an excerpt from today’s sermonette

Lumen campus ministry (for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and hangers-on) guest speaker Matt Seddon wrote the following reflection on the doubting Thomas story:

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Our doubts and questions are a fundamental aspect of who we are.  But is a reasonable doubt–a question about something fantastic and inherently unbelievable, something that requires a leap of faith to accept–truly a problem?  Or can we wonder more about other doubts, the kind of doubts that keep us from living into that leap of faith, the doubts that keep us from proclaiming the resurrection in our lives?

In his Easter sermon this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury notes:

For a great many people, the burning question about faith is not just, “Can anyone believe this?” but “Can anyone live like this?”  Is it possible to live “in heaven,” in such a way that our selfishness is eroded?  To live on the basic assumption that people can be healed of their miserable compulsions to fear and resent each other and to cling to their grievances and injuries?

 

The Archbishop suggests that rather than worrying about doubts of faith (“Do I adequately believe in God?”  “Can I ever wonder about the truth of the resurrection?”), we should worry more about doubting our ability to live into the Easter message – the message that we can forgive, we can overcome our tendencies to place self above all others.

Do we doubt that we can live into the resurrection?  That a new thing can happen?  That our failures and sins and past wrongs and limitations are, in fact, no limitation to life with God? To me, that is one of the profound and great hopes of the Easter message – that our worst acts, up to and including state assassination of God’s own child – are still no barrier to God’s grace and love.

It is also the most difficult message to accept.  I have an easier time accepting that God could enact a miracle with God’s child than I can accept that such power might still be acting in me, might be able to overcome my own tendencies to operate on self-interest, worry, fear.  I get discouraged on a daily basis.  I fail to extend love, I see others treat each other with callousness, I think there is no point to continuing to try.  The Easter message contradicts this line of thinking and asks us to live into a new thing, a new hope, a belief in new possibilities.

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I never thought of the doubting Thomas story in this way.  I always thought of doubts as when we wonder whether our religion has truth, whether certain miracles could happen, whether God does exist, etc.  I never thought of doubting our own ability to “live into the resurrection,” to be freed from selfishness and sin and fear.

Sometimes I feel exactly like Matt does—getting discouraged, feeling overwhelmed with the world’s problems, thinking there’s no point in trying.  Sometimes I feel like a selfish, compassion-less, failing person.  I hope I can live into the resurrection in a new way.  As Matt says, “…let go of our own goals, and desires, and emphases, and live into a new world where our life together is more important than our own goals, than our own doubts that we can live together.”