This Great Experiment We Call Faith

Originally preached on April 16, 2023 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reading, PA.

Gospel text: John 20:19-31; The story of Thomas experiencing Jesus post-resurrection.

Today’s gospel lesson has a lot to do with belief, and seeing and what ultimately sounds like needing proof that Jesus showed up to the disciples in the locked room. It is not always easy to take a story at face value. We, as humans, have skeptical brains and want some back up proof to understand and accept what others have told us. I’m sure each of us have had those doubts – maybe not about faith but about something – and we certainly have people in our lives who do have questions. Every time I read this passage, Every time I approach my faith, I try to make understand without seeing and feeling Christ’s wounds what being a Jesus follower is all about. My science brain starts trying to make sense of this story, and I might be with Thomas on this. 

Before shifting into a career in ministry, I worked on research biology within the environment. I loved it. I studied the health of streams in agricultural lands that primarily had cattle farms by checking out the bugs that lived in the water. It was a year’s long survey that helped analyze the effectiveness of efforts to repair the vegetation around the streams to see if the water quality got better for the insects and fish who lived there. I loved following the scientific method from a question, to hypothesis, setting up an experiment or figuring out how to best collect data and then analyze for the universal truth I was trying to prove. That’s just how my brain works, and I think that’s how Thomas’ brain works.

So beginning with the question: What is Jesus up to with his post resurrection appearances?

Now a hypothesis: Jesus is leaving us with two major takeaways: he commands us to forgive, and as a result Thomas is the first to proclaim Jesus as God.

Lets set up our survey in the Bible and locate when Jesus is appearing to the disciples. If this was a scientific paper, a lot of this information would end up in the introduction. We’re only days after his resurrection, the Passover celebrations are winding down and people are leaving Jerusalem. The disciples are hiding out of fear of the Jews – which is really the Jewish leaders at the time, likely referring to the leaders who were collaborating with the Roman Empire posed a threat to first Jesus followers. 

We have to be careful about our language here because so often we conflate this small group of people being referenced here with all Jewish people. We allow this small group to represent all of the Jewish community, even today, and down that road leads to antisemitism and hatred for our Jewish community members. That’s not okay. We can be smart in our reading and understanding of context and translation here in the Gospel to know who exactly the disciples are afraid of. And that is not our current Jewish neighbors who. The anti-defamation league put out a report  in late March that antisemitism is on the rise in the US, and we need to remember that Jesus was also Jewish and have compassion for our neighbors.

Back into the story and our scientific inquiry into scripture, we find out later that Thomas was not among the disciples who were in a locked room when Jesus appeared to them after the resurrection. Well, any good method for testing a hypothesis has a control group, a neutral who didn’t experience Jesus firsthand, and a group who does. 

We don’t know where Thomas was. He could have been in deeper hiding somewhere, out on a grocery run, or checking in on the state of the city after the events of the week for the rest.

Here’s the crux of this experiment: Jesus breaths the Holy Spirit on the disciples. We are looking to see how the disciples respond vs Thomas. This breathing the Holy Spirit on the disciples is the same word in Greek, the Hagia Pneuma, when God breathed life into humanity in Genesis 2:7. This is Jesus breathing eternal life into his disciples. Into us. Into this community, laying the foundation that forgiveness is central to this community. I like the way this is translated in the Message Bible: “If you forgive someone’s sins, they’re gone for good. If you don’t forgive sins, what are you going to do with them?”

Now Thomas shows up and I can’t help but wonder what the mood in the room was when Thomas, our control group, walked in? Were the rest of the disciples excited that they got to see Jesus, or spooked that he came through a locked door? Were they confused? I can imagine what the emotional whiplash might be: in the fresh grief of losing a beloved teacher, he appears before them. I am not sure if I would be comforted or challenged by his appearance.

Thomas’ reaction to their news is understandable. There are several moments of unbelief throughout the Gospels, including earlier in this chapter when Peter had to go check the tomb because he did not believe Mary’s proclamation that Jesus had risen indeed. So Thomas has his questions and wants to see himself. He yearns for a living encounter with Jesus just as his sibling disciples had. I can relate, and maybe you can too, to Thomas who can’t settle for someone else’s experience of resurrection, but sticks around in the hope of having his own. We can relate to someone who dares to confess uncertainty in the midst of those who are certain. To someone who recognizes his God in woundedness, not glory. When we look at Thomas, we see a man who yearns for a living encounter with God. Aren’t we all looking to experience Jesus’ resurrection too?

Jesus has charged the disciples to forgive, to go out and share that good news? Jesus first forgives them - for their abandonment, for their fear, for their paralysis. Then he charges them to go and do likewise. This is the point on which this whole great experiment of faith is hinged upon: Jesus has, died and rose again, and does that matter? How do the disciples respond? Once Jesus’ Holy Spirit breath is in each of us, how do we respond? 

Early in the Gospel of John people are invited to “look” and to “come and see” (see John 1). We are invited to learn about this ongoing experiment of faith, and like gravity, prove the hypothesis over and over again that Jesus is present in our lives. In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene proclaimed good news to disbelieving disciples, and they’ve witnessed to Thomas, who was absent from the first resurrection appearance in the locked room. It is Christ centered community that helps to make the resurrection real to each of us – we see the evidence of Jesus’ presence —Today that might look like rejoicing together over a new job, surviving an illness, living in recovery, accomplishing a goal, ability to pay off debt, and so on. We point to the goodness of God with our lives, wounded and transformed. 

Like any classic experiment, our results are not quite what we expected. The result to experience faith isn’t that we stick our finger in Jesus’ wounds, but we understand that Jesus experienced this wounded world, and whenever we experience it, it brings us closer to Jesus.

But sometimes this is hard to see. Thomas is known in John’s gospel as the one “called the Twin” (11:16; 20:24; 21:2). Professor Johanna Haberer brilliantly describes Thomas as our “twin” in doubt and faith.* She points out that he is the patron saint of precise things: building, construction, architecture. All very STEM fields. Thomas wants to understand what he’s getting into and asks probing, analytical questions. He’s the same disciple who asked Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (14:5), to which Jesus responded, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). Seeing/not seeing, asking questions, and believing/disbelieving are a part of Thomas’s personality; Jesus never reprimands him for this.

So here’s our conclusion this morning: and Thank you for coming on this journey into scripture with me. Jesus is big enough to handle our questions, our doubts, our unbelief. What we are left to figure out is how we respond to the proclamation of Jesus present, alive, resurrected among us? We are forgiven, which means we can share the good news that we are so incredibly loved by God that God sent Jesus to live with us, and the Spirit to inspire us. May the way we live our lives be evidence in this great experiment of faith.

Amen.

Scandal at the Well!

Originally preached on March 12, 2023 at St Luke’s Lutheran Church, Devon, PA

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

Gospel Reading and Sermon begin at minute marker 30:00.

Grace and Peace be with you all from our God who lives among us. Amen.

Good morning. I am so grateful to be among you, proclaim the gospel at Pastor Matt’s invitation. As you heard earlier, my name is Mycah and I am currently on a final year pastoral internship in Reading, PA at a mission developed site called Common Ground Recovery Community. We work with folks in addiction recovery, and people who live with food and housing insecurity, and mental health struggles. Our ministry is focused on the intersection of twelve step spirituality and inclusive Christian faith, recognizing the brokenness of all people and sharing God’s loving Grace. My wife and I move to Downingtown, PA when I started seminary at United Lutheran in Philadelphia and have enjoyed living here for nearly four years now. 

Before I came to seminary, I worked in a church in Virginia as a Communication and Ministry Specialist. I had a lot of varied responsibilities during my time there, but part of my role was to support our new member class. 

Every new member class included a short Bible study on the story of the Woman by the Well from the Gospel of John (4:7-26). One of our longtime members was a woman a Biblical Storyteller, and she would preform this passage for us before we broke out into small groups to talk about what the passage might mean. The first time I went through this process as a new member myself, I was bracing myself for some tiresome anti-woman rhetoric. I’d heard it before, and maybe so have you.

I have heard this woman preached on time and again, and those interpretations had left me feeling a little jaded toward studying this passage with church folk. The woman at the well was immoral because her ethnicity made her less than Jesus and the disciples (implied racism), her marital status was in question (sexism), and not to mention the scandal of a woman being alone and approached by a single man (patriarchal scandal). I was in for a surprise when the pastor leading our class introduced new perspective and context to this scripture passage. We talked about the meaning of hospitality, and the importance of Jesus’ ministry to the Samaritan woman. The history of text reception of the woman at the well is steeped in unforgiving assumption, but by divesting Jesus and the woman’s interactions at the well of those assumptions, we can pull out important message: Jesus’ call to go out of his way to show care for all.

This is a long gospel reading, right? And at first glance, Jesus leaves us with a few more questions than he does leave us with answers. We open with this conversation with a Samaritan woman, alone, at a well. This is the making of an old testament meet cute – just like Moses and his wife Zipporah, or Jacob and Rachel. What could it mean that Jesus pauses to speak to this woman, alone, in the middle of the day, who happens to be a Samaritan?

This is a pretty scandalous scene, but not for the reasons that I grew up hearing, and maybe you did too. We might have questions about what it means that this woman was at the well in the middle of the day – could it mean that she was an outsider in her own community, not drawing water early in the day with the rest of the women, or that she was in great need of more water for some reason that day? We really don’t know. What we also don’t quite know is the significance of her five husbands – it’s not that she is promiscuous or immoral, but maybe that she is in a dire situation.

But this is not what made this interaction stick out to early Jesus followers.

She was Samaritan! Jesus is in Samaria! From the perspective of Jew’s at the time, Samaritans had all the history, but told the stories wrong. They worship the wrong mountain, one near them called Gerizim instead of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and the temple there instead of in the Holy City. The book of Ezra details their ethnic background, being brought into this land during the Assyrian occupation while Israel was in exile. And somewhere along the way one of the Scribes changed the wording of the Samaritans from “we do sacrifice to God” to “we do not sacrifice to God.” The Jews’ refusal of the Samaritan’s help became the basis for excluding others from temple worship for centuries to follow. 

There’s a lot of ethnic and cultural drama between the Samaritan woman, and Jesus who is a Jew.

In fact, this is likely the most scandalous part of this interaction. It is not that she is a woman, but that she is a Samaritan, and Jesus asks for her help drawing water. He is inviting her to play host, inviting himself into a hospitality relationship that is still so sacred to this day. A Samaritan, hosting a Jew and drawing him water. Even with all the animosity, hatred, distrust, scandal between them, Jesus puts his trust in her.

But, in a very classic move by Jesus, just after asking her to give him water, he takes the role as host to offer her living water. Her confusion here is genuine because the Greek word for Living could also be translated as spring water, but how would Jesus know about a nearby spring that her people who have lived here for generations did not know about? We know the water Jesus is offering her is more than something that will quench her physical thirst, but nourish her spirit as well.

And as we get to know this woman, Jesus is not condemning her for any perceived promiscuity or forgiving her of her sin – that is something that we read into the text ages later – it is that Jesus is turning to her with compassion and inclusion. Despite her painful personal history, Our painful personal histories, despite their people’s history of hating one another, and the conflicts that stretch into the 21st century now, Jesus shares the Good News about God with us.

The woman even asks – Where should I worship God? On this mountain near here, or the one in the Holy City? She wants to settle this old debate, as if revisiting this specific history will settle generations of hurt. Jesus responds with inclusion. We will not need a holy mountain to praise God on, because the Spirit will be with us always. 

The geography matters here, right? And we still have conflicts over access to clean, drinkable water and other resources. 2000 years later and we are still asking Jesus the same question about where we should worship God. Where can we get a draw on that living water?

But how does Jesus respond? 

Scholar Karoline Lewis wrote, Jesus has to go to Samaria, not geographically, but theologically, because God so loved the world (John 3:16) and Samaritans are a part of that world that God loves. Jesus had to make that clear. The Spirit of God will be with them. The last place that the disciples and early Jesus followers would expect Jesus to go, there he went.

You see, Samaria was out of his way, and his disciples questioned why they would pass through this region when a safer, more direct, more welcoming route was available. 

But Jesus has to go to Samaria. Jesus has a message to share and that is that God so loves this world, that God shows up even in Samaria. Even in Devon, even in Reading, even in Kensington. Sharing the good news that God has come to be with the people.

Jesus has to go out of his way to make it clear that the last people we might expect to be objects of God’s love are right at the top of the list for Jesus to go see. To minister amongst. To raise up new disciples like the Woman at the Well and encourage her to share with her neighbors. 

That is who we are called to be. Jesus invites us, in this story, into the scandal of his inclusion. We are called to go out of our way to welcome people on the margins, who are at the well in the middle of the day for whatever reason, and also be the one to share out of our neediness. 

It is something we do at Common Ground, and something y’all have done with the Welcome Church in Philadelphia or participating in an upcoming blood drive. It’s something we can do every day. We, like the Samaritan woman have the opportunity to share the living water that is Jesus going out of his way to be with us. Something that satisfies our bodies and also our Spirit. That shows us a new way into the future where old historic divisions can be set aside to honor God amongst us by caring for each other.

So may we be an extension of Christ’s welcoming and loving inclusion for all. Amen.