Easter II 2008

Speaking Index

Delivered 29 March 2008, the Second Sunday of Easter

Alleluia! Alleluia! He is Risen!

Today we deal with the aftermath of the resurrection. We'll spend some time with Doubting Thomas and look at truth and the search for knowledge, Romeo and Juliet, and touch on the matter of myths, although I find that I didn't actually use that word in the sermon. The sermon I wrote today isn't the one I expected to write, but Larkin will probably be very glad of it. I don't think this one is likely to get me thrown out of the church, my first idea might have! Larkin lives in constant fear that this will happen again, every time I open my mouth!

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
I Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from his son Jesus the Christ, and from the Holy Spirit. Amen

When I first encountered Thomas in Sunday School, lo these many years past, I was horrified that Thomas could have doubted the resurrection. I was sure that I would have had no doubts at all. How could Thomas have demanded to put his hand in his Lord's side before accepting the truth? How could he have not seen the truth? Of course, this was when I was six, maybe eight years old. I hadn't yet paid the price of believing things that weren't true.

As Pilate [pronounced pee-LAH-tay] said in the Gospel we heard last weekend ... Can I pronounce it that way now? I'm frankly delighted that the Pilates fitness program may finally teach Americans how that name is actually pronounced. I'm talking about Pontius Pilate, [pone-TEE-us pee-LAH-tay] the Procurator of Judaea, whose name my Sunday school teachers all rendered as PAWN-chus PIE-lut. But I digress ... As Pilate said in the Gospel we heard on Good Friday, "What is truth?"

I don't know if Pilate knew the answer to his own question. I've struggled with it for years.

There's a wonderful movie Larkin and I enjoy, Secondhand Lions, in which a pair of crotchety and reclusive old brothers find themselves with a young grand nephew, Walter, left at their door. The more irascible of the two brothers, Hub McCann, played by Robert Duvall, gives Walter a piece of his "what every boy needs to know about becoming a man" speech. We don't hear much of it, but what we hear is potent:

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honour, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power, mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this: that love, true love never dies! Remember that boy ... remember that. Doesn't matter if it is true or not, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

And that's true, isn't it? But wait, that's a work of fiction. There was no Hub McCann, there was no "what every boy needs" speech, just a script for a movie, and the writers didn't even script the whole speech. When Hub gives the speech to a group of young thugs he's hoping to straighten out, the camera is twenty yards away and Duvall has his back to it. All we get is a fragment of a fictional speech. But it's true, isn't it? That honor and courage and virtue are the things worth believing in, that true love never dies?

I don't know how many have seen Second Hand Lions, but it's hard to imagine that anyone hasn't seen some of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, we certainly all know the story. Love never dies, but lovers do. Does anyone doubt that what Shakespeare wrote is true? Again, it's a work of fiction, but we know it to be true at the same time we know it doesn't contain much fact.

As Pilate said, "What is truth?" And as Thomas showed us, how are we supposed to know it when we see it?

When we read the story of Thomas, a week after the Resurrection, we get the impression that it's better to accept the truth without proof. There has to be more to it than that, because I can't live that way. Not only have I struggled with that, the church has struggled with it as well.

Some Greek astronomers were convinced that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and everything else revolved around the earth, a belief known as geocentrism that is often called the Ptolemaic model of the universe. During Christ's life there wasn't really a lot of cause to think much about these things, but as far as it went, most people "knew" that the sun revolved around the earth. Despite what many of us were taught in grade school, by the time Thomas was struggling with doubt nobody thought the world was flat, but the idea that the earth revolved around the sun was held by very few. It wasn't until the sixteenth century that Copernicus clearly laid out the orbits of the planets around the sun, and the seventeenth before Galileo confirmed it. I've never quite figured out why, but at that time the church "knew" that the earth was the center of the universe, and all else circled around it. If Copernicus hadn't died the day his book came from the printer, the church probably would have locked him away.

In the next century, Galileo confirmed that Copernicus was correct, and the church put him on trial. They forced him to recant, and only because he had friends in high places was he allowed to live out his life under house arrest rather than ending up in some dungeon. Imprisoned for life, by the church of Jesus Christ. Imprisoned for life for telling the truth. Not that he was telling the truth, mind you, he thought the sun was the center of the universe. Today we know not only that we aren't anywhere near the center of the universe, but that the center of the universe wouldn't be a good place to be.

What is truth? How do we tell?

As a logical person, at least some of the time, and a devout Christian, I dance on the razor's edge. Some of the questions are easy. Are the dramatic works of William Shakespeare true? Absolutely, they distill what we have learned about love and sin and remorse and action and consequence. Are they factual? The occasional couplet is, of course, but overall? No. Romeo was never born, Juliet never married him, although we know the date on which this didn't happen. That was the 11th day of March, 1302.

Did the disciples gather in the upper room with Thomas on the first second Sunday of Easter? Did these words, or at least their equivalent in Aramaic, actually pass as conversation? Do we know the date when this took place? We don't know any of this, although if I had to bet I'd say that today's Gospel reading relates a conversation that took place on the 12th of April in the year 33. That's based on looking over the arguments presented for all the possible dates of the crucifixion, which mostly range from the year 28 to the year 36. Did the crucifixion actually happen on the 3rd of April in the year 33? There isn't any date that fits all of the available data, but if you look at the most credible data, that's the date that best fits. And today's Gospel events were nine days later.

Essentially, I've had to live with a dichotomy between what is truthful and what is factual, and then struggle with the implications of that. And yes, it's a struggle. How I live my life is up to me, and I have to constantly make decisions. In science the idea of Garbage In, Garbage Out has a long history. You can prove anything if you're prepared to make up your data, but in the scientific or logical realm you aren't allowed to make up your data, and you aren't allowed to ignore data. There are rules of logic, and when it comes to choosing your diet, or your career, or the location you live in, the consequences of making decisions based on wrong data can be dire. But we can't prove God, or his Son, from the available facts. The data don't exist. We don't have the advantage the disciples had of seeing Jesus in the flesh, or the advantage of Thomas who had first-hand reports he rejected before accepting the truth of the resurrection.

Does that mean that the last words of Jesus as related in this lesson, "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" apply to us, that we are blessed because we believe in a risen Christ we can't prove. I think it does. I think it's the truth. But I can't declare as fact that Y'shua stood in that room and said those words to Thomas and the others on 12 April 33.

What is truth?

It's a hard word to define. The dictionary definition is circular, in the Concise Oxford Dictionary I read that truth is [quote] "the quality or a state of being true or truthful" [end quote]. In some specific areas, we can be more specific. We have the rules of logic, but they only help if we have properly framed statements to test, and we have a way to verify the basic facts behind them. One meaning of truth is "agreement with fact or reality". Facts are pretty easy, actually. Factual information is that which can be tested, and there are lot of things in the physical world that can be accurately tested and measured, far more today than ever before. When Galileo did his work, he had telescopes that went beyond anything any previous astronomer had available, but absolute garbage compared to the Hale telescope at Mount Palomar that was first used 60 years ago, which in turn is nothing compared to the Hubble telescope which is not yet 20 years old. Even the Hubble wasn't as clear as possible when it was launched, and two years later astronauts installed corrective optics, almost like my wearing glasses, to correct a spherical distortion, to make the heavens come into better focus. Over time, our ability to work with facts gets better and better, our ability to ferret out truth isn't much better than that of Thomas or Shakespeare.

Does today's lesson mean that we should ignore facts, ignore the scientific search for knowledge and understanding, ignore the search for truth, and substitute for it the acceptance of what we are told by others? I can't believe that it does. I don't for a second believe that Christ's statement, "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" means that you and I are blessed and that Mary Magdalene and Thomas, who did see Jesus risen from the tomb, are somehow not. And I think that history is very clear about the dangers of accepting errant nonsense, even, or maybe especially, when approved by the church, and treating it as law.

Those who treat Torah, what we know as the first five books of the Bible, as if it were fact will tell you the universe is less than 6,000 years old, and that Adam and Eve were literal persons who came into being as adults six days after the universe was created. Before the launch of the Hubble, we knew the universe was between ten and twenty billion years old. Now we know that it's between thirteen and fourteen billion years old. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that we're never going to pin it down to an exact time and date. There was no point at which a person suddenly emerged, with a name and a spouse. Does that mean that Torah is false? Absolutely not. It means that it isn't factual. There was no man named Adam, there was no woman named Eve, there was no Garden of Eden. But there was a Garden of Eden, there was a Fall from grace, it very well may have partially resulted from the very hunger for knowledge that so animates my life. But the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden is true. As completely devoid of fact as Romeo and Juliet, and as absolutely true.

Pilate asked Jesus, he asks us, "What is truth?"

I think the answer is that finding truth is our life. From our mothers' wombs we came into this world without a clue. From our mothers and fathers we learned that it's good to put soup on the stove, but it's not good to put your hand there. We learned about Thomas from our Sunday school teachers. We learned to read from our earliest school teachers, we learned to challenge what we read from later teachers. We discover the wonders of the world around us, not just things under a microscope or through a telescope, but the magic of our relationships with our families, with our work, with our life partners. From the day we are born to the day we die, we stumble ever toward the truth.

Through it all, we have Pilate gaoding us, "What is truth?". Through it all, we follow Thomas. We hear something and, like Thomas, say, "I don't think so!" And then we look again, or someone hands us another fact, and like Thomas, we say Aha! I get it now! We hear of the resurrection, and we want a connection to the facts that we can cling to. We so badly want to see the wounds on the broken human body of our God. We so want to know the exact date and hour, to find that house with an upper room. But somewhere, somehow, we get it. With Thomas we say, "My Lord and my God!" Scripture has an exclamation mark after that. After the tomb is thrown open, standing among the lilies, we too put an exclamation point on it. We get it. My Lord and my God!

That is truth.

This is what we call Good News. This is the Gospel of the Lord. Amen.