The Default Scenario

2nd Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn

Readings:
Acts 4:32-35
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/2A62828C-3EDB-9FDF-1876-102DE4792F9A.mp3

Pastor Mohn began with the notion that she and Thomas “are good friends”. Often the Sunday after Easter is left to seminarians and associate pastors to preach on Thomas on what’s often a lightly attended 2nd Sunday of Easter service. Pastor Mohn was admitting it was getting tough to come up with new slants on Thomas and she was, ultimately, “saved” by a 47 year old British woman named Susan Boyle.

Susan appeared on the British “American Idol” Britain’s Got Talent. The newest YouTube video to break records was written up in yesterday’s NY Times. Perhaps in response to Susan answering that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an actress and singer in British musical theater, the audience (and the judges) were somewhat sneering and laughing at her "dream" ... apparently not expecting much from the woman who, until recently, had been taking care of her ill mother. And all this before they heard her even open her mouth to sing. Everyone in the room, in a moment of anticipation of what would follow, bit lips and hid their faces or stared through slits in their upheld hands. And then she sang. Jaws dropped, eyes popped, and the audience was carried away to a standing ovation throughout her rendition of the ballad “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRmM1J1sfg ).

There’s a deeper connection of faith, Susan Boyle and the doubting Thomas as Pastor Mohn points out. Something connecting the faces that doubted they would hear anything they’d ever care to remember. We all struggle to have faith, to believe. Susan Boyle doesn’t have the outward appearance we are taught from an early age to associate with “stardom”. We accentuate the young and the physical and allow it to take our attention from the substantive. Sometimes we are led to "believe" that dreams are only for the young, only achievable by the svelt even with all the examples around us that speak quite to the contrary. We become so "certain" that you have to look like Elaine Paige to sing like Elaine Paige. We search and yearn for certainty so much that we bottle it with a prescriptive recipe: in the absence of the voice, we judge "what will occur" on false pretenses, on appearance of what it ought to look like. And barring evidence to the contrary, we simply choose to doubt rather than believe.

When we can’t absolutely have certainty, we settle for doubt instead of faith.

Doubt, not faith, is the default scenario.

We want certainty. And if we can’t have it … because we weren’t there when the tomb was opened … or because someone doesn’t “look the part”, we choose NOT to believe.

When we have certainty, there’s no need for faith. The challenge is when there is no proof. Pastor Mohn astutely points out that faith … the choice to believe in the absence of proof is always a progression. It must be actively constructed (through effort). One does not call it out of thin air. It is difficult!

What is also sooo fascinating about Susan Boyle’s singing “I Dreamed a Dream” is that the song is about a woman dying, a woman convinced that the end is, for her, imminent. The lyrics, almost ironically, point to the young as being those who fall prey to the tigers that come out in the night. Hear the words she sings:

There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting

There was a time
Then it all went wrong
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living

I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

And Susan Boyle turns this ballad of lost and broken dreams torn asunder by soft thunder into “a bright beginning”. She imbibes the lyrics with a breath of hope as if to announce that …

…between certainty and doubt … THERE … lies a thing called faith

Faith in things unseen, faith that an unemployed woman of 47 can call from within herself the voice that would stir countless to rise from their seats. In his all-too-human stance, Thomas, like all the Britain's Got Talent judges, has made up his mind, to forgo faith for doubt. From where, then, comes faith in the unsung hero, the unemployed older woman with The Voice, faith in The One who came to conquer death for all?

If ever there was a metaphor for the Resurrection in full view, here it is … what our humanity sees so much as an ending was the most glorious of beginnings. Susan Boyle helped show us all again. One chapter's close gives rise to the opening of all that's to come after. "I will make a new thing", Jesus says.

Please forgive one last venture into Britain’s Got Talent. In that same NY Times article was a link to another Britain, a cellphone salesman, Paul Potts, who early on in the history of the show dreamed of singing opera. He chose to sing Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s famous opera, Turandot ... the aria made most famous as the chosen encore for tenor Lucianno Pavarotti. Paul Potts delivers the aria exquisitely
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA), a piece I still associate with Easter and Jesus rising from the dead only because of the building to the crescendo ending of the aria in which the character sings of desperation that he must rise above … he sings “I will conquer, conquer, conquer (Vincero, vincero, vincero)” These words belted out in song for me bring visions of the rising that only comes through real pain and suffering ... and I see Jesus rising and finally conquering death for all.

Paul Potts breaths into Nessun Dorma perhaps in a way different from Susan Boyle, but just as convincing, a reason to believe that, while we tend to doubt that Jesus will arrive in a older, more worn out package shy the perfect body or luxurious teeth, a package dressed up as Susan Boyle or Paul Potts ... although we tend to doubt that good things will come so packaged, Jesus is full of surprises.

Yes ... between certainty and doubt, there IS faith. Just ask Susan Boyle and Paul Potts.

In a moment after Susan Boyle is finished singing the judge Simon Cowell says (jokingly) "he knew all along she was going to do something extraordinary". But the truth is almost no one did. We are, most of us, Thomas-like at least in this regard. We actually choose to doubt. Maybe it's the safe choice. As Jesus says today, though ... blessed are those who risk "safe", who are bold enough to believe EVEN before Susan sings - blessed are those who choose not to give entirely into the stereotypes of glitz and bodily beauty. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed ... in One who rose from the dead to conquer sin and death, once and for all

Vincero!

Vincero!

Vincero!