Before I begin I want to thank the graduating seniors for asking me to speak to them at what would normally be baccalaureate but because of the dedication of the Trophimus Center has been shifted to Wednesday chapel. Since I am retiring, this is a sermon to mark not only your own graduation from Trinity, but also in some sense mine. It has been a great honor to teach and to get to know hundreds of seminary students in these last eighteen years. It has been my great pleasure to get to know those of you who are graduating as well as those of you who will not graduate this year, but will be here awhile longer. I will miss you.

I also want to express my appreciation to my fellow faculty and to the staff. One of the wonderful things about teaching at Trinity has been the people who have dedicated themselves to what we do here. I especially want to express my appreciation to Don Collett, who arrived the same year I did, and to my fellow author Joel Scandrett for his collaboration on our book on the atonement. I just wish more people would buy it.

Two of the faculty, my dear friends the Rev. Drs. Martha Giltinan and Rod Whitacre, have now joined the celestial choir, where Rod no doubt plays ukelele, and Martha sings. By now I assume that they have resolved their disagreements about women’s ordination. Bishop Grant LeMarquand who was here when I arrived, and Dr. David Yeago, our first Lutheran theologian, have recently retired. Three of my dearest friends the Rev. Dr. Leander Harding, the Rev. Dr. Wes Hill, and the Rev. Tina Lockett are now serving the church elsewhere.

I also want to thank those who to me will always be the new faculty, Jack Gabig, David Ney, Brad Roderick, and Jacob Rodriguez. I cannot forget our Lutheran friends David Luy and Alex Pierce or our Presbyterian Rich Herbster. And of course, without our librarian Susanah Wilson, neither of my two books would have been written.

I have known four Dean Presidents and numerous Board Members, and there would be no seminary without them, so thank you to Dean Presidents and the Board. But the heart of seminary life is the faculty, the staff, and the students, and they are the ones I will remember with the greatest joy. Thomas Aquinas famously reinterpreted the virtue of charity as friendship, friendship with God and friendship with our fellow Christians. I am immensely grateful for the friends I have found at Trinity.

I am a layperson, which means that I am a sheep, not a shepherd. In what follows, I’d like to give some advice to those of you who as shepherds are about to be turned loose on the flock. The Anglican Divine George Herbert In The Country Parson defines your future role this way: “A Pastor is the Deputy of Christ for the reducing of Man to the Obedience of God.” Herbert goes on to say that, after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, “Christ being not to continue on earth, but after he had fulfilled the work of Reconciliation, to be received up into heaven, he constituted Deputies in his place, and these are Priests.” In typical Anglican fashion, Herbert gives us the titles of both “pastor” and “priest.” What is important for Herbert is not the title, whether “pastor” or “priest,” but what he means when he says that a pastor is a “deputy” of Christ.

Another way of saying that a pastor is a “deputy of Christ” is to compare the pastor to an icon of Christ. I preached an earlier version of this sermon at an ordination when I first came to Trinity, which was published in The Living Church. That sermon later led to my publishing a book about ordination. In both cases, it was the publishers who chose to give the sermon and the book the title Icons of Christ.

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I gave the following sermon in chapel the Wednesday following the Second Sunday of Easter, where the Gospel reading is always the story of Jesus’ appearing to the apostle Thomas in John’s Gospel. Trinity Seminary also annually celebrates a “high church” service, with incense, bells, and chanting. Since Trinity is an “evangelical” seminary, some students would not be familiar with this kind of worship, usually associated with Anglo-Catholicism. I confess that I have spent my entire adult life since becoming Episcopalian/Anglican worshiping in “high church” congregations. I would identify as “Evangelical Catholic” or “Catholic Evangelical” rather than Anglo-Catholic.

John 20:19-31

The second Sunday of Easter is known as “Low Sunday.” I find myself with a bit of liturgical whiplash this morning as we celebrate our “High Church” service with the readings from “Low Sunday.” I thought about asking the experts at Nashotah House if this was okay, but I imagine they’d just respond “What’s a low Sunday”? No one knows quite why the second Sunday of Easter is called “Low Sunday,” although it is speculated that “Low Sunday” contrasts with the “High Sunday” of Easter itself. It is not called “Low Sunday” because of the low attendance in church the Sunday after Easter, although perhaps it should be. The Sunday is also known as “Thomas Sunday” because of the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday of Easter, which is the selection we heard this morning, the story of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to Thomas the apostle.

Poor Thomas has received a bit of a bad rap because of this familiar story. He is known as “Doubting Thomas,” although no one uses names like “Denying Peter” or “Overly Ambitious James and John.” Despite his bad nickname, there are sermons that turn Thomas into a kind of apology for our own questionings. “Do you sometimes have doubts about whether this Christianity thing is true or not? That’s okay. Jesus’ disciple Thomas had doubts too.”

I once heard a sermon on Easter Sunday (not Low Sunday) where the Episcopal priest reassured those of us who were attending: “If you’re here this morning, and you’re not sure whether you really believe in the Easter stories, don’t worry. Modern biblical scholars assure us that we do not really have to believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.” So that was the good news of Easter. We don’t have to believe that Jesus rose from the dead after all. That was the last Sunday I attended that church.

I am going to focus on the Gospel story for my sermon this morning, but I want to claim that it is a misreading of the story to assume that the story is a story about Thomas’s doubt or even about Thomas at all. First, the name “Doubting Thomas” is misleading because the English translations are misleading. In the NIV translation, Jesus says to Thomas “Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27). The NRSV reads “Do not doubt but believe.” However, there is no Greek word for “doubt” in the text. The actual contrast is not between doubt and believing, but between believing and not believing. The ESV translation actually gets this right. When Jesus appears to Thomas, he does not say to him “Do not doubt,” but “Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

In addition, Thomas’s position is not all that different from the other disciples. In each case, the movement of the appearances is from not believing to seeing to believing. When Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, she does not recognize him at first, but thinks he is the gardener. It is only after he speaks to her that she recognizes him. She then goes to the disciples and announces “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:11-18).

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Isaiah 59:9-20
Psalm 13
Hebrews 5:11-6:12
Mark 10:46-52

The Old Testament reading and the epistle reading this morning seem made to order to make both the preacher and the congregation uncomfortable. In the Old Testament passage, the prophet focuses on the problem of injustice and puts the blame squarely on his hearers: “For our transgressions are multiplied before you, and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities” (Is. 59:12).

The Hebrews passage threatens about the dangers of apostasy. The apostle warns that in the case of those who have fallen away “it is impossible to restore them to repentance . . . since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt” (Heb. 6:4, 6). Should I preach a sermon to a chapel full of seminarians in which I accuse you of injustice whose “transgressions are multiplied” before God? Or rather should I go down the path of suggesting that you might be apostates who are guilty of crucifying the Son of God to your own harm? Best to stick to the Gospel story of Jesus giving sight to Blind Bartimaeus.

However, I think that both the Old Testament passage and the epistle are on target for where we find ourselves in contemporary culture. The problem of injustice is a concern that plagues not only the culture but the church. We approach a political election in a matter of days in the midst of what feels like the most politically divided period in my lifetime. And the rabid disagreements between both political parties are primarily moral. The resentment of both sides of the electorate against one another stems out of a kind of moral outrage that is rooted in mutual accusations of injustice.

And of course, the church itself has had to deal with issues of injustice in the past couple of decades, particularly connected to issues of clerical abuse, primarily sexual abuse but also leadership abuse that has led to the scandals of clergy being defrocked, but also disagreement about the nature of Christian morality that has led to denominational splits among the mainline churches.

Concerning apostasy, we are living in the midst of an abandonment of Christian faith in the last several decades that seems unprecedented. The brief religious revival of the Jesus Movement and the charismatic renewal of the 1970s was followed almost immediately by the rise of the New Age phenomena in the following decades, of the cultural popularity of the New Atheists in the early twenty-first century, and the recent phenomenon of Christian Deconstruction in the last decade.

If you are hoping that I will resolve any of these problems this morning, you are expecting far more than a seminary professor can offer in a chapel sermon. I am not going to tell you how to vote next week, how to resolve the disagreements that have divided the mainline churches in the last two decades, or how we can reverse the numbers of people who are leaving the church.

I do think however that the lectionary passages from Isaiah and Hebrews can tell us something about what the Bible has to offer concerning the issues of injustice and apostasy. (more…)