SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER B

There are three sacraments which we can receive only once in our lives, baptism, confirmation and Holy Orders, and having celebrated all three of them in St Thomas’ church in Muirkirk and received my early education just down the road in St Thomas’s primary school, it’s perhaps not surprising that I have a soft spot for Thomas. Known from time immemorial as ‘Doubting Thomas’, there’s evidence in the gospels that this man who, according to tradition, preached the gospel later in both Syria and India, also stood out among the apostles for his courage. On one occasion, when the others were afraid to go to Jerusalem with Jesus, it was Thomas who spoke up and encouraged them to go and, if necessary, die with him. And it has been suggested that the reason he was not in the upper room that evening, was that he alone was brave enough to venture out into the streets, perhaps to buy what they needed to eat once the Sabbath was over. And putting these two aspects of Thomas together, what I suggest to you today is that he’s an important model for us all in an age when one of the things people of faith need most is the courage to doubt and ask questions. And the key to why lies in the Eucharistic Prayer we use every week.

In it, we ask God to keep us alert in faith to the signs of the times and eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel so that, sharing the daily experiences of the men and women of our time, we may bring them the good news of salvation. We are called, in other words, to do what Jesus did and enter deeply into the human condition. In recent days we have seen Jesus experience in his own body what it is to be afraid, what it is to feel abandoned by God, what it is to keep trusting through terrible suffering and pain. He did not turn away from these human experiences but entered deeply into them and, in an age where there is so much confusion, so many questions, so much apparent loss of faith, we are called to enter as deeply into our experience as Jesus did his. The Second Vatican Council proclaimed that nothing that is truly human fails to find an echo in the hearts of the followers of Jesus and it’s in that spirit, in imitation of the God who was made flesh and, in the fullest possible sense of the word, lived among us, that, in the context of the times we are living through, we are invited to abandon the world of false religious certainties and, with the courage of a Thomas, explore in ourselves the doubts and questions of the age we live in. Because, until we do that, until we learn to walk in the shoes of the men and women of the 21st century, feeling what they feeling, struggling with the questions they struggle with, we cannot begin to speak to them with any kind of authority...So what does this mean?

Well, as I said a moment ago, it means leaving behind the world of false religious certainties and venturing into a very different and much more challenging world filled, as we often say, with a thousand versions of the truth. There are millions out there who have lost faith in the very existence of God and millions of others who inhabit a land half-way between belief and unbelief. And if we are to engage with their world and understand their experience, we must begin by facing our own doubts and our questions about God, including the question of his very existence. And if you tell me that you don’t have such doubts and never ask such questions, then I don’t believe you. The only god we can have no doubts about is one created in our own image and likeness. There are aspects of the real God so far beyond our comprehension that, given the limitations of the language we use, it’s almost impossible to say anything about him with absolute certainty. As the fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, famously said, ‘Whatever we say God is, God isn’t,’ and it’s only by plunging into this paradox that we will ever understand the age we live in and have something helpful to say to it, my own experience being that, as the years pass, I have to live more and more with the possibility that the God I believe in does not exist.

But it’s not just about God. One of the problems we face in relation to our modern culture is the way the Church developed over the centuries a complete system of knowledge in which every question had an answer. Often, in fact, there was no answer. But given that nature abhors a vacume, people made up answers. They were the best ones they could think of at the time, the problem being that we now find found ourselves clinging to them long after they have passed their sell-by date, leaving millions with the impression that religion – and even faith – is ant-reason and stuck in the dark ages. And so one of our great challenges is to stop offering the world old answers to modern questions and join it in its exploration of all manner of questions about God, about theology, about science, about the world, to which we have no pre-determined answers. All truth comes from God and leads to God and so men and women of faith need never have anything to fear from it. And so when science or any other branch of knowledge discovers something true but which clashes with our traditional religious ideas, then we must have the freedom to abandon those redundant religious ideas and go where truth takes us.

And, of course, inside each one of us there are ideas about God which are true and others which are down right untrue. We all have distorted notions of who God is and a lot of our thinking about the Church and theology is plain wrong. There’s so much that we need to learn, so much ignorance of what is out there, so many things that we need to open up our minds to. And we need to do it, not just for ourselves, but for the world.To the extent that we are unwilling to do so, we become obstacles to the growth of faith in others. And when that happens, Jesus tells us, it would be better if a millstone were put round our necks and we were thrown into the depths of the sea.

So let’s ask God to raise up among us many doubting Thomases, men and women of faith willing to question and, where necessary, let go of what others cling to in fear.


BIDDING PRAYERS


From the beginning, the task of the Church has been to teach all nations and take the Good News of the Resurrection to the ends of the earth. Led by St Paul and inspired by the Spirit of Pentecost, it moved out into the ancient world, learning as it went to express the truth of the Gospel in the languages of the people it met along the way. And so we pray that that same Church in our own day will learn to speak to the world of our time in language it, too, can understand............ Lord hear us

The first Christians had begun life as Jews and it was not easy for them to let go of the past. The human tendency to hang on to what is familiar has always been there and has proved to be one of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the Gospel in every age. And so, at this moment in our long history, we ask for the wisdom we need to recognize the limitations of anything we say about God so that we remain open to new understandings and new ways of expressing old truths...................Lord hear us

The modern world with its enormous advances, not only in science, but in many other fields of knowledge, raises many questions for people of faith. This is not only inevitable, but a great opportunity. It is one of those signs of the times the liturgy speaks of each week, an opportunity for growth, and we have nothing to fear from it. And so we pray that the Churches will grasp this moment in history with both hands and rise to the challenges it presents us with..............Lord hear us

If we are to rise to the challenges of our time, then we must learn to live with questions which have no answers. Many questions, especially about God, have to be lived with for a whole lifetime, the simple reason being that there are things about God which will always be beyond our comprehension. And so we pray for the humility we need to live with this fact and not create answers which are no answer at all and so, in time, become obstacles to genuine faith..............Lord hear us

If we are to grow in faith and be able to engage with the doubts and questions of the age through which we are living, then we must be willing to learn. One of the great needs of our time is for Adult Education in Faith and next weekend we reach the fifth stage of our journey through the history of the Church. But on the parish website there is already a discussion going on about where we go next. Many interesting topics have been suggested, and we simply ask God to guide us.............Lord hear us

Perhaps the people who need most help with their faith today are the young. Never before has a generation had to find its way in a world with so many versions of the truth and so few landmarks or signposts to guide them. There is currently a proposal to do something about this here in the parish, but it will only be possible if people come forward who, after training, are willing to help. And so we ask God to raise up among us the people we need..........Lord hear us