Late on the first Easter Sunday, after the Lord had risen from the sepulcher, ten of the disciples gathered for the evening in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem (John 20). They were afraid and probably confused. Since their leader had been crucified by the Roman power, as organized by their own Jewish leaders, they feared that now his followers might also be hunted down and punished. They closed and locked the doors. Were any of the women there? The story does not say, but Peter and John were, who saw and talked with the angels that morning, and the stories of the women were known. Some time must have been spent wondering and perhaps arguing - was He really alive? How could they know it was really Him? This kind of thing, coming back to life after you’re dead, this doesn’t happen in this real world, there must be some mistake!

Then two of the followers, not of the twelve, but the two that had gone to the village of Emmaus, came in, excited and bursting with their news. They had seen Him! They had walked with Him for seven miles and He had told them wondrous things! They had only recognized Him when He broke bread and ate with them. "Don’t doubt us, it really was Jesus!"

And then as they all talked and argued, there He was, standing with them in the room. "Peace be unto you," He said, and He showed them His hands and feet and His side, where he was wounded. He calmed them, and told them that just as he had come down to mankind, so they must go out and teach to all people all the true things that He had taught in the years He was with them.

It was these truths about how to live one’s life that were saving, not the disciples themselves. These saving truths have the power to remit or retain sins, because they were from the Lord, the disciples only transmitted them from the Lord to those who would listen and take them to heart. Then He breathed on them - representing His holy spirit - so that they would not only want to pass these truths on to people, but would also be given the words to say whenever the times came. And then He was gone again.

Thomas was not there that night. We don’t know why. And Thomas, when he heard the story, just could not swallow it. "Except I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe", he said. (John 20:25.)

The next verse tells us that the next Sunday they gathered again, and that Thomas was present this time. As before, the Lord was suddenly there, saying again, "Peace be unto you", and then directly to Thomas, "Reach hither thy finger… and reach hither thy hand… and be not faithless but believing". Now Thomas's response was, "my Lord and my God". It seems as if the Lord came this time just to convince Thomas, because it was Thomas who needed Him.

I think He does work this way. I am reminded of another story, from the gospel of Mark (Mark 9:17-27) where a father comes to Jesus with a young son who is possessed by a devil, and asks Jesus to cure him, and is asked in turn: "Do you believe I can do this?" In Mark 9:24 the father responds. Crying out, he said with tears, "I believe, help thou my unbelief."

I think many people have this conflict between lingering doubts and a desire to have the doubts taken away. If we carry on and make our decisions in life as if the doubts were indeed gone, then indeed they will lose their strength and actually will be gone.

These are the only details given of these two meetings in Jerusalem. Chronologically the next post-Easter stories are the ones that take place in Galilee.

John does go on to say at the end of his gospel "...many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God...." (John 20:30-31). Perhaps there were more post-Easter stories that weren't written down, but the ones we do have are strong. For the disciples who were involved, there was an unstoppable impact from the life and teachings of the Lord, and His crucifixion, and physical death, and now - in these stories - His resurrection. Hearing the Lord's charges to them, these Galilean fishermen and their colleagues launch out into the wide world, and work to achieve the Great Commission, enduring hardships and persecution, and succeeding - probably beyond their wildest dreams!

She said to Elijah, "What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?" —1 Kings 17:18

Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!" Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." —John 20:28-29

There are many degrees and kinds of the thing we call "faith." We may feel completely confident that the sun will rise each morning, but put a lock on our outside doors because of lack of confidence in our fellow human beings. We may speak of a faithful wife, or a faithful husband, and be easily understood. If we lose faith in our doctor, we will probably look around and find another. If we happen to be a Republican while the Democrats are in power, or vice versa, we somehow manage to maintain our faith in the future of our country. A little child has faith that Mother and Father are the wisest and kindest and best people in the world.

Loss of faith in our neighbors, or in traditional practices, or changing institutions can be an experience which leads people to despair; and such losses probably drive many to seek expert help from psychiatrists or pastors or others in the helping professions. Sometimes in such cases faith can be restored by a transfer of confidence to a person more deserving, or a practice less controversial or a more stable institution. This type of restoration, while important, is not, however, the principal object of our attention this morning. The examples given so far can be classified as secondary forms of faith. It will be our contention that all such forms of faith have their origin in and exist because of the primary form of faith, which is religious faith or faith in God.

When a person today loses faith in God, there is apparently no place to turn. That is, if one's faith is grounded in a belief in one God. Ancient Greeks and Romans avoided this sort of dilemma by having many gods, and if worship of one failed to bring the things they wanted, they simply turned to another, and another.

Think, though, of the plight of the widow of Zarepath in our text, which is closely analogous to the utter loss of hope of so many in this present day. "The son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, 'What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?'"

Not only is this sort of despondent cry of lack of faith in God raised at the loss of one of our dear ones, it may also be heard during severe and crippling diseases, at the loss of a job, or by the disgrace brought to a family by a delinquent son or daughter, or by the loss of all our personal belongings, or even as a result of a terrible personal humiliation.

In order to discover a cure in all such instances, we must first learn to analyze the underlying causes of such losses of faith. The teaching of the New Church tell us that there are two degrees or levels of religious faith, called simply "natural" faith and "spiritual" faith. And the person who loses faith for any of the sorts of reason we have listed may be reassured to this extent: the faith lost was the lower or natural degree of faith, not spiritual faith. It is, for one thing, less serious, and also is more easily regained.

In Arcana Coelestia 8078 there are brief definitions of three forms of natural faith. Let's look at them first:

"Merely natural faith is faith which is introduced by an external and not by an internal way, such as sensory faith, which is believing a thing to be so because it has been seen and touched... It is also like faith in miracles, for miracles tend to compel belief, and what is compelled does not remain. The third type is faith in authority, which is to believe in something because someone we trust has said it."

Over against this is our teaching concerning spiritual faith. In Heaven and Hell 482, we are told that a person does not really have faith if it does not come from heavenly love. There neither is nor can be any real faith in people who are absorbed in physical and worldly love apart from heavenly and spiritual love. All they have is knowledge, or an urge to regard something as true because it is useful to their worldly love. Faith is more than believing; it is loving what is true and wanting to do what is good and true from inward affection.

The person who has lost faith that can be defined as one of the three types of natural faith—that based on sense knowledge, or as the result of a seeming miracle, or on the authority of another—needs to realize first that what was lost was spiritually lifeless anyway, for whatever is truly spiritual, that is, whatever has God in it, can never die. Therefore what is called for in such cases is not to moan over our misfortune, but learn how to call on God to put new life into the old dead framework of our former natural faith.

Here is where our Old Testament reading can help. For the pattern for this sort of renewal of faith is perfectly portrayed in the deeper meaning of the details of restoring the widow's son to life by Elijah. Before turning to the revealed patterns of life contained in this Scripture incident, however, I'd like to suggest that the basic lesson to be drawn here probably applies in some way to every one of us, whether we have recently had a disturbing emotional experience or not. So far we have only mentioned such clearly defined causes of loss of faith as the loss of a loved one, severe illness, personal and financial losses, or seemingly undeserved hardships. Let's think about some of the less clearly defined causes of loss of faith.

I should like to repeat the second verse of a hymn:

"Where is the blessedness I knew

When first I saw the Lord?

Where is the soul-refreshing view

Of Jesus and his Word?"

Probably all of us have, back somewhere in our life history, not only pleasant but exciting memories of the surging joy we felt when it first dawned on us that the Lord Jesus Christ is our personal savior, and that he loves us with an everlasting love. And this realization undoubtedly led us either to a new or renewed relationship with the Lord and the church which fairly glowed with missionary zeal.

Can any of us say that the luster of that experience has not dimmed at least a little, that the ardor has not cooled somewhat? Has it gone beyond that, so that our faith is now so tarnished and pedestrian that it is little more than a spiritless habit pattern? Whatever the degree of loss of faith that you and I have experienced, I believe we all can profit from the lesson the Lord has given us for restoring and revitalizing personal faith by opening to us, and to all who seek them, the treasures hidden in his Word:

"'Give me your son,' Elijah said. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his own bed. ... Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried to the Lord, "O Lord my God, let this boy's life return to him!" The Lord heard Elijah's cry, and the boy's life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. ... Then the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth."

As we seek the spiritual meaning of this incident and its relationship to our own lives, first let us have in mind one of the primary teachings of the New Church: that all the natural things spoken of in the Bible—persons, places, objects—have a definite and individual correspondence with spiritual things. Many of these relationships, once made known to us, become evident without further explanation. For example, we all know that Moses is closely related to the Ten Commandments, so we are not surprised to find Moses spoken of even in Scripture as being himself the symbol of the Law of the Lord.

Nor is it difficult to see that the forty-year wilderness wandering of the Israelites in their quest for the Promised Land is a mirror of your struggle and mine to attain the heavenly way of life. Let me mention just one more immediately obvious prototype: Jerusalem, or Zion—the religious center of the ancient Hebrews—is quickly identifiable as symbolic of the church of God in all ages. In this same way, all the details of our text from the first book of Kings have been identified with their spiritual counterparts in the writings of our church. All that is left to us is to read and heed the lessons these truths make available to us.

So here we go: looking at our text, Elijah is outstanding among the Old Testament prophets. And more than once in the New Testament his name is linked with that of Moses, the outstanding instance being the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Elijah, we readily see, corresponds to the prophetic Word, that is, God's Word as it has an active effect on our daily lives. Using more psychological language, we might say that Elijah symbolizes dynamic divine truth. In the highest sense, Elijah represents the Lord himself as the living truth.

Moving on, in our text the widow's son was her only hope for the future, and thus pictures anyone's faith, at whatever level it may be. This mother's experience is typical of that of anyone who despite efforts to live a Christian life still may be struck by some disaster and consequent loss of faith. Even the simple act of the widow releasing the boy from her arms to Elijah contains hidden wisdom. For one thing, it points up one of the reasons faith can be lost, namely, a too-possessive attitude regarding our faith, which is really a veiled tendency to ascribe our faith to our own intelligence and goodness. This sort of essentially selfish outlook will eventually kill faith in anyone.

I wonder how many of us who have experienced some sort of loss of faith have ever realized that it probably was basically self-inflicted because of our mistaken attitudes? And how often have we perceived that the only path then left to follow is to concede somehow that faith is never really ours, but both comes from and belongs to the Lord alone? That's what it takes. Once we have this insight it will lead immediately to an elevation of our faith to a more interior level and bring about a closer union between us and the Lord. All of this is contained in the hidden wisdom in the simple act of the woman giving up her apparently dead child to the prophet.

Once this symbolic act took place, Elijah took the child upstairs to his own room, laid him on his own bed, and stretched himself out on the child—not once, but three times. I'm sure you have noticed the striking number of times groups of three appear in the Bible. There is above all the divine trinity. There is faith, hope and love. Among the Lord's disciples we hear most often about Peter, James and John; this same Peter denied the Lord three times before the rooster began to crow. And there are many others.

Three is one of the biblical numbers which denotes completeness. Every complete phase of life has a threefold nature. First there must be a desire or will to do a thing, then there must be the knowledge or understanding of how to do it, and then there must be the act itself. Applying this insight to our text, the action of Elijah shows us that, if we call on the Lord for help, we must also be prepared to make close application of the living truths of his Word to the full complex of our lives. For the Lord can help us only as we voluntarily submit to having divine truth chasten our desires, purify our thoughts, and spur us into applying the truth to our actions.

Then the truths of faith which we formerly understood only in a natural or worldly way can become filled with spirit and life. Then, with confidence renewed, with faith restored to life, we can bring it down again from the heights, so to speak—for we cannot remain for long in the very near presence of the Lord—and reestablish our faith to a place of everyday usefulness in our lives.

With the new concept of faith as essentially spiritual, and hence new spiritual faith, which this experience can give us, we can then realize that any future loss of faith need not be a source of despair, but can in fact be a means of drawing us closer to the Lord than we have ever been before. Furthermore, armed with this sort of knowledge, we will also begin to see new opportunities to reach out to others less fortunate than ourselves and to help them see the only path to restoration of faith.

The faith of the apostle Thomas is good, it is a step in the right direction:

Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!" Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

But the faith of Thomas does not meet the specifications of spiritual faith, and will in time fail. This has been dramatically illustrated to us in history by the fact that the church founded by the apostles in time fell into such falsification and decay that it was necessary for the Lord to come again in spirit and in truth to renew it.

Faith which is based on no more than a combination of external testimony of (1) the truth that there is a God, and (2) the trust we have in those who do believe in God, is useful but nevertheless natural faith. We have far better evidence, more convincing evidence for faith in God when we order our lives in ways that allow God's Word to bring inner light and peace to our souls. This is to be numbered among those of whom the Lord said, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."