Sunday Homily - April 28th, 2019 - The Reliability of our Faith

The Appearance of Jesus to Thomas Icon

I.

In the tradition of the Church
 there is a command to teachers of the faith
  to teach carefully.

In the letter of St. James,
 James actually says the following:
  "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters,
   for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness."
   [James 3:1 NRSV]

The whole reason why I wear that funny black hat at the beginning of the service
 is because it is indicative of any priest's office and charge
  as a teacher of the faith handed down to us.

I bring this up because today we need to talk
 about our basic doctrine as Christians.

And the reason why we need to do this has everything with last Sunday
 the holy celebration of Easter
  the acclamation that Christ is risen indeed.

Because three things happened last Sunday
 three things that, when taken together,
  struck me as very very perplexing.
   Extremely strange.

And those three things were the following:
 1) The celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead;
 2) The tragic bombing of the Christians celebrating Easter in Sri Lanka,
 and
 3) an interview with Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary.

The first two of these things are very self-explanatory.
 The celebration of Easter both leads to a victory shout over death
  and also reminds us of the fact that some people around the world
   literally give their lives to worship Jesus Christ.
    Those people have something to teach us American Christians about sacrifice.

But the third thing, the interview with Serene Jones,
 in the context of Easter
  was something that provoked incredible backlash within Christian circles.
   And the reason why will become very clear,
    because I'm going to read you a small excerpt from that interview.
     If you want to read the whole thing, you can look up the original piece
      at the New York Times.

Here is a small piece of that interview:

Kristof - Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that.

Jones - When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.

Kristof - Isn’t a Christianity without a physical resurrection less powerful and awesome? When the message is about love, that’s less religion, more philosophy.

Jones - For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.html]

It is really unfortunate that this interview happens
 THE DAY of the celebration of the resurrection.
  But what is even more striking to me
   is that many people heard what she said
    and just went along with it.

After all, she's a seminary president
 surely she knows what she's talking about when it comes to Christianity.

That's why, friends, we are going to need to eat our vegetables this morning,
 because we are going to briefly discuss some very basic claims of Christian belief.
  If you get confused over what I'm about to say,
   I would LOVE to sit and talk this week more about this.
    So please, give me a call if you want to talk!

So, without further adieu,
 let's talk about whether the Biblical account of the resurrection
  is a reliable way of knowing
   whether Jesus actually rose from the dead.

II.

And, guess what, our Gospel passage this morning,
 perhaps by Divine Consequence,
  or perhaps Divine Irony,
   is about Doubting Thomas!

Or, rather,
 the fact that ALL the disciples doubted the resurrection of Jesus
  and dismissed it as an "idle tale" when the women who saw the angels
   told them of the scene at the tomb.

Notice the main point of our Gospel this morning:
 the disciple's DON'T believe the testimony of the eyewitnesses
  but rather Jesus himself came to give evidence of his own self.

Thomas gets a bad rap for disbelieving the story,
 but let's not forget that the other disciples weren't all that much better.
  Jesus just appeared to them sooner than Thomas.

But Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, does not desire for the disciples to remain in doubt
 about his resurrection from the dead!

He comes and gives them evidence by showing them his own self.
 And that causes Thomas to give the strongest claim in John's Gospel
  of Jesus's divinity,
   where he exclaims,
    "My Lord and my God!"

That's the account of the resurrection that we hear this morning.

III.

But now that we have heard it,
 the main thing that we now wrestle with is the following question:
  how do we know that what we heard from John's Gospel is reliable?

That's the question that Serene Jones gives a pretty clear answer to
 in the interview above:
  her answer is no.

Now, let's understand WHY she said no.
 Some modern scholars of the biblical accounts
  are suspect of any miracle that is recorded in Scripture.

In our post-modern society,
 there is a firm tendency to view miracles in the Bible as, at best, suspect
  and at worst, an agreed upon story to theologically explain
   the happenings of the world.

Serene Jones, relying on several hundred years of this type of inquiry
 has made the decision that based upon the accounts in scripture
  and relying on higher criticism (which is a technique for interpreting the Bible)
   that the accounts of the resurrection are unreliable
    and thus that they are sensationalized, not to do harm,
     but instead to lay claim of the power of sacrificial love
      even in the face of death.*

*[this is my own extrapolation of the interview; this does not necessarily reflect her actual position]

So, I doubt that she says what she does with the intent to detract from Christian theology.
 She is a United Church of Christ minister, by the way,
  so I doubt she is meaning harm by saying this.

However, even if she doesn't intend to do harm
 does not mean that she gets to escape scrutiny.

Because there are underlying assumptions that even president's of theological seminaries make
 that are not based upon well-examined inquiry
  into the actual reasoning behind the traditional faith.

So, as we respond to some of these claims,
 let me give you three particular points of evidence for you to mull over
  in defense of why we can believe that the eyewitness accounts in the Bible are reliable.

1) The Bible itself undeniably presents Jesus's resurrection as literal, and in no way is it metaphorical.

From the manuscript evidence that we have received,
 the Bible's attestation to Jesus's resurrection
  is not presented as anything less than actualized reality.

The disciples AS A WHOLE did not simply come to a warm fuzzy feeling
 that Jesus was still around in their presence,
  or that they "discovered" that they still experienced Jesus
   even when he was not with them.
    That is not what the Scripture attests to,
     and anyone that tells you otherwise is confusing their theology
      with objective biblical studies.

Like I said, we can make the choice to not agree with the Bible's testimony,
 but we CANNOT say that the Bible says something that it objectively does not.
  That's where theological inquiry must begin.

Rather, the Bible actually presents the disciples and Thomas
 disbelieving the reports of the women at the tomb
 as idle tales
  UNTIL Jesus, in the literal bodily resurrection appeared to them
   and gave the physical evidence of his own body,
    bidding them to not just behold, but "place your hand in my side,
     and feel the nail holes in my hands and feet."

The Bible
 does not
  present the resurrection
   as a metaphor.
    It is real, literal, and bodily.

2) The Bible
 and specifically the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament
  as a whole
   are some of the most reliable documents of the Ancient Near East
    that we have in all of history.
    [for a breakdown of the basic argument, please see F.F. Bruce The New Testament Documents]

And that means that the testimony of the resurrection of Jesus found in the New Testament
 can be used as evidence of the literal resurrection with high explanatory power.

Here are a few very interesting metrics as to why this is important
 and this is a compilation of resources from various places,
  so I encourage you to check out the link in my sermon if you want to read more:

"Because of time and wear many of the historical documents from the ancient world have few manuscripts to which we can refer. This is specially true when we consider the secular historians and philosophers. For instance, we only have eight copies of Herodotus’s historical works, whose originals were written in 480-425 BC. Likewise, only 5 copies of Aristotle’s writings have found their way to the 20th century, while only 10 copies of the writings of Caesar, along with another 20 copies of the historian Tacitus, and 7 copies from the historian Pliny, who all originally wrote in the first century, are available today 1. These are indeed very few.

When we consider the New Testament, however, we find a completely different scenario. We have today in our possession 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, another 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and 9,300 other early versions (MSS), giving us more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today! Though we do not have any originals, with such a wealth of documentation at our disposal with which to compare, we can delineate quite closely what those originals contained."

[http://www.debate.org.uk/debate-topics/historical/the-bible-and-the-quran/the-bibles-manuscript-evidence/]

We have, in extant manuscript evidence
 more than 5800 Greek manuscripts and evidence that have been publicly cataloged!
  It isn't a secret, the academy of biblical scholars know about these things,
   and these manuscripts are out there for you to go and check out!

[from an interview with Dr. Daniel Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM); https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/an-interview-with-daniel-b-wallace-on-the-new-testament-manuscripts/]

The reliability of the Bible has not been disproved by modern scholarship.
 It has actually been strengthened by textual criticism.

The difference in whether the Bible is believed to be reliable or not
 especially in the professional opinion,
  is not about higher critical methods,
   but instead about our own biases and theological assumptions ABOUT the Bible
    when we USE tools like higher criticism.

Don't blame the tool for the mistakes of the craftsmen.

3) The disciples gave up their very lives to tell the world about this Truth.

Of course it is a theoretically possible
 that all of the eyewitnesses of Jesus's resurrection
  had a shared ecstatic experience
   that led them to share the resurrection
    as a pure spiritual experience
     and that Christ was experienced in their midst
      as a real presence.
      [c.f. episcopalarkansas.org/who-we-are for an example of this rationale]

But, let me maybe ask a simple and really divisive question:
 is that what the evidence in the Bible says about the resurrection?

Does that explanation make sense
 in the light of the fact
  that many of the first Christians
   and all of the Apostles
    were put to death for their faith in the bodily resurrection?

If the resurrection was not literal and bodily,
 if it was not real:
  why die for it?
   Why endure imprisonments
    beatings,
     being brought before the priests and council like they were in our Acts reading today
      and give the defense that they did in our Acts reading
       if it wasn't real?

IV.

So, I can understand if your eyes have completely glazed over at this point,
 all of these big ideas and evidence being submitted.

But friends,
 the real, literal, bodily resurrection is the heart of the Christian faith
  Period. Full stop. End of sentence.

In our Christian faith,
 you will certainly have doubts
  about that faith.
   Doubt is not a sin.

But, friends,
 God does not wish for you to remain in doubt.

Thomas, just like most of us sitting here
 starts as saying, "Unless I see the actual Jesus,
  I cannot believe."

But Jesus doesn't leave Thomas in that doubt alone.
 Christ is right there to MEET Thomas's doubt
  with the assurance of his resurrection
   in the actual, physical body of the resurrection.

And this is something that continues to happen
 in real life
  in real history
   where Christ reveals the truth of his resurrection
    and commissions new disciples to go into the world
     in testimony to what they have seen and heard.

This is why it is SO important to examine your faith.
 Don't just BELIEVE things because you are told to,
  but also do not DISBELIEVE things just because someone comes along
   who sounds intelligent.

This is where the responsibility is on YOU
 in YOUR relationship with Jesus Christ
  who stands before you
   and is willing to present his own self
    as evidence of the resurrection.

If Jesus Christ is not bodily risen
 then we are of most people to be pitied
  and we are still dead in our sins.
   Because if Jesus Christ is not risen
    we have put our faith in a crazy dead man
     who claimed to be God's son
      and the poor disciples just really wished to believe so hard
       that they lied to the whole world they preached to.

BUT.
 In fact, Jesus Christ HAS risen from the dead!
  And we have EVIDENCE that this is true!
   We have EYEWITNESS testimony to these things,
     we have multiple attestations to this by proven reliable textual sources in the New Testament,
      we have logical reasoning to believe in the experience of the Apostles in their preaching,
        and many of us here have actually EXPERIENCED the power of the literal resurrection.

And because Jesus Christ IS Risen,
 we now have HOPE!

Because Jesus Christ IS Risen,
 because our faith in Jesus IS Alive
  the whole world now has HOPE.

And because Jesus Christ IS Risen,
 we no longer fear our physical death
  because Jesus Christ has actually, literally, in our reality
   DESTROYED the power of death and hell forever
    and that this life is offered freely
     to anyone through the virtues of the salvation
      brought through your baptism!

We proclaim something that is Good for the whole world.
 Don't let that proclamation be silent.
  Dare to walk in the light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior.

In the name of the +Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.