“The Show Me State” Vance L. Toivonen
READING John 20:19-31
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, 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 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." A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
READING Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art
Reenchantment, as I understand it, means stepping beyond modern traditions of mechanism, positivism, empiricism, rationalism, materialism, secularism and scientism – the whole objectifying consciousness of the Enlightenment – in a way that allows for a return of soul. Reenchantment implies a release from the affliction of nihilism, which David Michael Levin has called “our culture’s cancer of the spirit.” It also refers to that change in the general social mood toward a new pragmatic idealism and a more integrated value system that brings head and heart together in an ethic of care, as part of the healing of the world.
SERMON
You are walking down the sidewalk on a warm, sunny day. As you stride along you look down and notice a caterpillar inching across your path. You stop, forgetting about your destination for a moment, and stoop down to get a closer look. You celebrate the bright colors with your eyes and then decide to interact with this relatively small, but intriguingly beautiful creature. You lay your hand in front of the caterpillar and wait patiently, still squatting there on the sidewalk. The creature bumps up against the side of your hand, stops momentarily, then crawls up on your hand in an effort to continue in the direction it was originally headed, for the caterpillar, like you, has some destination.
You stand, briefly, caterpillar in hand, watching, and feeling, the movement of the creature. As you watch, and feel, you begin to wonder in your mind about what the ultimate destiny of this creature will be, assuming, of course, that there will be wings and a very different body in it’s future. You are lost in a moment of reflection when all of a sudden you hear a voice. An adult has happened along your path and noticed your interaction with the caterpillar. The voice jolts you out of your wondering and says, “Those caterpillars are poisonous, you know! You better be careful!” This stranger then walks off, leaving you to decide about the caterpillar. You squat down and place the caterpillar close to the grass wishing it to safety, and continue on your journey.
I begin with this story to illustrate what it must be like to be a child in a world full of adults who always seem to know what is best for you, a world full of adults who have long ago forgone that sense of wonder that you have as a child, more concerned about their destinations than the journeys themselves. Suzi Gablik refers to re-enchantment in the second reading today, as does Thomas Moore in his book The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life. In that book’s introduction he writes,
When I was a child in school, I would sit at my desk half listening to the teacher telling us how many square miles made up the state of Michigan and how to do compound interest. My mind was occupied with more serious issues: Do dragons exist? Was there ever a flood? Were Adam and Eve real?
It took many years of education, a Ph.D. in religion, and then more years of independent reading and writing before I felt I had answers to my pressing questions. I passed through a period when I was convinced through elaborate theories of metaphor and psychological projection that faeries and dragons were symbols and metaphors, or were real in fantasy only. For a long time, I believed in Jung’s unconscious and considered it a good explanation for such things. But now, finally, I’ve come to realize that dragons are real, faeries do indeed dance, and the Flood of the Bible is more real than flooding on the evening news. Our reduction of figures of imagination to psychological categories steals the magic away from a potentially rich poetic participation in life…The authority for many passages in this book is the wisdom I have gained from my children, who are experts in enchantment and would probably wonder why this book has to be written.
Earlier in our service the Call to Worship reminded us of an encounter with Jesus long ago. The disciples were shooing the children away as they swarmed around The Master, thinking their Rabbi to be of utmost importance with no time to waste on the dalliance of children. Jesus’ reaction to this was indignant, although he probably laughed as he told the disciples to let the children come to him, and smiled as he told them that those children know better than anyone the path to God’s kingdom.
The story in the first reading, in John’s gospel, is that of Thomas, usually referred to as Doubting Thomas. Thomas is the voice of reason, the voice of the adult who says, “Show me. Prove it to me. I want evidence.” Thomas is caught up in a ‘show me’ state of being, a place we find ourselves as adults all too often. Thomas had forgotten, it seems, that Jesus never used pie charts and statistics to persuade his audiences. He did not use sharply honed rhetoric, nor did he rely on well-reasoned philosophy. Jesus spoke, and taught, using the simplest of stories, stories about seeds and trees and animals; stories about men building barns and women sweeping floors looking for lost coins. Jesus told stories about children growing up and leaving home, and adults alone on journeys through treacherous territories. Jesus used parables to teach people about the kingdom of God, and the use of those parables required only one primary faculty, a sense of wonder and imagination.
The counterpoint to a ‘show me’ state of being is our ability to imagine. The child holding the caterpillar imagined the caterpillar becoming a beautiful butterfly even as it crawled across her hand. She stopped on her journey, forgot about her destination, fired up her imagination, and was present in what was to become for her a formative moment in her life. The interruption of the adult, who was clearly in a ‘show me’ state, reminded the girl that the imagination and wonder of life is not always celebrated by everyone. And although she let go of that moment, returning the creature to resume its journey, her sense of wonder and imagination continued on with her. She was not going to give up those precious commodities of her childhood that easily.
In contrast to re-enchantment, to a sense of wonder and imagination one associates in her case with art, Suzi Gablik names nihilism. I have had days and moments, as I’m sure you have, when the utter despair of nihilism has crept into my heart and mind. One of the most prominent philosophers associated with nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 585.
Jesus enters the world in stark contrast to this nihilistic tendency of humankind. We are blessed, and, I suppose, in some ways cursed with a consciousness. Nihilism feeds our consciousnesses with despair and meaninglessness, while the teaching and wisdom of Jesus, and others like Jesus, grants us a diet of hope and awe and peacefulness. Children do not have to be taught this sense of awe and wonder, this incredible optimism and hopefulness…they’ve got it from birth. It is we who teach them otherwise.
It will take imagination and wonder to sense the presence of the risen and living Christ, as the disciples once did. We will not arrive at the same place they arrived by looking for cold, hard evidence. We will experience the living and risen Christ only through that childlike wonder and imagination that burns deep within us still. Our spiritual journeys invite us to bring that child in us out into the open, setting aside our incessant drive for evidence and proof. We are invited to make our lives a wonderful blend of thoughtful reflection, and simple, sheer, unadulterated wonder and awe. Jesus showed us how to do this. Some people didn’t go for it, and some still don’t. But those who do will discover that the path to God’s kingdom is best accessed through a process of re-enchantment, letting our imaginations soar, and our sense of wonder flourish.