“I felt like I’d been a Christian all my life, but I didn’t have one of those dramatic moments,” she told 1,300 high schoolers Monday evening (July 7) who are here for week three of the 2008 Montreat Youth Conference. “So I began to wonder whether I really was a Christian, whether Jesus had forgotten about me.”
Green, a Presbyterian minister who is associate for Racial Ethnic Young Women Together (REYWT) in the Women’s Ministries program area of the General Assembly Council, said she imagined feeling the same way as the disciple Thomas in John 20.
“I imagine Thomas felt a little left out and alone,” she said in the first of a series of sermons she will preach here. “Thomas was there when Jesus took his last breath, but now, when Jesus appears to the disciples not once but twice, Thomas wasn’t there. I think he must have wondered if the others were delusional, or maybe Jesus loved the others more than him, or that maybe he was inadequate.”
And so Thomas falls back into a thoroughly human reaction: he won’t believe until he sees Jesus himself. “Sometimes we have a hard time seeing the possibilities, our senses can’t grasp them and so we fall into ‘seeing is believing,’” she said.
For Thomas and for us, Green continued, “our inability to believe does not trump our desire to believe. Thomas just can’t seem to dispel his doubt, even though he desperately wants to,” she said.
It is to those who have not seen and therefore have trouble
believing that God comes in Jesus Christ with Holy Spirit, Green said. “Jesus knows what we need to believe,” she said. “Without Thomas saying anything, Jesus knows, saying ‘Do not doubt but believe.’”
He’s saying the same thing to those here at Montreat this
week, Green said. “God is reaching out to us whether we realize it or not, and this is a gift of God … a gift that comes to us only because God offers it.”
Polling the crowd to learn for how many this is their first, second, third, or even fourth Montreat Youth Conference, Green said, “Many of us have not seen what happens at Montreat. Blessed are those who have not seen but have come to believe.
“Many have come before but are open to whole new possibilities,” she said. “Blessed are those who have not seen but have come to believe in the possibilities.”
