A little trivia question for you old rockers out there. How many of you recognize the name Alice Cooper? Alice Cooper was a rocker from the 70s and part of the band that goes by the same name, Alice Cooper. It is hard to believe that Alice Cooper is 64 years old. I actually have a picture of him. Alice was known for what songs? “School’s Out.” What else? “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” “I’m 18.” “Welcome To My Nightmare.” Some of you may not believe that Alice Cooper is 64 and you may not believe that Pastor Chuck Gohn actually attended the Welcome To My Nightmare concert in Portland, OR in 1975. It is hard to believe. What is even harder to believe is that Alice Cooper is a born-again Christian. I didn’t believe it so I got on the internet and through You Tube he gave a nice little interview with somebody. He was very open and honest about his faith and his walk. He was raised in a Christian home. His father was a minister. His grandfather was a minister. His father-in-law was a Baptist minister. He was not shy about sharing his testimony and how his faith influenced many of his lyrics. You may struggle with some of his music but what is cool about Alice Cooper is he was definitely somebody who not just talked the talk but walked the walk. Even today, he continues to take what he believes, takes his faith and uses it in a creative way to impact his community. He has a foundation called the Solid Rock Foundation. I saw his vision statement and I thought this was cool. This is what we need to be doing in the community. Solid Rock’s primary goal is to help meet the spiritual, economical, physical, and social needs of teenagers and children in our community. He takes at-risk kids and sees their potential and sees that they have been made in God’s image. He teaches them music and the arts. He sets up these community centers all across the United States. That is just a cool thing, but it is hard to believe. You wouldn’t know that unless you did a little research.
Today, as we open our Bibles to the book of John, we find another guy who struggled with belief. Not belief whether Chuck was into heavy metal or Alice Cooper was a born-again Christian, but someone who struggled with the idea that Jesus Christ had been risen from the grave. He really struggled with that. So if you have your Bibles, please open up to John 20. You may recall that we have been going through the book of John. We are getting close to the end. We have two more weeks left. Last week if you were here, we went through the story of the resurrection. We had a few more people last Sunday. The Christmas and Easter people are long gone, so it is truly the committed people that are here today. You might recall in John 20, we went through the passage about the resurrection how Mary went off to anoint the body of Jesus and she got there and the stone had been rolled away. The disciples came and they looked in and they left. They didn’t know what to do. She sat there and cried. A man shows up who she thought was the gardener and actually turned out to be Jesus. Jesus made that very first appearance to Mary Magdalene. As we see in today’s reading, he continues to make appearances. Today, what we are going to see is he appears to the disciples who are locked up in an upper room for fear of the Jews. Once again, we are going to be reading from John 20:19. (Scripture read here.)
So the situation is that the disciples are gathered in this room in this house and it is shortly after the crucifixion. They are probably in this room feeling grief. They lost their good friend. They are feeling anxiety or confusion. They think maybe he did rise from the dead. They are obviously feeling a lot of fear because if the Jews were going to take Jesus and take him away to get crucified, it might be their turn. The Jews might come and pull them away and have them crucified. Really, what we see happening is that even though they were fearful, they were about to get a visit. They were going to get a visit by Jesus himself. We don’t know how Jesus gets in the room. The doors are locked. He shows up and what does he say? He says “Peace be with you!” There is an exclamation point with that. It says “After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.” We have a situation here where Jesus shows up and says peace be with you. You have to keep in mind when he says peace be with you, it is not from the 70s. He is talking about Shalom. It actually comes from the Hebrew word shalom, which has more of a sense of a complete tranquility of body, mind, and spirit. This is an important passage because it reminds us that when Jesus is in our midst, we can have that shalom. We can have that peace that transcends all understanding. That guards our heart and mind and soul. Jesus is amongst us and gives us that peace. Jesus told the disciples that he was there peace. In fact, he had said earlier on a few chapters back. He said the world is going to give you trouble, but I have overcome the world and I come and I bring peace. He is now demonstrating that. It says the people became overjoyed, which is also a completion of the promise. A few chapters back he said you will grieve. You will mourn, but your grief will transform to joy. That is what happens when Jesus enters into the room. Then he goes on and he says again “‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Spirit.’” He says the Father has sent me, I am sending you. The underlying Greek word that we translate sent is actually the same word that we translate apostle. Apostles are known as the sent ones. They are the ones that are sent by God. In many cases we all are like apostles. We should be sent out. We should be carrying the good news of Jesus Christ out into the world. As you know, a few chapters back again, Jesus said although I am sending you and I am going away, I am not going to leave you as orphans. I am not going to abandon you. I am going to send another person of the same essence of myself. I am going to send you the Holy Spirit. So we see the Holy Spirit coming here. We see Jesus breathing on the disciples and saying receive the Holy Spirit. Scholars aren’t exactly sure what is going on here because we will see in a few weeks when we get to Pentecost Sunday that the Holy Spirit came out in great force through fire and wind and filled the whole church. Here we see him breathing on the disciples. We think this is a partial fulfillment of the promise that he is about to give to the whole church. Some actually think that it points back to the book of Genesis where the Lord God had formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being. Back then, he made him a living biological being. Here he is saying I am giving you more than the breath of life. I am giving you the spirit of God that is going to be with you as you go out into the world because you are going to need the power of the spirit living within you. What we see going on is the disciples have obviously now seen the risen Lord.
They had gotten their commission to become the messengers to go out into the world and now they also received the power of the Holy Spirit so they were ready to go. They were excited. What did they do? They leave the room and go to look for somebody. The first person they look for is the guy who missed the staff meeting. The guy who was not there at the meeting, Thomas. We don’t know why Thomas missed the meeting, but for some reason he wasn’t there. They find Thomas and say we have seen the Lord and they are all excited. Thomas says so what. I don’t buy into it at all. He says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” He is just not going to believe it. He must be from Missouri. The “Show Me” state. You have to show him. Whatever it is, he will not buy it.
I don’t know why this thought came to me but going back to the 70s when I was in my 20s, I was gainfully unemployed like many of you 20 year olds and trying to figure out what to do. I opened the paper and see this ad for salesman and a base pay of $6 an hour plus commission. That was a lot of money back in the 70s. It is still a lot of money now in some respects. I answered this ad and I go to the Marriott or something. This huge hall and you have all these guys up there showing diagrams and doing all sorts of things. Sales pitches. I am trying to figure out what it is it I would be selling. They called it an air filtration device. I found out shortly later it was a vacuum cleaner. Everybody has to sell vacuum cleaners once in their life and that was my time. I said why not. I need the money. How hard can it be to sell a vacuum cleaner? I went to the next sales meeting and I get in this room and all these guys were in there and all these salesman were there pumping us up and showing us all the features. We are screaming and shouting and all excited. Then he says take your vacuum cleaners and go sell it. So I grab my vacuum cleaner. By the way, these were called Filter Queens. They were the industrial, heavy-duty vacuum cleaners. They weren’t cheap. They were $500 a piece and back in the 70s that was definitely a lot of money. I grab my vacuum cleaner and I am going out and the first people I look for were my parents. As a side note, my dad’s name was Thomas so this should give me a clue as to how things turned out. I get there and I am trying to show all the features and of course I forgot half of them. By the time we were done with it, my father who wasn’t at a loss for words and used a little bit of profanity and said get that blank thing out of here. What the blank am I going to need with a $500 vacuum cleaner? That was the end of my vacuum cleaner career.
But I can relate then to the disciples who went out with that excitement and said we have seen the Lord and all of a sudden were shut down by Thomas. The neat thing about it is that Jesus somehow decided to accommodate Thomas. He said okay I am going to give Thomas what he wants. A week later, we find the disciples gathered in the room behind locked doors and Jesus shows up again. He shows up and says “Peace be with you!” “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’” This probably scared Thomas half to death. He goes on to call Thomas’ bluff. He says “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” Although the early artwork like 14th century art shows Thomas actually touching the wounds and that sort of thing, I don’t think he did it. I think Jesus called his bluff and he was just so in awe that he just stood there. That is the point that Jesus said “Stop doubting and believe.” Stop it. Stop doubting and believe. This is the line that is forever going to be connected to Thomas. When we think of the apostle Thomas, we think of doubting Thomas. It is really not fair to peg him like that because yes he was a little bit of a skeptic but he was definitely loyal and he was not afraid. You may recall back to the story with Lazarus. Remember Lazarus had gotten sick and the messengers came to tell Jesus and Jesus we have to go back and see Lazarus. All the apostles said you can’t go back there because the Jews are going to kill us. What did Thomas say? Well, let’s go die with him. Let’s go die with Lazarus. He was excited. He was not afraid. He might have been a little bit of a skeptic, but he was definitely not afraid and he was definitely loyal.
As a side note, when we think about doubt, we attach such a negative thing to doubt. Realistically, if you are Christian or not a Christian you are going to doubt. You are going to have your concerns and that is okay because I honestly feel that doubt is just an indication that there is something working inside of you. There is something happening in your faith. It is trying to move to a new place. When you are walking through life as a Christian and you start encountering things, whether it is challenges in your family, your workplace, your home, your health, you begin to hit these challenges. Right away you have a crisis of faith. Do I believe or I don’t believe? I know what I believe about God but am I really willing to act on that. When you do act on it where you stay firmly committed to your Christian faith and you choose to walk through that, what happens is you come out and you are at a higher level of faith. You are at a new place in your faith. You could not get there unless you had the initial doubts. Doubts are not a bad thing.
Even though Jesus is not hammering Thomas because of doubts, he is using this situation as an opportunity to give some very good lessons not only to Thomas but to the apostles and even us today. When Jesus goes in there and says stop doubting and believe, once Thomas figures out this is Jesus what is his response? He says to him “My Lord and my God!” This is such an important line here because this encapsulates all the teaching of Jesus in the gospel of John. It encapsulates the idea that Jesus was not simply a good teacher. He was not simply a prophet. He was not simply just Lord. The idea of lord can take on the meaning of master, but it doesn’t take on the divine necessarily. When Thomas takes Lord and couples it with the word God, he is making a very clear theological statement. We are not just talking about any man here. We are talking about the divine. We are talking about God. We are talking about the second person of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are talking about the one that is spoken in John 1:1. “In the beginning was the word. The word was with God. The word was God.” John 1:14 “The word became flesh and made its dwelling amongst us.” John 1:18 “No one has ever seen God but God the one and only who is at the Father’s side has made him known.” That is the guy we are talking about. Jesus is God.
Some of you have been exposed or have family members who are part of what I would consider, I hate to use the term cult, but I use it in a sense of meaning that it strays from what I would call the core beliefs of Orthodox Christianity. It would include the Mormons. It would include Jehovah Witnesses. Mitt Romney is in the news a lot lately. Nice guy. Great character. All that stuff, but he is a Mormon. Mormon’s are not Christians. If you were to sit down with Mitt Romney and have a conversation and ask him flat out was Jesus God, he would likely say no. He would say he is Lord, but he would not say he is God. Same with a Jehovah Witness. They do not believe that Jesus was divine. That sets us apart. That is what makes Christians different. They believe Jesus was divine. Jesus was God. Jesus didn’t say Thomas don’t call me God. You can call me Lord but don’t call me God. If he wasn’t God, then he would be guilty of blasphemy and he deserved to die on the cross. By saying that he is God or not rejecting this, he is going against the very law of God where God says in the Old Testament “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other Gods before me.” Including Jesus. For Jesus to say he is God or not to rebuke Thomas for saying he is God, if he wasn’t God it would be direct blasphemy. But he didn’t rebuke him. He received that.
Not only did he receive it, he went on to a new teaching. He says Thomas because you have seen me you have believed. Of course you are going to believe. I am standing right here. You can see the nail holes. You can see the wound in my side from the sword. Of course you are going to believe. “But blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” What he is saying here is something new is about to take place. No longer do we live in the realm of just pure sight. It is really impossible. Jesus was going to depart. He made appearances to the disciples and supposedly up to 500 different people, but that was going to go away. We were going to switch to a new currency and that currency was faith, and it is going to be faith from this point it. It is going to be faith that is going to be the fuel that drives the car of Christianity. It is going to be faith that continues to move this great religion called Christianity forward. It works. Last count, I heard that there are over 2 billion Christians alive today in the world. That is not to mention the billions that have gone before us for the past 2,000 years. So it works. Christianity is a religion of faith. You cannot get around that. In fact, if you don’t like that, I would say try something else. Christianity is all about faith. It is a faith-based religion. It can’t be based on pure sight. It can’t be based on pure logic. If it was, the religion would have died out after the last apostle died. It would have just died. If everybody was a doubting Thomas, it would just die out.
Having said that, Christianity is still a reasonable faith. It is. God didn’t say if you become a Christian you have to check your brain at the door. You can’t think. That is wrong. God welcomes all the questions. No matter how crazy they are. In fact, Christians I think sometimes we try to avoid the questions for fear that someone is going to ask a question that is going to crumble all of Christianity if they answered wrong. It is not going to happen. What if somebody asks me a question I don’t know? What do I say? Just say I don’t know. I say it all the time. How bad do you want to know? If you want to know really badly, then let’s sit down and we will dig in together. But you find out that a lot of people don’t want to know. They just want to play stump the pastor or stump the Christian. They don’t really want to know. Seriously. If they want to know, they will sit down but some don’t want to take the time to know because I say if I can get this answer for you would you become a Christian? Well I don’t know about that. They really don’t. It is a reasonable faith, but it is a faith that is not based totally on reason. It can’t be. You are entering into the spiritual realm. The minute you say God created the heavens and the earth, think about that. You are saying something that you cannot prove. You can make a pretty good case for God created the universe. You can’t prove it. But atheists can’t prove that he didn’t because God is not going to allow himself to placed in a test tube experiment. He is not going allow him to be an experiment in a lab. It is just not going to happen. The same when you think about the resurrection. I can give you all sorts of evidence that the resurrection was true, but I can’t prove it because I wasn’t there. I can give you all sorts of evidence. I think I said at Easter that the biggest evidence is that the apostles all died as martyrs for their faith. People will die all the time for something they believe to be true but few people will die for something they know to be false. The apostles were in a position to know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether Jesus really rose from the grave. If they knew it was a lie, they are not going to follow this man. In the Christian faith, faith will always 100% trump reason.
I was reading in the commentary the other and I liked the illustration. Reason is like the little 5-year-old boy chasing down the road after his daddy. His daddy is faith. He is trying to keep up with faith. You say prove that. It is simple to think about. The minute you start saying God created the universe. God created man in his image. God gave us all these wonderful things but sin somehow got in and corrupted the world. God saw the problem. He came in and fixed it and sent Jesus to die on the cross. Then Jesus died but he rose again after three days. All of a sudden, you are entering into the spiritual realm. The person who believes it sits there and says let’s get going. Let’s do something with this. This is the best news. I have to go out and tell somebody. In the meantime, the person with the reason is still back there in Genesis saying six days or seven days. Are you sure? Was it really Adam and Eve? How can you prove the resurrection? They are bogged down in the facts. The people that say I have seen the Lord and I am going forward, they are going off trying all sorts of new initiatives. They are out there ready to change the world. The person that has to see by sight and logic is bogged down. That is why it says here that “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” The interesting word is blessed. We just kind of throw it around. Somebody sneezes and we say God Bless You. Blessed was a term that was never designed to be used as a secular meaning in a non-religious setting. The word blessed predates Christianity. It was actually used by the pagans. When they would say someone is blessed, they mean this person has somehow been raised up to the status of the gods. They were in a new realm. They were in a realm that was removed from the trials and the problems of life. They were blessed. They were given a new status. Really, that is what Christians are. Christians are blessed because they have something that the people that live simply by sight and reason don’t have. They have been entered into the heavenly realm. They have a new scope of vision. They have been given the VIP suite at the Penguins game. They are up there and see a whole different perspective. I love how Paul says it in Ephesians. He goes on to say “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Why? “In order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” He wants to show us. He wants to give us that bird’s eye. When by faith we begin to believe, it is like the doors swing open and wow look at what is out there. Look at the kingdom of God stretching all through eternity. Look at the work that you are doing. Look at your plan to be able to redeem all mankind back to you. Isn’t that exciting? What you actually do is you begin to believe it and when you believe it you begin to start thinking maybe there is an impact on my life. Maybe my behavior should affect my belief. I should live differently. Not only that, I have a new purpose in life. I should go out there and you begin to see people differently. You don’t see them the world sees them. You see the people that have this potential in them. You are looking at them differently than the person in logic that says I am not going to give anything to this person because they are just ripping off the system. They are just doing this. You begin to see them as a child of God and what you do is you try to draw out their potential. You begin to see them in new ways. You are out there running ahead with what you believe and you have reason sitting there saying this guy ripped off the system or this or that and it doesn’t all add up. You say I don’t know but all I know is that Christ is alive and it affects my life and I see the potential in people and I want to do something with it. That is what happens when you believe. You have come up into a new dimension. You have come up into the heavenly realms. That is an awesome thing. That is why the whole gospel of John, if you have been paying any attention at all, is about belief. It is about belief. John wants you to believe. He goes on in the last line in John 20 to say “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Not simply eternal life. Not simply a ticket into heaven. No that you will have life. That Zoe-life he calls it. Abundant life. That says your life is beginning right now. You have entered into that dimension. Now you have that life. Now you are to give that life to others. You are supposed to partner with God and be his messengers. You were sent by God. Filled by the Holy Spirit. Come alongside with God as he redeems all the world. You see that. Wow. You are blessed to be in that position. It doesn’t matter who you are. You begin to realize that belief must be affected by behavior or behavior must be affected by belief. What you believe will affect your behavior. Not just your morals but how you impact the world. You get to the point where it doesn’t matter if you are Susie homemaker. It doesn’t matter if you are Billy the Businessman or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you are Chuck the pastor or Alice Cooper the rock star. You begin to realize that God has given you a special position and you have the responsibility to take that gift and take that position and take that belief and begin to impact the world. (Alice Cooper Video shown here.)
I wanted to show that because I do believe that Alice Cooper is a Christian and somebody who practices what they believe. Because he believes all this stuff that we have been made in the image of God, God created the universe, he sent his son to die for us, because he believes that, it has impacted his life. He begins to understand that just like all the other billion people that are Christians alive today he too has been seated in the heavenly realms. He had been given a unique perspective on the world and also a unique God-given set of abilities and gifts not to be hoarded on, not to be held back, not to be used for your own glory or your own employment or whatever it is, but to be used to begin to expand the kingdom of God on earth. That is what it is all about.
In closing we are all at the same spot. I would say that most of the people here would say they are believers. But so what. Bottom line, belief should affect your behavior. Not just your behavior, your purpose in life. If you believe it, you are blessed. You are blessed. You have been seated up at the right hand of God. You have a grand vision of God. The more you understand that. The more you truly believe. The more you meditate on that reality, the more your eyes begin to be open to see the world in a new way that you have never seen before. You begin to say I can change. With the power of God within me I can begin to change lives. I can affect lives. I can affect marriages. I can affect schools. I can impact the entire community. I would love to see something like this in Bellevue. There is no reason why you could not have a school for the arts for the underprivileged in Bellevue. With all the gifts in this area. All it is is saying I believe it and I believe that God is with me and I believe in the power of God that this can be done and it is changing one life at a time. It can happen. All it is is believing. Believing and understanding you are blessed and you are blessed to be a blessing. Let us pray.
