Doubting Thomas, the Big Bang, and the Greatest Detective Story of All Time

Today’s Gospel is one of the most famous resurrection appearances, the story of doubting Thomas, which is found only in John’s Gospel.  It is a story about the difference between secondhand experience and the firsthand threshold of the Easter miracle.  Though Jesus has appeared to some of his disciples in resurrected form, he has not appeared to Thomas.  Until Thomas meets the Risen Lord personally, he refuses to believe in the resurrection.  Makes perfect sense to me.  There is a little of Thomas in all of us, and that’s alright.  Until the Easter story meets you personally, until it calls you by name, it remains someone else’s story.

            In the words of Thomas: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

            Thomas gets to do all of these things, and his confession of faith in meeting the Risen Jesus is the strongest affirmation of any disciple: “My Lord and my God!”

            Is Thomas supposed to be a bad guy?  The skeptic?  If he is, I still love him, and completely identify with him.  Much nonsense, hatred, and intolerance is done in the name of religion.  I am Dutch—Dutch American, and proud of it.  My Dutch DNA tells me to be suspicious of those who think they hold the only true religious position.  My Dutch DNA also says to practice tolerance and love with those who are different from me.  I’m also curious about what I don’t know, and how it may transform me.  Jews and Muslims, and all religious minorities, were always welcome in Amsterdam, and New Netherland.  The colors of the New Netherland flag were blue and orange, the same colors of the New York Knicks and New York Mets.   The New Netherland colony is now called New York City.  Like you, I heart New York.    

So one of the disciples, the future apostle Thomas, stands up and says wait, hold on, what are we really talking about?  If that’s who Thomas is, this guy is my hero of the Bible. 

Doubting Thomas becomes Saint Thomas, and I love them both.  But they are both the same person—sort of like Jesus crucified and resurrected.  Same guy.  This is like seeing a movie and not wanting to give the plot away to someone else.  Gravity or Midnight in Paris or Field of Dreams, you didn’t want to tell someone what the movie was about.  What’s it about? 

Can’t say.  See it for yourself.   It will be better that way. 

Ok, what about spring?  Is it really here?  Can’t say.  See it for yourself. 

What about winter?  Can you talk about that? 

Nope, I’ve been pretty cold every day this week.  How about you?    

Thomas, the so called Doubting Thomas, presents a cycle of reasoning, and it has to be firsthand to be genuine.  Some questions of Thomas then, and me.  Is Jesus a ghost?  No, all of the gospels except Mark’s original ending (before the church authorities changed it) present Jesus as having a body after his resurrection.  But once again, this is the testimony of others, not you, or Thomas.  Ok, did Jesus actually die?  Everyone says he died.  How about a physical examination with the sense of sight and touch and then an application of human reason?  Is there a doctor in the house?  Someone with a background in medical forensics?  So Thomas becomes Sherlock Holmes, or better yet: he becomes House the doctor, whose character is based on Sherlock Holmes.  Gregory House.  What would Dr. House say? 

“Hold on, you crazy people.  What kind of nonsense are you talking about?” 

House will slice through it, with a scalpel, if need be, down to the bone. 

But let’s also put some other detectives on this cold case (2000 years old).  Let’s see what they can figure out.  Here are my favorites from the detective genre.  First: Kurt Wallander, the depressed existentialist detective from the Swedish Crime series by Henning Mankell.  Here’s how Kurt’s process works.  First: he sometimes sleeps when he’s tired.  Then Wallander looks at his dreams for signs and interpretations.  When conscious, awake that is, Wallander’s mind works like this.  The beginning question is not: who did this crime?  If you ask me, the death of Jesus seems to be a crime scene.  The beginning question for Wallander is this: why did this happen?  If you figure out the second, you often figure out the first.  It is both deductive and subjective, as a reasoning process.    

Ok, another detective. 

Bernie Gunther is my all time favorite detective, even topping Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart (if I even have to point that out).  Bernie Gunther is a fictional detective and policeman working in Nazi Germany.  The author of this detective series is Phillip Kerr, who is British.  First: Gunther never joins the Nazi Party; he is dead set against the Nazis and the lunatic Hitler, who medical doctors believed suffered from advanced syphilis, among many other disorders.  Gunther does not drink the Kool Aid.  Please don’t, people, find out what’s inside it.  Gunther is always making fun of Hitler, Goring, Himmler, the whole insane crew (Goebbels and Heydrich are the smartest…they’re all very different).  But Bernie also observes everyone and everything keenly; he doesn’t try to be too smart.  Socrates and all wise men know this is a mistake.  Gunther is often “in a tight spot.”  That is, he is about to die, be tortured, and sent to a death camp, which does happen.  He is often accused of being a “Jew lover,” which he is.  I am too.  But his wisecracking style draws out the powerful, and intrigues the innocent to talk to him.   How does Gunther survive in Nazi Germany?  He’s just a great cop, that’s it.  And a fascinating human being, a man with a moral center of law and order for children.  I read ten books in the Bernie Gunther series in one month.  It is the most impressive blend of historical fiction with the detective story genre of Berlin noir.  Berlin once was a tolerant city, after all.  Don’t lump all Germans in with the Nazis.  Think for yourself.  A German can be Prussian, Bavarian, Swabian, Austrian, Polish, Czech, and in any one of these groups you can be Jewish too.  You can also be a Junker.  Germany’s history is tribal, and it has no coherent ethnic identity.

All of these detectives are anti- institutionalist--totally independent thinkers.  You have to be to investigate a crime, like the death of Jesus.  You have to think outside the box.  It’s necessary for clear, objective thinking, but there are subjective leaps as well.   

Ok, let’s round out this legal brief.  I am not a lawyer, but my wife is.  My mentor was a lawyer too.  And a Marine.  Semper fi.  

What about the people who believe detective stories and the crucifixion itself aren’t really appropriate for kids?  Here’s the truth, like Doubting Thomas meeting Jesus.  All young people are natural detectives.  Sophisticated reasoning processes start very early.  Animals have amazing reasoning skills, especially primates.  My cats, a brother and sister from the same litter, are geniuses, such fascinating and interesting creatures.  I love spending time with them.  My previous cat Sailor was feral.  She was a serial killer too, and I harbored her.  Eventually she met her fate, after a good run, by tangling with a bobcat.  Karma will work itself out.    

What about kids?  Homo sapiens, I’m talking about.  They ask great questions, ones that adults often don’t know how to answer, or don’t want to answer truthfully.  Talk about Doubting Thomases.  Who’s really in trouble here?    

Let’s be clear.  Doubt is not the opposite of faith.  Fear is.  Fear rules the world. 

Or does it?  What about love, truth, and beauty?  This was a tough case, I told my partner.    

Ok, let’s get in the detective car and roll through town.  Berlin, Kent, Sweden, Jerusalem, wherever.    Questions, please, in our investigation.  Do you believe in God?  What about Jesus?  Did Jesus have to die?  Did God demand it? 

Dr House screams: “wrong questions!”

Wrong questions!  Dr. House calls God, my higher power, an imaginary friend.  That lunatic reads Nietzche to wash down his painkillers.  Could someone get the doctor under control?  Before leaving, House tells us that the better question is this one. 

Why Does the World Exist?  (Jim Holt too).    

Then get bigger than the Earth, our holy mother.    

It’s not that big a planet; there are countless others like it, discovered everyday in the gravitational field of billions of stars by high tech astronomers.  Maybe it’s time to put these new Galileos on trial.  Put them in a tight spot, to really feel the heat, like our beautiful sun.  Follow-up questions from the children in the house: Why does the universe exist?  How big is it?  Is it really expanding?  Will it break apart and end at some point?  Or is a previous universe the origin of the Big Bang?    

What is that your business?  (Annie Hall reference.)

What about the Buddhists?  What do they have to say?  BOOM.

“We’re going Boom, Boom, Boom.  And that’s the way we live.”  (Talking Heads reference).  Boom goes the dynamite.   

This said, the best person to talk about the position of Buddhists is Rachel Choe.  She is the president of the Buddhist Meditation Group, and I am the faculty advisor.   

But why does the world even exist?  Wallander?  Gunther?  Miss Marple?  House is gone now, what a relief.   We’ve got computers to look for answers, let’s google it.  Google is a verb by the way.  People are on their phones right now.  But we’re tapping phone lines.  What does Edward Snowden think?  Is he a bad guy?  A doubting Thomas?  The NSA?  Good or bad?   

What do you all think?   For a second.  Why does the world exist? 

To me, Thomas seems like the most reasonable detective in the Bible: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

What about Ferris Bueller?  What does he think?  That poor guy needs a day off.  Save Ferris.    

Bueller?  Bueller? 

I’ll end this morning with Ferris from 1986.  You know the film.   

Ah, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one of the two greatest movies from 1986 (Top Gun is the other…if you had to ask). 

Ferris:  “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Look for your own answers.  Be an individual.  That’s what St. Thomas did, and he became an apostle.   

May God bless all of you, students and visitors, during this season of Easter.  And may God bless Doubting Thomases everywhere.  Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.  God loves each of you as if you were the only person on the face of the earth, even though you aren’t.  So let’s keep it real.  My name is Falling Hawk.  Asian Pride.  Black Power.    

Peace.   

A Door Set Open

For some of you, dropping everything on this Friday to come to chapel, in the middle of the day, is a new experience.  Good Friday.  What’s going on?  What’s this all about?  The foot washing last night was strange enough (ending in darkness), but now, this day called Good Friday.  For others, those who have a history with this day, there is more experience—some spiritual muscle memory, and personal understanding of this day.  For me, images of the crucifixion go very far back into my memories of childhood, with three hour services on Good Friday, like the death itself.  Jesus died after just three hours on the cross, all of the gospel writers report.  Many of the crucified lingered for days in agony.  Their time on the cross before death often was directly related to how much they were beaten and whipped before being crucified.  After their deaths, the bodies of the victims were left on the crosses as a warning to everyone about the fate of those who would challenge the authority of the Roman Empire.    

For everyone, both new and veteran, the question inevitably is posed by someone who is paying attention: Why is this day called “good”?  Isn’t it actually terribly depressing?  This is torture, a painful and humiliating death for the one people call the Son of God, or, mockingly, the King of the Jews.  And yet the cross is now the foundation of the Christian faith.  This day is good because people have done some theology, some attempt to explain what the death of Jesus accomplished—what it means.  In reality, this reclamation of the cross—this recreation of this day as good, took time.  It took hundreds of years, not just three days.  And the Church grew, steadily, by embracing the cross, not running from it.  There is something to learn from that—that goodness can come from any adversity or tragedy if you take the time to figure it out, or, better yet, to experience it completely.  At the heart of this day is the execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman Prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate.  Crucifixion is not a pretty business.  It was a horrible way to die, with suffocation of the human body after days on the cross for some.  Crucifixion was state violence in the name of law and order.  The cross in its inception was a symbol of state power over the individual.  

There are many different theological explanations for what is happening on the cross on Good Friday; what the death of Jesus accomplishes for us and for the world—the good that came out of it.  Jesus is the great sacrifice within the sacrificial system of his own Jewish religion.  Like the perfect, or sinless, lamb led to slaughter, Jesus is often thought to be the culmination of the old system of atonement through sacrifice: a great and lasting climax of religious understanding which begins a new covenant, reconciling humanity and divinity through the body and blood of Christ.  But does God really demand the death of animals, or especially an innocent human being, to forgive humanity?  A deeper theology of the cross can still be sought, but we will need to go further into the mystery of suffering in order to find it.  And we’re not very good at that.  Yes, I am saying that there can be more than one theology, more than one way to explain the goodness of Jesus bringing God into the mystery of human suffering, and the reality of human suffering into the heart of God.  

 The last two verses of the Gospel of John—two very fascinating verses—point to this nascent creativity; they acknowledge the limitless legacy of Jesus with a reference to the literary productivity resulting from the life and death of Jesus:
 “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.  But there are also many things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

 We are still talking about the cross—that’s the amazing thing--two thousand years later; we are still approaching it with awe, dread, and wonder.  For all of the theories about the cross, this day is not intellectual at all, not really.  Good Friday moves us into the blind side of the human heart where there aren’t easy answers or convenient theologies.  And there shouldn’t be.    

To be comfortable with the cross is to no longer see it.  We’re not supposed to be comfortable or intellectually confident today.  We’re supposed to live by faith, moment by moment, as Jesus did.      
 At our safe and reasonable distance of two thousand years, we forget the enormous taboo of the cross within the early Church.  Why should Christians even wear crosses?  It’s strange when you think about it.  The cross is a symbol of violence, of state terror, its absolute power over any human life.  However, right now, you can buy chocolate-covered crosses at your nearest Wal-Mart.  We have come full circle.  This absurdity of religious symbolism was perhaps best expressed by Bob Dylan in his song “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding.”

“Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred.”

The crucifixion was never portrayed in art by the early Church.  It was too raw, too painful.  It took hundreds of years for images of the cross to reach the canvas of Western artists; to come to grips with the portrait of suffering.  This portrait of suffering collects the pieces of our broken world, the bloodshed and violence, especially of the innocent, in our fallen world.

Yet the cross, slowly but surely, became a paradoxical symbol of victory for the Church.  The Sign of the Cross dates from the third century, and this is part of the same piety that venerates the cross’s power.  Holy Cross Day began in 335 A.D., and this was unusual because it was, and still is, observed like a saint’s day.  In many respects, it proposes the cross in the context of sainthood, as if it were a person, or had a human character.  Early church fathers attested to the discovery of the real cross during the time of Constantine, and the traditions surrounding St. Helen, the emperor’s Christian mother, made the cross the most important relic in all of Christendom.  The cross became associated with healing power, and this was power not limited to the relics of the original cross.  The tradition of kissing the cross on Good Friday dates from the fifth century, and this veneration continues in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and High Church Anglican services on Good Friday to this day.  I grew up in a church where people kissed the cross during Good Friday services.  It was not my cup of tea, but you never forget that kind of devotion.  Christians have prayed to the cross throughout the centuries, and monastic orders like the Roman Catholic Passionists and the Anglican Order of the Holy Cross, the monastic order of our founder Father Sill, view the cross as the most central element of their Christian spirituality.  Rather than being suppressed, the cross has become the most dominant and accepted symbol of the entire Christian religion.  You don’t think twice about every chapel service beginning with an acolyte carrying the cross into chapel on the first hymn.  It wasn’t until the seventh century that this processional tradition became the norm in the Church, often with the cross anointed with stones, gold, and jewels.  What a strange journey this religious symbol has had.    
 
Goodness on this day took hundreds of years to really come out into the open.  But I think Good Friday is at its most powerful when the cross becomes not so much theological, or historical, but personal.  All of our hymns today, sad and mournful, reflect this personal, emotive response, not some great and elegant theology.  There is a short poem from G.K. Chesterton, the British writer and unabashed Christian, that takes us faithfully towards the cross.  How can God redeem the death of Jesus?  How can God redeem the tragedies of our world? 

From Chesterton: 
“Good news; but if you ask me
What it is, I know not.
It is a track of feet in the snow.
It is a lantern showing a path.
It is a door set open.”

Good Friday is about suffering and pain and faith all mixed together.  The faith allows us to go to the deepest places of confusion and trauma in or lives, the small things and the really big things.  It seems like every week someone in this community experiences the reality of death, in the loss of a loved one.  Where do we put that experience, that new understanding of grief and loss?  We bring it to the cross.  When the cross becomes personal, your own struggles and suffering flow into the collective memory of the historical event, and a suffering God is beheld.  A suffering God is held, by all of us, by each of us, with our fragments of love and grace and healing.  The chaos of our time, the failure of human community again and again, the death of the innocent finds a collecting point on the cross of Jesus.  It is a door set open, an unexpected path in the snow this week.  So, today we put the cross of Jesus in the center of the school day.  We choose not to avoid pain, but to embrace it on Good Friday.  We find our own paths.  We stop in the middle of the school schedule.  We say our prayers.  And we set the doors of our hearts open--open just wide enough, for a strange goodness in the crisp, clean air to keep them that way.  Be kind to each other.     

The Good Grief of the Paper Lion

This morning I would like to talk about one of my heroes (as much as I have them or believe in that kind of thing); a person from whom I learned something about virtue, character, and the importance of good humor in all human endeavors, especially sports.  He taught me everything that I needed to know about the importance of failure, and how it should be embraced, not avoided.  Who is this person?  The sportswriter and sometime athlete George Plimpton demonstrated, again and again, that success and failure are not so far apart, and you can’t have one without the other.  George Plimpton, once a fixture of elegant and eclectic Manhattan society, died eleven years ago, but his famous—or perhaps infamous—deeds still live on.  First, he was famous for his amazing Manhattan parties, where you could bump into a former president and his security detail, meet the Secretary of State, discuss opera with Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, or sports with Hunter S. Thompson.  If you don’t know who Hunter S. Thompson is, you should definitely look him up.  The S. stands for Stockton, by the way, which is a closely guarded secret.  My wife once got an invite to one of Plimpton’s Manhattan parties, and I’m still jealous.  It really should have been me, not her.   

Despite his relative fame, George Plimpton could always be seen riding his bicycle along the streets of Manhattan, waving at friends and strangers alike.  George Plimpton was the Blue Blood who sought out adventure through failure, rather than standing back and just enjoying his wealth and privilege.  He had a strange kind of faith in life, and its Creator.  Few people have willfully, intentionally subjected themselves to more experiences of failure and disgrace than the genial, witty, and always courtly George Plimpton. 

So what did he do exactly? 

It is difficult to classify Plimpton simply as a sportswriter, though he wrote for Sports Illustrated for many years.  He was a strange surveyor of grief and failure--through his participatory exercises, mostly in the realm of athletics.  These exercises, participations he called them, put him on the inside of the action.  He was a sportswriter who put himself into the actual game as a participant, and then wrote about the awful results of the inside experience.  It was Plimpton who taught me that it is far better to fail out in the open with everyone watching you than it is to be safe and secure, never knowing what you might have achieved in the open arena.  It is far better to lose than to never play. 

So what did these participations look like? 
 
One of his most famous exercises in futility was his preseason stint with the Detroit Lions, which was made into the movie Paper Lion, with actor Alan Alda playing Plimpton.  This participation included going to training camp with the Lions.  Keep in mind you have a sportswriter from Harvard, and not even a real Ivy League athlete (if there is such a thing), attempting to actually play football with professional players.  Plimpton played in one series at quarterback for the Detroit Lions in an NFL preseason game.  In the series, he managed to lose 30 yards in three plays for the Lions.  None of the opposing players took it easy on him; they even made a point of roughing him up.  And Plimpton always tried gamely.  For those of you who are holding something back just in case you fail, academically or athletically, in Plimpton’s world you are only living half a life.  Or rather, you are living a kind of lie.  Give everything your best shot, whether it is the art course you’ve never taken before or the theology course that baffles you now, or the English paper you are putting off because you feel you have nothing to say.  No matter what happens, you will always get a story out of it, sometimes a good one, and sometimes a great story.  Plimpton was after the great story, and you only get that by being on the inside of life.     
 
George Plimpton didn’t stop with football; he tried all the sports that he could in his participations.  He even got in the ring with a champion boxer.  Plimpton was bloodied sparring three rounds with the then light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, who was actually a very nice guy in real life.  Plimpton played goalie for the Boston Bruins (falling down many times on his skates during the exhibition), and he even pitched to National League All Stars in a baseball exhibition game.  He actually got Willy Mays to pop up for his only recorded out as a baseball pitcher.  In all of these participations, Plimpton was almost always roundly embarrassed, even though he tried his best.  He always tried.   

In the words of the late writer:
“I am often asked which of the participatory exercises I have been involved in was the most frightening.  People are always startled when I say that the one that frightened me the most was not playing football with the professionals, or basketball, or boxing, but when I played with the New York Philharmonic.

I played the triangle.  And some of the other percussion instruments.
 
One reason it was terrifying is that in music you cannot make a mistake.  Almost all sports are predicated on the concept of an error being the determinant in the outcome; in tennis you put a twist on the ball in the hope your opponent will make an error; in boxing you feint and hope the other fellow is going to drop his guard…; football is an immense exercise in trying to get the other people to make mistakes—not to be where they should be.

But in music you cannot make a mistake.  It is not part of the zeitgeist.  In music if you make a mistake, a big one, you destroy a work of art.”
 
It was his experience with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, that scarred him the most of his zany stories and madcap adventures.  Leonard Bernstein screamed at Plimpton on the triangle; the conductor mocked him daily in rehearsal, swore at him, and even fired him after a performance in Ontario.  He was able to rejoin the Philharmonic the next day.  Conductors can be so temperamental.  Yet Plimpton both cared and took it in stride.  He gave it his best shot, but was able to smile and write his story when he failed.  George Plimpton’s life was a complete success because he was willing to be a complete failure in public, and to keep trying no matter the score. 

In an odd way, but a real one, George Plimpton reminds me of what I actually like about Holy Week, which begins this Sunday on Palm Sunday.  On Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem, just like a king.  But by the end of the week, the journey to Jerusalem leads to the cross.  Holy Week is a moment in the year when we embrace seeming failure, and certainly suffering and death.  We reverse the tendency in human society to only talk about the good and pleasant things.  We put the death of an innocent man—and the death of all people--in the middle of our busy lives, and we slow down in the moment.  In doing so, we may just glimpse the transitory nature of both joy and sorrow, and perhaps brush up against the reality of God. 

George Plimpton practiced failure, like a religion.  This is like being a Boston Red Sox fan before 2004; or being a Chicago Cubs fan at any time in human history.  Plimpton embraced suffering, however humorously.  The self-deprecation, courage, and whimsical fortitude of George Plimpton are for me an icon of the human spirit in response to adversity, and dignity in response to defeat, even humiliation.  Plimpton’s public embrace of folly and self-mockery is a spiritual statement, a cosmic victory through his many defeats.  Getting over your fear of failure—or stranger yet, your fear of success, can be the moment where you start to live life more fully than ever before.

The ultimate Participation is in life itself, and in knowledge of its Creator.  George Plimpton, writer, gentleman, and sportsman knew defeat, but he also knew great joy.  I would ask you all not to be afraid of sorrow or joy, tears or laughter, when they come to you in the coming days and weeks and years.  Let them lift you up and take you further than you have ever gone before, into the full participation of your life with God.  Choose life in its fullness.  And accept no substitutes.