This week we lift up the virtue of doubt. Early on, I put my money with Socrates who said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living." I believe it was third grade when I was thrown out of Sunday School for impertinence. Our teacher, as was the custom in the deep South, was regaling the wonders of becoming 'born again' for probably the hundredth time of my young childhood. Reportedly, I remarked something like 'great now what do we do with the rest of our lives?' Mrs. Sawyer asked me to go see the Pastor of the church to the horror of my mother. Fortunately for me, my grandmother was visiting that weekend and she thought it was the funniest story she had ever heard, as a half-religious Presbyterian living in the buckle of the Bible belt. 
The bible tells us that St. Thomas was the only disciple that wouldn't believe in the resurrection until he touched Jesus and he has been held up as a figure that is a little 'less than' the other disciples ever since. But the censure is undeserved and Jesus never actually castigates anyone for incredulity. 
If you are curious about how we are supposed to live in the modern world and still be guided by ancient texts, this week is an intellectual reflection that you will find helpful. In fact, you might just drag along your sneering spouse or your cynical friend. At a minimum, they might stop dismissing you and engage a serious subject with the sobriety that it deserves. It is true that we in the Church have given people ample reason to question our authority but in the grown up world, neither is it wise to simply satirize religion. That bar is simply too low. 
How do we connect our reason and our faith? We'll think about this together on Sunday.

The good Princess in the "Game of Thrones" has been taking her army from Kingdom to Kingdom growing larger. She hasn't had to fight all that seriously because she first addresses all the people of the city she is attacking next. She promises the slaves freedom and tells them that their enemy is not her but their Masters standing next to them. Then she catapults crates of broken slave collars behind the walls of the kingdom and points behind her to this enormous army of freed slaves.
Just now, our headlines are highlighting place after place in the world where we have protracted conflict that diplomacy is unable to resolve. Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the list is much longer still. It simply isn't in the interests of the warring parties in these conflicts to bring about a peace. In many cases, these societies are going through profound social changes brought on by modernity. This alone creates a revolutionary internal foment that outsiders would be unable to effect one way or the other. 
Watching the good Princess make her appeal, I was reminded of the spiritual gravitas that attends a moral vision of the common good. I was reminded of Gandhi who not only built the self-esteem and self-worth of his Colonial Indian subjects so that they could demand self-rule, he also started a movement based on respect in a pluralistic society. Likewise, what made Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, and Nelson Mandela such charismatic leaders was the moral vision they depicted of a place where all people are included and respected, even minorities and the poor who had been relegated to second-class citizens in the de facto world of 50's and 60's. 
The bible has a saying that 'without a vision, the people perish'. They would also say of those times "in those days there will be wars and rumors of wars". Protracted social conflict and upheaval are like that. 
Despite the steady drip of cynical self-interest that permeates the attitudes people have around us in the workplace and the marketplace of New York, it is a reasonable thing to pray that God would inspire leaders in these hot spots that would develop a moral vision of their society that will break through the gridlock of retribution and vindictive revenge that defines these places socially. 
It is unlikely that outside intervention, however well intentioned, will actually make the breakthrough that leads to a genuine reconciliation. Every people need their own Thomas Jefferson to come to a new self-awareness together, each of them owning a new and higher vision of how they shall live.Then it becoms possible for the people to come to a genuine repentance for the self-destruction and malformation of their children wrought by a generation of wanton violence. 
Prayer changes things, we know that. For genuine peace, we pray.

The Rev.