A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

Saint Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough

April 23, 2017

Second Sunday of Easter

Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Ps. 16; Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Yesterday, on the front page of theNew York Times,there was a striking image of the earth—a pinpoint of light—as seen from afar between the icy rings of Saturn. The image was transmitted by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been circling Saturn and its environs for the last 13 years.

On Saturday morning, the spacecraft skimmed over Titan, the ringed planet’s biggest moon, and was pulled onto a new orbit, into the narrow gap between Saturn and it’s innermost ring, where no human artifact has ever gone.

On September 15, Cassini’s mission will end when it will crash into Saturn and be incinerated.

With the aid of a primitive telescope, Galileo discovered Saturn’s rings in 1610 but never figured out what he was seeing.I discovered another very strange wonderhe wrote to his patron that year. Saturn, he thought, was not one star but three—a large one flanked by two smaller bodies, all in a row.

Two years later, he was even more astonished when the smaller bodies vanished, as the rings do every 15 years when they appear edge-on.I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel,he wrote.

It wasn’t until 1659 that a Dutch physicist, Christiaan Huygens, solved the puzzle. He suggested that all the observations of Saturn could be explained if the planet was encircled with a ring. And then later, in 1675, an Italian-French astronomer discovered that the rings were split into two parts by a dark band.

Much later—several hundred years later, in fact—the space probe Voyager’s cameras, in its flybys of Saturn, showed that Saturn’s rings were actually thousands of tiny ringlets resembling the groves on a phonograph record, held in line by the gravitational pull of the planet’s moons; a very strange wonder, indeed.

What we know about Saturn’s rings today—how we see it—is the collective accumulation of a vast body of perception and knowledge assembled over hundreds of years. Galileo was but the first in a long line of scientists whose minds were blown by the wonders of this mysterious planet.

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist who argued that religious faith is a delusion, portrays the Doubting Thomas of our gospel reading this morning as a scientific hero who demanded evidence and refused to succumb to blind faith.

In John’s gospel, the other disciples tell Thomas:We have seen the Lord.But Thomas is not convinced:Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, I will not believe.

A week later Jesus appears to all the disciples and addresses Thomas:Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless but believing.

Thomas then believes, and Jesus says:Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Another British scientist, Thomas Dixon, who has written a brief introduction to science and religion for the Oxford University Press, argues that Dawkins is right that we are not supposed to admire Thomas’ refusal to believe, but that he’s wrong about the reason.

Thomas’ error, Dixon asserts, is his refusal to believe reliable testimony. After all, what better basis for belief than the testimony of his most trusted friends? The testimony of the other disciples should have been sufficient for Thomas, yet he insisted on more evidence.

Communal observation and testimony are central to both religion and science,Dixon writes,Scientific knowledge, like religious belief, is produced by collaborative acts of observation which, in turn, rely on the observations, testimony and inferences of others.

Galileo himself admired those who believed in a sun-centered solar system before the advent of the telescope. If they relied on sense experience alone—that is, that the sun appears to circle the earth—they would never have come to the truth that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system.

Of those early sun-centered believers whose faith was in the unseen, he may well have said:Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

In both science and religion, Dixon argues, the most important beliefs rest on a kind of seeing that cannot be done by an individual alone.

In 1602, the Italian artist, Caravaggio, painted theIncredulity of St. Thomas,which uses the dramatic lightning and subtle evocation of human emotions so characteristic of his work. It depicts a collective act of witnessing. The Risen Christ opens his shroud to reveal the crucifixion wound in his side.

Thomas’ hand, with his index finger outstretched, is firmly grasped by another disciple who stands behind him and the guides his finger to the open wound. Caravaggio renders Thomas’ eyes dark, even blank; he is gazing straight ahead, not at the wound, which he appears not to see at all.

Caravaggio’s is a depiction of a blind man, a man being led by others towards something he himself cannot see.

The resurrection—like the rings of Saturn, that very strange wonder, so surprising, so unlooked for, ever new—is not ours alone to perceive.

Ours is a communal seeing, a communal knowing, and our faith depends upon that of others who have gone before us and those who are with us today;

that great cloud of witnesses, the living and the dead, who even now encircle us in love and point the way to eternal life. AMEN