Your Faith Journey - Finding God Through Words, Song and Praise

For those of you who either read her book or were able to come and hear Jacqueline Bussie in February, you will remember she talked about the many unspoken “rules” or “laws” Christians so often feel they must obey, rules that are often more harmful than helpful.  Bussie urges us to be Outlaw Christians and break some of those rules.  She describes Outlaw Christianity as a new, life-giving faith for those who ache for a more authentic relationship with God and other people by no longer having to hide their doubt, anger, grief, scars, or questions.  Jacqueline says that one of the unspoken laws people tend to follow is this:  Don’t doubt.  Doubt is faith’s opposite and is therefore sinful.  She suggests most people have grown up believing this very harmful rule.  Bussie then reminds us, as theologian Paul Tillich did, that doubt is a very necessary element in faith.  In fact, a living faith includes doubt and such doubt requires risk and courage.  Bussie, when talking about doubt being a good and necessary element in faith, writes:

How can doubt, rooted as it is in uncertainty, be a good thing, or at the very least an acceptable thing?  For starters, we should acknowledge and name the doubt within us because, much like snot and passing gas, doubt is natural and human – that is to say, embarrassing and unwelcome but real and impossible to be healthy without, much as we want to pretend otherwise.  But more than just natural, doubt is also necessary, healthy, and good for our faith life.  Doubt functions as a robust spiritual virtue, rather than faith’s wimpy opposite. (Outlaw Christian, p.50)

Well, in today’s gospel, we come face to face with doubt.   And, while doubt comes to the forefront in the story of Thomas, the truth is that all the disciples were experiencing doubt.  You see, it is the day of the resurrection and here we find the disciples sitting in a room behind locked doors because of fear, doubt, and quite likely more than a little shame.  They have blown it completely, they are hiding in fear, and they are doubting everything their master had said.  And, what I find so fascinating is that, in the gospel of John, when Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, nobody initially recognizes him.  Notice in the beginning of today’s reading, the disciples do not recognize him until Jesus shows them his hands and side.  They all doubted him!  They doubted it was Jesus!  It is only after Jesus shows them his hands and side that the disciples rejoice because they have seen the Lord.  While the other disciples also have experienced doubt, for some strange reason, only Thomas gets labeled “doubter.” 

Far too often we judge Thomas because of his doubt.  We need to cut him some slack and give him a break.  In Thomas we find the yearning of one who wants to see with his eyes and touch with his hands that of which he has been told.  He has real questions, real concerns, and a desire for a real encounter with the risen Lord.  I think the story of Thomas captures our hearts and minds because we, too, were absent to the Resurrection experience two thousand years ago.  When faced with the mystery of the Resurrection, the story of Thomas names that part in each of us that wants to scream out, “Show me!”

Thomas has just had a very harsh encounter with reality.  Reality had hit hard in the form of a cross when his dear friend had been crucified.  And, when he fled that horrible scene, not only had Jesus died, Thomas’ hopes and dreams had also died.  Jesus’ crucifixion had destroyed his hopes for the future and very poignantly reminded him that there is an end.  And, it is the same for us.  When the harsh realities of life hit us – whether it be the death of a family member, the loss of a job, an unexpected illness, a broken relationship, or whatever – reality deeply cuts into our hopes, our dreams, the very fabric of our relationships, and we are reminded that there is an end.  There is an end over which we have no control as we feel we have been taken captive by an extremely cruel conqueror.  And, we usually experience doubt!

The reality that sliced into his hopes and dreams left Thomas emotionally bleeding and broken.  As he again joins the community of disciples, within the context of those who proclaim Jesus is alive, Thomas lays bare his doubt.  He is very honest about his doubt as he says, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  In the depth of his despair Thomas articulates his doubt, and it is in that place where he is now confronted with the risen Christ.  It is in that place of despair that Thomas is greeted by the risen Lord whose presence exudes forgiveness and grace as he hears the words, “Peace be with you.”  In that moment, Thomas knows he is in the presence of God and he believes. 

Theologian, David Lose, describes the experience of Thomas in this way:

When Thomas is greeted by the forgiveness and grace embodied in the words, “Peace be with you,” he instantly believes and makes the great confession of John’s gospel: “My Lord and my God!”  In a heartbeat Thomas knows that he is in the presence of God, has been saved and redeemed by that God, and that he will never be the same again. 

Thomas lays bare his doubt which takes him to this encounter with the grace of God, embodied and enfleshed in the risen Lord Jesus.  Doubt drives him to question and it takes him to this place where he is encountered by the risen Lord and his entire reality is changed.  Wow!!  Did you get that?  Reality itself has changed.  The despairing Thomas does not escape from the real world and there is not a break from the tangible reality of the world.  No.  But, there is something very different, something very, very new.  God’s grace and God’s kingdom have invaded the real world, transformed it and nothing will ever be the same again. 

I think Thomas experiences Easter in the way many of us begin to experience it.  Thomas finally gets Easter when he brings forth his questions. He wants to see and touch. He wants tangible proof and needs his own encounter before he can trust the story.  It is doubt that compels Thomas to ask the questions and it is doubt that takes him to the place where he is looking for what is really real and what truly matters.  You see, without doubt, our faith is shallow and rootless.  We fail to go down deep.  And, quite honestly, if we do not express doubts and have only certainty, it closes us off to the newness that we so long for.  Doubt is a sign of a healthy and deep-rooted faith, though most of us are taught to believe the opposite.  And, when doubt takes us to the deeper places in faith our reality changes.  We are transformed and our perspective on all of life changes.

The story of Thomas and doubt is one of the most compelling, believable, realistic stories in the Bible because it is our story.  Doubt is an element of faith because it gives birth to the questions that arise which take us to the deeper places in life.  So, be honest about your doubt.  Doubt functions as a robust spiritual virtue, rather than faith’s wimpy opposite.  In fact, doubt and the questions that arise are the heartbeat of our faith!   They enable us to be open to the newness of the risen Christ.   And, the risen Christ is always breaking into our doubt and the questions we ask, transforming our lives and making us new.  Christ is risen!  Christ is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

This is the special music, Festival Introit for Easter sung by the chancel choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

This is the special music, Festival Introit for Easter sung by the chancel choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

This is the special music, Now is Christ Risen by Handel and Hopson sung by the chancel choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

This is the special music, Now is Christ Risen by Handel and Hopson sung by the chancel choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

I am sure many of you remember the closing theme song on the PBS show, Lamb Chop’s Play-Along, which was hosted by puppeteer, Shari Lewis.  It was “The Song That Doesn’t End.”  “This is a song that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends….”  At the end of each episode, the puppets and children would sing several continual verses as that song just keeps going on and on, and Shari Lewis would in vain try to stop them.  It was one of those songs that just kept repeating inside your head.  The Song That Never Ends.  Well, today we come to celebrate another song that does not end…the song of joy and of hope, the song of the resurrected Lord.  And, this is a song that keeps repeating in our being for the rest of our lives.

The beginning of the end in Mark’s gospel is very much like the other gospels.  It is early on Sunday morning and the women are headed to the tomb while it is still dark.  In their grief, they are carrying spices to embalm Jesus’ body because they had not been able to do this when he was wrapped in linen and placed in the tomb. On that horrible Friday afternoon of Jesus’ death, the Sabbath was about to begin, and even anointing a body was forbidden work on the Sabbath.  So, the women arrive at the tomb and are astonished when they discover the massive stone that had blocked the entrance has already been rolled away.  And, equally alarming to them, is the stranger they find in the tomb, a man dressed in white, who tells them, “Do not be afraid.  Jesus, who was crucified, has been raised.  He is not here.  Go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee…just as he told you.”  Well, if the trauma and horror of the past days had not been enough, this stranger now tells them to not be afraid and go back and tell the others Jesus has been raised and will meet them in Galilee!  And, it is here where Mark’s gospel, which by the way was the first gospel to be written, is very different from the other gospels.  Mark’s last words to us are, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

That’s it folks!  That is all we get!  That is all Mark gives us.  In fact, the risen Jesus never actually makes an appearance in Mark’s gospel.  We have a resurrection scene without Jesus that seemingly ends in failure. The women not only fail miserably as they leave in terror, they also say absolutely nothing to anyone!   This is quite a cliffhanger to say the least!

Now, it is true that most of you will find in your Bibles a few additional verses to Mark’s gospel.  However, those additional verses were added a few hundred years later by monks who found Mark’s ending so unsettling and unfinished they had to “fix it.”  Yet, the stark reality and truth we face on this Easter morning is that Mark’s gospel concludes by deliberately not concluding!  Theologian, Tom Long, describes this unfinished-ness so well when he says the writer of Mark’s gospel finishes the story of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, “by dangling something incomplete and unsatisfying before the reader in the final verse….. Not only does this verse fail to provide proper narrative closure, it also lurches to an awkward grammatical stop because a more literal translation of the Greek would read, ‘To no one anything they said; afraid they were for...’  It is almost as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in midsentence.” Mark’s gospel story ends very abruptly, unfinished, and the risen Jesus never appears.

So, why would Mark end his telling of the Jesus story in this manner?  What gives?  What is going on?  Well, Mark not only was a good storyteller, he knew exactly what he was doing.  If we look at the opening verse in Mark’s gospel, Mark 1:1, we find these words, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  The entire gospel of Mark is only the beginning of the story.  Mark uses a cliffhanger to invite us into the story.  Mark’s gospel really ends unfinished because the gospel story is always beginning again, anew for every person, in every time and place.  This open-ended gospel that threatens to end in failure places us where the women left off.  We are invited into the story to go and tell the good news that this person, Jesus of Nazareth, has been raised and is going ahead of us to meet us, just as he promised.  And, did you notice where Jesus is going?  The man in white tells the women Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee!  That is where they will meet him.  Galilee was home, the place where Jesus and the disciples were from, the place where they lived their ordinary day to day lives.  This is significant because, as we hear this story, we are told Jesus will meet us in the ordinary places of life, those places where we spend our day to day lives.

Joan Mitchell, in her book Beyond Fear and Silence, suggests the three women who left that tomb in terror and silence in Mark’s narrative, bring each of us, the readers and hearers, to our own thresholds of faith, to the limit of words to speak the unspeakable….and to the limit of human experience to trust Who or What is beyond death….the narrative still calls the disciples of each new generation to speak for themselves, and bring the gospel into dialogue with our lives. (p. 115)

Yes, we are called to bring the gospel into dialogue with our lives.  That dialogue happens in the depth of human pain and suffering as we discover the crucified, risen Christ is present to us.  That dialogue happens when we find ourselves in the depths of failure, when we fail miserably and discover the crucified, risen Christ is present to us.  In the depth of such pain and despair, in the messiness of our own lives, we meet the crucified, risen Christ and we discover hope.  Today’s gospel tells us that we meet real hope that is rooted in the love of a very real God who walks with us and meets us in the depth of all the messiness, all the mixed-up-ness, all the joys, all the sorrows and the real “stuff” of our everyday lives.  And, the song of the crucified, risen Christ becomes our song because that unending pattern of dying and rising is the story of our lives.

We live in a world where we like closure and happy endings.  When we read books and see movies, we want closure and happy endings. However, when we finish reading a book with a happy ending, we put it down and simply say, “Great story!”  The gospel of Mark, with its unfinished ending, is very different because you cannot put it down, even if you want to.  The gospel good news is the never-ending story!  The crucified, risen Christ walks with us as the Jesus story continues to be written in our own lives, and we joyfully sing out the victorious song that never ends!  Today, we celebrate the hope we have been given as a community of Faith, hope rooted in the love of the risen Christ who lives among us!  We celebrate the hope of the never-ending story, the song that never ends, the song of the risen Christ who is always, always bringing life out of death.  We celebrate the hope of the risen Christ who goes before us and is drawing us into a new future, making us ever new!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

I am sure many of you remember the closing theme song on the PBS show, Lamb Chop’s Play-Along, which was hosted by puppeteer, Shari Lewis.  It was “The Song That Doesn’t End.”  “This is a song that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends….”  At the end of each episode, the puppets and children would sing several continual verses as that song just keeps going on and on, and Shari Lewis would in vain try to stop them.  It was one of those songs that just kept repeating inside your head.  The Song That Never Ends.  Well, today we come to celebrate another song that does not end…the song of joy and of hope, the song of the resurrected Lord.  And, this is a song that keeps repeating in our being for the rest of our lives.

The beginning of the end in Mark’s gospel is very much like the other gospels.  It is early on Sunday morning and the women are headed to the tomb while it is still dark.  In their grief, they are carrying spices to embalm Jesus’ body because they had not been able to do this when he was wrapped in linen and placed in the tomb. On that horrible Friday afternoon of Jesus’ death, the Sabbath was about to begin, and even anointing a body was forbidden work on the Sabbath.  So, the women arrive at the tomb and are astonished when they discover the massive stone that had blocked the entrance has already been rolled away.  And, equally alarming to them, is the stranger they find in the tomb, a man dressed in white, who tells them, “Do not be afraid.  Jesus, who was crucified, has been raised.  He is not here.  Go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee…just as he told you.”  Well, if the trauma and horror of the past days had not been enough, this stranger now tells them to not be afraid and go back and tell the others Jesus has been raised and will meet them in Galilee!  And, it is here where Mark’s gospel, which by the way was the first gospel to be written, is very different from the other gospels.  Mark’s last words to us are, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

That’s it folks!  That is all we get!  That is all Mark gives us.  In fact, the risen Jesus never actually makes an appearance in Mark’s gospel.  We have a resurrection scene without Jesus that seemingly ends in failure. The women not only fail miserably as they leave in terror, they also say absolutely nothing to anyone!   This is quite a cliffhanger to say the least!

Now, it is true that most of you will find in your Bibles a few additional verses to Mark’s gospel.  However, those additional verses were added a few hundred years later by monks who found Mark’s ending so unsettling and unfinished they had to “fix it.”  Yet, the stark reality and truth we face on this Easter morning is that Mark’s gospel concludes by deliberately not concluding!  Theologian, Tom Long, describes this unfinished-ness so well when he says the writer of Mark’s gospel finishes the story of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, “by dangling something incomplete and unsatisfying before the reader in the final verse….. Not only does this verse fail to provide proper narrative closure, it also lurches to an awkward grammatical stop because a more literal translation of the Greek would read, ‘To no one anything they said; afraid they were for...’  It is almost as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in midsentence.” Mark’s gospel story ends very abruptly, unfinished, and the risen Jesus never appears.

So, why would Mark end his telling of the Jesus story in this manner?  What gives?  What is going on?  Well, Mark not only was a good storyteller, he knew exactly what he was doing.  If we look at the opening verse in Mark’s gospel, Mark 1:1, we find these words, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  The entire gospel of Mark is only the beginning of the story.  Mark uses a cliffhanger to invite us into the story.  Mark’s gospel really ends unfinished because the gospel story is always beginning again, anew for every person, in every time and place.  This open-ended gospel that threatens to end in failure places us where the women left off.  We are invited into the story to go and tell the good news that this person, Jesus of Nazareth, has been raised and is going ahead of us to meet us, just as he promised.  And, did you notice where Jesus is going?  The man in white tells the women Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee!  That is where they will meet him.  Galilee was home, the place where Jesus and the disciples were from, the place where they lived their ordinary day to day lives.  This is significant because, as we hear this story, we are told Jesus will meet us in the ordinary places of life, those places where we spend our day to day lives.

Joan Mitchell, in her book Beyond Fear and Silence, suggests the three women who left that tomb in terror and silence in Mark’s narrative, bring each of us, the readers and hearers, to our own thresholds of faith, to the limit of words to speak the unspeakable….and to the limit of human experience to trust Who or What is beyond death….the narrative still calls the disciples of each new generation to speak for themselves, and bring the gospel into dialogue with our lives. (p. 115)

Yes, we are called to bring the gospel into dialogue with our lives.  That dialogue happens in the depth of human pain and suffering as we discover the crucified, risen Christ is present to us.  That dialogue happens when we find ourselves in the depths of failure, when we fail miserably and discover the crucified, risen Christ is present to us.  In the depth of such pain and despair, in the messiness of our own lives, we meet the crucified, risen Christ and we discover hope.  Today’s gospel tells us that we meet real hope that is rooted in the love of a very real God who walks with us and meets us in the depth of all the messiness, all the mixed-up-ness, all the joys, all the sorrows and the real “stuff” of our everyday lives.  And, the song of the crucified, risen Christ becomes our song because that unending pattern of dying and rising is the story of our lives.

We live in a world where we like closure and happy endings.  When we read books and see movies, we want closure and happy endings. However, when we finish reading a book with a happy ending, we put it down and simply say, “Great story!”  The gospel of Mark, with its unfinished ending, is very different because you cannot put it down, even if you want to.  The gospel good news is the never-ending story!  The crucified, risen Christ walks with us as the Jesus story continues to be written in our own lives, and we joyfully sing out the victorious song that never ends!  Today, we celebrate the hope we have been given as a community of Faith, hope rooted in the love of the risen Christ who lives among us!  We celebrate the hope of the never-ending story, the song that never ends, the song of the risen Christ who is always, always bringing life out of death.  We celebrate the hope of the risen Christ who goes before us and is drawing us into a new future, making us ever new!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

This is a special musical performance of All Glory Laud & Honor by the Faith Bells!

This is a special musical performance of All Glory Laud & Honor by the Faith Bells!

This is a special musical performance of Lenten Love Song by the Faith Lutheran Chancel Choir.