“Fiction or Non-Fiction ”

April 30, 2006

Scripture Reading:    Luke 24:36B-48

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

I heard about an employee of Barn’s and Nobel book store who was complaining he got fired because he had decided to put the Bibles in the "Fiction" section of the book store. Obviously, he felt the Bible was made up fiction. He felt it was a badly written novel at best. He thought the fiction of the Bible was so obvious he couldn’t understand why anyone would get upset at him and fire him. We might thing of him as an obnoxious in your face skeptic. He, however, probably thought of himself as an honest pioneer, and courageous doubter.

Have you ever doubted? I have. On Easter Sunday every thing was up, up and away! A few weeks after Easter things look different. To say the least, we are back from spring break. Our vacation is over. Everything is back running on a routine basis. In Fact, everything is so routine that we being to wonder if we hadn’t been carried away with all the excitement of Easter. Things in life, all of life seem to operate pretty regularly and dependably. The sun rises and sets at a calculable time each day. We can heat our tea kettle for the same amount of time before the water gets hot. Our cares always get the same mileage on the same amount of gas. Even the price of gas is predictable, lately it is predictably going up. We take some comfort in life’s dependability and regularity. Rocks don’t fall up. Water is not hard. The sky is never orange. And, the dead don’t come back to life. We wonder did the resurrection really happen? Perhaps we should file it under fiction instead of fact.

Furthermore, we are scientific people. We demand that something be proven to be regular and proven to be repeatable before we belie it to be a fact. And we demand that we must believe it as a fact before we believe it as a faith.

The resurrection certainly doesn’t satisfy this pillar of scientific verifiability. It is certainly is not repeatable or regular. . It happened once and only once in all of history. The resurrection is a ball that bounced way way outside the bell curve. For another thing, it is not regular. Given our scientific predispositions and our reassuringly routine back to school/work week, we look back on all the hullabaloo about the resurrection and wonder that maybe it was just wishful thinking; maybe the disciples were just a sad, half-crazed group of people who made up a fantastic story just to make themselves feel better. Maybe it was like the following story about how everyone in a village came to believe that there was a monster in the river:

The village priest was distracted in his prayers by children playing outside his window. To get rid of them he shouted, "There’s a terrible monster down at the river. Hurry there and you will see him breathing fire through his nostrils."

Soon the whole village had heard of this monstrous apparition and was rushing to the river. When the priest saw this he joined the crowd. As he panted his way to the river, which was four miles away, he thought, "It is true, I invented the story. Still, you never can tell."

AS willing as we might be to put the resurrection in the fiction side of the book store, we have to stop at today’s scripture and think about the fact that even the disciples were loaded with their own doubts at the time of the resurrection. The disciples were not credulous followers who got themselves all worked up into beliving Jesus rose from the dead. After the horrible, bloody crucifixion they didn’t say, "Gee, it’s almost like he is still with us. Let’s all try to believe that he is still with us."

However, the disciples themselves were about to file the whole Jesus thing under fiction just like the man at Barnes and Nobel. His followers were not in a sentimental mood after Jesus death. Good Friday was it. The Romans nailed Jesus to the cross. The job was done. The whole Jesus thing was a bad dream. This was the mood they were in when they were huddled down behind closed doors, frightened and worried. There is no doubt lodged by any atheist or skeptic that wasn’t put forward by one of Jesus' own disciples first.

They might have been simple people in the first century, but they weren’t stupid. A stiff is a stiff, to put it bluntly.

So what happened to change their skeptical minds? The one and only thing that could happen to change their minds - Jesus showed up anyway. He showed up in today’s account. They were huddled behind closed doors and suddenly there he was. Christ offers his hands and his feet for examination. He even eats, for goodness sake. The tomb was not just empty. That would in itself have been a strange story that was worth whispering around the camp fire. But, Jesus appears to them. The disciples encounter his living presence. It was this living presence that turned a strange story into a profound faith that they were willing to die for.  

The disciples should have been devastated by the crucifixion. It would have been understandable if many of them took years and years to recover. In fact it would be understandable if they never got over it. However, within three days something happened to them so that instead of feeling their lives were over, they ended up blessing god and filled with joy. Instead of deep depression they suddenly are elated by hope. This recovery is astounding. This type of recovery from grief just does not happen unless they had experienced something very, very profound. Jesus showed up.

It is true that science finds it hard to explain how it is possible that someone would come back to life the way Jesus did. It is true the skeptics have good reason to be skeptical. However, experts and skepticism must give way to an event if it did indeed happen. This is so even if they can’t explain it. An old Sufi tale humorously pokes fun at the experts who try to squeeze the square peg of their theories into the round hole of reality:

A dead man suddenly came to life and began to pound on the lid of the coffin. The lid was raised; the man sat up. What are you doing?" he said to the assembled crow. "I am not dead.." His words ere met with silent disbelief. Finally one of the mourners said, "Friend, both the doctors and the priests have certified that you are dead. So dead you are." And he was duly buried.

However skeptics can be unhealthy when it is used as an excuse for something else. When it is used as an excuse which covers up a fear of having to change our concept of reality as we know it. This is a fear of having to let go of the security we derive from the routine of our lives and the security we derive from our puny assumptions of how life is. It is the fear of that dizzying feeling and anxiety when we have to split open our neatly wrapped and tied scheme of reality and make room for a great mystery.

The theologian Marcus Borg says: There is an insufferable pettiness in much of the church today. We seem too timid to make very large claims about the goodness and work of God, therefore we limit ourselves to small assertions: God is the one who helps you feel better. God helps you to make it through the day. God reduced to a slogan that you can put on a bracelet or around your neck. There is nothing petty about the great victory of God in the resurrection. This is large and sweeping in its implications and comic in its scope.

However, in the end, it doesn’t matter what we think. It matters what Christ does. We can think up all the arguments against the resurrection possible, we can lock the door and throw away the key. We can put the whole stack of bibles, the NIV, the King James, the NRS, the Good News, etc. the whole kit and caboodle in the fiction section of Barnes and Nobel book store. Christ appears anyway. As Rev. William Willimon says, the thing that gives rise to faith, that which makes us Christians, is not that we have done a careful bible study and decided what is really possible to believe. It is not hat we have all close dour eyes and tried real hard to believe, even after Easter. The thing that give rise to faith is that the risen Christ has come to us, has intruded among us, has revealed himself to us, has shared the table with us, has opened the scriptures to us, and we believe. It is not the words of Jesus that we need to get right; it is his living presence that we need to experience.

In his autobiographical Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolf tells of that moment when his chief character, Eugene, sits beside the bed of his dying brother. Eugene, like Thomas wolf, had left his boyhood faith, had gone to college, had adopted the prose of the skeptic and the cynic, and had utterly forsaken the Christian faith. However, as he sits beside the bed of his dying brother, he is confronted again by faith.

Eugene did not believe in these things, but he was afraid they might be true. He was afraid that Ben might get lost again. He thought that no one but he could pray for Ben now. That dark union of their spirits made only his prayers valid. All that he had read, all the tranquil wisdom that he had learned in his philosophy course, the great names of Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, all that left him now. Now he must pray frantically, as long as a little ebbing, flicker of death remained."

Though Wolf could no longer believe in the doctrines of faith, could no longer affirm the great affirmations of the creeds, he still believed in the reality of his brother Ben. In the end it was the love for his brother and his faith in the reality and the goodness of his brother that gave him faith. Likewise in the end, we can argue the pro’s and cons of the Bible, the facts and fiction of the Bible until we are blue in the face. But in the end, it will be the presence of Christ that gives us hope and with whom and for whom and by whom we pray.

Consider this fact:

A handful of wheat, five thousand years old, was found in the tomb of one of the kings of ancient Egypt. Someone planted the grains and, to the amazement of all, the grains came to life. The resurrection is like finding this handful of wheat. It is finding seeds that were set aside thousand of years ago which you assume are dead. But, it is finding that the seeds were just waiting to be discovered and planted. Likewise, the resurrection might seem like so much dead fiction from an ancient religion. However, it only needs to be planted in our souls and, surprise, we find a living growing, thriving presence of Christ before us. We find bread for the soul and a deep faith.