Texts: Psalm 12; John 20: 19-31

In 1984 Jennifer Thompson-Camino was raped in her Burlington, North Carolina, apartment. Presented with photos of six men who could have been her possible assailant, she pondered over the photos and identified Ronald Cotton. “Are you sure?” she was asked, and she said she was positive. He was sentenced to life plus 54 years. In Missouri, Larry Johnson was sentenced to life based on a lineup identification in spite of the fact that the defense was not permitted to test certain items that the police actually had in its possession. Cotton and Johnson both languished in prison until 1995 when The Innocence Project took on their cases. After more than six years of work, they were both exonerated by the technology of DNA evidence. In both cases, the women had identified the wrong people. There is more to truth than meets the eye.

The same is true with optical illusions, those puzzles in which the picture or frame of something is hidden in something else. Looking at a series of blocks or wavy lines we are often amazed by what we see. Children have the “Where’s Waldo” series and adults have the intriguing paintings of Bev Doolittle who showed us how we had to really look for horses in the woods.

What artists and playwrights have known for centuries, scientists investigate, of course, and look for the hidden truths beyond the appearances we see. Our notions of truth and trust are founded on an underlying faith that more information is better, and that information, all things being equal, should be made available. To begin with, for the most part, we really believe that life presents “problems” to be “solved.” And we also believe that the more exposed a problem is, the easier it is to solve it. In some cases that’s true; however, sometimes, more information only creates more complexity to the issue and makes the problem even more difficult to “solve.”

We also hold a contradictory belief: that in many cases secrecy, or the lack of what we call transparency, is essential to protect ourselves against others. Governments across the world try to sell us on this principle and those who violate it are put under the most severe forms of punishment even before guilt is determined. Look at the case of Private Bradley Manning, the man accused of supplying Wikileaks with the information that proved such an embarrassment to many governments. For almost a year, he was kept in solitary, forced to sleep only in his boxers without blankets even in an unheated cell through the winter and made to strip in front of other prisoners at Quantico; he was not permitted any contact with anyone. When the story broke about this, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the ACLU pressured the government to change the conditions of his confinement. Last week he was moved to Leavenworth under new conditions of confinement. Now, note, he has not been formally charged with any crime! In this case, we have been about as “transparent” as the prior gulag states.

We are often told that we can “know too much.” What does that mean? And what does that have to do with faith -- and doubt? These are the very questions presented by this morning’s reading. What is it that we are supposed to not know before believing? In certain areas of the country, people are opposed to having evolution taught because it will “destroy” faith. It’s a pretty shallow faith that can be destroyed by a few dinosaurs.

Over a thousand years ago Peter Abelard said, “Doubt leads to inquiry and inquiry leads to faith.” In some sense that is what this morning’s reading is all about. The facile words attributed to Jesus by the Gospel writer, “Blessed are those who have not seen but believe” were used to calm down the anxious who were part of a new generation who had not known Jesus personally but relied on the testimony of others. I submit that those words are not in keeping with Jesus’ approach to life and faith. Jesus brought a radically new vision of God to his age and to ours. Rather than a deity fixed in a specific place and time, rather than something that had to be worshipped in a temple -- or a church -- Jesus offers us the opportunity to experience God in a radically new way.

Jesus showed us the face of God in humanity -- not the amorphous concept of humanity but in individuals whom we meet every day. We can experience God in the face of grief and in the faces of joy. We can experience God in the kindness of others as well as God’s absence in cruelty. We can see God through the images from the Hubble telescope and the beauty of a single insect. God is all around us and in us and as Scripture so beautifully puts it, "finally, we can experience God in our hearts."

We live in an age of doubt. So how do we have faith in this age, this age of doubt? By allowing God’s spirit to enter our hearts, and opening us to the truth that is far deeper than intellectualization. As we share the bread and wine this morning, consider not just the bread and wine, but the very heart of God through every other person sitting here this morning. Then there will be the new face of God as shown to us through Jesus of Nazareth, who became the Christ as our crucified and risen Lord.

Let us pray: Open to us your face, O God, giving us the new vision of you shared with us through Jesus of Nazareth, who died because the world shunned his vision, and who lives in us as we accept it. Amen.