Text — Luke 24:36-42

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”   37 They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.  38 He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”  40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.  41 While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”  42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish,  43 and he took it and ate in their presence.

Our passage this morning makes a big deal out of Jesus showing the disciples his wounded hands and feet, and it’s these details that led to the phrase in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”  I’m not going to get into how we might understand “bodily resurrection as interesting as that topic is.

My springboard today is verse 41… “While in their joy they were disbelieving …”  You expect it to say, “In their joy, they were believing.  If they were disbelieving, why the joy? 

Actually, many things that happen to us do bring a kind of disbelief.  We’ve all felt, and probably said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”  What we see and what we believe are not necessarily the same thing, or not as closely connected as we might at first think.

This morning I’m going to tell you about a crisis of belief that happened to me some years ago.  When I entered Divinity School I was 27.  At that time, before any classes started, I had a certain image in my mind of what that experience would be like.  I had some understanding of the Bible, how it came to be written, and how to read it.  I also had a lot of questions, but I figured I was in the right place to get some high-powered education and some high-powered religious experience.  Yale University has a great mystique and I was enthusiastic. 

I started going to church every Sunday, and there was also worship every weekday at the Divinity School chapel and I went to most of those.

When I got about ten weeks into my courses, learning more about the origins of the New Testament and reading what various philosophers had to say about religious language, and having great conversations with students and teachers at virtually every mealtime, I found myself in a different state of mind.  I said to myself, and sometimes out loud, “This is all just made-up.  The Christian religion, the Bible, the church — this is all just human culture.  The Bible didn’t come from God.  It contains some insights and history, but it’s basically fiction.”   Here I was, in a seminary, and yet for many of the people around me, including some of the faculty, even the concept of God was suspect.

I remember one night reading the work of Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach was a 19^th century German philosopher.  He said that God is a human projection.  Human beings have in our minds an ideal of what a human could be, or should be, and we project this ideal onto the screen of the cosmos and worship it.  That’s what God is according to Feuerbach.  He came up with this theory in the 1840s — a long time ago.  But it was new to me, and I was impressed.  It was elegant, and simple, and persuasive. 

In my New Testament course, I was shown a lot of evidence that the gospel stories were not written close in time to events they describe; rather, they developed over many decades, with  many details added along the way.  The gospels were shaped by many social and even political forces.

After about ten weeks of this, I said to myself, “I can’t believe this anymore.  What am I doing here, spending all my money and going into debt if this is what the Bible and religion are all about?  My experience is fairly common for first year Divinity students.  And it’s disturbing.  A lot of students go into therapy.  Some of them decide to become therapists instead of ministers. 

I watched the belief I thought I had dissolve like a snowball under the hot examining light of modern scholarship and theories about religion.  I couldn’t go to a worship service without getting depressed, or even angry.  If I went to church, I felt like raising my hand to challenge everything that was said.  This was distressing. 

But I don’t want to give the impression that I was totally miserable.  There were many other sources of delight in New Haven, what we call “lesser consolations” in divinity school lingo.  There was great music to hear, theater, poetry readings, films, and lectures by famous people.  One day you could hear Alan Ginsburg reading poetry and playing his harmonium.  The next day you could hear Itzhak Perlman play the violin.  There was something every evening.

And though it will be hard to believe that I would even notice this (as you look at me in my mature age) there were also a lot of female students.  Intelligent women, attractive women, single women, including many who were also, like me, disillusioned first year Divinity students. 

So I wasn’t exactly in great pain.  The scenery was very picturesque.  I had a lot of dates.  (This was four years before I met Robin, so it was all very innocent, I assure you.)  And with all the university sponsored plays, films and concerts these dates cost almost no money, which was good because I was running out of it fast.  Lesser consolations get a lot of people through school. 

Over time, another thought started coming to me: “If Christianity is a fraud, then why does going to church depress me?  Or really, by this time, why does not going to church depress me?  Why am I reacting so strongly to this loss of belief, if there’s nothing to it.  Why do I care?” 

I stayed with this question.  I came to school to believe more, to have my belief reinforced.  Instead, my belief evaporated.  But if it really evaporated, why was I upset?  Why did I care?  Why did it bother me that worship depressed me?  Why didn’t I just quit going and move on?  This thought was a major turning point. 

I began to see that even though I couldn’t believe in the way I used to believe, still this Christian faith, this language, the worship traditions of the church, singing hymns, the Eucharist, still held a lot of power for me.  I was depressed because I was still drawn to these things.  I missed them.  I wanted to believe.

Here I am today.  I’m a believer again.  I can stand here with a clear conscience and say with a lot of conviction that while the gospel has some fiction in it, it’s much more than fiction.  It holds the deepest truth about God and human life that I’ve found. 

It’s the greatest treasure.  I can’t imagine living without it.  I can’t imagine facing the end of my life without it. 

Religious belief is a mysterious thing.  One thing I think I understand is that when it comes to the deepest things in life, our most important convictions and commitments are not based on hard evidence — on physical facts, or on scholars’ theories.  They are based on what we want out of life and how we think we can find it.

There’s another Easter text, in John’s gospel, in which Doubting Thomas said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails on Jesus’ hands and put my finger in his side, I will not believe.”  Then Jesus appeared and Thomas saw, and touched, and believed.

Remember Jesus’ response?  “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

We have not seen.  Jesus is no longer walking around on earth, showing us his wounds.  I found my way back to belief — a different kind of belief — because I wanted to believe.

I didn’t believe in the Bible the way I used to.  I believed in this sense: that Christianity, its scriptures, its sacraments, its behavior, its language, its music, its creeds, will take me in the direction I need to go and where I want to go.  I believe in the sense that I can trust these elements to be the lure, the challenge, that will take me deeper into the mystery of God.  And in this, I have never been disappointed.

Why some people believe and others don’t is a mystery.  But religious belief is about what we want — the kind of people we want to be, the kind of people we want to be with.  It’s based on how we want to be together, and how we set out to find what we want. 

Occasionally someone will say to me, “I feel hypocritical coming to worship because I don’t believe.”  Then I say, “Don’t worry about what you believe or disbelieve, for now.  Your belief can catch up later.  Come, if you want to, just because you want to.  Let your heart lead you.  That’s enough.  That’s everything.