Come To Believe: a sermon for the second Sunday of Easter

Preached on Sunday, May 1, 2011 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found by clicking here.


Today is sometimes called ‘low’ Sunday. There’s that particularly Episcopal locution -- the description of church as either ‘high’ or ‘low’. As many of you know, ‘low church’ means a particularly plain style of liturgy and worship, which usually goes with a more Protestant ethos -- a church that is more likely to be called a congregation than a parish, an ordained person that might be called ‘minister’ even if ordained as a priest.

And of course, ‘high church’ is the more catholic ethos, Anglo-Catholic in our case. A more articulated form of worship and liturgy, some would say a grander, perhaps more formal service, in a parish, conducted by a priest, in vestments, redolent with the smell of, yes, you guessed it, incense! 


But whether your church is a low church or high church kind of place, on Easter Day, chances are you got about as high as you ever get, which you do on Christianity’s most important feast day. And therefore, after all that liturgical exertion, chances are that for today, the second Sunday of the Easter season, no matter how high you were last week, this week, you’ll be a bit lower. A bit plainer in your worship for “Low Sunday.”


And that’s not all that will be lower. Look around you. Attendance is a bit lower today versus last week, isn’t it? And the vestry members who count the collection this Sunday… well, let’s just say they’ll spend a lot less time doing it compared with last Sunday… But there’s one other thing you can say about low church and high church… Last Sunday was a high church Sunday almost everywhere, and high church can also mean looooong church… It took us a while to get it all done last week, didn’t it??? So, it’s not so bad, I guess, if some of us take a break this Sunday. There was quite a bit of church on Easter Day, maybe it lasts a while for some of us…


Or maybe there’s something else at play. If you came to church last Sunday and chose to skip it this Sunday, you get to skip something else. You get to avoid this Sunday’s gospel. As is almost always the case, on the second Sunday of Eastertide, we meet our friend Thomas. And with him comes doubt. 


Almost as soon as we have witnessed the glory of the resurrection, doubt is introduced into the story.All of our readings today center around this theme of doubt and faith. In our first reading from Acts, we hear Peter addressing the multitude. Peter is proclaiming the gospel with a fervor and conviction. We see Peter in what we know is a rare and powerful moment. For Peter, all that was predicted and promised has come to pass right before his eyes. He has seen it all come true. What more powerful experience can you have? To witness, to live through, the coming of the Messiah and his resurrection. It must have been as powerful an experience for Peter as the second coming of Christ would be for us. 


Then in the gospel, we come across Thomas -- the one who will not believe, who flatly refuses to believe the word of his trusted friends. No, Thomas demands and receives his own experience of the risen Lord. Thomas is often called Doubting Thomas for obvious reasons. But Thomas is also courageous. Thomas wants to touch and feel not just the glory of the resurrection itself, but the wounds that killed Jesus in the first place. Thomas wants to know that the living man he sees is also the one who died on the cross. Thomas is willing to face the wounds, to touch them, to probe them, to look at the death of Jesus from the inside. And as a result, he comes to believe through a very intimate experience of his Lord.

But Thomas’ experience of Jesus is not ours, not exactly. Jesus tells Thomas that he believes because he has seen, but blessed are those who have not seen, but who yet have come to believe. That’s you and me. You and I were not there with Thomas to reach into the wounded side of Christ, but we are here, aren’t we? A community of faith who these 2,000 years later have also come to believe. Our experience is one a bit more in keeping with our second reading today. Sandwiched between Peter’s certainty and Thomas’ doubt is a reading from a letter attributed to Peter. In it, we hear words of comfort for those who, like us, must live at a remove from Thomas and the others in that upper room. 


In the epistle, we hear some of our own story of faith acknowledged, don’t we? 

“Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:9). 

Yes, that’s a bit more consistent with the life of faith that you and I know. We are not afforded the proximity that Thomas was given. We cannot place our hands into the side of the wounded Jesus to know for certain that the resurrection is real. We cannot have the certainty that Thomas did, we must have faith. Alan Jones, sometime Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has said, 

“The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” 

Those of us who follow Christ these two millenia after Thomas are not granted the certainty that he was. Instead of proximity in time and place, we have been given something else. We have been given the gift of faith. And the epistle tells us, it is gift more precious than gold.

But how is one to live a life of faith? How are we do find faith, what are we to do in order to make ready     our hearts and minds to receive God’s gift of faith?    And what are we to do when faith falters, when doubt enters our story of faith?

I have a friend who has been in recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous for many years, and as such, he often counsels those who are new to recovery. 12 step programs like AA have a strong spiritual dimension. The second of the 12 steps states that those who are successful in recovering have done so because they -- and I’m quoting exactly AA’s second step -- because they, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” 


As you can imagine, having to struggle with a faith in such a higher power, a faith in a God of one’s own understanding, is a tall order on a good day, much less on the first few days and weeks when you are trying to face life without your usual cocktail or two… or ten… But this step of AA’s is the second step, one that is recommended quite early in the process of recovery. My friend says that he tries to break it down for those he counsels and he tells his charges to take it a step at a time and if that’s too much, to take it even a word at a time. He tells them, “First, just come, just show up. Then you’ll find that you’ll likely ‘come to’, you’ll have a growing experience of consciousness, of clarity. Then and only then, you can ‘come to believe’.” 

Come…. come to…. come to believe.


Good advice for a life of sobriety perhaps, but also good advice for the life of faith. Come… show up in a place and at a time when you might hear the word of God, when you might be fed with it, and even fed with the very body and blood of the wounded and resurrected Christ. There will be high and low Sundays, there will be high and low days and even hours. The life of faith is not filled with rock-solid certainty, there are what our epistle calls “various trials”, there are doubts… But just come and it’s very likely that you will come to, that you will begin to have a clarity and a burgeoning understanding… And then, over time, you will come to believe… 


And when those doubts come again-- as they often do -- have the courage of Thomas and takes those doubts in hand -- and come.  When you are faced with trials -- as you will be -- you can always go back to the beginning -- you can just come. 


And in time you will come to and then come to believe yet again. You will be given something stronger, more beautiful than certainty, you will be given faith, faith in the living God. You will be given a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and a new birth into an inheritance that is kept for you in heaven, protected by the power of God, a new birth, a living hope, that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. (1 Peter 1:3-4)   +Amen.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins