Luke 24:40, 41

Let me begin this morning on a liturgical note. In case you may be wondering, we didn't forget to take this beautiful white "Resurrection" banner down. It still belongs up there. For we are now in what the Christian calendar calls Eastertide, or Easter time.

It's a fifty day period between Easter itself and Pentecost -- between the day of resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Advent, as you know, is a time leading up to Christmas, a time leading up to that birth in the manger, a time when we contemplate what the coming of Christ into our lives and into our world means.

Just so, Eastertide is a time leading away from that empty tomb, a time when we contemplate what Christ's esurrections means for us and for our world today.

Some people might find that statement troubling, even unbiblical in a way. For some of our Christian sisters and brothers, Easter and resurrection can have only one meaning. Easter is about one thing, and they are certain of that. And their faith flows from this certainty.

I understand that sentiment but, curiously, biblical faith is not about certainty. In these post resurrection texts, like the one we just read, I am always struck by the presence of doubt. The resurrected Christ appears to his disciples, as promised, and their response is not certainty but skepticism, not faith but doubt.

In light of these surprising doubts, there are, in my mind, at least two ways to read today's text. The first is a sort of comic reading. The disciples are huddled together and are still smarting from the loss of their best friend and mentor.

Suddenly this same man whose death they are mourning appears among them and in a chirpy voice, says "Peace!" "Shalom,' in Hebrew - the first century equivalent of "Good Morning!" - as though the current circumstances are entirely ordinary. "Good morning! Peter, how you doin'? James, Thomas, good to see you! How are you?! Me? I'm great! Just been resurrected. Never been better!"

That's one reading. The other reading is a little more . . . potent. Same setting, same facts, same people. Suddenly in the middle of a locked room a man appears with nail scars in his hands and a lethal gash in his side, a beatific glow emanating from his resurrected body like the red sun on the mountains at dawn.

On this reading Jesus takes something plain and ordinary -- "Peace!", "Good Morning!" -- and he turns it into a declaration of cosmic significance. When this man, this man who predicted this astounding post-death rendezvous, when this man walks into a locked room and announces "Peace!" you'd better believe it.

You'd better believe that your assumptions about life and death have just changed -- that the reality you take for granted in which hope dies with our worst losses, in which nail scars disappear as a dead body decomposes -- you'd better believe that this reality has given way to something bigger.

When this man says "Peace," you'd better believe it. Who wouldn't? He's standing right there.

Who wouldn't believe it? Well, the disciples for one.

They were startled and terrified, the text says, and so he said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?

Apparently, Peter, James, Thomas and company need a little help believing what they can literally see. They need help believing that what they hoped for might be true. So he shows them his hands and his feet, as if to say, Your eyes are not deceiving you. Your heart is not deceiving you. It's really me. It's okay to believe.

Well, it helps, some, this act of bodily show and tell. It makes them feel better but, surprisingly, it does not resolve their doubts.

As Luke puts it, in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.

I love that phrase, still wondering. Aren't you glad faith isn't about certainty, that it allows room for wonder? Have you ever found yourself still wondering what this whole thing is about? Have you ever found yourself still wondering why you come to church? Have you ever found yourself still wondering if God is paying the smallest bit of attention to you?

This past Tuesday Presbytery met. For those of you who may not speak "Presbyterian," Presbytery is basically a convocation of ministers and elders from all the churches in a particular region, WNC in our case. We meet quarterly to decide various matters of policy and practice.

Our main business on Tuesday was to consider an overture from the First Presbyterian Church in Hendersonville. They were asking Presbytery to ask our General Assembly, in turn, to reject certain provisions in the recently released Peace, Unity and Purity Report.

The PUP report is recommending that the General Assembly give a little bit more autonomy to local congregations in terms of who we ordain. Some people see this recommendation as a way for our denomination to move forward together, despite our differences over ordination standards. Other faithful people see this as the end of our connectional system of governance in which we all abide by the same standards.

One man got up and spoke quite passionately against the PUP report. He said that the committee who drafted the report wants you to think that, as he put it, "It's all about relationships." That what matters is not our theology or our doctrine or our standards. What matters is only whether we can get along and learn to respect each other's differences.

Our faith is not about relationships, he insisted. It is about obedience to the Word of God. Our faith is not about sociology; it's about theology. For this man faith is about doctrinal conformity, and perhaps more than anything, it is about certainty.

His plea was passionate and compelling, but I have to confess that as I listened to him it felt to me like we read different Bibles. For didn't Jesus himself say that the entire Law is summarized in these two commands, Love -- Love! -- the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

My friends, my sisters and brothers, relationships are at the very heart of scripture. Relationships between you and God, between you and your neighbor, between you and yourself - these are the very point of scripture.

That really should come as no surprise. Today, theoretical physicists, quantum physicists to be more precise, seem to be discovering the very same thing in their own way, in their own field of study.

I'd like to share with you the passage that Bill Sanderson was meant to read last week. It may be even more relevant this week. This is from Barbara Brown Taylor's book, The Luminous Web , from a chapter entitled "The Physics of Communion":

"'From the quantum angle . . . an electron is not simply an electron. Shifting energy patterns shimmer around it . . . all the paraphernalia of the subatomic world latch on to an electron like an intangible, evanescent cloak, a shroud of bees swarming around a central hive' . . . It is not a discrete individual but part of a complex network of relationships" ( The Luminous Web, pg. 67).

What that means, as I read it, is that at the infinitesimal level relationships are the very building block of the material universe.

And they were the very building blocks of Jesus' universe. This is my body, given for you. Look at my hands and my feet. Touch me and see that it is I . . .

The word for "touch" here in Greek is rare in the NT. It means to search for, to feel, to verify by contact, to grope and explore, the way a blind person might explore your face to know what you look like, to know that it's really you.

From the beginning Christ's ministry has been about table fellowship, communion and community. He has spent his ministry breaking bread, multiplying loaves and fishes, and giving them to those who hunger for food and for meaning. And when he is not at table he is out among the people, touching the wounded and making them whole.

Now, he's getting ready to leave his disciples forever. And so he invites them to touch his wounds. He asks them, for a change, "Have you anything here to eat?"

Three years earlier they left their nets and their tax booths to follow this man. Now it's time they began to practice their new trade. It's time they began touching wounds. It's time they began sharing loaves and fishes. It's time they began to transcend their doubts and to put their faith into practice. It's time they embodied what they believe.

The world lost a truly great disciple of Jesus recently, a man who did just that - who transcended his doubts and put his faith into practice, put what he believed on the line in the service of God and the world.

Listen to what William Sloane Coffin said about the very thing we are talking about this morning. This is from his last book, Credo - Latin, incidentally, for "I believe":

"There are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. What a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse -- to have limited certainties and unlimited sympathies -- is not only more tolerant but far more Christian " ( Credo, pg. 144).

"God is love," Coffin continues, "and that means the revelation is in the relationship. "God is love" means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. "God is love" does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. "God is love" is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith," he concludes, " is being grasped by the power of love" ( ibid., pg. 28).

Faith, biblical faith, is not about certainty. It's about being grasped by love. We are here today, most of us, because this is a place of community, a place of healing, a place of transformation, a place where bread is broken and wine is shared, a place where faith is about relationships, with each other and with God.

We are here because we are possessed by an impulse that gropes for meaning, an impulse that searches for God like a blind person searches out your face to know it's you.

Yes, sometimes we may find ourselves still wondering what faith is all about. That's okay because our faith has room for doubt and wonder.

Which is why with Bill Coffin we can find it in our hearts to say, Credo. I believe!

Amen