really happen?”
Instead ask, “What was there about Jesus that caused people to think it appropriate to portray him as having power over nature, over sickness, and even over death?”
What was it about Jesus?
That’s the question.
Well, I think it was the good news that Jesus announced.
That’s what it was about Jesus.
Jesus was not a Bible teacher.
Jesus proclaimed a realm beyond the Bible, beyond scripture.
Over and over, Jesus proclaimed his message contradicting the conventional wisdom of the day.
Jesus took up with unacceptable people.
He was advancing dangerous, even revolutionary, ideas.
He offered hope that changed people’s lives.
Those things, I believe, are what was at the bottom of the experiences people who knew him had.
And that’s what’s at the bottom of the experience of Jesus that I have today because, of course, it’s exciting to even think about being part of a revolution, and Jesus’ message of revolution is just as relevant today as ever.
But it’s much more than that for me, much more than the thrill of a revolution.
It’s that the teachings of Jesus have changed my life.
Compassion.
Far more important than belief.
Compassion is the essence of Jesus’ teachings.
It’s the essence of religion.
All traditions teach that it is the practice of compassion, and honoring the sacred in the other, that brings us into the presence of the One we call God.
Doubt and believing have little to do with it.
Doubt is not the opposite of faith.
Certainty is.
It’s okay to call me “Thomas” any time you want.
I’ll consider it a compliment.
Jerry Brooks+