April 12 ~ Doubt Pushes Us to Make a Leap of Faith

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

Sermon by Joel Crouse

“Often wrong, never in doubt.” I am not sure exactly who coined this phrase.  The credit, depending on who you ask, goes to a lot of different people in many walks of life -- politics, business, science and philosophy. But then that’s probably because we all know someone who leans hard on that tendency. People who offer opinions as if they are facts, or who cite facts you know to be wrong, and won’t back down. People who are so certain of their own perspectives that they have decided this is the truth of the world, no matter what anybody else says.

Certainly, we can see how dangerous this is for all of us: to have leaders who never doubt. Leaders like this never listen to other viewpoints. They are never cautious with their own reactions. They rarely pause to consider consequences. Indeed, right now, the world is embroiled in a dangerous war involving leaders – on both sides – who are so certain in their flawed opinions that they would rather endanger all of us than be wrong.

Recently I read an online post that Christianity fears doubt, because once you start doubting it takes you to a place where belief and faith make no sense.

But the opposite is true: it is doubt that makes faith possible. If we didn’t have doubt, we would never have to make the leap to faith. If we didn’t have doubt, why would we need hope, faith’s close companion? If we never had doubt, the world would never change and improve.

It is the questioning of what was believed to be true that led to progress. People who had doubts asked why some of their neighbors were treated differently from others, why some citizens didn’t get the right to vote, why some people in love were not allowed to marry? It is why, at the end of every scientific paper, you will find a section on limitations, where the scientists identify the parts of their findings they have yet to fully understand. 

And so, if we look at doubt as something to be championed, Thomas is not the weak link of our gospel this morning – as he is so often portrayed. He is the hero; he is honest about his doubts and seeks an answer to them.  

After all, the other disciples, locked in their room, were quaking in their doubt; for what is fear but doubting that things will work out? And what assuaged their fears was seeing Jesus in person. Thomas, who wasn’t there, only voices the question the other disciples would have also been thinking: “I can’t believe, he says, until I see it for myself.”

Thomas is the representation of all our doubts. Where is God when people suffer? Where is God when I suffer? Where is God in this chaotic, violent world?

And Jesus does not shame Thomas for expressing his doubt. He appears to him. A week later, Jesus comes back—for Thomas. He meets him exactly where he is. He invites his questions. He offers his wounds again, saying: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”  

And in that moment, we are reminded: following the gospel does not require blind faith.  It requires honest faith.

But then Jesus says: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

This statement has typically been seen as Jesus’s scolding Thomas, or as suggesting that those who believe without seeing are more faithful than he is. But the problem with this interpretation is that doubt doesn’t happen just once, it returns to us again and again.  To follow the gospel, Thomas would have had to believe without seeing many more times in his life.

Jesus, as I understand this passage, is saying there are two ways our faith is strengthened. There are things we see in the world around us – charity, kindness, the sunrise. And there are those unsettled mysteries that give us faith in something larger than ourselves. Nothing in life has a perfect and certain explanation. Every day we learn more about kindness as it appears in nature every day. We learned more about the sun when Artemis II made its lunar flyby this past week. We can never know everything – and in that unknowingness, we live with doubt. 

And to live fully in the human reality, we must accept what we do not know and have faith.  English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it, “the willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith.” That is the blessing that Jesus extends in our sacred text today.  Many times, in our lives, we will have to leap - toward hope, toward joy, toward faith.  And when we do that, guided by the principles of the gospel, our doubt is what pushes us forward to a deeper understanding of the Divine. 

Faith is a recognition that the world is complicated, that thinking changes, that new discoveries are made. And that is the story of the Resurrection, as it plays out for the disciples, for Thomas, and for us.

The Resurrection we celebrate at Easter does not make the world perfect. It does not return us to some better time. It does not release the disciples from the risk-taking, courage, and hard work they will yet encounter. Jesus, in his very important conversation with Thomas, is reminding him, and all of us, that while we may get the answers clearly some of the time, we will have to go on faith most of the time. 

This is why, after all, we have the gospel to guide us forward in a nuanced world. When the path is unclear, how should we respond? We know this for sure: with compassion, with mercy, and with love. Amen

April 5 ~ Easter Sunday

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/3ef8bd_27534918a1e54460ab1393ee5311446a/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Jeremiah 31:1-6

Psalm : 118:1-2, 14-24

Acts 10:34-43

Matthew 28:1-10

Sermon by Joel Crouse

Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen!  Alleluia!

Easter morning invites us into a story that is both familiar and astonishing, and yet it is easy to let its power slip past us. We hear about an empty tomb, an angel, two women running in fear and joy, and we think we already know what it means. 

But the heart of Easter is not simply that Jesus arose. It is that God’s answer to a world full of harm, fear, and injustice is not to condemn us but to offer renewal.  In despair, we are offered possibility. In resignation, we are given courage. 

Jeremiah gives us the first hint of this when he speaks to a people who have lived through devastation. They know exile, violence, and the collapse of everything they trusted. Yet God says to them, “I have loved you with an everlasting love… again I will build you, and you shall be built.”  

This is not a sentimental promise. It is a declaration that even after the worst has happened, God is not finished. We are not finished. God imagines a future where people plant vineyards again, where joy returns, where communities rebuild what was broken. The resurrection is a moment of new beginning, and fresh starts, and renewed energy. God opens the tomb and builds us up.

That is an important message on this Easter. We arrive here to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus – this miracle offering from God – and yet also burdened by difficult realities of the world right now. We see leaders who trade truth for power. We see communities targeted because of who they are. We see the vulnerable pushed aside. We see the ethical bar fall lower and lower. We are good at condemning.  We are less strong when it comes to pushing back and building up. This is why God comes to us at Easter and does the building up on our behalf.

Easter is the happy ending to Lent. And sometimes happy endings get a bad rap for being easy and maybe fluffy. But in happy endings we find goals to aspire to, we find comfort in grim times, and we find hope. And that’s the story of Easter – an aspirational, comforting, and hopeful promise from God. 

But Easter also asks something of us: a response. To look for the people who need protection. To shift our attention from the ones who cause harm to the ones who bear its price. 

There is a village that shows us what this looks like. During the Holocaust, the people of Le Chambon‑sur‑Lignon (luh sham-bon-suer-leen-yon), a small Protestant community in the mountains of France, quietly sheltered thousands of Jewish refugees. They hid children in their homes, forged identity papers, and smuggled families across borders. They did this while so many others responded with fear and conformity. When asked why they risked their lives, many villagers simply said, “We had no choice. They were human beings.”

Their pastor, André Trocmé, told his congregation that the Gospel demanded a refusal to cooperate with injustice. And they listened. They did not spend their days condemning the cruelty around them, though they knew it well. They spent their days saving lives. They focused not on the perpetrators but on the vulnerable. Not on judgment but on service. Not on fear but on courage. They lived as if resurrection were already happening. And because of their bravery, many lives were saved.

Easter is the celebration of that serving, saving spirit that resides in each one of us. A spirit embodied by Jesus throughout his ministry. When he told the story of the Good Samaritan, he did not linger on the priest and the Levite who walked by; he lifted up the one who stopped. When he met the woman at the well, he did not dwell on the people who had shamed her; he focused on her dignity and her voice. When he called Zacchaeus down from the tree, he did not define him by his past; he invited him into a new future. Jesus revealed what was wrong in the world not to condemn it, but to show us what could be right.

And so, Easter morning begins with two women who refuse to be bystanders. They go to the tomb. They face the darkness. They show up. And because they show up, they are the first to hear the angel say, “Do not be afraid.” They are the first to see the risen Christ. Their courage becomes the doorway through which hope enters the world again.

This is the invitation of Easter: To build the world Jeremiah imagined, where people plant vineyards again, where joy returns, where communities rebuild what was broken. Easter is the call to live like the villagers of Le Chambon—quietly, courageously, persistently rolling away stones. To feel joy, and to create joy. To see the empty tomb and to be inspired with the power of the gospel. To be the women who bravely ran forward, and, in their courage, found God. 

Lent has ended. Easter has arrived. Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen! Allelujah!

Now it is our turn.  

Amen

April 3 ~ Good Friday

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/3ef8bd_f2785c36705d406ab8ea36c90f26950b/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Psalm 22

The entirety of the Gospel of John

Sermon by Joel Crouse

Stay here now, in the crowd lining the path to Golgotha, while Good Friday confronts us with a story we would rather not hear.

Jesus is arrested, tortured, humiliated, and executed by the machinery of government:  the Roman soldiers who are just doing their duty. Pontius Pilate, the weak leader, who would rather hide comfortably behind a lie than save an innocent man from death. The executioner who nails Jesus’s hands and feet and tortures him, as he has done to so many others.

And all around him, stand crowds of people, the human mob. Some join in, throwing stones, taking out their rage on a man they do not know. Many, many more do nothing at all. They watch. They turn away. They say, “This is not my concern.”

In his book on the moral history of humanity, philosopher Jonathan Glover writes that the greatest moral catastrophes of the twentieth century were not only the work of perpetrators of evil and injustice. They were also created by the silence of those who stood nearby. Glover argues that cruelty thrives under three particular conditions: 1. when ordinary people convince themselves that someone else will act; 2, when we tell ourselves that nothing can be done; or 3, when we accept or ignore the suffering of others as simply the cost of keeping our own lives intact.

Good Friday is the story of God’s entering that world of bystanders.

A world like Jozefow in 1942.

Józefów was a small, poor town in eastern Poland. Before the war, 2,800 Jewish residents lived there, with long roots in the community. After the Nazis invaded, another 1,100 Jewish people were relocated there, despite the lack of resources. By 1942, overcrowding, hunger, and a typhus epidemic had devastated the residents.

On a summer morning that year, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from the city of Hamburg, were given orders to round up the town’s Jewish residents in the forest and shoot them.

The reserve police battalion was composed of ordinary people much like us: middle-aged husbands and fathers who had been drafted into police service. Postal clerks and dock workers and salespeople with no special training, who had never before fired a gun at a human. They weren’t idealogues. They were ordinary, regular people, as we understand ordinary and regular people to be.

The Major of the Battalion, Wilhelm Trapp, was shocked by this order. He shared it with his men, and then made this offer: anyone who did not feel up to the task could step out. No punishment or consequences.

There were, as I said, 500 members in the battalion. Of that 500, about a dozen took up that offer. The rest remained, and on that day and into the night, they dragged families from their homes, marched women, children, and elderly to the forest, and shot them at close range. They murdered fifteen hundred people.

As the accounts show, many of the men who did this cried about it. They got drunk. They threw up. But they didn’t stop.  As some later said, they were too afraid of being seen as weak or disloyal.  Or as one man later said, “I didn’t want to be laughed at.”

What pushed them forward, Glover writes, is not unlike what held the rest of the townspeople quiet while they watched their neighbors being taken screaming into the woods. It is not unlike what stopped the crowd from rescuing Jesus, despite knowing that he was innocent.

The list includes the following: Conformity – once Jesus started up that hill, it was harder to stop. Obedience to authority – after all, didn’t Pontius Pilate sign off on this? Fear of social censure: what if someone judges me for speaking out? Moral numbing: the first step, the first bullet is hardest, the second and third step, the second and third bullets are easier. Diffusion of responsibility: I am not in charge; what can I change?  And crowd momentum: everyone is doing it, everyone is thinking it; I might as well go along to get along.

Above it all, this phrase: Not my business. Not my business.

The massacre at Józefów, like the murder at Golgatha, was possible only because people fell silent in the face of evil.

They are all there on Good Friday -- ghosts in our own hearts, reminding us of times when we fell silent when we should have spoken up. The indifferent bystander who looked up at the noise as Jesus processed to the cross and then went back to sweeping her stoop. The complicit bystander who joined in because being angry felt good, or because going along was safer than resisting. The fearful who saw the injustice and wept for Jesus, but were too cowardly to act.

Afterward, many of those bystanders, who would have gone away, perhaps felt shame and convinced themselves that they weren’t responsible.

But this is Good Friday. It is not only the story of what was done to Jesus. It is the story of what was not done for Jesus. It is the story of what happens when a crowd decides that someone’s suffering does not merit their intervention.

Dr. Glover suggests a solution: moral imagination – the ability to recognize humanity in the one who is suffering and feel responsible to help them.

And so, on Good Friday, we are asked: where do we stand? Whose suffering do we see?

But God is not calling us to a life of guilt. Good Friday is a call to courage.

And we find it there, in the shadow of the cross, among our last group of bystanders. There we find the women who walked with Jesus as he stumbled, and stayed with him, powerless to save him, powerless to do anything but bravely bear witness so that he knew he was not alone.

Even when hope was gone, they resisted with love.  Amen

https://youtube.com/shorts/HgQnNR1TTYw?si=ZL5XyeURPppuEy43