I always wonder what an agnostic or an unbeliever or a skeptic does on Easter Day. Have you ever wondered that? Out of curiosity, let’s join two of them on the first Easter day. For them, the story was all over, the last curtain was rung down. Their hopes lay shattered. Their dreams lay twisted and ruined. Easter Day found them on the way back home to Emmaus, back to the old home town, about seven miles from Jerusalem, back to the workaday world, back to the dull, monotonous business of eking out an existence in a dead and dying world. These two men moved in a cloud of perplexity and disillusionment. Only a week before, the Kingdom of the Messiah was riding the crest of a wave of popularity. Jesus was acclaimed with enthusiasm wherever he went. And now, the Master was dead; the collapse of the Kingdom was complete. Instead of the long hoped for triumph, there was nothing except this ignominious defeat.

And so these two men groveled along in utter despair. But let’s not be too hard on them; let’s not be too critical. They were too close to the horror of Calvary, too close to the cross and the debris of their own shattered hopes to see clearly. Yes, too blinded by grief to see the stranger who had joined them and was walking with them. "What was this you have been discussing?" the stranger asked. One of the disciples answered with abruptness, irritation, and exasperation: "Are you the only one of the pilgrims to Jerusalem who didn’t know what happened? Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth, was crucified, he whom we hoped would redeem Israel. And, on top of that, some of the women in our company went to the tomb this morning and came back with the report that the tomb was empty. Our men went out and found the tomb empty, as they said, but they didn’t see Jesus. The women said something about seeing a vision of angels who said that Jesus was alive, but we think that the whole thing is an idle tale." And then the sad rebuke from the stranger: "O foolish men, O, foolish men, and slow of heart to believe."

Slow of heart to believe. These two men on that road to Emmaus on that first Easter became the vanguard of a great company of people, a great multitude groveling along hopelessly on the roads to their Emmauses, perplexed, despairing, disillusioned - because they will not believe what they have heard. They have, as John puts it, "made God a liar, because they will not believe what God has said."

The Risen Christ is walking with them. His words are ringing in their ears. He is here; and yet, to them, because they have closed their minds, he is dead! Dead! Even in front of them, he’s a stranger whom they do not know. Why will they not believe? They’re good, solid, no nonsense, meat and potatoes, practical men, the pragmatic, "I’m from Missouri" type. They want proof. All right, what kind? What kind will be solid enough to stick to the ribs of their minds?

There are certain laws of evidence that hold in establishing historical events. There must be documentation of the fact made by reliable, contemporary witnesses. And then, there must be effects on the other events in history that indicate that the event in question did actually occur. All right. Those are the rules. There is more reliable, documented evidence that Jesus Christ rose from the dead than there is that Julius Caesar ever lived, or that Alexander the Great died at the age of 33, that Columbus discovered America, or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. There is more direct, absolutely infallible evidence for the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than for any of the other so-called historical events.

Isn’t it strange that the historians will accept thousands of facts for which they have only the thinnest shreds of evidence, but in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Resurrection of Christ, they cast a skeptical eye and have intellectual doubts? Our scholars themselves set up the rules for the establishment of historical truth, and then they don’t have the intellectual honesty to follow their own rules. They are like the archeologist who was chiseling away frantically at the heiroglyphics on the inside of an Egyptian tomb. One of his colleagues saw him and asked what he was doing. He said: "I’m changing this inscription so it will fit with my theories."

All right. You want the facts? In the entire history of the ancient world, there is no event that is better attested to than the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is recorded in overwhelming detail in all four of the Gospels, and the four that we have in our Bibles are only a minute percentage of the Gospels that were written. And these men were historians themselves, eyewitnesses who gathered the eyewitness of other eyewitnesses. It is affirmed in 23 out of the 27 books of the New Testament by some ten different authors. It’s the keystone of the faith of the early church. In fact, there is absolutely no way, historically, to explain the existence of the early Christian church, without the fact of the Resurrection. It is the reason, historically, for Easter being the crowning event of the Christian year of 2,000 years. It is the fact that caused the changing of the holy day of the week from Saturday to Sunday.

Occasionally someone will greet me with the rather trite and redundant quip: "Well, Pastor, what do you know for sure?" Common, hackneyed, and repetitive as it is, that question never fails to jar me a bit. I’m always forced to ask myself: "What do I know for sure?" and the answer always seems to be a kind of mocking echo in my mind: "Not much, and that’s for sure!"

Look in God’s Word for sureness, and you find a typical example. Some of the disciples were turning away from the hard sayings of Christ, and he spoke to the chosen twelve, asking, "Will you also leave me?" And Peter, as was customary, replied, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, for we know and we are sure that you are the Christ, the Son of God." That sounds like a great affirmaton, doesn’t it? Here was the confession of a man who was really sure about something. And yet, a few days later, he denied publicly that he even knew Jesus.

"The Tentative Age" is what we have been called. We haven’t made up our minds. We aren’t really sure about anything. The only certainty to which we cling is the certainty of uncertainty. We are tentative, but we are also cynical and doubtful and disillusioned and skeptical. Again and again, we have found that our idols have feet of clay. A straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points. And so, we find that our axioms are not axioms at all. The inflexible laws of science, we find, are not inflexible, and, therefore, they are not laws. Another telling influence of our era is our scientism - our naively worshipful attitude toward the latest pontifications of contemporary science.

Often I am confronted by a college student who is disturbed by the contrast between his courses in science and those in philosophy. In mathematics or physics, for instance, he gets Q.E.D. answers. And if you forget what the Q.E.D. stands for, you remember it is "quod erat deinonstrandum" - "it has been demonstrated," that we put at the end of a geometric formula. But when they get to philosophy, when we discuss the origin, the meaning. and the purpose of life, it often sounds like guessing - intelligent guessing, but still ending up in speculation, surmise and conjecture, rather than any kind of provable certainty. The student wants to know whether in religious faith, in Christianity, there is an escape from this problematic, conjecturing to some solid convictions that one can really be sure about.

Well, the question deserves an answer, certainly, for all of us. But first of all, let us remind ourselves that many of the things that we like to think are provable certainties are not that at all. In our generation, Dr. Jeans and Dr. Milikan have been two major interpreters of modern science, and they have differed radically as to what is happening to the physical universe around us as a whole. Jeans thought that it was dispersing in every direction at such a prodigious rate that it might be said to be blowing up, while Milikan, on the other hand, thought that it was being inwardly recreated, and it was building up. At last, Milikan, discussing the differences between Jeans and himself, wrote: "The one thing in which we can both agree is that neither of us knows anything about it." Honest scientist!

Or take light. One would assume that physicists certainly understand light. And yet, one of them tells us that there are two different theories about light. Science isn’t sure which one is correct. And he adds, rather whimsically, that we use the one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. So, that’s how sure they are. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, one of our day’s great scientists, said: "We guess tonight, and we correct our guesses in the morning."

Listen to the words of Thomas A. Edison: "We don’t know the millionth part of one percent of anything." That’s getting pretty small, isn’t it? - millionth part of anything. "We don’t know what water is," he says. We don’t know what light is. We don’t know what electricity is. We don’t know what heat is. We don’t know anything about magnetism. We have a lot of hypotheses about these things, but, remember, that’s what they are - merely hypotheses.

Perhaps you heard about the woman who went to the doctor with back trouble. The doctor diagnosed her problem. It was perfectly obvious that her back was bothering her because she was wearing too tight a girdle. So, for the next two weeks, she went without a girdle. She went back for her next appointment, and the doctor said: "It’s obvious that your back needs support. What you need to do is wear a tight girdle." And she said: "But, Doctor, two weeks ago, you told me exactly the opposite." And without any perturbation at all and completely undaunted, as physicians are in such a case, he said, "But, Madam, in those two weeks, science has made great strides."

Like the professor in the medical school who went into a drug store and asked for some monocidicacidester of salicylic acid, and the pharmacist said: "Oh, you want some aspirin." He said: "That’s right, I can never remember that name."

Every week, I am told in the news that a certain kind of salad oil, or shoe polish, or soup has caused cancer in rats. Well, now, it’s only a relatively few people who ever called me a rat, and so I don’t know whether I should stop using these items or not. It is these differences that cause many people to ask: "Of what can I be sure?"

Certainly our first difficulty is that most of us start out with the mistaken assumption that there is only one roadway to truth - the scientific method. You see, that’s what Thomas in the Gospel wanted to use - the scientific method. What is it? Demonstrable experimentation. He wanted to stick his fingers into the holes of Jesus’ hands and thrust his hand into his side. This was the only way anything could be proved to him. In other words, scientific proof. That’s what it is, observable evidence. And so, that’s where we make our first mistake. Science is a roadway to truth, but it is only one roadway - not the only one.

For instance, I know that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is tremendously beautiful and inspiring. I know this with an absolute and final certainty that nothing can change. If I live to be as old as Methuselah and see endless changes in scientific conclusions, even see some of Einstein’s theories exploded, or perhaps hear that the American Dental Association has found that Crest tooth paste does not prevent cavities the way they thought, I will never change my mind about the beauty or the inspiration of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. That conviction is not irrational at all, is it? It is not antiscientific, because I am not antiscientific. But, obviously, it was not science that led me to that truth of which I am sure.

For many years, I have been in love with the same woman. I didn’t need any scientific aptitude test to make me fall in love with her. We filled out no psychological questionnaires. We had no genetic examinations. Our basic characteristics and personality traits were not run through any computer. She was not chosen by an IBM selector system. Frankly, I didn’t fall in love with her mind. I think it was her pretty finger that pulled the trigger. And yet, this love is the most important single fact in my life here on earth. And love is not just an emotion. It is the most important method of cognition of knowing something. We never know a person until we love that person.

Amelia Burr wrote to someone she loved:

I’m not sure the earth is round

Nor that the sky is really blue.

The tale of why the apples fall

May or may not be true.

I do not know what makes the tides

Nor what tomorrow’s world may do,

But I have certainty enough

For I am sure of you.

What are we saying? That there are many ways of arriving at certainty. Scientific proof is one. Oh, yes, Thomas stuck his fingers in the scars and then he fell down and said: "My Lord and my God," and Jesus rebuked him, because he had made it necessary to follow that way of the search for truth. "You’ve seen, you’ve had it demonstrated, so you believe. But happy are those who won’t have your opportunity and will yet believe." Certainly, science is not the only way of finding truth.

Our daughter was once a volunteer in a summer day camp for the blind. And through her, we found out a great deal about the lives, the habits, and a greater understanding about the blind. For instance, they know that the sky is blue and that trees are green, but they still don’t know what the sky or the trees really look like, because they haven’t experienced them. And yet, one young blind man who visited our home said when he left: "It was good to see you, and I hope I shall see you again." He was not resorting to wishful thinking. He was stating a vital truth. The most important things in life are not known or learned by scientific observation, but by experiencing them.

How do I know what anger is? When I get angry. How do I know what love is? When I love. How do I know what fear is? When I’m afraid. One of the great errors of our day, especially among the so-called eggheads, is that truth comes through the mating of intelligence with fact, and yet, areas where we can find truth by the intellect alone are so few and so unimportant in life as to be virtually negligible. We talk pompously at times about using our intelligence to deal with the facts objectively. I always laugh when I hear that remark. There is no one in the world who ever deals with facts objectively, and the moment he says he’s going to deal with the facts objectively, it has already become subjective, because he’s dealing with them.

The brilliant scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrell, has said: "Intelligence is useless to those who possess nothing else. A pure intellectual is an incomplete human being. He is unhappy - terribly unhappy - because he cannot enter into the world that he supposedly knows so much about."

All right, let’s look at religious truth and certainty. Certainly science itself makes God a probability. For instance, the possible contention that the universe was not created by God but arose by chance out of nothing and formed itself by accident. Dr. Frank Allen, the biochemist of Cornell University, says of this theory: "It is too absurd to deserve consideration." Yes, even science makes God a probability. But how can we change this probability into certainty? Here we might quote the great philosopher, Kierkegaard: "Existence must be content with a fighting certainty. We must remember that we are dealing with an attempted explanation of an infinite cosmos with a finite mind." And it can’t be done.

Multitudes of history’s noblest souls have had that "fighting certainty about God." They had their days of uncertainty, just like Luther, who said: "Some days I believe, and some days I doubt." But underneath, there is the sureness, like Paul’s: "I know whom I have trusted." The basis of that assurance is that same basis that supports most of the important certainties of life - not theory, but experience. Think of some of them.

The Experience of wonder: A few years ago, we stood on the heights of the snow-covered Alps in Switzerland, and I experienced the overwhelming wonder of God’s handiwork. And no one, at that moment, had to prove to me that it was his handiwork. I knew, because I experienced it.

Think of the experience of vocation: Why are people called to certain tasks, tasks that they never thought of undertaking, that they objected to, even abhorred? Until I was a sophomore in college, I was absolutely certain that I would never be so stupid as to spend my life in the ministry! Here I am. Experience, because I experienced the sense of vocation.

The experience of prayer as communion with God: Centuries of Christian living hear witness to this - the ability to say: "I am not alone. Even when I am alone, my Father is with me." As Emerson has put it: "God enters a private door to you, and you know it." God enters into every individual. And, as we pray, we are assured that we are not talking to thin air. We are in conversation with the eternal Father in heaven. Of course, no proof is possible, but then, no proof is necessary.

What do I know for sure? Well, the list isn’t very long. But all the important things I know. I know not by sight, not by induction or deduction. I know by faith, by experience. I know because I am sure. I am certain, because I know. Does that sound like double talk? It isn’t. This is the truth for all of us.

I think of how limited Helen Keller was in obtaining provable certainties. She could not hear. She could not see. She could not speak. When, finally, they developed that system of communicating with her, they felt the time had come that she should be told about God, and so they did. When they had finished their communication to her, she smiled and said: "I knew that God existed all the time. I just didn’t know what you called him." That is what I know, for sure!

A college student said this last Easter: "Wouldn’t it be terrible, after all this celebration, all of this hullabaloo, all of our songs of faith and our alleluias, if it were not true?" And I said: "Yes, it would be tragic. But you know it is true, and I know it is true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead by the glory of the Father, that even Job, in the midst of his misery, his deprivation, his loss, and the stupid explanations of his friends, was able to cry out: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’ "

I KNOW THAT FOR SURE!