Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

There’s an old family story about my grandfather who was in the Colonel Mewburn Hospital in Edmonton.  He was waiting for surgery on his eye that had become so affected by glaucoma the doctors told him it had to be removed.  This was a blow to him as he was a salesman travelling across Alberta to show merchants his advertising samples.  He had binders of pens, calendars, mechanical pencils, all labeled “Your business here” that stores could order and hand out to their customers.  He ignored the headaches and the blurry vision as long as possible, then when he did see a doctor, it was too late. His three sons were adults so that was a mercy, but the night before the surgery, his heart was troubled and he couldn’t sleep.

Finally, he dozed off only to have a vision that Jesus was standing at the foot of his bed and told him that he would be okay, and would still have a good life.  He woke up and told his wife and sons of his dream. 

His experience of Christ was as real to him as he was to his children and grandchildren.  That experience didn’t solve all his problems, it didn’t give him his sight back, it didn’t help him to learn braille, it didn’t help him keep his temper when blindness frustrated him, but it gave a sense of comfort that no one could take away.  He also committed to going to church, and it was so important that he went every Sunday.

We view experiences like this and Thomas’ with more than a grain of salt.  The world thinks everything should have a logical explanation, and that facts are more important than fiction.  People angrily attack others on social media for sharing such stories.  They type things like “Religion is evil, it has caused nothing but suffering and the only people who benefit are the con men pushing an unbelievable Santa Claus in the sky.”  The anger is as real as surgery or glaucoma.    It’s hard to have faith in a mysterious God and an even more mysterious resurrection in such a world.

Thomas knew that anger.  The death of his beloved rabbi Jesus was traumatizing.  It went against everything he had hoped for.  The disciples, along with women like Mary Magdalene, had been together for a long time, and learned much from Jesus.  But now he treated their words with distain.  How could they, in the space of a single day, go from grief to enthusiasm?  No wonder Thomas rejected their crazy story.  He felt betrayed by them, and he must have felt lonely and abandoned.  He no longer trusted them.

Our whole society right now is suffering a crisis of trust.  Bridges collapse, charity workers get bombed, civilians and even children are targeted for drone attacks, and there’s unpredictable and catastrophic weather patterns leading the news on a regular basis. Some people turn to shopping channels or bibles being sold by a politician.  Some believe that the UN is trying to sterilize everyone with contrails.  They ignore warnings about measles.  The world is changing, and they want to get back to a time when the world was predictable and there were never empty shelves in the grocery store.

It's hard to know who to trust or what to trust.  Thomas trusted his own senses.  He trusted his Rabbi.  But his friends?  No way would he have trusted them with his possessions as described in our Acts passage. And yet, he had an experience of Jesus that changed all that.

This experience was transformative, just as the vision of Jesus in the Colonel Mewburn Hospital was transformative for the man who lost his sight.  Just as it was for the disciples and followers of Jesus living in Jerusalem.  They became so inspired and so trustworthy that they were able to live together in what sounds like perfect harmony.  They came together in hope and trust and vulnerability and joy, because of the Easter experience of resurrection.

We too are called together to be in community.  This is not easy, and there will be times when we have angry Thomases demanding signs and proof.  They will demand a high level of trust from us.  What a daunting task!  If we think about trust in the way that the 1 John passage from our prayer of confession thinks, if we say we are perfectly trustworthy, we are liars.  The only thing that is perfectly trustworthy is God, and God is both the hardest and the easiest to trust.  Human trust is fragile and easily damaged.  As Brene Brown describes it, trust is made up with little moments when humans do thoughtful things for one another.  The more we are trustworthy in the little things, the more we will be trustworthy in the big things.  Trust, according to Stephen Covey, is made up of integrity and action.  Integrity is caring about equality, justice, and fair play.  Without action, it is useless.  When we commit to doing something that aligns with our values and fail to follow through, we lose trust.  When we follow through, that builds trust. We need to build a pattern of trust in ourselves and others that will stand the test of time.

Trust is seen in acts of bold discipleship and daring justice, but it is fed with deep spirituality by reflecting on the integrity and purpose Jesus had.  When we practice deep spirituality, we find the energy to be bold disciples who do daring justice.  Thomas’ encounter with Jesus was so transformative that he traveled far and wide to share good news to many people.  The blind man’s encounter gave him the courage to keep on living despite his many hardships and struggles.  May it also give us the courage to keep growing, trusting and praying for our own Easter experiences of the living Christ so we can make a difference in the world!

The Big Thaw

 Just a week ago I walked down to the river. for me it’s a short trip, but it was amazing to see that there was still a lot of ice.  It was just starting to show water in places here and there.  And now a week later, it’s all thawed with nary a speck of ice or snow.

And we can see how fast it runs now that the ice is gone.  It is moving swift and silently once again.  The geese are nesting, the fish are biting, the flies are hatching, the bulbs are sprouting, and the grass is greening.  The season is changing before our eyes and another winter is behind us.

When we still had snow and ice, it seemed like nothing would change and spring would never come. Saul was frozen into such an attitude.  He had built an ice jam of cold fury towards people he saw as a threat.  He would not be moved from that position that these new-fangled ideas were an abominable twisting of the Torah. The more he heard them, the more he listened to them, the more of a threat they seemed, and the more icy he became to their ideas.

He became so obsessed with the followers of ‘The Way” that he asked for special authority to deal with them.  He wanted that ‘double 0’ designation that gave him licence to arrest and kill.  And he was willing to walk all the way to Damascus in Syria!  That’s 275 km away.  At the average speed of most humans, Saul was willing to go on a two week journey to round up and arrest malcontents so they could be punished.

All he could see was the threat.  All he could think of was preserving the status quo.  All he wanted to do was hurt.  He was frozen in his attitude towards people he hadn’t even met in person, condemning them without a fair trial.  Even helping with their execution.  He was the one who held the coats of others while they executed Stephen, he was the one described as ‘ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both women and men to put them in jail’.

But he wasn’t the only one frozen into a particular opinion and attitude.  The real hero in this story, I think, is Ananias. He also was stuck in the attitude that Saul was a threat to his family, friends and his new faith.  He didn’t want to deal with this dangerous man.  He only saw the danger and not the opportunity that lay before him.  No way he wanted to go and be nice to Saul!

But Ananias was a follower of the Way and knew that Jesus taught them to pray for their enemies.  He knew that the resurrection had turned all their assumptions about the way the world worked upside down. He knew that he might not be the greatest at preaching the gospel to cynical people, but he was the ‘johnny on the spot’, the one God could connect with and send.  He was the one who healed Saul’s deep, frozen soul.  He was the one that started the river flowing, and what a river it was!

Saul who was so frozen in his ways and his attitudes and his hate, broke down in front of humble Ananias.  He realized his stubbornness and anger had been not only so unhealthy it impacted him physically, it also pushed him into behaving in ways counter to the faith he honored.  His extremist mindset pulled him into what today’s psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’.  Instead of honoring God and studying the Torah, he was persecuting people he didn’t know, breaking the Torah’s command to love God and love neighbor.

Who do we connect with?  Are we a Saul, stubbornly frozen in sure we know what is right and best for our neighbors, and willing to do whatever it takes to prove that we are right, and certain they deserve punishment?  Are we an Ananias, wondering how on earth we can talk to someone as angry and hurting as Saul?  Are we Saul’s companions, helping guide him to the support he needs?  Are we the followers of the Way, wondering what we can do to keep ourselves safe during the threat Saul is bringing?

If we are honest with ourselves, there are times when we are frozen in resistance to God’s message of compassion.  There are times when we are called to help someone in pain, and we feel like we don’t know where to start.  There are times when we can speak a word of comfort, not realizing how thawing simple words can be.  Ananias was not one of the twelve, and we don’t have letters in the bible from him to the other teachers.  This is the only sermon he preached.  This is the only story we have of him.  A simple man, following a simple message, speaking in faith and hope and courage to someone he never dreamed he could influence.

On this Christian Family Sunday, when we honor the many people in our lives who have been sources of love and healing, may we find the courage to speak out to the Sauls in our families who are frozen in cognitive dissonance and hurting enough to recognize their need to change.  May we find the honesty to face our own stubborn blindness and know it persecutes not just family and friends, but even and especially our Holy God.  May we help guide those who are in pain to safe places where they can thaw and find healing.  And may we find God’s healing presence taking the scales from our eyes and bringing us back our sight and energy to flow like a mighty river in God’s plan to end conflict and hate for all.  May we continue the story of ‘The Way’, one step at a time, one story at a time, one thawing river at a time. Amen.