The Plymouth Pulpit

March 30, 2008

Rev. Lisa Dembkowski

“Reach Out and Believe”

             The first words that ran through my head when I sat down to write this sermon were “I got nothin’.”  Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.  Faced with a particular task, you feel as if you have no resources or very little inspiration to accomplish it.  As a writer, I describe this condition as “writer’s block,” a temporary condition that happens to everyone at one time or another and I’m sure I’m not the only minister preaching this Sunday who, after the glory and celebration of Easter, stalled a bit in bringing together a message.

              Perhaps that’s why Thomas was not with the rest of the disciples when Jesus appeared to them the first time in the evening on Easter day.  Perhaps Thomas was having a difficult time processing all that was going on.  Perhaps he had “believer’s block” and stalled a bit in understanding the scope of what was happening.

              Put yourself in Thomas’ shoes for a moment.  Can you imagine it?  You’ve become a disciple, a follower of a man who teaches God’s message of love, a prophet who has knowledge of God unlike no other prophet before him.  You’ve eaten at the same table, slept in the same camp, walked on the same dusty roads.  You’ve witnessed his miracles and his ability to heal, his ability to bring people in from the margins of society to a place of dignity and respect.  You’ve come to know him as a friend and brother.  Yet, despite his goodness, and despite the fact that just the week prior he entered the city of Jerusalem as the much anticipated and celebrated leader of the Jews, over the last few days he has been put on trial and crucified.  And he dies.  He dies and is quickly buried in a tomb.  And then Jesus’ body is missing from the tomb and Mary reports that she has seen Jesus alive.  He has been resurrected from death!  All of this happens within a very short period of time.  I can imagine that the words that ran through the disciples’ heads, including Thomas, were “I can’t believe this is happening. It’s too much to grasp. I just can’t believe it.”

              At some point on Easter day, the actual day of Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas leaves the group for some reason.  We don’t know why.  We only know that he was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared among them that evening.  Perhaps Thomas had some personal business to attend to.  Or, after all they’d experienced, perhaps he just needed to break away from the group for a while.  This sounds reasonable enough to me.  When faced with great difficulty, it’s fairly normal to withdraw for reflection, to try to sort things out.  Indeed, this was a difficult time for the disciples.

              I can understand Thomas’ difficulty with the situation.  His beliefs were being pushed to the limit.  And believing isn’t easy nor is having faith easy.  I read an article this week about the challenges and difficulties of faith.  The article picked up on Staples, the office supply company’s popular advertising slogan “That was easy” along with its big red “easy” button.  Wouldn’t it be great if we had an “easy” button that enabled us to believe and to have faith?  With all the chaos and strife that had occurred, can you imagine the disciples locked in a stuffy room somewhere, hiding from much-feared danger at the hands of the authorities?  On a rickety table in the middle of the room is an “easy” button.  A quick push of the button by Jesus and all of sudden the entire world is bright and new!  Every person in the world would turn to Christ and acknowledge their relationship with him by saying, “My Lord and my God.”  And, to be perfectly honest, I believe that God is powerful enough to enable that kind of universal belief.  But God has bestowed upon us the great gift of free will, the capacity to be free from any external constraint or imposed necessity, and I ask you, what good and caring parent forces their child to believe in something without understanding it?  That’s where you and I come in.  Like Thomas, we are called to wrestle with our understanding of God and then, as our understanding increases, we can then believe.  But first, like Thomas, we must reach out—reach out to God, reach out to others, and reach out to the world.

              Reaching out to God is an action we can take to overcome our own doubts, our own “believer’s block.”  The Bible tells us of the numerous times Jesus went off to pray by himself.  He turned to God in his suffering and at those times when the reality of his situation pressed him to confusion and uncertainty.  Perhaps in leaving the group that day, Thomas was following Jesus’ example of reaching out to God in prayer.  Of course, we can’t confirm that this is true but I hold it out to you as a possibility.

              For us, reaching out to God also means faithful and regular worship attendance.  On this Sunday in particular, I know I’m “preaching to the choir” in making this point.  But as we face the struggles of everyday life during the rest of the week, our faith is often challenged by the injustices of our world, by the suffering we endure due to illness or tragedy.  Even the little things can mount up to the point where our ability to believe is blocked.  We come to church on Sunday to find relief from such blockage and to be renewed, to be reminded of the new life God offers us.  Each Sunday we come to celebrate again Christ’s resurrection and to receive the new and living hope that comes from having faith in Christ.  In our worship, we reach out to God in song and prayer and we are encountered by God as God reaches out to us through scripture, through the Word, and through our fellowship with one another.

              A minister named Mike Nelson writes that while he was serving as an intern at a mainline Protestant church in northern Minneapolis, he shared an office with a retired pastor named Bob Evans who served the church as a voluntary evangelism consultant.  Bob’s role was to offer advice and strategies for filling the pews each Sunday.  One week he ran an announcement in the church bulletin that read “Surveys show that the average church-member invites someone to church every fourteen years.”  Below that, he offered, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, “How many of you are overdue?”

           It would be great if we had an easy button to use each Sunday to fill the pews.  Instead, each of us has to step out briefly from our comfort zone, reach out to people and invite them, one by one, family by family.  Not as easy as simply pushing a button but far more meaningful in the long run as they and we experience the joys of fellowship and faith.

           As we wrestle with our understanding of God as Thomas did, reaching out to God, to others, and to the world also involves questioning, even doubting what we are being asked to believe.  That’s our heritage as Congregationalists and that’s what the disciples did as they spent time with Jesus.  They asked him questions about God and about heaven.  They asked him about God’s kingdom and about serving others.  They asked about prayer and humility and about God’s concern for those who are lost.  They asked about redemption and gratitude and judgment.  They wrestled with their faith.  And, in the end, the one whose doubt was greatest seemed to experience the greatest transformation.  In reaching out and touching Jesus, not only does Thomas believe Jesus to be Lord but he also comes to believe Jesus to be God.  Such belief had not been expressed before by the disciples yet Thomas, the doubter, takes his belief to the next level and he comes to a deeper understanding of Christ.

           As disciples of that same Christ, we are called to question what we believe.  We are called to seek a deeper understanding of our faith through study and devotion.  Learning and thinking about God and the church enables us to see more clearly God’s vision for our presence and work in the community.  Our faith and thus, our belief, is magnified and intensified when our intellect is stimulated through study and discussion.  As we study together, the influence of the Holy Spirit becomes more evident and we recognize that we are bound together and inspired by God’s Holy Spirit to envision a common goal, a common purpose for our faith and for the ministry of Plymouth Church.

           Faith lives toward the future and on this Sunday after Easter, the future has been revealed to us through Christ’s resurrection.  We have seen the Easter miracle and believed.  We have not seen the first-person Christ as Thomas did when he reached out to him, touched him and believed but we are all the more blessed because we have not seen him and yet we have come to believe anyway.  This kind of belief reveals God’s great mercy and grace and it allows us to have persistence in our Christian service.

           I’d like to share with you an excerpt from John Wesley’s diary:

         “Sunday, A.M., May 5 Preached in St. Anne’s. Was asked not to come back anymore.
          Sunday, P.M., May 5 Preached in St. John’s. Deacons said “Get out and stay out.”
          Sunday, A.M., May 12 Preached in St. Jude’s. Can’t go back there, either.
          Sunday, A.M., May 19 Preached in St. Somebody Else’s. Deacons called special meeting and said I couldn’t      

          return.
          Sunday, P.M., May 19 Preached on street. Kicked off street.
          Sunday, A.M., May 26 Preached in meadow. Chased out of meadow as bull was turned loose during service.
          Sunday, A.M., June 2 Preached out at the edge of town. Kicked off the highway.
          Sunday, P.M., June 2 Afternoon, preached in a pasture. Ten thousand people came out to hear me.”

          Each of us suffers our own trials.  Life is never easy.  The depth and persistence of John Wesley’s faith is revealed to us as he suffered through his preaching defeats.  Yet he believed in his message and he believed that God wanted him to keep on preaching even though he was rejected over and over again.  There’s no easy button for our faith and for believing and we might even feel hurt when it seems that we’re getting nowhere despite our best efforts.  The old fitness cliché “no pain, no gain” comes to mind.  But as we experience pain, we must remember the resurrection and the empty tomb.  We must remember Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you. As God has sent me, so I send you.”  We receive God’s peace into our lives and we carry that peace with us wherever Christ sends us.  When we feel the wind, we feel the breath of God and we receive the Holy Spirit.  Because we have reached out and believed, we are empowered as disciples and apostles and together we will learn and serve in Jesus’ name.  We will be servants of God, trusting God to give us counsel and instruction.  Despite our doubts and our questioning, our hearts will be glad and our souls will rejoice as we learn the way of life God intends for us. Amen.