Beyond Certainty or Proof
“Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” John 20:29b
When this note goes out, I will be on a brief hiatus from the work of ministry. Fear not, I’ll be back for Sunday!
When Paul and I decided to get married and knew that both of us were going to share a whole lot of our time with the church, we picked our wedding date to have the greatest chance of celebrating our anniversary not at work, but together. This meant it would be past Lent but not on another Holy Day, and before the typical Methodist conferencing season.
We landed on April 23. It didn’t check our boxes for quite every year of our hopeful lives (Easter will fall on April 25 in 2038 and April 24 in 2095), but it was good enough. Fortuitously, the assigned lectionary passage for the week was from Revelation 7:9, a shared favorite of ours.
If this is the church nerdiest thing you’ve read in a while, I assure you, the whole thing got much nerdier.
Today, we mark our 10th anniversary. We are still making good on our commitment to celebrate with intention, no matter how busy the season. Many times in a week we remark to each other on what feels like the sheer dumb luck of our charmed life together. More than anything ever, I am profoundly grateful for our relationship.
I believe that this is the nature of relationship that the disciple Thomas had with Christ. Not that Thomas and Jesus were an item, or that one of us is Jesus and the other is Thomas (pretending to be Jesus is super weird). But that Christ’s invitation to Thomas is echoed in our most trusting relationships with one another.
Like Thomas I am a doubter and perfectionist by nature. I nearly always feel like I need more information to make a decision, more certainty to be comfortable, or more detail in my plans to feel safe. But by the grace of God, that strong pull to perfection is demagnetized in the singular space of my relationship with Paul.
This is a remarkable blessing, because in any relationship there is no way to be certain in the future together. Even in the healthiest of relationships, people grow and change. Sometimes we grow together. Sometimes we grow apart. There is no fault in this.
In 2016 and today, the perfect information does not exist to know ‘without a doubt’ that our lives will go as expected. Indeed, they have not. Instead, we live in that wild and wondrous layer of the atmosphere beyond the certainty and beyond the proof: we live in the trust of relationship. This is the trust that Jesus invites Thomas in to, and that Thomas accepts in his proclamation to the risen Christ. Holding no proof of certainty, Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!”
For me, my covenant with Paul is one relationship where I do life without the proof of certainty. For others, it’s with their parents, or a sibling, or a dear friend. For Thomas, it was with Christ who appeared, in the flesh. For us as the spiritual body of Christ, it is in the community of faith. We do life together, knowing that there are no guarantees, only trust.
It is the trust of relationship that nourishes our community of faith, allowing us to grow in belonging with one another. As a passerby in the congregation (given the itineracy of Methodist clergy), I am also profoundly grateful for the trust that the congregation places in one another and in the passersby like myself. That there is this group of strangers who have become friends and even family, who are ever growing in their trust of one another, trusting the community with their joys and their sorrows and every part of life in-between.
I am never more grateful for this trust of relationship than when I get to make pastoral care visits. Many of the visits that I do are in the trailing years of someone’s life, or at the hospice bed, or with their family after they have died. The trust of relationship present is sacred; trust that I did not earn or prove myself to be worthy of. These beloved folks in our congregation may not have seen the fruit of our care ministry, and yet they believe that God has sent us to sit with them in their most vulnerable moments. There is perhaps no greater trust than this.
Together, we do life without proof of certainty that our effort with one another will bear fruit. There is no proof we can offer to gain each other’s trust, no certainty that these are the right folks to journey alongside. But we trust anyway.
This is the call of the risen Christ, to Thomas, to you, and to me. Won’t you join us?
With you on the way,
Pastor Karyn
Rev. Karyn with First Church member Sam Naito at a home visit in April. Sam turns 105 in December.
Together with you,
Pastor Karyn