Acts 5:12-20
Psalm 81:1-5
John 20:19-31

The Life of Angels

For those of you who are not Orthodox, I will share that today marks the end of "Bright Week," an unending day of the First Day of the New Creation. (You know that Sunday is called the Eighth Day.) We stand at the end of that long day (in our terms, one week), and those who are newly illuminated must now engage the world.

Appropriately, therefore, we celebrate a moment — the moment when an Apostle transcended intellectual life and crossed over into the world of divine mystery and ... therefore, of certainty, resolution, and inner peace. He had left the intellectual state of mind — of endless debate, of embattled differences, of knee-jerk skepticism and automatic disagreement, and never of resolution. His formation had been the world of early rabbinic Judaism, whose spirituality consisted of intellectual pursuits: commentaries, targums (which are paraphrases of Scripture), and warring interpretations.

Though first-century Judea was very different from our world, it shared an essence of intellectual life in that it cannot lead to ultimate answers, but rather to an ever-receding horizon of questions. I recall long ago being energized by a picture of a man climbing a ladder up through the clouds with a question mark lashed to his back. That would be me, I pledged to myself and then devoted twenty-three years to university and post-doctoral study. I even worked, and then retired from, a university without faculty, a kind of "think tank." But final resolutions or ultimate meanings? No, I never saw these. The life of the mind, however rigorous, can never do that.

As George Bernard Shaw said, introducing Albert Einstein at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1930 "Ptolemy made a universe, which lasted 1,400 years. Newton also made a universe, which has lasted 300 years. Einstein has a made a universe, .... and I can't tell you how long that will last" (New York Times, October 29, 1930). The business of science is to propose impermanent truths, temporary laws, which are destined to be repealed, discarded, or, maybe, revised. And I will insert here that the most prestigious journal Science resisted the Big Bang Theory because it suggested that the Laws of Physics were provisional and not eternal.

Thomas Kuhn warned in his landmark study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the history of science is not one of evolution, much less of linear progression. It is the chronicle of shipwrecks with whole worlds-of-thought, once held to be true, going down like twisted hulks of scrap metal to the bottom of the dark sea.

But we who are alive today were formed to believe that the opposite is true, that we should trust in the "eternal verities of science." I recall as a teenager a New York City talk-show host liked to describe science as "three dried peas perfectly aligned in an unchanging geometry." He revered this world of "black-and-white" having no shades of gray. He had never heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Russell's Paradox nor had ever read quantum mechanics in physics. Finally, he welcomed a distinguished scientist from nearby Columbia University as his guest, who during the course of the program told him that science was nothing like three dried peas in a changeless geometry. And perhaps that scientist would not have thought it strange that mystery could lead to changeless truths. Certainly, the head of Bell Labs Research did not think it strange. Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978, told me that the opening chapter of the Bible presented us with a "precise, though poetic, description of the Big Bang Theory."

In some ways, the world that God created does point back to God. But it does not follow from this that the world or worldly life will lead to God. That requires a leap above the world and of our worldly ways. This is precisely the leap that St. Thomas made — in one moment, dug into habitual skepticism, in the next, offering to Jesus the most exalted title ever heard on the earth: God.

Thomas' former self we know very well. He was a member of that party within the Disciples who held back their faith insisting on their intellectual "credentials." Thomas asks in exasperation, "How can we know the way?" And Philip demands, "Show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied" (John 14:5-8). They both say "we." Who else is a member of the intellectual party, we might ask? Perhaps Nathaniel, Philip's friend, who had asked archly, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" But whoever they were, we know that they had seen Jesus' signs and wonders, had witnessed His giving sight to the blind and paraplegics legs to walk on, had beheld the raising of Lazarus after his body had rotted in a tomb for four days.

We know this kind of man — standing back with his arms folded, always saying, "Oh, I don't know about that." For no matter what Thomas and Philip are shown, they must make a show of their superiority. Others might be taken in, no, no, but not them! Jesus turns the tables on them suggesting that their problem is not a mind that is too sharp but rather one that is too dull: "Have you been with Me so long, and yet you do not know Me?!" (John 14:9).

Can we picture, then, the crabbed Thomas, always contradicting everyone? Can we hear him mocking the others?

Notice that St. John's Gospel does not say that Thomas actually touched the wounds of Christ as so many paintings have depicted over the centuries. The only thing of which we may be sure is that St. Thomas drew very near to Jesus. Imagine yourself drawing near to the Risen Christ. This is the One Whose mere Presence shattered the House of Death, sent fearsome divine beings howling in flight. And now you are drawing near to Him, each hundreth-of-an-inch drawing closer and closer to the supernal Energy that created the world. This is not a Thomas engaged in perfunctory data verification. This now is a reverent man extending his frail, human hand into a holy mystery and in that act becoming so awed that he falls to his knees voicing tones he can barely manage to breathe: "Lord .... God." He has leapt above the shadowy and unstable world of the mind into the brilliant light where angels dwell, into crystalline clarity and certainty. This was the invitation extended to Zechariah and the one which the teenage Mary accepted. This is the reality the angel offered to the imprisoned Apostles:

How is it that we have accepted the lie that human reason leads to certainty but that the soul can only point to a swirling fog? As it turns out, we are able to answer this question, for it points back to a well-documented history of sixteenth-century events that turned the spiritual world upside-down — a revolution called empiricism, which would give rise to materialism and thence to the scientific revolution. It all took place during what historians call "the long century" from the 1650s to the 1840s. Empiricism begins about a century before that.

Before empiricism, the Western world was oriented to God and to eternal life. The world was seen as a living organism, which grew old and would eventually decline and unravel (a proposition that would ring true to many people living today). Accordingly, the further back you go in time, the nearer you draw to a freshly made world and to absolute truths — for example, to the Advent of God during the first century; to the appearance of the "I AM WHO AM" speaking plainly to Moses in the Midian wilderness and later atop Mt. Sinai; to the morning of the world in the Garden of Eden, where man enjoyed direct and intimate communion with God in pristine newness and purity. Conversely, the further you travel forward, away from these encounters with God, the more the debris and wreckage of the world clouds one's lens into the past.

The motto of empiricism was, "Believe nothing until you verify it yourself." You can imagine then what empiricists made of received truths from antiquity. Why, they must be thrown on to the scrap heap and burned! And many European libraries did just that, making room on their bare shelves for the flood of treatises and scientific papers that catalogued a new world of verified facts.

Indeed, the New World across the Atlantic was seen to be a place where one could escape hopeless, Old-World errors, a place where one might start from scratch in the purity of verified data. This helps us to understand the meaning of the word Puritan (a term which later became distorted, with an emphasis on puritanical, meaning "moralizing"). The Puritans were a people who believed they were building not just a New World, escaping European oppression, but a purified, new reality. The college they founded, which would become Harvard University, was so committed to this ideal that Puritan leaders like Cotton Mather and William Bradford seriously debated scrapping the English language (!) and inventing a new language from scratch in order to elude the thought forms of the Old World.

Do you see the great reversal here? For thousands of years the Western world had looked to the past for golden truths. Now, suddenly, Western humanity understood truth to lie ahead, not behind. What was to become of religion and God? Well, all over the Western world, churches emptied, and ancient religion was rejected .... by some accounts up to half the faithful. Empiricists like Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and Philip Melancthon emphasized a new kind of religion — a religion predicated not on the past but on the direct and first-hand experiences of men and women going forward. What was to become of mystery? What can we say about spiritual journey or a communion with the saints? That must be thrown on to the scrap heap.

Sola Scriptura! Luther cried. Each person would now be his own investigator and theologian with only a Bible needed for the job. Never mind that the Bible itself rejects this idea:

Sola fide! Luther cried. Each person's private and personal convictions are all that is required ... forgetting that the Bible itself reject this:

A distinctive development of empiricism and its outgrowth, Protestantism, is the doctrine associated with being "Born Again." This is the idea is that one can verify one's state of soul through a first-hand examination of the body. Famously, the Anglican priest John Wesley reported the empirically verified moment of his salvation. He said he had been listening to Luther's Preface to the Letter to the Romans:

May I say that I too have had supernatural experiences? I too have entered divine secrets, have seen divine things. Yes, feelings of awe swept over me, and I felt transformed, but I did not conclude from this I had "been saved." Instead, I concluded that I was progressing in a spiritual journey toward God and that eventually my family resemblance to God's Son (for we are made in God's Image) might become more and more perfect if I were to continue along that path.

Why then has "born again" religion become a hallmark of U.S. Christianity? Because the history of the U.S. has mostly been the history of the American frontier. The ancient tradition of spiritual pilgrimage was not open to frontiersmen and -women. European Christianity began with monasteries and holy women and men. The Celts evangelized by St. Paul sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and landed on the western coasts of Ireland and then Scotland. Thousands of missionaries then journeyed eastward across the British Isles converting Picts and Anglo-Saxons, offering them not only the faith but also a spiritual path pointing back to elders and monasteries.

But in the American West there were no monasteries to receive and guide illuminated people following a revival meeting. There was only tonight under the tent. Tomorrow, even the tent would be gone, and the revivalist would be off to the next town or county. If it were going to happen, it must happen tonight. Thus, the "Altar Call" was invented and "the sawdust trail" was sprinkled in the mud, so people would make their path to the altar, where the itinerant preacher, might lay his hand on them. In an instant, they believed! They had crossed an invisible line from being damned to being saved.

Everything was instant. It had to be. The Christian journey of the American West was not so much a journey as it was an emotional upwelling. No one there knew anything about spiritual tradition or the saints. Indeed, many people could not read. And if they could read, there were no editions of the saints, of their writings or The Lives of the Saints. Only Bibles. And this suited Luther's Protestant theology very well.

Who might be the patron saint of empiricism? Of demanding first-hand verification? Is it not the Apostle Thomas, who would not receive the Sacred Tradition of the Apostles, would not trust the religious experience of those who had seen the Risen Christ. "Until I see it or feel it myself," Thomas said, "I will not believe!" And it is not for nothing that the Catholic and Apostolic Chuch is founded when Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on to the Apostles (John 20:22), just before this scene in which Thomas acts out.

By whose hand will you be led, then? By the grasping hand of a rebellious spirit insisting on his own dignity? Or by the hands of the saints? During this past Bright Week, many illuminated Christians are still wearing white, spiritually speaking, still fragrant with the anointing they received making them Christians. They did not trust the roller-coaster ride of religious emotionalism. No, not in the end. Rather, they trusted the Lord Jesus Christ, and the wounds by which we are healed, Who founded a Church, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, upon the Apostles. And they trusted the saints and now walk among them, reverencing their icons, praying before them, and stepping into churches all over the world to join these same holy women and men in a "great cloud of witnesses." We give thanks as they make their way toward God. And we watch them, who were made in the Image of God, now resembling God's Son more and more as they journey toward the light of the saints.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.