The Faithfulness of Doubt
Easter 2C
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Rabbi Raachel Nathan Jurovics

Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31.

Good morning. Thank you for the privilege of sharing worship and learning with your community; it is always a great joy for me to be among the people of St. Mark's. Now, take a deep breath and let it out slowly [model]. This past week has been a time of easing away from the anticipation, intensity, and sheer busy-ness of the Passover/Easter season. Jews and Christians have both passed through a peak spiritual time, a time of liberation, of redemption, of hope fulfilled—a time when we are invited to perceive, with special clarity, the intersection of the divine and the human in our respective religious histories. In these days following Easter and Passover, our communities enter into a 50-day journey: for Jews, the trek to Sinai, where, on the holiday of Shavuot, we receive Torah and enter into an eternal covenant of service to the Holy One; for Christians, the journey toward Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit pours out its Torah onto the disciples, so that they may be able to share Christ's teaching throughout the world.

With so much similarity, one might think we would find it easy to recognize the spiritual authenticity of each of our respective sacred traditions. Well, perhaps we do, because we have accepted the invitation to welcome one another into our communities of worship and have experienced the blessing of learning from one another. But, truth be told, our traditions have expended far too much energy over the past two millennia competing with one another. Whether victim or victimizer, we have taken comfort in a sense of triumphalist superiority, as if we really imagined that “my messiah can beat up your messiah,” as if we really imagined there are competing deities struggling for the reward of our faith.

We've all paid a price for failing to recognize the divine intentionality in religious diversity. (This is where those of you who have heard me expand on this topic know I'm going to mention cockroaches! As in, “we know God loves diversity of all kinds, else why would there be more than 3,500 species of cockroach?” Heaven help me, I'm completely addicted to this analogy between biological and spiritual diversity.) We continue to pay a price when we limit our interfaith conversations to discussing our similarities, when it is precisely in the expression of our theological and ritual differences that we find the greatest opportunity to learn about God's infinite potential to relate to creation and to invite relationship. It is in the honoring of our differences that we find God's grace, God's assurance that each one of us can discern a pathway into engagement with the holy.

When we cease worshipping the forms of our religious traditions as idols, when we truly commit to serving God and God's creation with loving humility—with our best human effort at reciprocating the divine love in which we find our eternal source and home—then we can begin to make some headway in partnering with God in the creation of just and compassionate societies, in healing the wounds we have inflicted on the planet God entrusted to our care, in accomplishing all of the messianic goals it is within our human power to fulfill: loving one another; caring for the poor, the sick, the weak; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked; generously sharing the fruits of our boundless creativity.

Samir Selmanovic [sel-MAN-oh-vich], a pastor in NYC and Christian co-leader of Faith House, a community of communities devoted to deepening our understanding of ultimate interdependence, writes movingly of the ways we make idols of our religious certainties:
'At one end of the spectrum—the less violent end—are people who are deeply concerned with the integrity of their religion, theology, practice, and tradition, so they act as the guardians of these things. They see their belief system as a symphony that needs to be reined in instead of played out, a complex but controllable piece of music that encompasses everything one can know about God. Instead of feeding their soul on the music itself, these religious conductors use a tremendous amount of energy and resources to control the orchestra of their belief and practice. Preoccupied and often exhausted by the God talk of their religion, they stop listening to the music. The Beloved wants to play and dance and kiss and caress, but they are too busy managing the orchestra and the score. . . .'

More problematic, though, at the other, more violent end of the spectrum of the idolatry of certainty about God, are those whose fear of doubt and uncertainty becomes a source of self-hatred. Dynamic and uncertain relationships with ourselves, other human beings, and God are too difficult for them to bear. Since God's revelation both reveals and conceals and since carrying trust and doubt intertwined in the fabric of life is threatening to them, they gravitate to acts they hope can resolve the uncertainty of faith. And destruction resolves. (It's Really All about God, 114-5)

This week's lectionary passages point directly to this teaching: that we are called to serve God; that the forms of faith are for the purpose of opening us to divine service, not for the purpose of separating us from others; that we are to turn from the worship of every idol, of everything that is not-God. To embrace this kind of faith, we must also embrace our doubt.

John tells us that Jesus appeared among his disciples and, reminiscent of the creation story in which God breathes life into the first human, breathes on them and invites them to receive the Holy Spirit. Just as our creation in the divine image implies the divine command that we seek to be holy as God is holy (Leviticus 19:2, Jesus's breath conveys the responsibility of ministry to the disciples, empowering them to carry the message and substance of repentence, forgiveness, and resurrection into the community.

The disciple Thomas did not experience this direct revelation, and when his companions told him of it, he asked for the blessing of the same direct encounter with the Divine Presence in our midst: unless I, too, can see and touch, I will not believe. A week passes, and Jesus comes again to stand among his disciples, greeting them with “shalom aleichem,” peace be with you. Jesus honors Thomas's doubt, and invites him to believe through the experience of his human senses, and Thomas's doubt yields to the divine reality before him.

It is easy to hear rebuke in Jesus's reply to Thomas's confession of faith, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Yet, John continues his account by reminding us that Jesus revealed many other signs to his disciples—whose faith was bolstered, as was Thomas's by their direct experience—and tells us that he has written down some of these signs “so that [we] may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name.” (John 20:19-31) John reports the signs of the Presence among us so that even those of us who were not there will be led to faith, precisely as Thomas was confirmed in faith by his opportunity to share in the revelatory experience of his fellow disciples. Blessed are those who see and believe; blessed, too, are those who have not seen, but who find their hearts transformed by the spiritual authenticity of others' experience and then commit themselves to serve the Holy One of Being. Both are paths to God; the travelers on these paths are not in competition with one another.

The reading from Acts (5: 27-32) stops just before the spiritually practical pharisee Gamaliel urges the people to wait to see the evidence of divine intent in the story of Jesus's resurrection. “If this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!” (5:38-9) How like Thomas he is, withholding judgment until he experiences directly a confirming sign of an authentic divine revelation. Gamaliel teaches us that patient doubt must be welcomed as a valid theological position, as an open-hearted willingness to consider that something new may emerge that requires us to change our understanding of God, which by its limited, human nature can never express the fullness of divine potential.

This week's reading from Revelation (1:4-8) also invites us to experience our lives as what Pastor Selamanovic calls “a void into which God speaks . . . [a place where we can recognize that there] is no wisdom without humility, without cultivating an empty space where we can learn instead of teach, receive instead of give, submit instead of control, lose instead of win. . . . [a place where we are reminded] again and again that religion is not the pearl, but the shell that holds the pearl.” (It's Really, 141-2) This particular passage from Revelation expands on divine blessings granted to the Israelites in their Sinai covenanting with God, widening the invitation to live as priests serving the One God, the One who appeared to Israel as Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, the Great I Am, the One who was, is, and will be. And, as if to remind us that seeing can be believing, John envisions the Divine Presence riding the clouds, where “every eye will see,” where each of us, in our uniqueness, will have an opportunity to encounter the holy. If religion promises that every eye will see, and that what will be seen comprises the totality of divine potential, then on the face of it we know that this promise cannot be fulfilled exclusively within the constraints of a single religious tradition. None of us possesses a box big enough to contain the Alpha and the Omega, the One who is, was, and will be. But all of our traditions possess something to enhance the wisdom, insight, and hope of the others.

Recognizing this, we are obligated to “free our religion from the burden of being our God,” empowering it “to serve us and the world around us.” (It's Really, 142) Sharing again the words of Pastor Selmanovic, of whom I have become deeply fond, I underline for you my conviction that to accomplish the necessary replacement of the idol of religion with the reality of God, we need to engage seriously with religions other than our own:

Other religions can challenge (or at least help us see) the idols we create because they expand the whole territory of knowing. They pose difficult questions we don't want to ask, make assumptions we don't want to acknowledge or examine, create meaningful arguments against us we don't want to consider, and expose harmful practices we don't want to stop. Where we have created a vacuum of knowledge and virtue through our own religions, God enters that space through the religions of others—through strangers. When we let them come close and embrace them as our neighbors, they can help us see God's presence, grace, and care where we cannot see it on our own. (It's Really, 146)

This deep need to open a space of humble not-knowing into which we enter with strangers so that we may meet in that space as lovers of God, this deep need is especially profound for Jews and Christians. In our day, after the many destructions of our shared human history, and especially in the deep shadow of the Holocaust, God calls us to look honestly into the most guarded chambers of our own hearts, hearts hardened by millennia of physical and spiritual suffering, by millennia of aggressively asserting a constricted theology with room for only limited paths to the One, paths marked with the murderous signposts of human insecurity, doubt, and fear of the other.

Among the many religions that have emerged on our planet, Judaism and Christianity have a particular call to repair our ancient patterns of mutual disdain, of spiritual and physical violence. The Holocaust, the Shoah, is a shared wound, and if we do not turn ourselves wholeheartedly to claiming it as a moment of divine revelation, as a cosmic demand for transformative healing, now in our day, then I assure you that the future will not forgive us for knowing what we have done. The future will not forgive us for knowing what we have done.

When the Second Temple was about to fall into Roman hands, some of Rabbi Yochanan ben-Zakkai's students smuggled him out of the city in a coffin, which they opened at the feet of the besieging general, Vespasian. The rabbi arose from the coffin, greeted Vespasian as emperor-to-be, and asked for a small gift in return for the prediction. Jerusalem lost, the biblical forms of Israelite worship at an end, ben-Zakkai asked permission to open a school in the coastal village of Yavneh, and that school assured the evolution of the Israelites into the Jews, the continuity of the Sinai Covenant into our own day.

We live now in a Yavneh moment, in which Christianity must come to recognize the eternal authenticity of God's covenant with the Jews, and Jews must learn to honor the deeply aspirational nature of the Christian story, of the covenant embodied in that one child who will make all the difference. Tolerance is not enough: we must find ways to recognize the truth in our respective paths and to create a spiritual climate of such deep respect for one another's true connection to the Only One of Being that we are distracted by nothing else in our combined effort to redeem God's world.

This week's Torah portion is Tazria/Metzorah, a part of Leviticus addressing issues (you should pardon the pun!) of defilement and purification many are tempted to skip over, in hopes of finding something less unpleasant to contemplate (12:1 -15:33). Yet, even here, we are challenged by God's insistence that we always make a way to return the individual who has been separated from the community back to his or her place among us. God insists that what is out be brought back in, even if what was once in has been touched with what our ancestors understood as spiritual contamination. God will not permit us, unless we make of our religion an idolatrous not-God, to raise up impenetrable barriers; God insists that we are fully interdependent, among ourselves and with the Holy One.

In the words of this week's reading from Psalms, God is our deliverance—not Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other religious tradition, but God alone. The God of unexpected, reciprocal uplifting dwells among us and invites us to exult and rejoice in the vibrant life and love with which we have been blessed, through no merit of our own. God lifts us from oppressions of our own making, and we in turn extol and bless God's marvelous work. That which seems to us of no value, a rejected stone discarded by human builders blind to its potential, appears in God's sight as the most precious part of creation. May we be blessed to cultivate the humility, determination, and spiritual curiosity to open our hearts to what we might previously have discarded—the insights, teachings, rituals, and Scripture of strangers—and to make of these a cornerstone for an ever-deepening shared life in the heart of the Beloved who has brought us into being. And may we do so now, for “This is the day that the Lord has made—may we exult and rejoice on it,” (118:24)ogether. Amen.

©2010 Raachel Nathan Jurovics