Do You Love Me

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday of Easter at McLean Baptist Church in McLean, VA. My wife, Meg, is the Minister to Youth and Young Adults. You should check them out at: http://www.mcleanbaptist.org/

You can watch the video from YouTube, or listen to the sermon from SoundCloud on your phone.

“Do you love me?” No four words can cause more problems in my house than those. Meg and I use them all the time, in different situations. Often, I use them to shame her into feeding our dog. I will ask the dog, “Do you love me? Does your mother love you?” Of course, Meg pets him and walks him often…it’s the feeding part that I bug her with though. At times, we uses those words in those quiet moments where we need reassurance that we are not alone. We both use them when we are trying to get out of the frustration of not having done that “thing” we were asked to do. 

“Do you love me?” Every person on the planet wants to feel love. We crave it as one of the things that completes us and allows the individual to recognize their value. Interestingly, we, in this community, live in a culture that has for generations tried to downplay the need of love in our lives. Sure, we have always communicated a strong message that the idea of family is what completes our existence, or shows that we have truly succeeded in life. But in order to achieve those goals, we must toil and strive alone, hiding our need to be loved because we view it as a weakness that can hamper us from reaching our cultural goals. In order to be seen as successful in a world we describe as “dog eat dog,” “needy” is an adjective we can not afford to have hung on us. 

“Do you love me?” It’s a question that can leave you feeling vulnerable. The question expresses need and lays bare feelings of inadequacy. Can you truly be deserving of love? But in a world with so many swirling questions of race, gender, nationality, socio-economic concerns, religion, and politics, could this question be any more important to our very existence as children of God? 

Just a few weeks ago, I read a blog from a young minister talking bout how they feel in church. Like myself, this person is a millennial. We vaguely remember Reagan, we were there when all the cultural icons of the 90s were huge, and now we are the ones trying to find our way in the world post-college or grad school. Every church is struggling with what to do now that the largest generation in America doesn’t attend church. Whether you are reading the Barna Group, Pew Research, or any of a number of blogs by millennial writers, the word is out that my generation is post-Christian. Depending on the commentator, we are called lazy because many of us return to live with our parents, entitled because as a group our sports leagues started the practice o recognizing participation alongside victory, technology addicted because many of us do not remember a time without the internet, or disruptive because we have very few issues with asking questions of authority or our culture. Never mind that we are also the most highly educated generation, with more college graduates than any group before us, or the most indebted generation because we were encouraged to go and get that education, or the one with the fewest options because entry-level jobs do not pay on the same scale as they did before us.

This minister is trying to reconcile that existence with a world where the church is also struggling to know what to do with us. How can the church attract millennials when they don't join things? What new program can we put together to get them thought he door? However,  they asks questions of the Church, the one with the big “c”, and some of these questions are great because they express feelings I have heard from others. Will the Church treat us as more than props to show that you are growing, and allow us to actually find our place? Will you allow us to define ourselves instead of labeling us into groups such as “single,” “married without children,” or “married with children?” Can this Church be a place where we can ask our questions, or is that too much to ask? I have asked these questions, point blank, of the church that ordained me, and I heard the stories of heartache as my friends who are ministers, and millennials, were asked the same. 

“Do you love me?” A question that flows beneath all of the searching of a generation who is seeking its place in the world. It’s a question that cuts deep to the heart. As we read the story this morning, there are things that stand out in the telling. The disciples, after having caught nothing the entire night of fishing, follow the advice of this person they don’t know who is telling them to drop their nets just a few feet from where they had just pulled them up. Though they had caught 153 fish, this person they now know to be Jesus is already cooking fish for them when they arrive. And then, Jesus ignores the other disciples to talk only to Simon Peter. This is a story we know, fairly well. Though growing up, my church didn’t follow the Lectionary, we still heard a sermon on this passage at least once a year. To say nothing of the many Bible studies that would have something about this passage during Sunday School. While it may not be as strongly burned into your memory as say John 3:16, we at least feel familiar with the story. 

We are familiar with how Simon Peter’s three denials during Jesus’ trial are echoed here in Jesus’ three questions. This is the place where Peter is restored after having failed so painfully on that most painful of days. For most of the Gospel story, Peter has been one of the most inconsistent of followers. He is able to to both inspire those around him with strong declarations of faith and fidelity, and then able to fall so horribly short of the standard that he becomes the subject of sermon jokes. When we read the Gospels many of us both want to be Peter, and also want to smack him on the back of the head. Though we recognize that we are the outsiders looking into this story where we already know the ending, Peter still makes us cringe with his naïveté. After hearing those parables and seeing the miracles, how does he not get where Jesus is going? When the Christ reaches out and touches the outcaste, dines with the socially reprehensible, undermines cultural leaders, embraces people who are not considered people, chooses to associate with the poor instead of the rich, and casts disparaging remarks toward Caesar as the king, how did Peter not see what was coming? 

“Do you love me?” This Easter season, as the front page of the bulletin describes, is one of great joy and celebration lasting till Pentecost. Starting two weeks ago, we were given a great opportunity to remember and celebrate the joy of proclaiming, “He is Risen. He is Risen, Indeed.” In the development of Christian thought, there is no bigger event than Easter. Our forebears in the faith felt it was so important that it is recorded in all four Gospels. Not only are there four accounts, the community that has followed Christ has found them each so compelling that they kept all four. We are an Easter people. All that is our existence as the children of God comes from our Easter experience. As Jurgen Moltmann said, “All faith begins and ends at the Cross.” We find our place in Easter, we find our hope in Easter, we find our reason in Easter. 

Easter is the culmination of the story of God continually reaching out to those on the fringes, or even beyond the walls of society. Whether it’s calling children close, speaking to and being questioned by a Samaritan woman, healing leapers, or defending prostitutes, Jesus’ life displayed that God’s love is directed at lifting up those who are being pushed down. The life of Christ is one that called people to walk out onto the edges of their own existence and face the possibility of a world turned on its ear. In the words so often printed in red we find the call to seek out a world where all can come to the table. Jesus laid the first stones on a new path that pushed beyond the horizon to a new world where the banquet table was set for the beggar in the name of the King. The event of Easter itself, of death and resurrection wrapped around the question of being forsaken shows that God is on the side of those called God-forsaken. 

“Do you love me?” With those things in mind, we turn our eyes back to the disciple who had forsaken God by denying His son. It is here in this moment by the lake, when we look into the eyes of a disciple who had seen so much and failed so many times, that God reaches out to reconcile one who had forsaken God. Peter’s denials may have been to save his skin from certain association with the man on trial at the time, but their implications are much greater than that. We have to understand what it meant for Peter to say what he said before we can fully grasp how much forgiveness was really at stake. 

“Do you love me?” One of the things I have thought a lot about over the last couple of years as Meg and I have moved around is just how different I am now from how I was when I grew up. I’m sure each of you have experienced that feeling at some point in your life. We change as we grow up and have new experiences. Today, I stand over a thousand miles from where I grew up, and that is not just a statement of geography. When I think back on that place and time, I remember the friends I had. I remember the people from school that I don’t speak with anymore. We all grow up and change, but I think back to that ignorant, arrogant guy who said some mean things, and wish he knew what I now know. Which isn’t all that much.  But I pushed away people for rather unenlightened reasons. Those slight embarrassments are a part of my story, and who I am today just like similar stories make up all of our experiences. 

Simon Peter, though, wasn’t just distancing himself from the kids in his hometown and not calling them again. Jesus was the image of the invisible God on Earth, and Peter denied ever knowing him. What is at stake on that lake shore is not just forgiving a friend who said he had nothing to do with you when you went on an unpopular political rant on Facebook. Jesus was asking Peter, the man who had denied knowing God Incarnate, to come back. Come back and be a part of the story again. The story that was feeding hungry people, touching sick people, healing broken people, and comforting forgotten people.

“Do you love me?” It’s also a part of our story because the story doesn’t end on that lake shore. It exists in twenty-three other books in the New Testament. That story stretches from the Ancient Near East around the globe through 2,000 years of strife and struggle. Through persecution, heresy, Reformation, conflict, and awakening. In all those times, the story has moments where this scene on the lake is played out again and again. Where “Do you love me?” is not just a collection of letters on a page in different languages for different people, but the actual call from the Spirit of God. It rings out again and again for us.   In times of colonialism, Inquisition, racism, political discord, and war, the voice of God calls out to those who have forsaken God and asks, “Do you love me?”

Each time, the Church has found its way to say, “You know I love you, Lord.” Sometimes it caused us pain, just as it did for Peter. That pain is deep, for it would be simplistic to say that our failings were premeditated attempts to subvert the plot. Rather, we lost our way. We got scared because it was a moment where we were standing on the in the courts with others asking us if we knew the man, and we reacted out of our fear of being implicated. We did it without thinking, without considering, but because we felt something. For all that humanity would like to think itself a creature of rational logic, we are really making our decisions with our emotions. We were blind-sided by the moment where we were called to account. The Church found itself standing with an angry mob, just trying to get a better view of that thing over there when the mob turned and said, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be a disciple like those out there?” And in a moment of panic because we saw how hard it was out there, we said, no.

“Do you love me?” Peter’s question becomes our question. Peter’s response, our response. “You know all things, Lord. You know that we love you.” The response is uttered through the pain of remembered betrayal. We squint in the blinding ray of forgiveness that is calling in those who have forsaken God. This penetrating question, that exposes the vulnerability of a betrayed God, exposes us as well. We can not run from it, can not give the non-answer answer. We look at our story. The question has been there through the ages. And it is at Easter we are called to rejoice that we are asked this question. God is offering an opportunity to move through the pain of betrayal into the joy of celebrating the Resurrection. “Do you love me?

Are We The Twin

I should first apologize for not writing anything for awhile. Needless to say, things got busy. This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this last week at Belle View Baptist Church in Alexandria, VA. It was a good morning, and I think a pretty good sermon. I had hoped to have audio for it, but my recorder crashed five minutes into the sermon. So, all you get is the text. I pray you all have a good week, and look forward to getting back in the swing of things.

“Are We The Twin?”

John 20:19-31

Faith and doubt. Did you know that the majority of people will strongly believe something negative about a public figure without much evidence, yet continually doubt positive affirmations regardless of the support? Faith and doubt. We have total faith that people are as bad as we always believed they were anyway, but constantly doubt whether something good is real. Faith and doubt. We just “know” that our pursuits and endeavors will come to fiery end, but doubt that we make a real difference in the world around us. Faith and doubt. Obviously, most Americans see the world as a place for caution where we should always question, because we fear the world turning upside down on us. Yet, things that work exactly as planned leave that anxious feeling in our stomach as if the other shoe is about to drop. Faith and doubt. 

It sounds exhausting, to say the least. Yet, it happens so quickly and with such regularity that it can be difficult to see the world in any other way. We have developed habits that are the closest thing to automatic responses outside of the urge to take a breath. Doubting what we see has grown into a natural part of our lives. It takes effort to to have faith in something. It’s why Christian culture, at least that which I grew up in, mocked doubters as lazy, painted skeptics as intellectually dishonest, and agnostics as those unwilling to make commitments.

Faith and doubt. The Church struggles to talk about faith and doubt together. We idealize faith, and the Scriptures give us a “Hall of Fame” of faith’s greatest models. We command people to have faith, we debate the essence of faith, and we struggle to express or “live in” to our faith. We spend so much time talking about faith that we rarely, if ever, confront or express real doubt. I don’t know what it was like in this church, but as a child and teenager, we never stopped talking about or trying to enhance the strength of our faith. It was part of every class, or Bible study.

Faith and doubt. When doubt did become a topic, it was addressed with equal parts fear and loathing. I remember a pastor talking about doubt as “the principal weapon of the the enemy” when preaching about how the thief comes in the night. Doubt would sneak up on us when we least expected it. As a youth, we were told that doubt first manifested itself in the lives of those who were complacent in their faith. It came in the good times, those times when you didn’t pray as much because you didn’t feel there was anything wrong to worry about. And because you had allowed doubt to creep in, we were told that is why the bad times happened in the first place. Looking back, doubt was a convenient way to blame the victim for struggles of life. Doubt is always the opposite of faith. It was the Lex Luthor to the Superman that is faith. It is the darkness to the light.

Doubt became this boogey man that was always waiting to pick you off if you strayed from the narrow path of faith that had been laid out by those who taught us. It was the justification for why people did not express or speak of their faith exactly the same way we did. Those with different theology were just people unfortunate enough to fall to the trap of doubt. It took me years to figure out what was going on. I had spoken the same words and affirmed the same principles. Only after I experienced real tragedy and began to ask questions did it dawn on me. Doubt was how we kept things in order. As I struggled through my own experience of how the world was not quite as fair as I had believed, I was being told to “let go of my doubt and have faith.” It happened one day when I was pastoring an international church overseas. 

Faith. My wife and I had been married for just a few months and taken this position as co-pastors of an English-language church in Bali. Before we left, we knew we would be there for only a few months. The church did not have the financial ability to support ministers for long tenures, and it wasn’t connected to any specific denomination or missions organization. But we thought it would be an adventure. We didn’t have kids, very little debt, and so we threw caution to the wind and moved halfway around the world. Now, we weren’t totally without reason. When we returned, she was going to start seminary, and I was sending out resumes all over trying to find a place to serve. While we were living this part of our adventure, we were going to prepare for the next part. We dug into our ministry with deep faith and fell in love with the most diverse group of people you will ever meet. On any given Sunday there were half a dozen nationalities and languages meeting in our small church, and all of them had made a conscious choice to worship in English. It was a beautiful, creative time where I truly felt we were living in the present what the Kingdom of God would look like in the future. 

Doubt. There is a day in the Revised Common Lectionary that comes during Eastertide, every year. At the end of the Gospel reading in John 14, Jesus tells the Disciples, “do not be afraid.” As our time overseas had marched toward its predetermined conclusion, I was not getting anywhere in terms of finding a place to serve when we returned. We were going to be homeless, without income, and left to the generosity of our families. While that is a steadfast bedrock for both of us, it was not how we had pictured our adventure, nor was it the hope on which I had staked my call. I knew, and still know today, that I was called to be a servant in God’s Church, yet I was not seeing where we were to go next. We were both doing everything we could to keep the stress to ourselves. That week, as I prepared for the sermon, the only think I knew to do was to lay out my own fear and doubt. I wanted to start a conversation among the church about how difficult it can be to follow the command of Jesus, and not be afraid. That day at the pulpit, I struggled and for sure, it was not one of my best delivered sermons. 

As the service ended and we had the time of response, I sat at this small table we had set up to the side of the worship area. It was meant to signify that this time of invitation was an opportunity to start a conversation. A member of the church from South Africa, a man of deep devotion…which means we argued a lot about how best to articulate faith and doctrine, came to sit at the table. He put his hand on my shoulder, trying to comfort and give me support. He looked directly into my face and he told me, “You need to have more faith.” Something in me broke at that moment. I was almost completely overwhelmed with a flood of emotion that I was not prepared to sift through. I was angry and offended. I had been struggling with these feelings of inadequacy and doubt for months, knowing that I still had faith that my calling was to ministry, but not seeing the path of where to go next. Later, he and I would talk about that moment, and I was able to truly express my frustrations and anxieties to him in a way that was able to communicate that there was deep faith still in my heart. Then, he was able to tell me of his own struggles of doubt that he had also been hiding.

We learned, together, in that moment, something that Christian mystics had been talking about for centuries. Faith and doubt are not opposites. They are compliments. 

Faith and doubt. These two parts of our lives co-exist in all of us. They happen all the time when we make decisions. Is this the best investment for my future? Is this the best time to change my practice of living? We know on the one hand that we are being given a great opportunity, but we also doubt whether this opportunity is really for us. 

One of the things I have always lamented about the Gospel text for today is that some Bibles put in the title “Doubting Thomas” before this story. In truth, I don’t really like titles in my Bible anyway. Editors added them in recent decades, and I question not only their veracity as ways to understand the text, but how they break up the thoughts and message. However, that is something best discussed in a long Bible study. For today, let’s just focus on Thomas. This story is one that we know pretty well, or at least we have heard it read in church often enough that it’s familiar to us. That can be one of the problems with Bible passages like this as well. We feel familiar with the text enough that we don’t really read it that often.

This text is more dramatic than I tend to give it credit. It is set on Easter Sunday. Already, the community that had followed Jesus were busy. Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the Beloved Disciple had already gone to the tomb. Mary had an encounter with someone she thought was a gardner, but was in fact the risen Jesus. She had already told the other disciples of her experience, in essence being the first person to share the Gospel of the risen Christ. All of this happens just before we pick up in verse 19. 

Faith and doubt. The Disciples, sans Thomas, are gathered in a locked room, presumably hiding for fear of their being implicated with Jesus and crucified when the Christ appears and shows them his hands and side. Then Thomas shows up afterwards, and asks for the exact same thing they other disciples had already experienced. However, he is the one who is labeled as doubting. There are so many things in this small passage to talk about. In John’s Gospel, this is the arrival of the Holy Spirit, this is the Great Commission, and this is the place where doubt and faith meet. John’s Gospel has been telling us all the way through that the Disciples don’t get it. They don’t get it when it comes to the place of children in the Kindom of God. They don’t get it when it comes to the need for miracles. They don’t get it when it comes to Jesus’ rejection of violence and surrender to crucifixion, and they don’t get it when it comes to the resurrection.

Faith and doubt. Thomas appears two other times in John’s Gospel as a character where his words are recorded. Once he is shown as courageous, offering to go and die with Jesus, and another time he is shown as theologically astute, asking good questions about how to follow Jesus when he is speaking cryptically of where he is going. In a way, I guess it goes to show that one, seemingly negative incident can brand you for life. The text doesn’t even tell us if Thomas put his hand in the wounds that Jesus offered, but there is a painting that depicts it, and so for many that is the image in our imagination. The people of the Gospel text watched everything they hoped for, but didn’t fully understand, come to ruin in the most painful and gruesome way they could have imagined. 

Then, 2000 years later, this group of know-it-alls come along and brand Thomas a “doubter.” We start with his doubt of the other’s witness that Jesus has risen. From there, the entire story is colored by Thomas’ doubt. Jesus offers words of blessing for those “who have not seen, and yet believe.” It should be an assurance for those who read the text that they are a blessed people because they believe without seeing, yet instead, it is seen as condemnation of those, like Thomas, who want to see. We turn this text of the miracle of the risen Christ into a zero-sum game about what it means to have faith. Ultimately, we label Thomas a “zero” because he saw, and believed. However, that’s not what the text tells us. Jesus asks him if it required sight for him to believe, and then proclaimed those who believe without seeing as “blessed.”

Faith and doubt. What does it matter if we pack these preconceptions about Thomas in this passage? Thomas still doubted before he had faith. I believe it helps us understand what we mean when we say we have faith. If anything, this passage teaches us what faith really is because Thomas and the Disciples had it at the end of this passage, and they were looking right at the risen Christ, yet we also have it, and we have never seen Jesus in the flesh. At least, I haven’t. Maybe you have. Regardless, the true measure of faith is not the ability to believe in something you can’t see. Faith is not like believing in the Invisible Woman from the Fantastic Four. Something that is there, but you just can’t see. 

Faith is so much more. The Quaker theologian, D. Elton Trueblood, said, “faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” No one would disagree that at the end of this chapter, everyone involved has faith that God has raised Jesus to conquer death. Yet, they were given visual proof of his resurrection. Even Paul will see Jesus on the Damascus road, which will lead him to faith. Faith is so much stronger than something that just starts the life of one devoted to God. Faith is less about someone’s need to close their eyes, and more about how we stand on the promises. 

Faith and doubt. There’s one part of this we story from John we haven’t talked about yet. When Thomas is introduced, we are told that he also called “the Twin,” but we aren’t told why. This is the second time in John’s Gospel that the reader is told that Thomas is “the Twin,” but we are never told with whom he is a twin. Are they identical or fraternal? Why is it important for the reader to know that Thomas is a twin? Are they playing tricks on the Disciples by switching places with each other from time to time? 

What if “twin” has a bigger meaning? Maybe, we are the twin. I told you one of my stories of doubt. I’m fairly certain, that though I don’t know any of you, you could also share stories of doubt. Life is just too hard sometimes for there to never be doubt. I’ve heard doubt in the hospital rooms where I served as a chaplain, in the pews of the churches I’ve served as a pastor, on the streets where I’ve been a citizen, and in the quiet when my own voice of doubt starts to push against the silence. There’s more doubt now than I can ever remember. And in all that doubt we find Thomas’ twin, begging to see the risen Jesus. 

It’s in the voice of those who are saying, “that group over there, they are taking away our stuff.” It’s in the violence that breaks out because we think we have to fight to hold onto this illusion that our lives are fine, or that we already possess some “dream”. It’s in the voice of the preacher who realizes their church is getting smaller, getting older, and that the things they imagined ministry was going to be like…are not happening, and so they lash out at those people or this generation. It’s in the voice of the millennial who has become disillusioned because the church they grew up in is not big enough for their questions, or thinks they are too lazy and entitled to be important.  Those are the voices saying, “Unless I can touch…I will not believe.”

Doubt. It’s been three years since I served, with my wife, that church in Bali. In those three years, I’ve moved across the country, but have never served in God’s Church which I know I’m called to. And there were days when my doubt threatened to swallow me whole. I wanted so badly to touch and know that God was close. I am Thomas’ twin. I’ve heard my friends, my wife, remind me that I am called, but I did not believe. They all testified to what they had witnessed, and yet, I still doubted. If we are to call him “Doubting Thomas” then I am “Doubting Will.”

Faith. But I am also one of the ones that Jesus has called “blessed.” Because I have not seen, and yet I believe. It may not be the grand image of the prophet who pronounces, “Thus saith the Lord,” but I am here. I am here because I have faith in the promise of the Risen Christ. The one that breathed and said, “receive the Holy Spirit.” The one that said, “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace…take courage; I have conquered the world.” It’s my trust without reservation. It’s the only way I know. I was told, and I put my trust in the telling. It can be difficult to imagine that faith and doubt can reside so close together. We imagine that the contrast between one place and the other is stark. That the line is bold on the pavement and so easy to see. 

Faith and doubt. I remember a story I read once when preparing to teach spiritual formation at a church I was serving. It was from the mid 1990’s and the Orthodox church that had existed in the former Soviet Bloc countries was coming out of hiding. An American journalist has been sent to interview one of their Patriarchs, or leaders. It was an in-depth interview of how this man had maintained his faith while hiding from governments that wanted to harm him. At some point in the interview, the journalist asked the Patriarch to describe his prayer life. Obligingly, the man told the journalist a prayer he had said often, and the journalist was a little surprised. I can’t remember what the prayer was exactly, but it had been very simple. Much too simple for such a person of deep faith, or so the journalist thought.

The Patriarch looked at him patiently and said, “We need not over-complicate it. Prayer is just talking to God.” Then, the Patriarch said something that really energized me. “Often, we imagine that the acts we do for God are complicated. And so, we get caught up in trying to figure out ‘how’ we are to do something. The difficult part, though is not in the ‘how,’ but in the ‘doing.’”

Faith and doubt. I often imagined that one was so different from the other. They were talked about as if it were like crossing a river and burning the bridge behind you. Now, it seems that the hard part is not in “how” I believe, but in the believing. “I” am the twin. I’m the one who has cried out to touch the hands and the side. I’m the one who didn’t believe the testimony of those who love me. But I’m also blessed. Because I, like you, am one who has not seen, and yet has believed. Amen