“Faith in Experience”
A sermon from John 20:19-31
Here’s a question: How would we define “experience”?
Without using the word “experience”? I found out once, in front of a class I was teaching, that it’s really hard to do that. It was hard for the students to do, too. We all kept wanting to fall back on something like “it’s what you … you know … experience.” Even Google has a hard time with this, because one of its three definitions of the word in its noun form is, and I quote, “the knowledge or skill acquired by a period of practical experience of something …”
Still, the dictionaries do give us some helpful additional language for what feels to most of us like simply a basic feature of life. Language like “feel” or “encounter” or “undergo,” specifically in a direct, personal way, so as to observe or participate in something. We distinguish what we “experience” – because we ourselves are directly part of, or in contact with, it – from what we “know about,” say from reading or hearing about it, and from what we “think about” or even “imagine.”
That direct, personal quality of “experience” may have something to do with the way it feels, to most of us, like something that really belongs to us. And that makes the knowledge we gain, from experience, feel different to us from what we know as facts and figures from books, or even as the procedures from a procedures manual – before we’ve gone through them ourselves, that is.
And this vital difference we feel, between experience and the other kinds of knowing we do, seems to lie at the heart of this familiar story about Thomas and the other disciples. This is the story that has led Christians down through the millennia to refer to Thomas as “doubting.” Doubting, because he insists on experiencing the risen Christ, the way his fellow disciples have, before he’s willing to join in with their “Hallelujah! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!” celebration.
But honestly, can we really blame him?
Because here are the other disciples, having shared a transformative meeting with the Risen Christ, up close and personal … which, scary as it does seem to have been, has also been exhilarating, and transformative, and above all, convincing. It has for them the undeniable quality, of direct, personal contact, of first-hand encounter with reality – of experience.
[Although granted, in light of modern psychology, or even in light of ancient psychology, any skeptics among us could come up with at least a couple of ways to deny it, if they wanted to. Could point out how notoriously unreliable human sensory perception is, how vulnerable it is to illusions and delusions and deceptions and so on. All that could even have been going through Thomas’s mind in that first conversation with the other disciples.]
And clearly, the experience matters for them. It has moved them from fear to a new-found fearlessness. It has moved them from devastation and despair to rejoicing and hope and purpose. It has definitely given them something to talk about to Thomas, making them witnesses to what they themselves know in that direct, personal way.
We might well wonder to ourselves what Thomas’s experience of this new situation must have been over the next few days of hanging out with his old friends. This new experience of being in direct, personal contact with people he used to be on the same page with, at least more or less, who now seem to have a really different relationship to the world in which they’re all living. A really different personal sense of its perils and possibilities, its promise and their project in it.
I have to imagine that Thomas’s experience during this week is not terribly different from anyone’s – our own – who realizes they are looking at the world and its events from an entirely different place from a friend’s or a neighbor’s. [We may have had an experience or two like that ourselves, here in our everyday world in which people disagree so vehemently about various aspects of reality.]
Presumably it included a lot of asking questions: What happened? How did it feel? Who said what, exactly? And then …? Maybe it included reaching for explanations … for how this came to be “true for you” when it so clearly isn’t “true for me”? Maybe, also, trying to work out what they can and can’t still talk about, can and can’t agree on now, can and can’t still do together … whether they can, or can’t, still be friends?
But, importantly, we gather the answer to that last question must have been “yes,” because the following week Thomas is there with them. He evidently trusts his friends that much, and believes something in their story enough … to be there with them, to be part of their togetherness.
Perhaps because he’s hoping to see what they’ve seen? Or perhaps he’s feeling something less than hope, but something more than flat-out denial? Maybe he can’t believe that anything similarly real and convincing could possibly happen to him, but he’s willing to go along with the other disciples, at least for a while, maybe just for old times’ sake, or because, well, what has he got to lose … ? We don’t know – John the author of the gospel has left the story very much open to our imagination on this surely rather important point. There are a lot of ways we could tell this story.
And then, as John tells it, Jesus appears among them yet again. And this time, Jesus has a specific mission and a specific message for Thomas: look, here I am, for you, as needed and requested, so please, don’t stay on the outside of this resurrection life, trust it …
… to which Thomas says, in effect, “Wow, OK!” Or, in John’s gospel’s words, “My Lord and my God!”
And we Christians have been affirming that affirmation of faith, along with that of the other disciples, ever since. There’s a name for this story, by the way, along with all the other stories we have in our scripture, about Jesus, and his birth and life and ministry and passion and death and resurrection and ascension and subsequent ongoing interaction with his disciples in the power of the Holy Spirit, all of which comes to form the contents of the earliest Christian proclamation of the gospel. The Church calls it “witness,” specifically, “the apostolic witness” – the apostles’ sharing of their direct, personal experience of Jesus Christ, in life, and in new life. The apostolic witness – the apostles’ stories of experience – is the earliest scaffolding for the historic Christian community and its tradition, the tradition we ourselves are part of this morning.
In whatever way we’re part of it.
Because this story of Thomas and his process of coming to his own experience of the risen Christ reminds us that there’s more than one kind of story of “Christian experience.” There’s more than one path to direct, personal encounter with Jesus Christ. And Thomas’s path through doubt is no less real or valid or even “faithful” than that of the other disciples. Thomas, in the course of staying true to his own experience, and open to whatever it could come to be, has provided an encouraging role model for lots and lots of real-life Christians since.
When Jesus says “blessed are those who have not seen, yet have come to believe,” he’s right – well, of course he is, he’s Jesus; and we must know that the happy experience of always having had an easy time trusting the reality affirmed by the church, and by whoever brought us there; of just trusting the grace of Jesus Christ and the steadfast love of God and relying on the power of whatever we’ve come to think of as the Holy Spirit, feels like a blessing. The gift of that kind of untroubled faith is its own brand of direct, personal encounter with the risen Christ, through the life of Christ’s people. [It’s experience; it counts.]
But that isn’t everyone’s story, though, as we know – whether from reading about it, or from experience.
Some stories sound a lot more like Thomas’s. Anne Lamott’s, for instance, who writes in her book Traveling Mercies that “My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another (3).” Her arrival took a long time, too, starting from a home in which no one believed in God – “it was like we’d all signed some sort of loyalty oath early on …” in deference to her father’s early, what we might call “bad experience” with church (8).
As she tells it, the trip began with patchy early encounters with different kinds of religious people; took her through heart-breaking loss, and a long valley of substance abuse, and was decisively influenced at first by a priest, who skipped a meeting and waited almost an hour for her to show up in his office at church to talk with someone who sounded like she was in trouble, and who shared a story or two, and then later a quote from Dag Hammarskjöld: “I don’t know Who or What put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment, I did answer Yes (43).” [Yet another witness … from experience]
And then, after a few more years, the trip took her close enough to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Marin City, California, to hear the music on Sunday morning from the flea market outside.
And then to “begin stopping in at St. Andrew from time to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs (46).”
And then, to actually going inside the church, about once a month, never staying for the sermon, though.
And then finally actually sitting down in one of the chairs in the back. Still always leaving before the sermon.
And then, in the midst of a personal crisis, having what she experienced as a presence, in the room with her, which she felt sure was Jesus, with an invitation, to which she reacted by turning to the wall and saying out loud “I would rather die (49).”
But after that, she says, she kept having the feeling “that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever.” She wasn’t having any of that. But …
“… one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. …
“I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, ‘______: I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right. You can come in (50).’”
And as far as Lamott’s experience is from Thomas’s, in time and space and culture, we can’t help noticing that it shares a vital common element. Namely … the way it depends on “being there,” with the others. At first, barely there. But then, long enough to have some direct, personal contact with something vital in the life of that community, the one that forms around, and bears witness to, the reality, and the presence, of the risen Christ and the life Jesus makes possible. Being there, with the others, who are not only there for themselves and each other, but as we say in our communion liturgy, “the body of Christ for the world” – for all the Thomases and Annes and all others, who are coming by whatever route to their own indispensable, direct, personal experience of the life of the risen Christ.
WORK CITED
Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Anchor Books, 1999.
Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
#ChristianIdeasAndPractices #experience #faithHopeAndLove #theChurch
Harri
SydneyJim
Matters of Interpretation
Global News Canada
Kristen Simonds
MrNew1
🤘 The Metal Dog 🤘
