More To What More.

The announcements were just starting as the musicians ambled back to their seats.
The smell of dark, black coffee in hand drifted up to my nose and I found a seat.

I ran out the door five minutes prior, in a last minute decision to return to a church I had visited a few weeks earlier.  As I settled down into my chair and rummaged through my purse to find my bible I could not have been happier with my frantic choice.  The sweet routine of Sunday morning.

Ritual and routine is something I want to pretend that I don’t unabashedly love.  Crazy religious nuts do that; love that meaningless, going through the motions stuff. Part of the reason I thought I wouldn’t come back here.  It was so foreign.  Robes. Chanting. Readings.

But, who am I kidding?
I love routine.
The comfort of the leather in my hands. The familiar words spilling from the mouths of my neighbors. The standing and the sitting.  Okay, I still don’t like shaking hands with people around me with only enough time for an awkward "Good Morning", but I admittedly adore the comfort of sameness on the morning of the sabbath. [And this probably deserves a post of it’s own...]
Thankfully this morning I was able to look past the white robes and sash to hear something interesting. It’s a little more on What More? I wrote not long ago.

“Faith equals evidence plus the willingness to believe”

John 20:24-25
Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came.  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

Thomas was told by the disciples, [notice plural] -people with whom he’d lived and journeyed with for months.  Trusted comrades told Thomas that they had seen Christ return.  Just as Jesus promised.  And yet, that wasn’t enough.  Thomas wanted more.  He had the evidence, the word of many bystanders from several different occasions.  [Let’s not forget the Mary’s sighting at the tomb.]  He just couldn’t take the words for truth until his own hands and eyes could prove it.

And then Christ appears to Thomas.
“Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.” 


See you idiot. Didn’t I tell you I was coming back? Why didn’t you believe?
No, no.  That’s not what he says.
He says, “Do not disbelieve, but believe.”
Jesus doesn’t ground our doubting Thomas into the ground, but calls him up. Up to belief.

Jesus goes onto say that the blessed are those who believe when they haven’t put their fingers in wounds.  I don’t think this calls us to be ignorant. Thomas wasn’t informed that Jesus had risen from the dead only by the town loony.  He was informed by reliable sources.  He did have evidence. Blessed are those who have evidence, even if it might not feel like quite enough, and choose to believe.  If I’m honest with my doubting self, there will never be quite enough.  And so continues my wrestling. I have accumulated a pretty overwhelming amount of evidence in my short life.  And am amassing more with the passing days. Am I willing to really step into the mess of all of it?

What more do you need? What more?

John 20:30-31
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.