Show Me

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 23, 2017

Show Me

John 20:19-29

“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 Lord.

Jesus said to them again,

“Peace be with you.

As the Father 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 Lord.”

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.”

****************************************

“Tis a ponderous burden,”

That’s how Jacob Marley described

to Ebenezer Scrooge the chains he wore

in “A Christmas Carol”.

In the film version, Marley drags the chains

clanking, thunking, clattering;

we can almost feel the weight.

I think of those chains

every time I read our lesson.

I think of Thomas chained to the word,

“doubting,”

chained for two millennia,

clanking and thunking through

more than 2,000 years of history

with his “ponderous burden”,

the sting of Jesus’ rebuke always fresh,

“Have you believed because you have seen me?

Blessed are those who have not seen

and yet come to believe.”

Yes, Thomas pushed back

when all the disciples spoke with one voice,

“we have seen the Lord.”

But who among us would have reacted differently?

After all, the disciples were saying to Thomas,

“Jesus is alive!”

Jesus, who was dead,

who has been killed,

executed on a cross,

whose body had been put in a tomb—

he was alive!

Even as man of deep faith,

I’ve always found Thomas’ skepticism understandable,

especially when we think about

what he and the others had just been through:

the fear, the stress, the exhaustion;

and then the dismay, the despair,

the grief beyond solace.

The Lord alive?

The Lord risen from the dead?

For Thomas, it was too fantastic.

As much as he might have wanted to believe,

he said, in effect,

“I’ll believe it when I see it

with my own two eyes.”

Look closely at our lesson:

What did Jesus do

when he first appeared to the 10 disciples

hiding behind those locked doors?

There he was, for all eyes to see,

his voice, so familiar, filling the room,

“Peace be with you.”

And yet, the text tells us,

“After he said this,

he showed them his hands and his side.

Then …the disciples rejoiced

when they saw the Lord.”

Then, the disciples rejoiced—

when they had evidence,

when they had proof:

when they’d seen his scars.

Thomas wanted only the same opportunity.

Perhaps it is the lawyer in me—

the law was my first career—

that tends to sympathize

with Thomas’ demand for proof.

Give me evidence,

Give me proof.

The disciple’s words –

they were all well and good;

but, to use a lawyerly term,

they were not dispositive,

they were not conclusive.

It is our human nature to want proof,

to want facts.

And yet, of course,

you and I are men and women of faith,

believing things that cannot be proved,

proved dispositively.

We see God’s glory all around us,

we feel God’s love,

yet, how can we prove God?

Still, God has blessed us with minds—

good minds,

minds to think,

minds to imagine,

minds to create;

and…minds to question,

minds to seek evidence,

minds to seek proof.

The church has for most of its history

been infected with

the virus of anti-intellectualism:

Don’t think;

Don’t question;

Just accept—

what we leaders tell you.

Writing a century ago,

The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick asked,

“Can you imagine anyone turning

to the church

if the church seems to say to him or her,

“Come, and we will feed you

opinions from a spoon.

No thinking is allowed here

except such as brings you to certain specified,

predetermined conclusions.

These prescribed opinions

we will give you in advance of your thinking;

…Think; but only so as to reach these results.”

“I plead,” lamented Fosdick,

“for an intellectually hospitable church.”

Yesterday’s March for Science reminds us

how we still struggle with closed minds,

closed minds both within the church,

and closed minds in society at large.

Yesterday’s March reminds us particularly

that within the church

we’ve closed our minds to science

more than any other discipline.

Galileo brought this conflict to light

more than 300 years ago

when he and others questioned the idea

that the earth was the center of the universe;

positing instead, that the sun

was the center of the known heavens,

and the earth moved around the sun.

“That simply cannot be,”

thundered the leaders of the church,

denying science,

denying learning,

denying observation,

denying thinking.

“Scripture tells us,” they raged,

“[God] has established the world;

it shall never be moved.”

(Psalm 93:1; 1 Chronicles 16:30,

Psalm 96:10)

“That’s what the Bible says.

Therefore, the earth cannot possibly

revolve around the sun.  

End of discussion.”

The debate between evolution and creationism,

a debate that has gone on

for more than a century,

has pitted science against Scripture,

as though we have to choose

between faith or science,

that it is one or the other,

that we cannot blend the two.

Now, I am a man of faith,

but I believe in evolution.

In fact, I believe in evolution

because of my faith.

What I read in Genesis is not science,

not the literal truth of how God created.

What I read there,

what I learn from those words,

is that God is our Creator God,

that God creates;

that God created.

The details matter only to God,

not me.

And I also learn from Genesis

that God wants me to

learn about God’s creation,

that God wants me to explore,

wonder, ponder,

question,

look for answers

so that I too might see

that God’s creation is good,

very good,

and so I can fulfill my calling

to care for God’s creation,

remembering that humankind’s

first God-given job

was to look after the Garden.

(Genesis 2:15)

On my list of weekly must-reads

is Tuesday’s “Science Times” section

of the New York Times.

Even if I skim the rest of the paper,

I read the science section to learn about

astrophysics, biology, marine sciences,

whatever the section offers in a wonderful buffet.

And as my scientific knowledge has grown,

so has my faith.

Science has deepened my faith.

Science deepens my faith.

God gave us minds to wonder,

ponder, explore,

imagine, and create.

God gave us minds to look out on the horizon

and wonder what lies beyond.

God gave us minds to figure out

how to build a ship;

how to read the winds;

how to sail the seas;

how to sail toward the horizon;

how to discover new worlds. 

Blending faith and science

can help us to find new ways

to feed the hungry,

as we learned through Rise Against Hunger,

which has developed food packages

with scientific precision

that can feed more and more people.

Blending faith and science

can help us to find new ways

to provide housing for the poor

with things like micro housing.

And, of course, blending faith and science

can help us to see the impact we have

on God’s creation;

how we cannot deny

that our actions have consequences.

And blending faith and science can then

open new doors to how we care for God’s creation,

helping us to leave behind

destructive, damaging choices,

moving, for example,

from 18^th and 19^th century energy sources

to 21^st century energy choices.

Buffalo, where I grew up,

was a dirty industrial city back in the 1960s.

Plants poured black smoke into the sky

and toxic chemicals into the lakes and rivers.

We finally learned the hard way

that the smoke we poured into the sky

killed and sickened,

and that poisons we poured in the lakes and rivers

killed and sickened,

not only men, women, and children,

but fish and fowl – all God’s creatures.

We learned the hard way

that the prophecy spoken through

the prophet Isaiah 2700 years before

was all too timely:

“The earth dries up and withers,

the world languishes and withers;

the heavens languish together with the earth.

The earth lies polluted

under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,

violated the statutes,

broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse devours the earth,

and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,

and few people are left.”

When we blend faith and science

we learn that when God created,

God created a delicate balance,

and, when we do things

that disrupt that balance,

we interfere with God’s creation.

Biblical scholar James May has written,

“To intervene in the flow of water,

the habitat of birds and animals,

the topography of earth,

is to breach an intricate divine ecology

into which human life is integrated….

We are learning slowly that we damage ourselves,

live in alienation from that to which we belong,

and threaten the future of life,

when we live without regard for this earth

or in denial of how our actions affect it.”

“God saw everything he had made,

and indeed it was very good.”

I can hear God saying to me, to you, to us:

“Show me that you my children

also see my creation as good, very good.

Show me that you are good and faithful stewards

of my earth, my creation.

Show me that you are using the minds I gave you

to find new and better ways

to serve and care for one another,

to serve and care for my creation.

“My beloved children,

I believe in you,

and I have faith in you;

but show me.

Show me.”

AMEN