"PROOF"
1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
Emily Martin
Seminary Intern
March 30, 2008
I read an article this week in the Scientific American Mind called “Searching for God in the Brain.” Scientists are experimenting with different brain imaging techniques to try and figure out what is happening in the brain when people have religious experiences. They have some neat pictures of the brain, but the article didn’t prove or disprove anything about God’s existence or the reality of religious experiences.
One researcher took it a step further by using what he called a “God helmet” to create the feeling of having a religious experience by stimulating certain areas of the brain with weak electromagnetic fields. The best the “God helmet” could do was to create a sense of a benevolent presence in the room with them, and it didn’t work with everybody. And that didn’t prove anything either. First of all, a benevolent presence is hardly the same thing as an encounter with the Risen Christ, and, secondly, you could easily argue that the God helmet just helped people access more easily the reality of God’s constant presence.
Still, I can resonate with Thomas’s desire for a little more proof. There are so many con artists out there. Every day I get bombarded with e-mails from imaginary people from different countries asking for my financial help or inviting me to share my banking details so that I can collect with them the inheritance of some benevolent billionaire. Yeah right.
And maybe he’s just tired of getting his hopes up only to be disappointed. Everyone knows what it feels like to really get excited about something, so much so that you can’t help talking about with friends and family—maybe it’s a new relationship, or a business opportunity, or a presidential candidate. This time it’s the real thing. This one is worth getting excited about.
Then, phrrbt. It fizzles out, your business partner turns out to be unreliable, your political hero ends up making as many mistakes as he did promises, and if you’re lucky—all those nice people who endured you going on and on and on about whatever it was—if you’re lucky, they’re polite and refrain from saying, I told you so.
Enough experiences like that will make cynics out of the best of us. As one of my friends likes to say, “If you always expect the worst out of people, you never have to be disappointed.”
So maybe Thomas knows something about disappointment. I’m not getting my hopes up this time, he says. I’ll believe it when I can put my finger in the mark of the nails.
The crazy thing, the unbelievable thing, is that Jesus gives him exactly what he asks for. He actually shows up, wounds and all, and says, “Go ahead. Touch me.” That’s the last thing I expected to happen. I was already to comfort Thomas and remind him that even Jesus felt forsaken and things aren’t always what they seem.
But then Jesus shows up, and he’s not just some “benevolent presence” like the God helmet, he’s a real live body that you can touch. So I start making all these mental adjustments. But then Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Not seen? Not seen! Wait, but I’m like Thomas. Some of us, at least, are like Thomas. We’re human too. We need something a little more tangible. Something we can touch. Do you really expect us to believe, to trust you just on the basis of… of …testimony?
Why yes, John says. That’s exactly what I mean. That’s the whole point. Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, but these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life.
But testimony doesn’t prove anything! You either believe it or you don’t. I think it’s ironic that even after Thomas has his encounter with Jesus that “proves” for him that Christ has risen, all he’s left with is that same testimony he’d been hearing all week from the other disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”
Sometimes I think that the fact that anybody believes is nothing short of a small miracle. What we ask people to believe is pretty crazy. That God is Three and yet one. That Jesus is fully human and fully God. That God would choose to become human in the form of a Jewish carpenter from a little nowhere town in Galilee? It’s crazy.
What’s even crazier is that we would take an infant like August, who can’t even speak yet, much less understand concepts like salvation and resurrection, and we baptize him in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and from then on we treat him as part of the body of Christ.
It’s a terribly risky thing to do. It would be much safer to wait until August could make up his own mind to baptize him. What nerve to baptize a baby! We baptize with water, but how can we be sure that the Holy Spirit is going to show up and seal the deal with faith? What happens when he grows up and starts to question everything, including us, including this church? What if he says, Jesus is more than just a character in the Bible? Well, prove it! What do we do?
Well, we testify. We engage in passionate truth-telling. We tell him what we’ve seen and heard, in the Bible and in our own lives, and what we believe about it.
So I’ve been asking people all week how it was they came to believe. I figure, if testimony’s all we’ve got, then we’d better start practicing. For most people, it wasn’t just one thing or one experience, it was the accumulation of a lot of things. The sensing of a comforting presence during a really hard or lonely time. An event or phenomenon that seemed beyond rational or scientific explanation. A verse or story in scripture that rang true.
Tracy, a young woman in our Monday morning Bible study, talked about the contrast between what the church had to offer and what the neighborhood she grew up in had to offer. The neighborhood offered drugs and violence and death, and the Church offered singing and food and comfort and welcome. When someone died, the neighborhood family responded with grief and despair and started planning how they could get revenge. The church came together to grieve, but also to eat and sing and hope and support one another and even to celebrate the resurrection. She said, One day I looked at the neighborhood family and I looked at the church family, and I said, I want what the church is giving out. I want to be a part of that.
If August were being baptized at the church where I worship in Atlanta, Oakhurst Presbyterian, the pastor would take him around the congregation and say, Now the world is going to tell August that his identity is that he is an American, white, male consumer. That his worth comes from who his family is, from how much money he makes, from what neighborhood he lives in, what Mardi Gras events he gets invited to, from what college he attends. That because he is American and white and male, he is entitled to more than those who are not.
You are here to tell him differently. You are here to tell him that his primary identity is child of God. That his worth has nothing to do with his race or gender or class or nationality. That his value has nothing to do with his earning potential or how hard he works. That his goal is not to be safe or comfortable or well liked—that his task is to love God and to love others as much as he loves himself. Every time a child get’s baptized at Oakhurst Presbyterian, I say, like Tracy—I want to be a part of that!
I have to admit, Thursday afternoon, about one o’clock, I was thinking about naming this sermon “The Trouble with Testimony.” I was almost in tears because I was struggling to write the liturgy, I still hadn’t studied at all for my lifeguarding test the next day, I had family coming in on Saturday that I wanted to spend time with, I hadn’t even eaten lunch yet—I hadn’t even started my sermon yet. And Laura kept notifying me of people Al wanted me to visit in their homes or in the hospital. I was just about ready to replace the prayer of intercession with a period of silent meditation, when the phone rang.
It was a volunteer youth advisor from First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, North Carolina. He worked full time, had two small children, and was ready to throw in the towel too. His church was in between youth directors, they’d already gotten an extension on the first deadline for Urban Mission camps, and they were going to need another one.
I don’t know what’s wrong with the youth, he said. I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to go, but they won’t commit to anything. They want to wait and make sure so-and-so is coming or that it doesn’t conflict with another trip to the beach or lake someone might be planning. Do you have any additional promotional material you could send us? he asked. Maybe a video or something besides the brochure you already sent us?
Listen, I said, the brochure and the website are a step up for us. I don’t have anything else. And then I thought about it.
This is my first time to be involved with urban mission camps, I told him, but what I can say is that it’s an experience that has changed people’s lives. This is not a mission trip where you show up, do a job so you can feel good about yourself, and go home. This is a journey they’re going to take with people who are very different from them—the homeless, people with developmental disabilities, kids from poor neighborhoods, men in drug recovery programs. They’re not just going to “serve” them, they’re going to get to know them.
They’re going to go through the serving line with them and eat the same meal. They’re going to sit beside them in a worship service and a Bible study and listen to their testimonies about what God has done in their lives. And, frankly, I don’t think they’ll ever be the same.
Oh, Man! He said. That is exactly what our youth need—they need something to unify them and refocus them outward. At our parents meeting we were just talking about how all our mission trips were the same thing—you show up at a battered women’s shelter—no one’s there of course, you paint a room or do some yard work, maybe at the most have some kind of formal gathering where you’re thanked for your hard work and service, and then go home. What you’re doing is different. This is exactly the kind of thing our church is all about. We have to come. We need this.
There’s one more thing, I said, and you may already know this, but our minister was really excited when he heard your church was thinking about coming because he grew up at First Pres. Gastonia. Forty years ago, he was one of those youth you’re thinking about bringing.
I am so excited about this, he said. I can’t believe that this is just a coincidence. I wish you could have recorded everything you just told me, so I could play it back to them. It’s so much more powerful than what you can put on paper or on a website.
I had to laugh. That’s exactly what John must have been trying to say. Testimony doesn’t prove anything, but it can be more powerful that anything you might imagine.
You don’t need a recording, I said. Just tell them what you’ve heard about our camps and why you believe it’s important for them to come. Just give your testimony the best you can, with conviction. That’s our job—that’s all we can do. Then we have to trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest.
It’s the same with August. It’s the same with all of us. Our job is to tell what we know about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit showing up in your life and the lives of others. To tell about how being part of the body of Christ, the Church, is different from being in a social club, to tell how it has changed us. Tell it with passion, as best we can, even if it sounds crazy, even if you know it doesn’t prove anything. And the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest. I believe that. Amen.