Second Sunday of Easter
Vivian Lewin, Spiritual Director in the Diocese of Montreal
Speaking of belief: On the way to the metro this morning, I realized I had to say something else entirely, and, by God’s grace, I will. [This is a transcription from the oral sermon delivered here.]
You could write a whole sermon on forgiveness. That was the first sermon I was working on, and I had all kinds of ideas about it. Then there was another sermon about the wounds in the world and how Christ the creator of the world is (even in the Resurrection) carrying a lot of wound, as is our world. There was another sermon about bodies, and the fact that as Christians, you would think that we would be pretty comfortable with the notion that bodies are holy because Jesus lived in one, like ours, but somehow we get icky about bodies even more than other cultures. I don’t know why.
I do want to say one thing about forgiveness: It’s not a work that we have to perform. It is a gift of the spirit. It’s one of the gifts of the resurrection. That’s why we have that lesson today.
But “we grow too soon old and too late smart.” Even though we hear the words of absolution in every Eucharist, we kind of hold onto sin as an interesting thing… mostly in other people. Like Thomas. We pay a lot of attention to his lateness. As somebody who is frequently late, who am I to judge? And his insistence that he see and touch what the other ones have seen and touched… well, he does have the courage to ask what he wants. This is a good thing.
The church was very slow to recognize Thomas as anything but the least believer. His feast used to be the darkest day of the year: 21 December the longest night. They gave that one to Thomas, but because he is the patron of a whole group of people in India, sent there by Jesus to them after the resurrection and he’s also the patron of architects. They moved his feast to the 3 of July.
One of my first Christian friends, a Jesuit priest, said that in his experience as a confessor, sin was actually pretty boring. There were not many sins and they weren’t very interesting. But we find them fascinating, don’t we? We look at Donald Trump playing with power the way a child plays with sponge blocks and we’re just endlessly fascinated. Is it because we’re not interested in cleaning up our houses?
I looked at the gospel again and again because I’ve always been encouraged by Thomas, I’ve thought he was a pretty holy example, but Jesus doesn’t actually say that Thomas is blessed. He says “you are blessed,” and to Thomas, he says “be believing.”
So I thought that I’d better talk about what I know about, which is doubt! I’m a “J.” (Note 1). I use judgement to make my way in the world… like many of us, right? We think, we’re intelligent, we consider ourselves virtuous, and we consider clearly other people’s failings. But what do we see in the resurrection light? Are these failings that we see huge, or are they just something that’s being called in our attention because we’re not really paying attention to the good stuff ?
As I was walking down the street between my house and the metro, I remembered the ordination in this church of our first woman priest Letty James. I was a member of the support group for her, as she came to ordination. There was a woman in this church named Frances Sheppard. Her brother was a priest in Alberta, and she was a very steadfast, almost doggedly compulsive church volunteer. She came and worked on addresses and things like that in the office every week, and she worked for other organizations in the same way, and so she collected all the addresses of women who were training for the priesthood all over the world, and wrote them letters of support. She convened this group for two years and finally our diocese got it together to ordain Letty. And we had a meeting in the chapter house of this very cathedral the week before her ordination and we’re praying and sitting together and Frances says “You know, I don’t really know about this. Women are very weak”.
What did she just say? Frances?! She’d been doing this for years. So we just ignore it, and Letty is ordained to the priesthood in this cathedral the next week.
That’s what I want to say about doubt. It’s not always a virtue sometimes it’s just an accident. The Greek word for sin in the Bible is hamartia, something that doesn’t hit the target.
I wanted to talk about that in the context of our own election for Bishop. There’s a lot of people with a lot of doubts about a lot of things, and there’s a lot of people really revelling in gossip about this and that, mostly without facts because when you don’t have facts the gossip gets juicier.
We have two really fine candidates for this election in our parish. Both of our priests, Bertrand and Deborah came to the diocese of Montreal from other places and have offered themselves to be elected as Bishop and that’s something we can be really proud of. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s been a very fraught election. Some people have been reading about it, and some people haven’t been reading about it.
One of the things we forget is that the bishop is not the head of the church. God is the head of the church. Jesus is the head of the church. That’s the way it works, so this kind of corrosive doubt is something that I think we’re capable putting aside. That we have to put aside.
The generosity with which all the candidates have offered themselves to the election is a sign of God‘s work in us and that will come its conclusion, God willing, in the election next Saturday.
One of the reasons I’m disoriented this morning is that we had a beautiful day of prayers for the candidates yesterday and I was responsible for making the PowerPoint for it which didn’t get finished so while everybody else was praying I was hunkered down beside the teckie showing him which slide was supposed to go up next.
Despite that it was a very beautiful experience… Ralph Leavitt led a meditation on the calming of the storm at sea. Jesus was asleep when the people said “Why are you sleeping, we are perishing,” and then he said “Peace be with you,” We hear it again in today’s gospel: “Peace.”
And then, already tired, instead of going home to work on this sermon, I went to hear the author Salman Rushdie. He was being given a lifetime award in the Blu Met festival. Rushdie was asked whether he believed in miracles, and he said “Well, I don’t believe in miracles, but I owe my life to one.” Almost three years ago an assassin came on stage as you might know in upstate New York, and hit him 22 times with a knife, including once in the eye. He lost that eye. And he said “If it hadn’t been good weather that day, the helicopter that took me to the emergency care centre wouldn’t have been able to fly and I would have died.” 2
So he wrote a book about that whole thing (and the subsequent recovery) called Knife. “What people don’t know is, this book is not about the crime. It’s about my recovery. I owe it to the love of my wife and the support I had from her.”
So the other thing that we need to say about the resurrection is that “Love never fails.” I’m quoting from First Corinthians 13 ..”Prophecies will pass away and tongues will cease and knowledge will pass away, but Love never fails. ”
That’s why we can find forgiveness in our own doubts and questions. It’s why we can find peace in the middle of all the wounds that the world continues to bear. I think we really need more and more to lean into the resurrection, and to explore this new territory… and that’s a lifelong exploration, thanks be to God.
I’ll close with a prayer we used yesterday for the election. It’s the prayer that we said in this church during the Easter Vigil between the dark part where we’re going through the whole salvation history and it’s not Easter yet and the point where we sing the Gloria and the lights come on and we ring our bells. Right before that, we say this prayer:
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look favourably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery. By the effectual workings of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation. Let the whole world see and know that things that were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown an old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
Notes:
The scriptures appointed for today, Sunday April 28, 2025 (Easter Two in Year C) are Acts 5:27-32, Psalm 118:14-29, Revelation 1:4-8 and John 20:19-31
Image: Relief in the Romanesque cloister at the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, c. 1150 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silos-Duda.jpg
1. J, judging, is a subset in the Briggs Myers typology of personality attributes.
2. The attack on author Salman Rushdie is described here.