Beyond the Patio

BELIEVING WHEN YOU DON’T SEE
John 20:19-31

Reading this Gospel I was struck by the statement of Jesus after he had invited Thomas to place his hands in his wounds, and after Thomas has declared, “My Lord, and my God”. Jesus says to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

The question that I was compelled to consider was, ” How does one come to believe, when one has not seen?” It is a difficult question to answer. We have become a people who must see, who must have all the evidence before us, who must have logical reasoned explanations to everything. So how does one believe when one has not seen?

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All that I can say is that I came to believe, not by the presentation of evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt, and not by some reasoned logic, but by all I can describe as the spirit of God beginning to stir in my heart, and I began to hear more loudly the call of God. I think that is the way it happens quite often. One comes to believe when we hear more loudly God calling us. It may sound too simple for you. I cannot think of any other way to describe it.

I suppose that people come to church for the first time for many reasons. People come to church on high festivals like Easter and Christmas for many reasons, but I believe that people come primarily, not because they have to be here, not because it is customary to be here, but because Spirit of God stirs in their hearts.

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Do you know what I think that God first stirs up in our hearts? It is a sense of wonder. That is a childlike attribute which is largely lost by adults. Children have it. A woman was traveling with her young child in a train. The boy was fascinated with everything that he saw. He looked out the window, “Look at that mother!”, “Hey would you look at that”. “Look at those trees, I’ve never seen trees like that”, “Wow! look at that river?” The mother was embarrassed. She says to the people sitting by them, “Don’t mind him, he still sees the world full of wonder.” It is one of those qualities that I think Jesus was referring to when he said, “You cannot enter into the Kingdom of God unless you become like little children”. It is not a mistake that we pray at the time of Baptism for the candidate (whether a child or an adult)

Sustain them O Lord, with your Holy Spirit
Give them an inquiring and discerning heart,
the courage to will and persevere,
the spirit to know and to love you,
and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works

Without that kind of wonder we cannot hear God’s call.

G.K. Chesterton, once said, “We have hands that fashion and heads that know: But our hearts we lost – how long ago”. God stirs within us that sense of wonder. We were not just intended to diagnose, and calculate, but also to wonder; to admire; to expect the unexpected.”

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My mind goes back to a time when I counseled a young woman who was having trouble with belief, but the very reason she was there talking to me was that she wanted desperately to believe. Her stumbling block was that she could not reconcile her intellectual understanding of things with the Christian belief . She hit the nail on the head when she said, ” How can I believe in a loving God, when most of my professors at the University, much smarter than I will ever be, much more intellectually superior than I am, do not accept a belief in God as reasonable.”

My question to her was: “Is our relationship with God based on intellectual understanding alone? on our reasoning ability?” If it were it seems to me that it would be unfair, unjust, on God’s part. If a relationship with God, if our redemption, if our salvation, was dependent on how intellectual a person was , who would have the advantage, who would be more likely to be saved, to be redeemed. The intellectual. The ones that are smart. Is that fair?

That is not the way it is. Everyone one come to God on the same basis, the leap of faith. That’s right, the leap of faith, being able to believe when you do not see. It does not matter whether you are the most intellectual person in the world. It does not matter whether you are the least intellectual in the world. You all come on the same basis, and that is faith. No one has an advantage. Doesn’t matter how smart you are. Everyone is equal in faith, the university professor, and the one who could not pass any grades.

Lately, after all my intellectual and critical assessment of scriptures, and consideration of whether Jesus actually came or didn’t, and if he did whether he was really resurrected, I choose to believe it all. I believe that as surely as I believe that the sun rose this morning even if I did not see it rise. I believe it because I see the evidence of it in the world full of light. Call it as Rilke did, “the second naiveté”, but God has stirred within me the grace to wonder and to admire and to expect the unexpected”

To believe when I cannot see.