Seeing is not believing

Seeing is not believing. The Gospel of John is full of people having things demonstrated to them in full view and in daylight – and not believing. Dorothy Sayers wrote in Gaudy Night: “The great advantage of telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it

When I retired six years ago we joined a fellowship of inquiring, searching, largely agnostic people. Our men’s group meets a couple of mornings a week. We are a pretty diverse group except for age. One of my friends sent me an Easter card last week. On the front there was one of those ghastly stained-glass hermaphroditic hippy-dippy Jesus avatars. Jesus was cuddling a baby dinosaur in his arms. I forgot to mention I got a satirical Easter card last week.

A simple world view would suppose that it is only liberal, tree-hugging people like my new friends who sit very lightly to the Jesus story. In 43 years of parish ministry the only serious theological question that ever came up was the uncertainty attached Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

The truth is that all men and women disbelieve the Easter story at least some of the time and usually on first hearing. They disbelieve it not because of the evidence, but in spite of it. They weigh don’t weigh the evidence with open minds, assess its relevance and cogency and finally decide that it is suspect or inadequate. Instead, they start with an a priori conviction that the story is incredible on its face. The only way anyone could really take this stuff seriously is if it were susceptible to scientific proof.

Mature people finally learn that the truth of religious stories, often referred to as myths, is that they are religious, not scientific stories. Religion is not about proof, but of interpretation, understanding and intuition.

Scientists have known for some time that the more we know about one part of a phenomenon, the less we know about another. When science is very precise about “A” is extremely vague about “B”. The stuff science knows absolutely and very precisely means that the imprecision of something else is virtually infinite.

Wow, infinity. It is both long and big. Physicists tell us that when the answer to some questions is “infinity” we have no answer at all. Truth be told no one knows what infinity is. We do know what it is like. For most of us infinity represents something mind-boggling large that is actually bigger than we can imagine.

God has the solution to all this variability. It was Easter Monday and God got up from her nap which she needed badly because raising his son from the dead is heavy lifting, even for God. God gave a gift to creation. The gift was - Faith. Like the beginning of creation, Faith was created out of nothing but God’s love for his world. Clearly when we say something this romantic about God we are neither scientific nor verifiable. This world would dissolve into entropic chaos almost immediately unless were at least one person left who could trust that things are more, not less than they appear.

Faith is the gift of God that helps us see what is so plainly not there. Alice in Wonderland may set out to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast. We only seek what faith tells us must be there for our life to be anything but insignificant.

Fredrick Buechner once said: “Whether you believe there is a God or believe there isn’t, if you never doubt the certainty of your position, you are either kidding yourself or asleep.”

A little boy didn’t usually listen to the sermons. Like most children he didn’t really think they were for him. But one Sunday he heard the preacher say: “We have all seen the Risen and Ascended Christ.”

Perhaps the reason he listened that day was because he knew for sure it wasn’t so. For once he heard something so completely outside of his admittedly limited experience, he had to pay attention. But just in case, just in case he had missed God somewhere, that Jesus had come in and not been announced, he looked everywhere: in the pew rack, under the kneeler, behind the pew. When one comes right down to it, there aren’t a lot of places to hide in a church, even for God. When his mother returned from Communion he asked her:

 “Momma. Father said we have seen Jesus, but I haven’t.”

His mother, smelling of communion wine said: “Oh, honey, of course we have. He is in each and every one of us who has come to worship him.” And in a twinkling of an eye he knew it was so. His mother’s warm hug told him that Jesus was really there.

Having connected his experience of worship and of his own mother’s trustworthiness, he could say with Thomas: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”