"One in Three, Three in One" Trinity Sunday Message, Year A

Genesis 1:1 - 2:4

In the beginning when God was creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together God called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.  The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.  And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,  and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.  God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth,  to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.  And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.  God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God were they created; male and female they were created. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw everything that had been made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work, and rested on the seventh day from all the work that had been done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that had been done in creation.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that God made the earth and the heavens.

Top of Form Bottom of Form

Matthew 28:16-20

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Creator and of the Redeemer and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

***

Will you pray with me? God of mystery, three in one, never fully known, always present, ever-loving—open our hearts and minds to your riddle, to your love, to your presence with us in ways we do not always recognize or understand; give us grace to accept and celebrate what we do not understand, to know that your foolishness is greater than our wisdom; to worship and love you in all your complexity, so far beyond our capacity to comprehend.  In your own mighty name, amen.

Have you ever been in complete and total darkness? I mean, where there was no light at all—not stars, not a nightlight, not even light from across a field? I once went on a cave tour—don’t ask me why, when I tend to be claustrophobic—but I did. And at one point in the tour, we were asked to gather close together, so that our shoulders were touching, and then the lights went out. Now, it was already pretty dim down there, so it shouldn’t have taken long for our eyes to adjust and find what light was available. But there was none. We stood there for one minute, two, three…and could not see a thing. Utter, complete and total darkness. I was glad I could feel the shoulder of a friend against my arm, and hear her breathing…because otherwise I would have thought I was the only person in existence. When the guide broke the silence and turned the lights back on, it was almost unbearable—what had seemed so dim was now blindingly bright—and yet we had not been able to see, although our eyes were as adjusted to darkness as they could get.

That gave me a taste of what it must have been like before God began creating. Now, I had a place to stand, which God apparently didn’t—God “moved on the face of the deep,” i.e., chaos, nothingness, total disorder. But like me, God had others there—God addresses them—“let’s make humans in our image.” 

There’s been a lot of discussion over the years as to who was with God in the creation. We believe in one God, three persons—so all three persons were present, but what does that mean, exactly? William Willimon compares it to family relationships—as I am mother, sister, and daughter; or to the ways we interact with the world—as I am pastor, driver, reader, for example—three ways of being, but one person. But if that’s what God was doing, then we have a bit of a delusional God, talking to Godself as if God were several beings, as I spoke to Reader RP as if she were separate from Driver RP…. Some have said God was talking to the angels, others that it was other minor gods then present in the Hebrew pantheon. But I think that God was speaking among Godself—as we sometimes say—or at least I do—“OK, RP, that was a stupid move;” or “Well, RP, you did it! Hooray!” God was Godself, totally, in all ways of being when God  began creating.

God, in all of God’s being, created and is continuing to create the universe. God, in all of God’s being, was present on earth with humans, known as the person Jesus Christ, and will be present with us again. God, in all of God’s being, is present with us, in wisdom and grace and mercy and blessing.  This is what Jesus means when he says “I will be with you always,” surely one of the most, if not THE most, comforting verses in all scripture.

That is the Trinity we celebrate on this Sunday. All that God is, in all God’s mystery—we have to confess we don’t really completely understand it and never will—but we acknowledge it as good.  What we can “take away” is the understanding that God is community—and that therefore we are created to be in community as well.

One writer put it this way: “The formula does not save us. Love does. The power at the heart of the universe is love. God is love. Christ is the most complete form of love who ever walked the earth, and the Holy Spirit is Christ’s love among us after Easter. But the essence of the Trinity is love- relational, community love. People should know us by our love, not our doctrine.” (Rev. Dr. Robert M. Watson).  And they’ll know we are Christians by our love…Hm. How true is that these days? But I digress…

There are a lot of ways to describe the Trinity. I mentioned one a few minutes ago, in terms of relationships; another is the metaphor of the apple—God the creator being the skin that holds the apple together; God the Child or Redeemer being the flesh—that which feeds us; and God the Holy Spirit or Sustainer being the seeds, the way God is found everywhere in the world. But these functional descriptions—this is what God does—always falls short of the fullness of God’s being, just as describing what a person does can’t encompass all of who they are. I preach sermons—but I am more than that; I drive a car—but I am more than that; I read a lot—but I am more than that.

It’s not about what God does—it’s about relationships—God’s community of love, and our part in that community—who God is in relationship to us, and who we are in relationship to each other.  “God is love;” that is the simplest statement we can make about God, and the most profound, because it holds all the truth about God within it. Love implies another being—someone to love and to be loved by in return; the very concept of love means a community and denies solitude. God’s very being is in community and based in love—love creates, and does not destroy; love saves, and does not cast away; love lifts up, encourages, advocates, and hopes—love does not judge or deny or condemn.  

Think of the love of an ideal parent—I stress the ideal part, because parenting is the hardest work I have ever done; those of you who have parented in any way know what I mean—and all we can do is the best we can do—and that’s all we can expect of our own parents, too. But an ideal parent never scolds or shames or criticises. An ideal parent loves the child—gives him or her options to choose from, but always with guidance, with teaching about what is the best way , the most loving way to behave—not the simplest for the parent, or that choice that makes the child feel best—but what is truly best.

How many of you have read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or seen the movie? Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch is the consummate parent. As a small-town Southern lawyer who takes on a racially-charged court case defending a black man accused of raping a white woman, his family and friends tell him he shouldn’t take the case, it will hurt his credibility, and in any case, there’s no chance he can win it—he should turn it down. But Atticus refuses to turn it down. He says he couldn’t face his children if he did. He is raising them to be fair, to care for truth and honesty, to look out for those who are weaker, who are oppressed or in danger and to care for them. You don’t shoot mockingbirds, and you don’t hurt the defenceless. Atticus is parenting by example—the kind of father I think all of us wish we had had and some of us perhaps, had.

That’s love—to lay down a principle, and then to live up to it, to set an example for others to follow.  In simplest terms, that’s what Jesus did—taught others about God’s love, about the real riches of God’s realm, about what life could be like if we loved each other as God loved us—the love that binds the Trinity together. He did not draw back from being misunderstood, abused, even executed—because he was simply sharing God’s love with the world. 

Because none of us is perfect, we don’t always show that love, live up to that standard, in all situations—we try, and we fall short, of course. But because we are in community, when one of us fails, or does not, as a friend puts it, “act out of our best self,” others of us can step up and lift that person. We can stand in the breach for each other, carry one another when that person needs to know he or she is loved. 

Ideally, that is what the church—both the small c church, the church of Jesus Christ around the world, as well as each individual congregation—is about. And at its best, that is what it looks like—creating hope and joy through worship and prayer, offering Christ’s redemption, sustaining each other. 

Can we be that kind of people? That is the question I would leave with you today—are we able, do we dare, to be people who set an example of God’s love for each other—not only the people we like, not only the people who are nice to us and do things our way, who like us and support us—but all people, even the ones who annoy us and anger us and hurt us? 

On the cross, as he was dying, Jesus forgave those who had called for and carried out his execution. With that as our example, surely we can forgive a difference of opinion, or even a deeper hurt? I am not minimizing the pain of broken relationships—but I am asking if perhaps we can dig deeper into our hearts and find the love and forgiveness Jesus showed to all humans. 

In the tremendous name of the one God in three, amen.

"Gibberish or Gospel?" Message for Pentecost, June 12, 2011

Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.  And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my servants, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of God’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Holy One shall be saved.’

John 20:selected verses

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the religious leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw him. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As Abba God has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 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 Child of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

***

Will you pray with me? Holy One, send your spirit of fire on each of us; make us to blaze with your Holy Spirit. Descend upon us and release us to be your people in truth and freedom. Open our mouths to speak your message of love; teach us the language to use so that your children will understand your truth. In your own name we pray, amen.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Well, perhaps Lewis Carroll isn’t taught in school anymore… But some of us knew it—could even recite it along with me!

But for those who don’t know Carroll nonsense poem, it sounds like gibberish. He said it wasn’t, just that he had used new words. “Brillig,” for example, means “late afternoon, around teatime.” And “slithy” means “graceful and slimy.” They are words, he said—just that the rest of the world didn’t know what they meant—not yet.

I think that must have been something like the experience of that crowd on that first Pentecost. There was something familiar in what they were hearing, but only some of them could understand some of it—others could understand other parts. Maybe a few understood all of what was being said. But for everyone, much of what they heard was nonsense. They didn’t know what it meant.

The definition of nonsense is different for each of us. What is normal and acceptable, and part of everyday for some individuals is incomprehensible to others. The difficulty arises when we use what we think is usual language and someone else thinks it is nonsense.

The wisdom of the Holy Spirit on that first Pentecost was in the varied speech—language—of the disciples. The same words that were gibberish to one person were words of life and wisdom and salvation to another person. The disciples spoke in many ways—and every one of them was understood by someone.

That tells us something about how we are to be disciples—not locked into one speech, one way of operating, one language, if you will. We have to be open to the moving of the Holy Spirit, who cannot be controlled and moves through and in us through God’s will. Each of us has our own way of communicating, our own understanding of what is nonsense and what is not—and therefore, we can each reach out to different people.

Depending on our own lives and circumstances, perhaps we “speak the language” of others: maybe people with addictions; or parents; or single people; or new Canadians; or people of a certain age; or with disabling conditions.  God can use all our circumstances for good ends—each of us has an “audience” who will understand what others might consider to be our nonsense. God speaks through us as God wills.

I have a friend who lives by a lake that is populated by geese—Canada geese, actually. They aren’t really my favourite bird, much as I like water birds like swans and ducks and herons. Geese tend to be noisy and messy and aggressive, especially when they have goslings. It’s difficult to walk by the lake sometimes, because the geese will attack—and even if they aren’t around, the benches and picnic tables are a mess from their droppings. They do what they like, they own the lakeshore, they cannot be controlled.

It is not a mistake that in Celtic Christianity, the wild goose is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. I think we can see why—wild, uncontrolled, free to move, always on the wing, just passing through, under no-one’s control but God’s.

That first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit made her presence known in no uncertain terms—and in a way that was wild, messy, unpredictable—under only God’s control.  Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the disciples were so unruly that people thought they were under the influence of something else entirely—that they were drunk, first thing in the morning! Well, perhaps they weren’t drunk on wine—but they were truly under the influence of the Spirit—wild, crazy, uncontrolled, nonsense.

How often do we let the Spirit influence us like that?

I know, we’re calm, well-behaved mainstream Protestants, plus we’re Canadian—we don’t create disturbances, we don’t speak in tongues, we don’t get unruly—or not very often, anyway.

But just as someone doesn’t have to fall down to be drunk, we don’t have to utter unknown languages to know the Holy Spirit is moving with and through us.

When I answered God’s call to ministry, I was under the influence. When MCC Windsor called me to this pulpit, some people thought they were speaking nonsense. Other people have their stories, I know—when God called them, spoke to them, moved their hearts and spirits to do what seemed nonsense to the world around them.

And yet, here we are. The Spirit is wild, uncontrollable—like the breath of God, blowing where God wills.

One of the things Jesus commanded the disciples to do was to baptise. This was a shorthand for “welcome others into this group.” Baptism is the sign of joining God’s community—the community of Christians, the church with a small c. It is God’s act, through the Holy Spirit, wild, uncontrollable. Many MCC’s offer baptism at every service—they recognise that the Spirit cannot be channelled and may chose another day than Easter, Pentecost, Homecoming or All Saint’s to call someone to baptism.

Today we will be welcoming a new member to this community; on her behalf, her parents will renounce all that separates us from God. In her baptism, we call upon the Spirit to be present for and with her—in gibberish and nonsense, in wild drunken joy. We remember our own baptism—whatever age we were—and give thanks for that unruly Holy Spirit that brought us home to God.

In the name of the wild goose called the Holy Spirit, amen.

True Faith: Ducklings into Swans

Acts 2:14. 22-32

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,  “You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. For David says concerning him, ‘I saw the Holy One always before me, for God is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken;  therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh will live in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’ “Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.  Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that God would put one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, ‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.’ This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”

John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Saviour. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As God has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Saviour.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 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 Child of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

****

Will you pray with me? We come before you, Holy Friend, with the greetings of the risen Christ ringing in our ears! You have done great things for us, though we barely understand them. You have done great things for us, though we sparely share their riches. You have done great things for us, though we rarely live in their full glory. Today in this ongoing Easter season, may the Spirit of Christ surprise us again with all his deathless truth and grace, and raise us up from the mediocre worship  into which we sometimes slide. In his name we pray. Amen!

When I was young, one of my favourite fairy tales was “The Ugly Duckling.” Written by Hans Christian Anderson (a bisexual man, by the way), the story tells of a young bird hatched into a nest of ducks. Because he does not resemble the others, he is harassed and teased. He sees wild swans flying high in the sky and admires their freedom and beauty, but knows he cannot join them. Forced out of his first home, he wanders from place to place, living with wild geese for a while, and with a farmer over the winter. In the spring he goes down to the pond for the first time, and in the water he sees a lovely white bird—himself—and realizes he is a swan. When the swans return, they take him as one of their own, and he is able to fly away with them, at home and himself for the first time.

It’s a wonderful story on many levels—there’s a subtext of being misunderstood, of not belonging where we are, that is common to us all as we grow up and find our place in the world. There’s a strong current of the LGBT person, too, not at home until they find others like themselves, and can know themselves as part of a caring, supportive group.

The theme I want to look at, though, is that of recognizing ourselves, of growing into truth and faith, living through the doubt until we see ourselves as we really are.

This is Thomas’ position. He missed the “big reveal” of Jesus’ first appearance to the other disciples on the afternoon of that first Easter Sunday—and he insists on proof. But let’s not be too hard on him—it is often said that the opposite of faith is not doubt but apathy. Thomas wants to believe—he followed Jesus through many difficult times, and is still part of the disciples. He just wants to be sure.

Maybe Thomas has a hard time trusting—maybe he has that familiar-to-many-of-us concern of abandonment. He wants to believe Jesus has risen, but he doesn’t want to be made a fool of, either. Maybe he has had his hopes and faith dashed too many times before this. For whatever reason, Thomas cannot, dares not, trust that what the others—John, Peter, James—tell him is really true. He cannot accept it as simply true, and so he makes extreme statements about what he needs to do in order to believe. And when Jesus calls his bluff, Thomas falls on his knees and believes. He cannot resist the truth—and he comes to know himself.

It’s a gradual process, like the duckling-into-swan. It doesn’t happen overnight—remember, it was a week later before Jesus appeared again. Thomas had seven days to think and remember and pray and listen to what the others were telling him.

True faith—whether it’s faith in ourselves or in something else—doesn’t come easily. It is a product of wrestling with what we know and don’t know, what we wish we didn’t know and what we long to know. It is precisely because it comes from this struggle that faith and apathy are opposites, not faith and doubt. Those who doubt want to believe—otherwise they simply would disbelieve, and be done with the matter. So they move from doubt to faith as a result of their struggle.

Sometimes there’s fallout, some other damage done on the way to that faith, though. In the case of the writer of the gospel of John, that damage was a legacy of anti-Semitism, of a bias that fosters a negative attitude to Jewish people and Judaism.

You see, at the time when this gospel was composed and recorded, the early Christians—who mostly began their lives as Jewish people—were in the process of leaving the synagogues. This was partly because their faith was leading them a different way, one in which they knew Jesus was the Messiah, and partly because they were seen as heretical by the Jewish authorities and were gradually being made to feel unwelcome in the synagogues. So they had to come to terms with this separation—which meant not only leaving their place of worship, but their extended families, their communities. How do humans often deal with forced separation? We get angry, we demonize the ones we are separating from—or at least we want to see them as completely wrong or foolish or unseeing or not understanding.

We do this when we end relationships—the ex-partner’s faults become magnified, and their good traits shrink to the vanishing point. All we want to remember is how selfish they were, or how they didn’t understand our needs, or were not willing to commit to the relationship. We do when we leave a job sometimes—the company was too demanding, or demeaning; or our boss stole our ideas. Many of us did this when we were adolescents and were in the necessary process of separating from our parents—our parents suddenly didn’t understand us, were out of touch, didn’t really care about us. Maybe we fantasized that they weren’t our “real” parents—that our genuine parents would swoop down out of the blue and take us off to live our “real” lives as princesses or in the circus or as superheroes—and adopted children have these fantasies, too, by the way; this fantasy of being foisted onto other people to raise, whether by accident or design—like the ugly duckling, forced to live as a duck when he was really a swan.

So John and the Christians of his time had to struggle with separating from Judaism—and so they demonized the Jewish people as a whole—even though they knew that what they were saying was not literally true, and was an exaggeration. It was part of the separation process. Unfortunately, after a few generations went by, the awareness of the context of those early Christians was lost, and Christians took the gospels literally in every detail, and Jewish people became seen as devilish, wilfully evil, and just plain wrong.

We have to recognise this and see the truth through modern eyes. Remember that Jesus was Jewish—God chose to be born into a Jewish family, into the Jewish faith. Jesus was an observant Jew of Palestine. We cannot allow the biases of the past to affect our understanding of eternal spiritual truth.

That was part of the struggle of faith of the early Christians.  Thomas had to overcome his fear of trusting that Christ was risen in order to be the apostle he was meant to be—the apostle who, tradition says, travelled to India to spread the gospel there, whose spiritual descendents are the Mar Thoma Christians of today’s India. The early Christians of John’s community, however, were not able to make that leap—they were not able to accept that the Jewish faith that nurtured Christ could, in another way, continue to nurture them. Instead, they turned away in recrimination, declaring like a teenager, “I hate you!” Most teenagers eventually come to terms with their parents—not all, of course—but most come to some kind of accommodation and acceptance. The early Christians, sadly, could not do that—and their poisonous legacy is the centuries of oppression, bigotry, and slaughter of Jewish peoples.

It’s appropriate to remember this today; it’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to remember all those slain in the Nazi concentration camps. They were killed in the millions because they were Jewish, or Polish, or Catholic clergy, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or lesbians, or gay men, or developmentally challenged, or twins, or physically challenged, or political dissidents.

This is the fruit of unquestioned faith, of faith that has not struggled to be born and sustained, a faith without insight into its own faults and weaknesses and thin spots. A faith that doesn’t know its own weaknesses will be convinced it doesn’t have any—and will act as if it is responsible to no-one. Have you seen the bumper sticker that says, “God said, I believe it, that settles it?” That takes a lot for granted, doesn’t it? For instance, that humans know exactly what God says, and what God means by it, and what humans are supposed to do with it. But an unquestioned faith, a faith that has not wrestled with the deeper meanings, is a faith that is afraid to look at these things—afraid, perhaps, that it will be toppled by a single word or action that casts any doubt. A muscle grows stronger through use—so does faith, through the struggle and doubt and wrestling.

It is through that work of faith, that struggle and doubt, that need to know for ourselves, not what another person has told us, that we come to know who we really are and what we believe. It is through the wrestling with difficult times—being thrown out of a nest we didn’t really belong in, sometimes even alienation and harassment, that we come to the knowledge of who we are, and to a stronger faith.

We may be ducklings today, placed in the wrong nest; we may be Thomas on that first Easter Sunday, doubting what we want to believe. But, praise God, through work and doubt and struggle, we will come to be swans, we will fall to our knees like Thomas, and cry out, “My Lord and my God!” and our faith will be strong. In the name of the one redeeming God, amen.