Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 19, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This is Thomas Sunday. The Gospel reading in the lectionary is always the same on the first Sunday after Easter, the story of Doubting Thomas. But did you notice that the lectionary reading doesn’t actually end when the story of doubting Thomas ends? It goes on for two more verses. Those verses read: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. “ John 20:30-31 Many scholars think this is where the Gospel of John originally ended, although there’s a whole Chapter 21 after these lines in that Gospel as we presently have it. Those lines sure sound like the end, and we’re a little surprised when the Gospel continues after them. Be that as it may, those lines struck me this past week as I was working on today’s service. The author says that he has written what he has written “so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah….” By “you” he means his audience, the community for which he was writing. And I think we can expand the meaning of “you” to include ourselves.

It struck me that these words come right after the risen Christ has said to Thomas “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” And it struck me that “those who have not seen” would be the same people as the “you” in the next verse. It would include everyone in the community to which John was writing at the end of the first century. And it would include us. Apparently the author of the Fourth Gospel thought that his mission was to get them, and people who came after them like us, to believe that Jesus is the Messiah through the way he told the story of Jesus. Certainly, throughout his Gospel he tells people that Jesus is the Messiah, with Messiah understood to mean the Word of God Incarnate. Apparently, simply by reading the Gospel of John we are supposed to become convinced of the truth of that claim. And that got me to thinking: Just how is it that we come to believe in Jesus Christ? Is it simply by reading someone else’s stories about him? Or is it something else? I think that’s a question worth pondering, so let’s ponder a bit.

A lot of Christians seem to believe, as the author of the Gospel of John did, that just reading stories about Jesus is enough to get people to believe in him. That, I assume, is why people hold up signs in sports stadiums that say only “John 3:16”. Their belief seems to be that if people will just read that verse—which says God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life—they will immediately see the truth of it and believe. I don’t doubt that those folks who hold up those signs are well intentioned, but I don’t think faith works that way. I think people find reading something like John 3:16 convincing only if they already believe it and not very convincing if they don’t. I don’t think anyone ever became a Christian simply by reading the Gospel of John, or even by reading the whole Bible—maybe less so by reading the whole Bible. So if just reading about Jesus in the Bible isn’t enough to bring us to belief, how do we come to believe?

My study of the matter, and more importantly my personal experience, have convinced me that real belief comes not from the outside but from the inside. I am convinced that real belief comes not from information but from experience. The beginning of faith, that is, the beginning of life lived within a particular faith tradition, is probably hearing. Most of us grew up hearing the stories of the Christian faith. If we didn’t grow up with them, at some point we heard them from somewhere. We knew at least that there is such a thing as Christianity, and we at least had some rudimentary understanding of what Christianity is. But that’s knowledge, it isn’t belief, it isn’t faith. I know lots of things. You know lots of things. That doesn’t mean we have faith in them the way we have faith in Jesus Christ. Belief, or faith, in the religious sense requires more than that. It requires experience.

The faith of which we have knowledge comes alive for us and becomes our faith when we experience its power and its truth in our own lives. Let me speak of my personal experience in this regard as an illustration. I acquired an extensive intellectual knowledge of the Christian faith long before I actually believed it in any meaningful sense. I studied theology. I studied church history. I studied the Bible. I learned a lot, and I may even have thought that I believed. But I now know that I didn’t really believe in any meaningful sense until Christianity changed my life. I didn’t really believe in any meaningful sense until in a time of deep grief and despair my faith lifted me up and gave me the strength to go on when I didn’t think there was any way I could go on. I really believed only when, through the rudimentary faith that I had, God poured the fruits of the spirit into my heart. That’s when faith in Jesus Christ came alive for me. In the time of my greatest need I experienced the power of the faith in my own life, and I truly came to believe.

So here’s how I think faith works. We make a decision. We make a commitment. We make a decision and a commitment to live our spiritual life within a particular faith tradition. To do that we must of course have heard of that tradition, and we must find something at least superficially attractive about it, even if only that it is the tradition of our family or of our culture. We make the commitment to live within the tradition. We practice the faith tradition. We learn its ways. We say its prayers. We participate in its worship. And as we do, it may be that we begin to experience in our own lives the truth of the tradition. We may begin to feel a peace we didn’t know before. We may feel challenged in ways we were never challenged before. We may find a courage we didn’t know we had. We may feel compassion for those in need we never felt before. We may feel anger at all the violence and injustice in the world that we never felt before. We may feel lifted up in a time of despair. As we live within the faith tradition of our choice, it comes alive for us. It becomes real for us. And then we believe. Then we really, truly, fully believe.

So with all due respect to the author of the Gospel of John, I think his hope that we would come to believe in Jesus simply by reading what he wrote is a vain one. I don’t think it works that way. Yes, living our spiritual lives within the Christian tradition means learning the Christian Scriptures, learning the Christian stories. Maybe we find those stories compelling, although if we do I suspect that it is because we are already feeling a connection with our own experience and not merely because of the stories themselves. But here’s what I think is more important. I invite you, and I invite myself, in this Easter season to renew our commitment to living our spiritual lives within the Christian tradition, within the tradition of the risen Christ. Let us resolve to be more intentional and consistent in our prayer, in our study of scripture, and in our attendance at worship; and let us not just resolve, let us do it. That commitment, if we will follow through on it, will open our hearts, minds, and spirits to the truth of the Christian faith. It will open us to its power. It will prepare us to experience that truth and that power in our own lives. Then we will truly, fully, authentically believe. Then we will know not from hearing stories, as John thought was enough, but from the experience of our own lives that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the Word of God made flesh. Then that truth will be real for us. We will know its transforming and saving power, not from stories about someone else, not even stories about Jesus, but in ourselves, in our depths, in our souls. And that will be a true Easter blessing indeed. Amen.