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Every year right after Easter, the Vicar of St. John's takes off (and who could blame him—Holy Week in an Anglo-Catholic parish is demanding) and asks me to preach. I thought I had escaped it this year, but he called on Tuesday and asked me to preach. Who could say no? Certainly not me. Of course, the Gospel for Low Sunday is always Doubting Thomas, and I've preached on this reading every year for many years. I thought I had run out of ideas, but I've found another one, yet again!

April 11, 2010 Low Sunday
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
First Reading: Acts 5:12-16; Ps. 117; Epistle: Revelation 1:9-13, 17-19; Gospel: John 20:19-31

The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.

One of the little-known but interesting facts about St. Thomas is that he is the patron saint of architects. As a matter of fact, that is almost the only thing that is known about him. Legend has it that Thomas was sent to India to build a palace for a king. Thus he is not only the patron of architects and builders but also the Apostle of India. Traditionally Thomas is depicted in stained glass windows and statues as holding a square—people often mistake him for a sanctified Freemason. So the line from Psalm 117 that I quoted above is quite apt for Thomas.

Faith is quite a maligned virtue today. In years past, someone who was described as a person of faith would be someone who believed in the precepts taught in the Nicene Creed, someone who attended Divine Worship regularly, took Communion more often than the laws of the Church prescribed, and who put their beliefs into practice in their everyday lives.

These days, being without faith is a positive asset. Tony Blair, now a Roman Catholic, once famously said of politicians, “We don’t do God.” Thus faith was, in one sentence, removed from the public square and consigned to the dark and dusty corners of the diminishing numbers of churches in the realm.

Richard Dawkins, the biologist, now makes his crust giving impassioned speeches in defense of atheism. His intolerance of religious belief more than matches any intolerance that the Church has shown toward unbelievers in times past. I’ve looked around for his thoughts on faith and found this quotation: Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Now I’m sure that Dawkins would be horrified at finding something he said used in a sermon, but I believe in using whatever you can pick up to illustrate your point; this quotation illustrates what faith is as well as what it isn’t.

A great mistake that people make these days is to assert that nothing is or can be true without strict evidence proving it. Thus, since the existence of God cannot be proven by people without a shadow of a doubt, God does not exist.

It’s true that we here below cannot prove that God exists. If we could, there would be no atheists or agnostics. Who would disbelieve in something that can be proven?
However, taking the other side, there is no proof that God does not exist, either. Dawkins is making the mistake of assuming that an absence of proof proves God’s absence. This is unscientific and unworthy of him.

There is currently no evidence of the existence of gravity, or the force that causes gravity. We see apples falling from trees, but we do not know what causes this or how the mechanism of gravity works. However, we see apples falling off trees, and every time they fall towards the ground. We don’t know why, or how, but we know that there is a reason why this happens, and we call that reason gravity.

Someday we may discover how gravity works. Various experimenters and investigators have set up tests to demonstrate that gravity exists in waves of force of some kind—but they haven’t yet found any. That does not mean that gravity doesn’t exist. Substitute the word “God” for the word “gravity” and the statement is still true.

I do not believe that Dawkins should be forced to believe in God. I also do not believe that he should be ridiculed because he does not believe in God. I just wish he would extend the same courtesy to those who do believe in God.

Faith is an edifice, built up brick by brick from our baptisms to our graves. We have no solid proof that God exists—we cannot point to a person or to an entity and say “There is God!” without any shadow of a doubt. But the building of faith continues, stone by stone, until it becomes your soul’s housing. The cornerstone of that house, once rejected, is Christ.

It’s too bad that Dawkins père didn’t name him “Thomas”, as it would have enlivened the discussions we have today. St. Thomas, too, had to build that house of faith for himself. He couldn’t live in someone else’s house of faith—that would have made his life uncertain and unstable.

Instead, he told the rest of the Apostles and disciples that he’d build his own faith. And what he needed to build that faith were facts. Cold, hard, facts. He wanted real wounds to touch before he would believe. Otherwise, it wasn’t true.

I’d like us all to think for a minute about our own houses of faith. Thomas’s faith and his words “My Lord and my God” are only one stone in our own houses. With what other materials have you built your faith house?

Have you got the foundation of baptism and the Eucharist underneath your faith house? Those are the supports which we all need in order to grow our faith and nurture it. Without the Eucharist our houses can collapse under the cares of the world.

Do you have the joists of the Scriptures on which to nail the walls of your faith? The Scriptures are the connective tissues of faith, showing us the progression of God’s desires for the world from creation billions of years ago to the present day and beyond. They carry all things necessary for salvation, and thus enclose your faith in a protective wall which can keep out all evil.

And finally we have Christ as the roof on our house of faith. Just as a house needs a roof to keep out the rain, the snow, and the wind, so we need Christ to keep our faith safe from the winds of the world, the rain of the media buffeting our faith, and the snow that would freeze our hearts. He gave his life for us and our faith in God is possible only with Christ’s protection.

Think of your own house of faith. Where it is in need of some DIY work, use prayer and meditation to shore it up. Where it is unsightly, give it the coat of paint that good works and living for others affords. That will attract other people to admire it and use it as a model for their own houses of faith.

I like to think that is why Thomas is the patron saint of architects and builders. His was the first house of faith, and we pray for his intercession at the Throne of Grace to keep our houses of faith in good repair today. AMEN.