One can’t believe impossible things

Photo by Parker Asplin

The following sermon was preached on April 8, 2023, during the Easter Vigil at Nashotah House.

Whether or not you are a fan of Lewis Carroll and his quirky Alice-in-Wonderland adventures, you may be familiar with this little episode between Alice and the White Queen, famous for an oft-repeated phrase. Displaced and distraught, for better or for worse, Alice has opened up with her feelings to the White Queen.

‘Oh, don’t go on like that!’ cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. ‘Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!’

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. ‘Can you keep from crying by considering things?’ she asked.

‘That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision: ‘nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your age to begin with—how old are you?’

‘I’m seven and a half exactly.’

‘You needn’t say “exactually,”’ the Queen remarked: ‘I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’

‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.

‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’[1]

Not only on Easter, but especially on Easter, it would seem we need to navigate our choices between the skeptical Alice and the credulous Queen.

The Queen makes a good point—a few good points, actually. It matters what we think, what we consider, what we believe—what we are willing to think, consider, and believe. Such choices affect our moods, condition our possibilities for our lives, and they even control our imaginations. There is something to be said for “six impossible things before breakfast.” (If you think about it, believing six impossible things before breakfast is more or less the Nashotah House method of formation [especially depending on who’s preaching.])

But Alice has a point also: “One can’t believe impossible things.” She’s right, isn’t she? I mean is supposing the six impossible things we believe before breakfast are not only impossible but untrue, what will we have finally gained from the thought experiment? We might have enjoyed some temporary fancy; we might have found some escape from brute reality with a fantasy journey into a “wouldn’t-it-be-nice world.” But that sort of escapism ultimately shipwrecks on jagged rocks of reality. The more that a life depends on a belief that is really nothing more than a wish, an oblivious devotion to something not real, the greater the waste has been.

St. Paul thought this: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ — that is, if there is no resurrection hope of a life to come — we believers are of all people most to be pitied”[2] Apparently, for Paul, the imagined consolation of the idea of a resurrection was a pitiable delusion if there was no reality beyond the wish.

So, the Queen is right: what we think matters. And Alice is right: we mustn’t believe impossible things.

The question, of course, is what we mean by “impossible.” Four-sided triangles are impossible. On the other hand, a man once truly dead, raised back to life to inhabit a new order of existence for eternity is . . . well . . . not impossible, though it is unprecedented, startling, astonishing, and, on the face of it, hard to believe. But impossible and extraordinary are not the same thing. And, with God, all things are possible and some extra-ordinary should not be unexpected.

Our obligation is not to believe untrue things but to believe all true things. We are not obliged to believe fairy tales and fantasies, myths and legends. But it is the height of hubris for finite creatures to suppose that the world is no larger or more complex than what we can apprehend by our senses or imagine with our limited minds.

If we pay close attention to our Scripture lessons this evening, they challenge us to believe not just one, but two, extraordinary — not to say impossible — things before our Easter brunch.

The first extraordinary thing is the testimony of Matthew’s Gospel, that unexpecting women arrive at a tomb Jesus was known to be buried in only to find the tomb empty and to meet Jesus alive on their way to tell his disciples. Extraordinary, not impossible.

As extraordinary events go, that’s a hard one to top. But it is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new story. Because our lessons invite us to believe another extraordinary thing, this one described not in Matthew but in our reading from Romans that preceded.

If it is extraordinary that a man should rise from the dead, hold on to your seats. Romans tells us that in some mysterious way this has also happened to us in our baptism. Indeed, we have died and were buried with Christ in baptism and raised with him to a new life.

. . . as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.  For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him (Rom 6:4b–8).

As far as miracles are concerned, I would suppose that Jesus walking out of a tomb has to be the winner, the more dramatic. But if we are talking about extraordinary things to believe before breakfast, maybe the claim that we are dead to sin and freed from it, that, like the resurrected Jesus, we walk in newness of life — maybe this is, if not more extraordinary, the harder to believe.

After all, of Jesus’ resurrection, there are witnesses, there is material evidence, there are causes and effects, there is the martyrdom of the first witnesses, easily avoided if they had just come clean and said it was all a myth.

But, as to our resurrection to newness of life and our freedom from sin’s enslavement, well . . . the evidence is . . . ambiguous, to put it kindly. We have good and bad days, better and worse moments, we find ourselves frequently struggling and sometimes losing, or, worse, not struggling at all. 

While some Christians have a nigh-miraculous story of transformation, most of us have a less dramatic story, something more of a mixed bag. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus; we believe we too will be raised with on that last day; we like what Romans 6 says, but were our lives the sole evidence to that effect, we would be hard-pressed to prove our death and resurrection with Christ in baptism.

Here's the best news I have for you: You do not need to prove your death and resurrection with Christ in baptism. If you died to sin and were made alive to God in your baptism, you didn’t do anything. This text does not tell you to die to sin; it tells you that you have.[3] The text does not tell you to live for him; it tells you that you are already alive to him. That we are raised with him to newness of life is as true as that he was himself raised from the dead, and neither depends upon our belief for it to be true, nor is either proved or disproved by our behavior. What matters is what is true. And what is true is that Christ is risen, and we with him.

Yes, it remains the case that more often than we would like, our experience does not confirm our reality.

Suppose a one-time, long-time prisoner, returns each night to stay in his former jail cell, now unlocked. Or suppose he should never venture to leave it during the day. He is no less free, even should he live as a prisoner. He might prefer that cell to the alternatives for any number of reasons — perhaps it is familiarity, perhaps it is fear of the unknown, perhaps his imagination cannot picture woods and beaches and mountains; perhaps this is the best world he can imagine for himself. But that he behave as though a prisoner does not put a lock on the cell that has been permanently unlocked for him. Though it be a shame and a tragedy that he should never enjoy his freedom, he is no less free, never mind how he might live.

Likewise, we did not overcome our sin; we did not put away our malicious thoughts; we did not conquer our addictions; we did not cast down our idolatries. These, in whatever measure we might come to enjoy them, these are the consequence not the cause of our freedom.

When we were joined to Christ, his destiny became our destiny, and his ways became our ways, and set free by his grace, our works became those which he “hast prepared in advance that we should walk in them.” 

“If the son shall set you free, you shall be free indeed.”

“Therefore, let also consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

After all, “That’s the way it’s done, nobody can do two things at once, you know.”

[1] From Through the Looking Glass, chapter 5.

[2]  Paraphrasing 1 Cor 15:19 in view of its context.

[3] It is true that at least two passages in Paul direct the believer to mortify “evil deeds” (Rom 8:13) and “what is earthly” (Col 3:5). While related, this is different than his much more frequent claim that “death to Sin” has already become the case by virtue of union of Christ. The differences are at least two: (1) what is to be mortified are individual “sins” or “evil deeds”; believers are already dead to Sin, that is the hypostasis or power behind the individual transgressions. (2) Without that “dead to Sin” status, the directive to “mortify” would only be an exercise in futility.

Dr. Garwood Anderson has been a member of the Nashotah House faculty since 2007 and has served as Dean since 2017.