I met her at a funeral. It was at the reception afterward and she came up to greet me and tell me the usual affirmation of how nice my words were. But then she paused and just looked at me as I thanked her for her kindness. And then she said, A I wish I had faith.@ More than her words, it was the look I her eyes that stopped me. They were misty and I could tell she was speaking to me from a deep place in her soul. She was in her 80s and it seemed she was worried about death and she was so uncertain about what lay beyond this life, yet she had trouble believing the traditional stories. She just couldn= t quite believe, but she wanted to so badly, she wanted that certainty about what lay beyond. She was a woman of faith; she believed in a Creator God who had made the world and given her life. She thought the world was a pretty good creation and gift from God. But she couldn= t quite believe all these other stories about resurrection and eternal life and she just wasn= t sure about what would happen after death. So she felt she had no faith.

It saddens me that the Church and the secular world, especially popular science, have colluded to convince people that life is full of certainties. Everything that is true can be proven beyond any doubt. If something seems not able to be proven, either it is not true, or we just have not found the right proof for it yet. But the physical, natural universe is all cut and dried, black and white, either/or, and therefore we have certainty and no doubts or misgivings.

But when people have doubt, don= t understand, grasp or agree with the proof, then they feel like something is wrong with them C they just don= t get it. And they live with a great deal of sadness and fear. How sad, because the biblical witness is that wonder, amazement and doubt have been around since the beginning and in fact, they are a necessary and acceptable part of any healthy relationship with God.

Look at our story from Luke this morning.

It is very similar to the story last week from John.

The disciples are gathered together, dealing with amazing news that Jesus= body is not in the tomb and some people have seen him alive.

Luke= s story is actually a third scene from that first Easter.

The first scene has the women and Peter discovering the tomb was empty. The second scene is the story of Cleopas and a companion on their journey to Emmaus meeting a strange traveler on the road who turns out to be Jesus, whom they recognize that evening at the dinner table. This third scene begins with those two having returned to Jerusalem to share their experience with the other followers, only to learn that Peter has also seen Jesus. Then, like last week, Luke tells us that Jesus suddenly appears in their midst much to their terror.

They think they are seeing a ghost. So Jesus tells them to look at his wounds and touch his body. It doesn= t say anybody took him up on this, but they begin to feel joyful, yet, as Luke says, A they were disbelieving and still wondering.@

Now this is after the women have told the group about the message of the angels at the tomb; Peter has supposedly already seen Jesus once; and Cleopas and companion have walked with him all afternoon and sat at the dinner table with him; yet this group is still A disbelieving and still wondering.@

Doubt that the crucified Jesus was also raised from the dead; doubt that God really did defeat death and evil; none of this is original with us.

Jesus= own disciples, those who had been with him from the very first, who had heard all of his teaching, doubted the good news that the women brought to them on Easter morning. And even after some of them had some sort of experience of the risen Christ themselves personally, evidently they still struggled with doubts and wondering.

A new ancient document has surfaced and is making news: the Gospel of Judas. What has surfaced is a document from the 4^th century that is written in Coptic, which is an Egyptian language written with Greek letters. The opening line is: A The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot...@ and the final line is A The Gospel of Judas.@

There is a record from a second century church bishop, Iraneaus, attacking a so-called Gospel of Judas as an heretical document.

It is one more of the many documents reported to have been written by Jesus= followers, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, etc., that all supposedly have A secret@ knowledge passed on from Jesus. Whether these documents do, or not, what they do illustrate is the struggle from the very beginning of Christianity to understand the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

If there had been no doubts, no questions, no wondering, among his followers and those they shared their stories with, there would have been more agreement and similarities in the stories from the very beginning. Doubt and wonder have always been a part of believing.

In fact, doubt and wonder are the doorways to a deeper faith, a more honest trusting relationship with God.

I grew up in the Church. I have told you this before, how my earliest memories are memories of me in church settings. Even though we did not always attend church as I was growing up, Christian faith was in the air we breathed, the water we drank, the food we ate in my family. It composed the very fabric of our lives and there never were any real doubts among us. I grew up hearing the stories of the biblical heros and especially the story of Jesus. When I was ten I walked the aisle and gave my heart to Jesus and was baptized. It was a given.

When I learned about evolution in science class, it didn= t cause any doubts, it was understood that it didn= t contradict the creation story, which was not a literal description of how the world came into being, after all, the bible also tells us that a day to God is as a thousand years to us, so at the very least, six days of creation would be at least six thousand years, certainly time for things to evolve. (Not really, but we didn= t push the timeline too much.) No, for most of my first 43 years of life I lived with certainty of faith in God and in the stories of the Bible and in what the Church and seminary taught me.

Then my mother died. And the bottom dropped out.

Looking at her body lying in that coffin suddenly there was no more certainty for me. Add to that the fact that at the same time my wife had to have a pacemaker installed to stabilize her heartbeat and I had suddenly been confronted in a major perrsonal way with the reality of our mortality. That was in September, 1999.

Two years later was September 11, 2001 and my brother-in-law dies in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Suddenly doubt has become my constant companion and I have questions galore.

So what enables me to stand before you this morning and share with you a belief in the resurrection of Jesus even in the face of my doubts and my questions? I would have to say to you that it is the grace of God, that is, it is a gift. It is not a matter of resolving an intellectual dilemma; it is a matter of God loving us enough to reveal God= s self to us in a real, personal, and powerful way.

That is what the gospel writers are all trying to describe -- the real presence of God in the lives of Jesus= followers. The thing that gives rise to faith is not that we have done a careful study of the Bible and decided what is really possible to believe. It is not that we have all closed our eyes and tried real hard to believe the unbelievable. The thing that gives rise to faith is that the risen Christ has come to us, has intruded among us, has revealed himself to us, has shared the table with us, has opened the scriptures to us, and we believe.

The real power of the resurrection is not just what happened to Jesus, but what happened to his disciples. Something happened to them, too.

They went into hiding after the crucifixion but after the resurrection appearances, they walked back out into the world. They became braver and stronger; they visited strangers, and healed the sick. It was not just what they saw when they saw Jesus, or how they saw it, but what was set free in them.

What was set free in them, what has been set free in me, is the ability to trust my life to God= s eternal care. What I continue to discover is that as I trust my life to God, God continues to fill me with the power and courage to live the life Jesus calls me to live.

That is what faith truly is, not a set of beliefs, not a list of affirmations one signs at the bottom, but rather an action of the heart.

It is an action that is taken not because all of one= s questions are answered or all of one= s doubts removed.

It is okay to have unanswered questions.

It is okay to be confounded. It is okay to still find joy even while disbelieving and wondering about it all.

To know and admit that we do not possess all the answers is a sign of the Holy Spirit at work in us. As the Spirit of God works in us, we will find the ability, received as a gift, to trust our life more and more to God= s care and guidance. That is true faith C what we do with our hearts, not with our minds.