God’s Grandeur  Gerard Manley Hopkins                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhLCSh4VLmA

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At long last the day has arrived, Pentecost, literally meaning the 50^th day of the great 50 days of Easter. Several weeks ago, our Trinity  preacher, Canon Bill Rhodes, employing all the skills and timing of a comedy club veteran, commented on the interminable sense that comes as we near the end of 50 days of Easter. Yes, sometimes we really can have too much of a good thing! His was a humorous lament for the loss of an Anglican tradition of Rogation Sunday. Rogation days represent an older, more primal sensibility recognizing that human beings exist within a network of relationships with the natural world around us, – a web of intertwined, dependencies.

God’s Nature

Christians celebrate the mysterious nature of God as we understand it. For us, Jesus alone is not God, yet, God includes and cannot be spoken about without reference to Jesus. The Holy Spirit alone is not God and yet God cannot be experienced without reference to the Holy Spirit.

For Christians the nature of God is not solitary, but communal. The concept of a trinity offers us a vision of God as a community of interdependencies. God is a playful interpenetration of three identities, which never-the-less share the same nature. Traditionally God is referred to by the gendered names of Father, Son, both masculine, and Holy Spirit, which while feminine in English is still usually referred to as he? Go figure.

We sometimes avoid these gendered terms by referring to God as having three modes or functions. In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier we often say. Yet these modes, as Cathedral graduates of Episcopal 101 will know denote functions and not relationships, and lead us to an ancient heresy called Modalism or Sebellianism.  For non 101 grads you can look this up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabellianism.

The most important insight we have into God is that God is fundamentally relational. One way to avoid the gendered terms and still retain relationality is to see God as Lover, God as also Beloved, and God as Love-Sharer. If Easter is the celebration of love redeemed. Pentecost is the celebration of love shared.  The lections for Pentecost provide us with three differing, yet complimentary perspectives on God as love sharer, or as we traditionally refer to this aspect of God, the Holy Spirit.

Visions of Pentecost

The Apostle Paul, through the metaphor of adoption perceives God as Love-Sharer . Human beings are no longer living enslaved to fear.  God as Love- Sharer adopts us as children. Paul is not content to see the Holy Spirit as adopting us only as privileged children. For him, being children of God is not a state of minority – as in prior to the age of consent.  The Holy Spirit adopts us as nothing less than heirs. Not simply heirs through Christ, but joint heirs with Christ able to participate fully in the promise of new life.

John’s understanding of God as Love-Sharer is as advocate and teacher. Jesus’ ministry comes to an end. In John, the Father is God as Lover and Jesus is God as Beloved in whom God redeems creation. The Holy Spirit, God as Love Sharer becomes the energy empowering us to live more and more deeply so that day by day we grow into the realization of God’s love for us.

The picture of Pentecost as a distinct event within a chronological unfolding of events beginning with the Incarnation, and flowing through the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and descent of the Holy Spirit today at Pentecost, is Luke’s invention. For Luke the coming of the Holy Spirit marks the transition from the ministry of Jesus to the life of the Church, which contains his spirit.

In Luke’s account of the birth of the Church in Acts:2, the descent of the Holy Spirit is depicted through powerful and elemental forces of nature – wind and fire.  Addicted as we are to special effects, we wonder, some with amazement, others with incredulity, at how this could be.

Yet, Luke’s purpose here is to draw our attention to the effects upon human beings of the descent of God as Love-Sharer. He uses the metaphor of an ecstatic eruption into a profusion of different languages among those present, to do so. Hopkins echoes such:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.

Luke’s theological message is that for human society – born anew as the Church, it is no longer business as usual.

Pentecost Signals An End To The Denial Of Difference

Why do men then now not reck his rod? 
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Hopkins, questions why humanity so reckless of God’s gift of creation, soiling it with its smudge and smell?   Extending Hopkins’ enquiry I would ask why are we as human beings so fearful of the differences between us?  Deacon Myra Kingsley, our last week’s Trinity preacher, lamented the corruption of Mother’s Day. Once an expression of protest against the futility of war and the injustices of oppression which generations have trod, have trod, have trod- so that we have become insensible to the feel of the earth, now made barren beneath our feet. Mother’s Day, a movement of protest against human recklessness has, like so much else, become seared with trade, bleared, smeared, with toil sharing man’s smudge. 

Luke’s vision of the Holy Spirit, God as Love-Sharer empowers us to embrace the sheer diversity of expression that lies at the heart of being human. No longer is it impossible for women and men to understand each other because of their differences. At the roots of discrimination, exploitation, and unjust systems  – is the fear of difference. God as Love-Sharer, calms our fears, empowering us to embrace our sheer diversity.

At one level of perception we see that we are not all the same. We notice the obvious differences between us expressed by skin color with its inevitable associations of race, culture, language, and education. These are real differences that evoke fear because they are emblematic of a more profound experience of the differentials of power, privilege, and access to the protections that these differences afford to some and deny to others.

Here in Arizona, as a foreign worker with a work permit, I was allowed a driver’s license from the moment of my arrival. Yet, the children of foreign parents, brought illegally into the country now possessing the same federally extended legal right to remain and work as I enjoyed, are in this, great state of Arizona still denied access to something so fundamental as a drivers license.

There are yet more, fundamental differences between us. We differ in gender and sexual identity. These are the attributes of being human, through which we are profoundly formed and in many instances deformed by our experience of a patriarchal world that deeply fears and is suspicious of the power of the anima –the feminine principle.

God as Love-Sharer calms our fears of the differences between us, inviting us to embrace the incredible richness that difference brings to our human sense of community. God as Love-Sharer is the ever-present energy that permeates our experience. The Holy Spirit – that which I am naming God as Love-Sharer  -is creative, interrelational, dynamic and open to the future. God as Love-Sharer is present in every moment of our lives and in every aspect of the created order within which our living forms only a part. A world that is interconnected to form a giant web of complex interconnections. The complexity of interconnection is the deeper truth that lies beyond all appearances of difference because it is our experience that what harms or blesses one, harms or blesses all.

God as Love-sharer, is powerfully present in this community. Each week as spiritually searching people, we find our way through the cathedral’s Great Doors. Initially, we are somewhat bewildered to find ourselves sitting in the pew of this church, - a church for God’s sake - whose liturgy and welcome seem both strange and wonderful at the same time. This mysterious turn in our lives brings us to return through these doors a second and a third time because those of us who are seeking God as a source of meaning in our lives know that we can be nowhere else.

Luke’s vision of God embracing all kinds of diversity is continually coming true at Trinity Cathedral. As individuals, and as a community, God as Love Sharer guides us beyond the limitations of only that which we can imagine for ourselves. Each time I face the profound disappointment of failing to achieve what I have so longed for, I have discovered that the Holy Spirit, with barely concealed sense of humor, has had something else in mind for me amazingly different from any dream of mine.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Short Recap from Part I

In the face of the potential fragmentation over internal differences, the Evangelist John calls his community to hold together through the active practice of purposeful love (agape). Not only will the practice of purposeful love (agape) bind the community from within, but it will also commend the community to a hostile external world.  Purposeful Love operates at both community and individual levels:

Love one another; as I have loved you, by this shall the world know, that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat. (closing stanza to Love, George Herbert)

Purposeful Love as Right Relationship

What are the qualities of purposeful love (agape)? How does purposeful love define the nature of the community where the members are bound together by a notion of right relationship?

For the Episcopal Church, the historical absence of a centralized teaching authority capable of declaring, and perhaps more to the point, enforcing an authorized interpretation of belief requires us to find some other basis for our holding together in community. We find this is the concept of right relationship. Right relationship is rooted in John’s understanding of purposeful love (agape) both binding a community together from within, as well as providing the means for projecting a discipleship presence into the wider world.

Agape, or purposeful love, has certain key characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of experience covered by the English word love.

• Purposeful love is not dependent on emotions of attraction or admiration or liking. It does not rest upon the experience of a felt emotional bond between people.
• Purposeful love honors the other, values mutuality, refrains from judging others simply on the basis of their difference from us.
• Purposeful love for others does not emerge from our sense of abundance as in a kind of largess that tends to patronize others. It arises from our own prior experience of being loved. We love others in this agape way because of our own experience of being loved by God, often communicated to us through the experience of being loved by other people. In this sense purposeful love is caught, not taught.

Purposeful Love as Worship Centered

The historical absence of a centralized teaching authority capable of declaring and enforcing an authorized interpretation of belief has had a profound effect on the way the Episcopal Church interprets received tradition as we seek to be true to Christ’s teaching amidst the challenges of the world  in which we find ourselves living.  For us right relationship finds its highest expression not simply in that sense of shared common purpose, though this is important, but in the experience of common prayer and worship.

For Episcopalians that ancient Benedictine emphasis on the community defined as the community at prayer or in worship has shaped our Anglican character. Worship becomes for us our unique expression as a community. Our emphasis on worship, where all are welcome, contrasts us from the majority of Christian communities on the American religious landscape who define themselves through enforcement of fixed content and definition of belief, usually referred to as a confessional statement.

As we worship, so we believe. In worship we encounter God’s conversation with us as a community. This conversation comes to us through the liturgical use of Holy Scripture as the sacramental basis of an inspirited encounter with God. For us, it is not only the inspirited encounter that leads to the writing of Scripture in the distant past. Our encounter with the text is equally inspirited in the present. The sermon becomes for us our response to the conversation God seeks to have with us. Both the liturgical reading of Scripture and the reflective homiletic response is guided by the presence of John’s Advocate – the Holy Spirit , whom in chapter 14:15 Jesus declares God gives to us to continue to remind us of all that he has taught us.

Purposeful Love as Justice

The Holy Spirit teaches us as a community through the in-spiritedness of our engagement with Holy Scripture within sacramental setting of worship. Worship thus empowers us as a community to carry that in-spirited engagement out into the world where as disciples we seek to witness to the presence and action on God who is already in the world all around us.

For Episcopalians, extending right relationship into the world requires us to enter into a creative engagement with the issues of the time. This creative engagement leads us to an appreciation of our understanding of all that Jesus has taught us, deepening over time. For we, as a Church, hold that it is possible for the Church to change its mind about the particular meaning of Scripture. Interpretation of Scripture is what constitutes Tradition. Tradition is continually questioned by Reason in the light of current experience. Examples of this process in action is the 19^th Century repudiation of  slavery. In the 20^th Century the struggle for civil rights in the areas of racial, and gender equality, led us to change our understanding of certain scriptural texts because we came to see in them a contradiction with the Jesus emphasis on inclusion. We continue to engage in a similar way with the issue of sexual identity in the opening years of this 21^st Century, along with an ever deepening of our commitment to global justice.

So within the community purposeful love is expressed as mutuality of interdependency. Yet, Christian community has a mission beyond its own internal world. The mission of  Christian community is to provide a base for going out and speaking to the issues of the world around us. William Temple was perhaps the greatest  Archbishop of Canterbury of the 2oth Century. He presided over the Anglican Communion during the dark years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. He reminded us that the purpose of the Church is to exist for those who are not yet its members. When we extend right relationship based on purposeful love into the world beyond our immediate communities, purposeful love takes on the expression of justice. For the Holy Spirit is not only a comforter, but also an advocate. An advocate is  one who speaks on behalf of God’s desire for ever greater justice to govern our relationships with one another in the world.

The Enigma of Love

Returning to George Herbert’s poem cited in my previous post . Love has been further immortalized for music lovers by the English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ who scored five of Herbert’s poems in his Five Mystical Songs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNMnGNL0-uw                                                                                                        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5JvpL6nyTc

Herbert highlights the common human experience that it is our shame that misguides us into hiding from, maybe even protecting ourselves from, the experience of love. We cannot take seriously the promise that God makes to love us, no matter what.

Herbert is talking of that love which we experience when we discover that we are beloved by God. We discover God’s love, not merely, despite our human weaknesses, but particularly because of our human vulnerabilities. Being human is to be a glorious creation much beloved by God. We hear in George Herbert that tender Christian humanism, which is an essential aspect of Anglican devotion, deeply rooted in the theology of Creation and the Incarnation.

Love one another; as I have loved you, by this shall the world know, that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat. (closing stanza to Love, George Herbert)

Previously (as they say on TV)

Through the Lectionary for the Sundays after Easter, God has been initiating a conversation with us through the medium of John’s Gospel. From this conversation we have drawn the following insights into living the new life in Christ.

Despite John’s story of doubting Thomas, the enemy of faith is not doubt, but fear. John’s picture of the disciples hiding away behind locked doors on the evening of the resurrection day is a metaphor for the way we hide from fear by erecting walls and locked doors in our minds. You can refer back to my posting for Easter 2- Behind Locked Doors: A Sermon for Low Sunday

My posting for Easter 3 Lakeside Breakfast and Life Changing Conversation

explored the experience of Peter with Jesus at the lake shore revealing that along with grief, guilt and shame are also powerful fears that come between us and living the new life in Christ.

On reaching Easter 5, God’s evolving conversation with us moves back from the post resurrection appearance, to the events of the Last Supper in John 13.  John is not so concerned with depicting the sequence of events, as he is concerned to paint the theological picture known as the Farewell Discourses. During this extended conversation, Jesus reveals the nature of his relationship with the Father, and uses this as the model for how the disciples are to live in community. In the Farewell Discourses, Jesus begins to speak exclusively to the community of his disciples, preparing them for what is coming.

What’s new about the New Commandment?

Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment:

- love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples.

 Have you ever wondered why John has Jesus call this a new commandment? The commandment to love God and love your neighbor, as yourself appears also Mark, Matthew, and Luke, each presenting it as the Great Commandment summarizing the Law of Moses. The new element in John is that Jesus offers more than a repetition summary of the Law. John shows Jesus modeling for his disciples a vision of love arising from the experience of being loved.

John, alone offers us a vision of love as an experience conditioned by being loved. There is a logical progression at work here. As Jesus is loved by God, so he shares this love with his disciples. As the disciples are loved by Jesus, so they are to share that love with one another. The point here is that despite John’s use of the word commandment, love is caught, not taught. We are enabled to love, because we first have the experience of being loved.

Shared contexts across time

John’s community struggled with internal, probably irresolvable disputes and tensions. Therefore, the only way for John’s community to hold together was on the basis of relationships forged through love, not through common agreement. This makes John’s community rather like the Episcopal Church where, historically, our unity rested on a notion of right relationship experienced through our willingness to worship together in spite of the lack of political or theological agreement between us.

What does John mean by love? He uses the word agape. The best translation I know for agape is purposeful love. Purposeful love does not require attraction. Neither does it rest on mutual likeability. It does not demand similarity and for that reason is able to bridge across differences. Purposeful love simply recognizes that we must love one another because God has first loved us.

John’s emphasis is upon the internal stability and unity of the Jerusalem Church. Yet, the lectionary places the gospel from John alongside a reading from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. The implication of Peter’s dream, directs us to God’s desire to extend purposeful love beyond the gathered communities of the like minded to embrace a widening of diversities present in the wider world. Of course this wider inclusiveness is the whole purpose of Luke’s writing.

The Episcopal Church rejects the false certainties that paint a world in hues only of blacks and whites. From the 19^th Century struggles over slavery, throughout the 20^th Century struggles for racial and gender equality, into the 21^st Century battle to accept differences in sexual identity as God given, Episcopalians remain where Anglican has always stood. We stand in that place of tension between respect for the Tradition we receive and living with integrity lives that confront the challenges presented by contemporary society.

The Anglican Tradition of the Episcopal Church, shaped by dynamics similar to those faced in John’s Jerusalem Community equips us well for the task of being the community of love in the world of the 21^st Century. Acts 11 shows us that God’s intention is wide and inclusive. Our experience as a tradition equips our Trinity Community as Christ’s disciples shaped and formed in particular by a vision of inclusive and purposeful love.

The nature of God’s conversation with us on Easter 5 points us to the need to read John 13:31-35 through the lens of Acts 11:1-8. I am grateful to the Rev. Amy Allen, an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a fellow in theology and practice at Vanderbilt University in the area of New Testament and early Christianity for referencing in her blog the following quotation of the great Martin Luther King.

Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people…It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both…Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”(http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy Accessed 04-15-13)

Jesus breaks through the walls and doors that the disciples have set up to hide behind.  Through the post resurrection appearances of Jesus John paints a theological picture revealing of the fear that the disciples experienced following the events of Good Friday and Easter Day, neither of which events, they seemed to have understood.  From our 21^st century perspective we can see that the walls and doors that the disciples hide behind are the mental walls and doors erected within their minds to protect them from emotions of grief and loss. Like all human beings, the disciples  are afraid that their grief and loss if not repressed, would overwhelm them.  This is why fear, not doubt is the enemy of faith, and I refer those interested to know more about what I mean by this to relationalrelaities.com/ Behind Locked Doors or the Trinity Face Book site  https://www.facebook.com/azcathedral?ref=hl  for the full published text of last week’s sermon.

There are four post resurrection appearances in John’s Gospel. So we can assume he thought them to be important. The first, is to Mary in the Garden with the second, and third, to the disciples in the upper room. John is painting a theological picture through the way he constructs these narratives. What does John wish us to understand through these stories? Perhaps more to the point, what is God drawing our attention to as we receive these Gospel texts gathered for worship at the Table of Our Lord?

Limited Expectation and Perception

John seems to imply that the disciples experienced Jesus continuing to come and go in their lives following his death and resurrection. It is only three weeks later and the disciples are back to life as usual. They are out fishing – picking-up the threads of their lives prior to their adventure with Jesus. So the boundaries of normal awareness with all the limitations of their conventionally conditioned imaginations have closed around their minds once again preventing them from expecting to see Jesus. It is well attested that human beings only recognize what they expect to see. They see the man standing by the fire on the shore and yet they don’t recognize him. It is not until the disciple Jesus loved –John’s code for himself, identifies him to the others. Perhaps we see here a little self congratulation going on here.

Commentators on this text all note that it resembles Luke’s Jesus calling his disciples to follow him as he observed them fishing from the shore of the Sea of Galilee. In Luke’s theological picture the call of the disciples comes at the outset of Jesus’ ministry. Yet, John places it at the very end following his resurrection. Luke’s positioning makes more logical sense, but John conveys a deeper theological truth through which God addresses us as the Christ following community sitting at the intersection of Roosevelt and Central.

Post Resurrection Discipleship

In John’s theological picture, Jesus’ call  to discipleship is made by one who bears the scars of his wounds. Whatever, seemingly magical qualities, Jesus’ post resurrection body possesses, it’s a body that still bears the scars of  the wounds inflicted by the Cross. Fear limits the disciples expectations and so they can’t see through the veil of illusion built up to protect them from their fears. They don’t see what is in front of them. In each post resurrection appearance, Jesus comes and breaks through the veil of illusion in order to reconnect the disciples with what they once knew, but have forgotten because of grief, and repressed because of guilt.

The second scene in John’s story concerns Simon Peter. While in the boat when the beloved disciple points out that it is Jesus, Peter recognizes his nakedness, hurriedly dresses and then jumps into the lake.  Of course we are left wondering – so why get dressed first? At first I interpreted Peter’s actions as another example of how he needs to be first and the center of attention. On reflection, I have come to see Peter’s clothing and jumping into the lake not as an attempt to get to Jesus first, but as an attempt to hide his shame. For it is his shame that Jesus seems to have come to address.

What follows is Peter’s rehabilitation from the failure and betrayal when last he sat warming himself before a fire in the court of the High Priest. For me, a rather interesting question arrises here. Is Jesus saying to him: Peter, regardless of the scars of your failure and fear I still call you?  Or is he saying: Peter, because of your wounds I call you?

Reparation

Jesus offers Peter to an opportunity to  repair the damage of betrayal. For any of us the events of shame and guilt from the past can never be undone. We, and those we have hurt will always bear the scars of memory.  We cannot undo the past, but we can alter the damage flowing from the past through actions we take in the present. Reparation is the most far reaching of all the psychological mechanisms available to us. Reparation allows a different future to unfold from the one made inevitable by the flow of unresolved guilt and shame from our past,into our present and on into our future. When acts of reparation are not enacted in the present our futures end up being only ever a repetition of that which remains unresolved in our past. Here, Peter is offered the possibility of reparation.

Yet, reparation depends  upon our acceptance of a responsibility to change and become different. Jesus is not content to receive Peter’s three-fold protests of love. Each time he lays upon him the charge – feed my sheep. Healing finds expression only through accepting responsibility for action and service in the here and now.

As with Peter, when we accept Jesus’ call to discipleship, we accept responsibility to act and serve in the world around us. We also relinguish being in control of the ultimate direction of our lives. Where once we buckled our own belt and walked where we wanted to walk, once we accept the call to discipleship, God buckles our belt and we walk where God needs us to go. In this lies our healing and salvation.

They know the Lord when Jesus breaks bread with them as he does in Luke’s Road to Emmaus story, or here in John when he offers them breakfast. So it is for us as we gather to make Eucharist.  Here we come to know the Lord Jesus who time and again breaks through the limitations of our expectations in the intimacy of the breaking of the bread.

Random Thoughts

What a strange name – Low Sunday? The origin of the name is shrouded in the mists of time. Yet, for me at least, it resonates with my mood. I took a couple of days out of the office this week. This was not really time-off, although no self-respecting priest in the Church of England is anywhere to be seen in Easter Week. However, the workaholism of American life, frowning on the need for time-off as a sign of personal weakness, exacts its toll. So I took two days out, which I hasten to add, were not exactly time off. I continued to work, but at least at a different pace thus providing me with some mental space for profound thoughts as I approach the task of preaching on Low Sunday.

In an email response to me this last week, Canon Dombek wished me a blessed 50 days of Easter. That’s nice, I thought to myself. I was about to move-on when the notion of celebrating the 50 days of Easter caught me like a catch in the back of the throat.

Whether we do much about it or not we mentally and emotionally resonate with the 40 days of Lent. But come Easter Day, the feeling is, thank goodness all that is now over for another year! Each year, I am pleased to note that a few more of our community take Lent and especially Holy Week to heart and discover the empowerment of a liturgical journey that orients us to the experience of Easter in new ways. You can’t parachute into Easter Day unless you have trodden the path of the Passion expressed through our community liturgy. Many of us have yet to grasp the essential point of being Episcopalian – which is to be a community of Christians to whom God primarily speaks through our celebration of the liturgy.

During this Easter Season, which runs until Pentecost Sunday, we will be hearing John’s Gospel proclaimed in the Sunday liturgy. I wonder what kind of conversation God will be seeking to have with us as we journey with John. As I have noted before the sermon is the community’s conversational response to God speaking through the lectionary. The preacher leads this conversational response by virtue of his or her Godly learning, as the Prayer Book of 1789 phrased it. In my case, this is supported by the fact that I am rarely thinking about anything other than our Trinity Community.

From time to time I need to stand back and take a breather in order to refocus upon what I am intuiting and sensing. Community is like a pond of water, fed by a strong underground spring. Turbulence gushes from the mouth of the spring rising to cause ripples and sometimes rather turbulent waves breaking the surface. As pastor and dean, my role is to gaze and reflect upon these ripples and waves. I am looking for the sense of where God is moving upon the face of our waters which are the reflection of our struggles to be faithful in our life as a community of Christ’s Body.

Conversing with the Text

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Temple authorities and their henchmen, Jesus came and stood among them and said ‘Peace be with you’.

It has been a long, bewildering, exhausting day. Amidst the devastation caused to the their hopes and dreams by the events of Good Friday, the disciples begin this day discovering the body of their slain teacher removed, by whom they do not know. Harrowed and blinkered by grief, they have forgotten what Jesus had spent three years trying to show them and so his death on the cross is a loss to them, the implications of which are literally mind splintering.

They do what human beings do in such circumstances – they lock themselves away. Secluded behind doors of wood and walls of plaster they seek that feeling of safety amidst a hostile world. Yet, the doors of wood and walls of plaster are emblematic of the impenetrable walls and doors within their minds. These, they have erected to shield themselves from their suffering. Profound suffering and loss is like a feared tsunami threatening to burst upon them and obliterate them in a torrent of fearful rage and grief.

I am perplexed by the way John depicts the first two of Jesus’ post resurrection appearances. Next week I will explore the wider meaning of the post resurrection experiences.  The central theme for John seems to be the need to have faith. Faith is complicated by fear and doubt. Yet, while in my view fear is the more serious antithesis to faith, John emphasizes doubt.

What are we to make of doubting Thomas? We need, I think, to see Thomas not as the doubting disciple, but as the personification of all their doubts.

I like this more contemporary version of the famous scene in John, published by Zondervan Press.

The epithet Doubting Thomas has become a name heaped on those who cannot rise to the demands of being true believers. In the story of Thomas, doubt is posed as the opposite of faith. This unfortunately has come to obscure for us the curious relationship of doubt to faith.  The story about doubting Thomas completely distracts us from recognizing the corrosive relationship of fear to faith, which is so strongly portrayed between verse 19-23. Thus the majority of Christians in this country are taught from an early age that doubt is the enemy of faith. To be a true believing Christian is to banish doubt, while encapsulating our fear, locking it away behind  blast proof doors deep in our minds. The denial and locking away of our fear so that we are no longer in touch with it is, for me, the principle explanation for the continued persecuting style of so much contemporary Christian rhetoric. A wonderful example is currently being played out before us as strident anti gay Christian voices now on the defensive, seamlessly move from victimizing others in the name of freedom of conscience, to seeing themselves as the victims of others who seek also to exercise freedom of conscience. However, John seems less interested in fear and more in doubt. He has his reasons, which I will explain later.

The popular attitude among many Christians concerning doubt evokes for me the conversation between Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter. Alice proudly tells the Mad Hatter that: Sometimes I believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.  The Hatter replies: That is an excellent practice.

Thomas, it seems would strongly disagree with both Alice and the Mad Hatter. He defiantly declares that unless he sees the proof he will not believe.

So John reports Jesus coming back the same time the following week seemingly to put Thomas right (note the cheers from the true believers in the background).  Yet, despite what Jesus tells Thomas- do not doubt but believe and blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, the process in play here is one in which Thomas comes to faith because he has the courage to voice his doubt!

John has a purpose in focusing on doubt rather than fear. He reveals his purpose in the last verses of Chapter 20. He writes here that his recording of these events is but a snapshot of many events not recorded. He records these events so that successive generations may believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and so have the life that comes from faith. So his emphasis is on his Gospel as the living proof taken on faith for generations yet to come. He has a reason for the story about Thomas. It is to denigrate doubt as a desire for immediate here and now proof, in favour of received faith. Yet, to doubt is to be human. I think it is to misread John as a denial of this natural propensity for human beings to doubt what they are told. Paradoxically, Thomas comes to embody this human dilemma in a way that endears him to many.

The Anglican Tradition encourages us to give voice to doubt in matters of faith. It recognizes that deep human truth – to be human is to have doubt. For Anglicans doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, as we see with Thomas, doubting is very often the road to faith. No belief is possible unless we have arrived via the road of doubt. Therefore, Episcopalians understand doubt more as the process of doubting. To doubt is not to deny what is true, it is to go in search of what is true in order that you may find it. Doubting is a necessary process that enables us to finally accept truth. What upsets other Christians is that faith is not a packet to be lifted from the spiritual shelf. Coming to faith is a process. That process leads via the road of doubting. Coming to faith will take as long as it needs to take. What matters is not arriving at faith as if like a destination. What matters is being on the road that leads to faith. The seeds of faith are always sown in the rich soil of doubt.

For me, the only effective enemy of faith is fear. It is the disciples fear that has enclosed them not only behind locked doors made of wood and walls of plaster. Jesus moves through the locked doors and walls erected to protect them from being overwhelmed by their grief. He stands among them and says peace be with you. He then shows them his wounds. It’s interesting that Jesus’ post resurrection body still displays the marks of his suffering.  Jesus is coming to as one wounded, yet not vanquished, by grief and death.

As we journey in intentional conversation with God through the 50 days of Easter, our first task is to become aware of those places deep within where we have locked away out fear. Fear, out of sight- out of mind, is a dangerous thing. While, walled away in unconsciousness fear continues to drive our actions.  The message of the Resurrection is that through Jesus God promises us new life and new life casts our fear. Yet, in our new life we will still bare the scars of the wounds caused by our fear. Scarred and wounded we might remain, but we will be no longer afraid.

Jesus is saying to us Peace be with you! My peace I give you!

Waiting for the kingdom is an experience of keeping the Watch with Jesus through out the lonely hours of the night as Maundsly Thursday transitions into Good Friday.

It’s 1pm on Good Friday and I am awakening after four hours of fitful and intense sleep following the long night’s Watch with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In our Anglican Liturgical Tradition watching is enacted symbolically before Jesus’ sacramental presence placed in the symbolic Gethsemane, a corner of the Church which remains decorated with flower, silks and linens, lit with lamps and lights in the midst of an otherwise interior stripped bear of its usual ornament.

What is Jesus watching – waiting for? What is he inviting us to watch and wait with him for? The answer is: Jesus is watching for the emerging contours of the Kingdom of God. Contours, emerging into reality, anxious minute by anxious minute, long hour by long hour.

The Watch, is a confrontation for each of us with our individual experience.  I observed some coming for their hour and then leave, a tinge of regret that the relentlessness of life demands takes them away. Others arrived for their allotted time and stayed on, unable to leave. Although, appearing not always clear about what continued to hold them, they communicated the look of those who know they can be no where else for that moment. Still, others came for their allotted time, leave, and then returned, some times more than once throughout the long watch of the night.

That this experience is spiritually purposeful to those companioning me through the long transition from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday is, for me, beyond any doubt! I expect over the coming days some will confide their experience to me, while others will treasure the experience in varying mindsets of palpable incomprehension of the sense of connection, in a moment there and then gone, but never absent.

Yet, what is my sense-making of my own experience of waiting with Jesus, watching for the Kingdom?  My spiritual memory locks me into repeating this event each year. Yet, this year, as priest in sole charge, without other priestly colleagues to share the load, I am there because I feel a responsibility for the safety of those who will come and go. This functional explanation helps and hinders me throughout this night. It helps to have a rational explanation for doing something apparently absurd. It hinders me, because it distracts and insulates me from experiencing the pain of my deeper spiritual need to wait, watching without knowing exactly what I wait and watch for.

There are moments when I am able to surrender to that which is just beyond the boundary of my conscious awareness. These are moments of calm. There are many more moments of frustrated agitation, in which to stay is to know that Jesus also is beside himself, agitated by the dawning enormity of what is unfolding for him. The dawning, a double entendre, of the Kingdom makes me desperate. I sit, like some 3^rd leg relay runner, gripping the baton at times in the hope of colleagues who will come and take it from me, letting me leave this long and exhausting race. Knowing they will arrive for Morning Prayer at 9am, I hang on only long enough to meet them arriving in the car park as I take flight under the pretext of fatigue. Like the first disciples, eventually I cannot bear any longer the waiting and the watching with Jesus for the coming of the Kingdom.

And yet, as I awaken from the imagined respite of four hours of sleep to repare for the coming Liturgy of Good Friday, even though I taste the bitter ego failure of having taken flight, I know I have seen the Kingdom of God coming through the agency of my Jesus who, sometimes in agitation, other times in calm certainty endures the violence of the kingdom of this world, a violence that implicates me, in order for another kingdom, God’s Kingdom to invite me-in.