Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see (Luke 24:39)

I am partially colour-blind. My wife says that explains a lot about my dress-sense and that’s why she will not allow me to choose the colours when she does the decorating. One thing that’s interesting about colour-blindness is that you don’t know you’ve got it until somebody tests you. They have these cards with patterns of coloured dots on them and you’re supposed to spot numbers or lines embedded in the pattern. I can get the first three of them. There are thirty-eight. It doesn’t matter how much you say to me, “Look and see!” - I just can’t see the numbers.

You need a different way of looking at these cards to see those numbers and lines. But the fact that I can’t see them doesn’t mean I think they don’t exist. Maybe they don’t - they are, after all, just splodges of colour. I just have to trust people when they tell me they can see them.

In the Sundays following Easter Sunday we’re thinking about the Resurrection of Christ and its aftermath. Last week we were thinking about Thomas and how the risen Jesus reached out to him in his inability to believe what the other disciples had told him. We also had that bit from John’s Gospel where Jesus says, “Have you seen and believed? Blessed are those who have not seen, yet still believe.” I don’t think that’s a criticism of Thomas. I think it’s Jesus speaking, through the Gospel writer, to the people who were to come after - to people like you and me, who haven’t seen the risen Christ but who still believe. People who have only the word of the disciples they had seen what they say they had seen.

And that’s why what they say happened is so important. Assuming Luke had some access to the accounts of those disciples then Jesus didn’t just expect them to blindly accept that he was back: he directed their attention to his hands and feet - to the marks of his crucifixion: “Look and see.” This wasn’t just some strange sense that Jesus was still with them in some weird “spooky” way. It wasn’t just a shared “doctrine”. It was an actual experience - an experience so solid, so real, that it would turn them from frightened men, hiding from the authorities to bold proclaimers of the risen Christ, as we hear in Acts.

There are those who will tell you that religious belief is irrational. They will tell you that it’s about believing six impossible things before breakfast, or that it’s like believing in an invisible flying spaghetti monster or a teapot orbiting Jupiter - I’ll be coming back to those. What got me thinking for this sermon, though, was something Richard Dawkins, the well-known Atheist campaigner said. He was asked to justify his position that religious belief is ‘irrational’. He said that it is irrational to believe in something that isn’t proven. Is that right? Is what we do here irrational because it’s irrational to believe in something that isn’t proven?

Of course it isn’t. Dawkins was just plain wrong - both in logical terms and in human terms. In fact you can ONLY believe things that aren’t proven. If something is proven, it’s not a belief, it’s a fact. You don’t believe it, you know it. If I tell you my car is red you can step outside and see my red car: you’re not going to go home today saying you ‘believe’ my car is red. He was wrong even in scientific terms. There are scientists who believe there is life on other planets. I’m inclined to agree, but there isn’t the merest shred of evidence beyond the feeling that if the universe is so big we can’t be all there is. There are scientists who think that this reality is only one of millions of parallel universes, or that there’s a whole set of particles called supersymmetric partners to the ones we know to exist. There’s not the slightest shred of evidence for either position - let alone proof. Is Dawkins really saying that all these scientists are “irrational”? Of course they aren’t. They have reasons for believing what they do, just as we have reasons for believing what we do.Dawkins is just plain wrong to say that it’s irrational to believe what is not proven. 

So why should we believe that God is real? Not out of pure blind faith, but because it makes sense - just as the idea that there’s life on other planets makes sense. Because that God keeps saying to us, as Christ said to the disciples, “Look and see”. God continually invites us not only to believe, but to experience him in our lives and in the lives of others - as the disciples experienced him in the risen Christ and as we experience him in their lives and in the lives of those who have followed them.

There are those who experience God in the majesty of nature. Maybe you do. Sometimes, when you travel through countryside as beautiful as we have around here, or when you see the glorious reds and golds of a perfect sunset, or when you hear the waves rolling onto the shore, you get an overwhelming, spiritual sense of awe that speaks of the Creator of all that beauty. Sure, you can say that these things are the outworking of the laws of nature - and they are. But why should we respond to them in the way we do? Where does that sense of awe come from? “Look and see”.

There are those who experience God in the poor and the hungry. Let me offer you Mother Theresa of Calcutta - and I could give you plenty of others. She’d travelled to India to live the life of a nun, but experienced an overwhelming sense of calling - calling to care for those the economic systems of the world had discarded. So tell me - where does that sense of being brother or sister to the lost and the forgotten come from? “Look and see”.

There are those who find courage to stand up for what is right through an experience of the presence of God. I give you Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; men who knew that what they were saying and doing could get them killed, but who found that there was something more important than life - that making a stand against oppression and power, even if it meant their death, was something they were called to do. If we are simply bags of DNA, impelled to pass on our genes, where does that willing ness to set life aside for the sake of others come from? “Look and see”?

There are those who can’t see what we see. I know what that’s like. But we don’t have to accept - and we don’t have to stay silent when they say it - that just because they don’t see what we see then we should stay schtum. We gather here this morning in the presence of God - the God who came into this world in the life of a human being to say, “Look and see”. We gather in the presence of a God who raised that human being to new life as a promise to us of life eternal for us too; “Look and see”. We gather as a community that grew from that upper room where the risen Christ met the disciples and they were emboldened to go out into the world and say, “Look and see”. We gather  as followers of that God who has inspired men and women to create great works of literature, music and art, to strive for justice and compassion in a cold, bleak world and to build schools and hospitals all over the world - show me the flying spaghetti monster that has done that! Kook and see! And today, tomorrow, in the way we live our lives, in the principles we stand by, in the values we show in the way we treat God’s children, we can show the world the risen Christ. “Look and see”. 

Lord, you came into the world to show us who you are and what matters to you: to show us your love for all your children. May we reveal that love in all we say and do

Preached at Gretna:St. Andrews Parish church