Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.
Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
Psalm 118:14-29
Go On, Saint Thomas, by Jack Baumgartner
Jesus says to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe, but believe what, exactly? In Thomas’ case it seems to be belief that Jesus is resurrected, so that Jesus can be seen, close enough to touch. For so many in all the centuries since, this is sticking point. Historians agree that Jesus the person existed, and that he was executed. Opinions vary on whether he was resurrected. Arguments against Christianity often enough focus on the resurrection.
I think it is not helpful to focus too narrowly on whether the resurrection happened or not. In fact I affirm my belief in the resurrection, both Jesus’, and ours. But for me, resurrection is not that interesting unless it is paired with what it signifies about Jesus. It signifies two related things. First, I stand with Thomas here when he says, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus is God. Second, if Jesus is God, we would do well to pay very close attention to what he says and does. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus is most significant to me when it compels us to pay better attention to the life of Jesus.
See, to me, belief in the resurrection too easily becomes a stark binary: either you believe or you don’t. The switch is on or off. But my experience of belief is not like that. My experience of belief is like a rainbow, a spectrum, or a vast field of moments of clarity, and doubt, and then clarity, but different than before. Belief is not static for me; it is lived. It is breathed.
Jesus said to them… “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” I experience belief as breath, as the Holy Spirit, literally the Holy Breath of God, in me, in my heart.
The resurrection of Jesus should not be reduced to a doctrinal statement, or a talking point in a theological debate. Belief in the resurrection should not just be belief in an extraordinary miracle two thousand years ago, nor even an essentially self-centered hope in some sort of afterlife for ourselves. I think belief in the resurrection is better framed as belief in Immanuel, God with us.
God is not the once and future king, like the legend of King Arthur who is not dead but magically sleeping only to rise again when the Britons need him most. Belief in the resurrection can be belief in the Holy Spirit at work here and now. Jesus is so alive in all of us as members of the Body of Christ that we might mistake him for a gardener now and then.
So in light of all of this, I propose reframing the idea of belief in today’s Gospel. I’m going to use a different word altogether: imagination. Let’s hear the passage again this way.
The other disciples say to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord.” But he says to them (and I paraphrase here), “Unless I see him up close, I will not imagine it.” And then when Thomas meets the resurrected Jesus, and says, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus says to him, “Has your imagination expanded because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to imagine so much more.”
Belief as imagination is not binary, but multivariate, expansive, creative, alive. Belief as imagination cannot be contained in any creed, in any orthodoxy, although those things can certainly help us focus our imagination toward our loving God.
Blessed indeed, I say, are those who have not seen a more just world and yet have come to imagine it. Blessed are those who have not seen the economic benefit of caring for the most vulnerable, and yet have come to imagine that to care for the vulnerable is to care for God. Blessed are those who have not seen the Kingdom of Heaven, and yet have come to imagine that it is indeed in-breaking here and now.
I suppose that for some, the word imagination is not more helpful than the word belief. Neither word reliably balances a checkbook, but I retort that neither does a balanced checkbook reliably convey love, or offer hope to the hopeless.
And we can get crunchy and practical too. It took imagination for scientists to prove that germs exist and then to prove that washing our hands can save lives. It took imagination to read between the lines of the Bible to hear the Holy Spirit teach our species that slavery is wrong, even though our Scriptures support it much more than not.
It takes imagination to interpret Scripture away from misogyny, homophobia, and all manner of other bigotries. Belief that is strictly binary, on or off, does not necessarily allow for a living faith. But belief as imagination does.
This is how I hear the end of the Gospel passage, when we hear that it is written 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.
Through believing we may have life in his name. Or in my paraphrase this morning, through the use of our imagination, guided by the Holy Spirit, we may participate in a living, God-centered, faith. Further, our faith can be such that it is not a part of our lives but instead our lives are a part of our faith. Imagine, or believe in, a faith that is so in tune with God’s will, that all that we do, and all that we are, is taken up in that faith, is held in its embrace.
In the winter of 1995 there was a song that was popular for a time. Some of you may know it. It’s called “One of Us,” written by Eric Bazilian, and sung by Joan Osborne. One of the lyrics is a question that is repeated several times: “What if God was one of us?” I remember at the time being struck by what it might suggest about our culture that this was an interesting question to ask. Surely it is an article of our faith that God was one of us, Jesus.
But in my experience this article of faith is expressed the other way: one of us, Jesus, is God. Or put as a question, like the song, “What if one of us was God?”
The two questions, “what if God was one of us?,” and “what if one of us was God?” are not quite the same. There is a difference in emphasis, in direction. When we ask “what if one of us was God?” we are starting with an us, and then elevating one of us, setting that person apart. It’s a distancing.
I am prepared to affirm at any time that Jesus is God, but that only makes sense to me in the context of the prologue of John’s Gospel in which it is clear that Jesus is not elevated to Godhood in his life but rather was God in the beginning. This is why I tend to revere the Incarnation fully as much as the Resurrection, because if Jesus was God in the beginning, his God-ness is not so remarkable as his human-ness. That, for me, is the power of the question in the song, “What if God was one of us?” It’s essentially a song about the Incarnation.
The reason I am going on about this song is that the question in the song is such an effective example of belief as imagination. I’ve talked about the problems of belief that becomes static, or binary. Here is another way to put that. I have not often found belief that is all about statements, with periods at the ends of them, all that useful in real life. More useful, I have found, is belief that is made up of questions, but not just any questions – questions that inspire our imaginations – “what if” questions.
What if God was one of us? What if God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only Son? What if rainbows are a sign of God’s covenant with us? What if justice and mercy are the offerings God chooses? What if when we pray to the Holy Spirit at this table, the bread and wine were to be for us the body and blood of Jesus, spiritual food that brings us together in an eternal, loving communion with God and each other? What if God was not just one of us, but deep within the hearts of all of us?
Blessed are those who have not seen these things, and yet still imagine them, and order their lives accordingly.