Sermon of April 24, 2005
Presented by Rev. Julia Williamson
Scripture lesson: Acts 7:54-60

“Seeing Is Believing”

Seeing is believing! A lot of people take this to mean that you have to see something in order to believe it. If you can’t see it, if you can’t prove that it’s there, then it doesn’t exist. You remember Doubting Thomas?  He had to put his hands into Jesus’ wounds in order to believe that it was really him.  And Jesus says to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29.)  The way I interpret “Seeing is believing” is that you have to believe something before you can see it. Why not let our faith change the way we see our world, instead of letting the world change our faith? You and I don’t have to see things the way we always have. Maybe you see things the way your family did when you were growing up, or the way you were taught to in school. Maybe you were taught “life is difficult” or “don’t take too many risks” or even “religion is a crutch.” Whatever it was, these messages have a big impact on the way you and I see our world today.

“Seeing is believing!” Let’s take this quote a different way and challenge the way we’ve always seen the world.  In order to do that we need a special pair of glasses.  These glasses have been used before– by Stephen when he had to face that angry crowd, by Jesus on his way to the cross, by any one of us who have faced a difficult situation and turned to our faith for strength and reassurance. Listen again to verse 12 of the passage from the letter to the Corinthians which we read a few minutes ago.  “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” In Corinth , a major city in Paul’s time, there was a mirror making business. All the mirrors were made out of polished bronze or silver. And so the reflection you got from these mirrors was not very good. Just to get the idea, I tried looking into this pewter plate. It’s kinda like going to the house of mirrors at an amusement park. In one mirror you look really tall, in the next you look really wide.  Paul, who wrote this letter, knew that people were familiar with these kinds of mirrors and so he compares this distorted kind of reflection, which is like how we see now, or how our world wants us to see, with the way we will see when we come face to face with God.  When you put on these glasses, you make a decision to see the world in a different way– to see it through the eyes of faith, to see things as if you are face to face with God. You change the way you see the world and along with that, you begin to allow God, through you, to change the world.

Last week I visited the aquarium in Boston and went to the Imax theater to see Monsters of the Deep. And I got to wear 3-D glasses. I hadn’t been to a 3D film in a while and had forgotten how much they make you feel like you’re right there down deep in the ocean, near those hot water vents that spurt up out of that seam in the earth.  and meeting face to face the amazing creatures who live down there all without sunlight, the little shrimp and the crabs... . I was even tempted to reach out and touch one. Have you ever tried taking off your 3D glasses during a 3D movie? That’s the experience Paul was trying to describe to the people in Corinth. It’s as if in this life we’re missing our 3D glasses. Sometimes we can’t quite see clearly and so we muddle our way through and hope for the best.

And then you’ve got Stephen. He did much more than muddle his way through when he was faced with that angry crowd. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone grind their teeth at me, but it can’t be a very pleasant experience. So imagine Stephen, in the midst of all these angry people. Again, they are angry with him because he has suggested that with Jesus, comes a change in the laws of Moses, in the way they’ve always done things. A lot of people were not ready to hear that, especially in the very earliest days of the church. So Stephen’s got this crowd honing in on him, and he looks up and sees the heavens opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. I think the key there is that the heavens are opened. Stephen’s got his glasses on, he’s looking with eyes of faith, and suddenly he can see things that others can’t.  There’s a lot of mystery in this world. Most of the time we are oblivious, just like we only use 10% of our brains. Ever heard that one? In this case, Stephen was able to keep his calm, to keep his faith and to focus on what was really central and important to him, in the midst of a really stressful situation. He let his faith change the way he saw the world, instead of the other way around. Seeing is believing!

Undoubtedly the most stressful year I ever had was my first year out of college when I was a French teacher and dorm mother at Kents Hill School , way up north, 17 miles west of Augusta , ME. . I lasted one year, primarily because I let my situation shape the way I saw things. I didn’t have the faith or the skills to hold my own in the midst of, maybe not an angry crowd, but a difficult and challenging one, namely young people a lot of whom didn’t want to be at this particular school, and didn’t want to learn French. So what do I do? I go down to the local animal shelter and get a Doberman shepherd mix puppy. She was meant to be a source of joy in my life, and she was, but it also turned out I was allergic to her, and she was very hard to train. And she chewed up my little apartment.  And, a couple of times just for fun or to make me more crazy, the kids would let her off her leash because they knew she’d be out of control and I wouldn’t be able to catch her. So anyways, I really needed some 3D glasses that year. If seeing is believing, then everything I saw had to be through eyes that believed God’s hand was at work at that school, in my classroom, in the dorm.   Fortunately that year I connected with a small church and got to know some people there. On Wednesdays we would meet for Bible study and sometimes I got to tell my story, of how difficult teaching was, of how my dog was out of control, my allergies were out of control and in general how miserable I was. And we would pray together. And those prayers were a reminder to not forget about those glasses– to not forget to see the world through the eyes of faith. To  not forget that seeing is believing.

Telling our story is often the first step towards seeing the world in a new way. Of course in Stephen’s case, telling his story,  the story of God acting in the world ultimately through Jesus, got him in trouble. Sometimes the world doesn’t want to hear our stories. And then what do we do? We certainly don’t throw away our glasses; because God’s love inside of us is patient and kind, not insisting on its own way, not rejoicing at wrong, but rejoicing in the right.

A few weeks ago on the news there was a report about some orphaned children from the area hit by the tsunami who are living all together in a shelter. The report was meant to show how they are getting along. They showed a 12-year-old boy who had written a song about what happened to him when the tsunami hit. It was very powerful to see him standing there with all the other children sitting on the floor listening. He was singing his song about the tsunami, simply telling his story. With that story the healing had begun. He had just written one verse, but maybe the next verse would be about how he had seen God’s presence in the people who came to help, in the helicopters who dropped all that food and supplies, in the doctors, nurses and others who left whatever they were doing in their lives in other parts of the world and came to help.

I think in singing that song, perhaps without even knowing it, he has started to see things a little differently.  He has started to believe that things will get better, and so now God can work through him, to indeed make things better.

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