Text: John 20:19-31
Theme: Embracing the questions of faith.
Thomas the Believer
This morning we are going to write a Psalm, the one hundred and
fifty first Psalm. It may be very short and I understand and that is okay
by me. We can have phrases or sentences of thanksgiving in honor of
earth day, celebrating this incredible creation we live on. We can have
phrases or sentences of joy because of Easter and God’s love for us. We
can name or list questions or doubts that we have. These are all fair
game for a Psalm.
There are some phrases from the Psalm we read together this
morning that really resonate with me:
Because God is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
I’m just stubborn enough to love the idea of not being moved.
The Lord is my chosen portion, I have a goodly heritage.
This reminds me of all the great people who have stood with God.
My heart is glad, my soul rejoices, my body is at rest.
When I am troubled I don’t sleep so the idea of my body being at
rest because my heart is glad and my soul rejoices is a good one.
You show me the path of life.
This has been true for me, God has guided me to my path.
In your presence there is fullness of joy.
What I have gotten from a life of faith is joy. This is the sole reason
I am a pastor because I think there is nothing more joyful than talking
about faith and living the life together.
Because it is the first Sunday after Easter we have been assigned a
joyful Psalm to read. But there are Psalms filled with pleading, “Lord,
there is no longer any who are godly. O Lord, attend to my cry. How
long shall the wicked exult? Why have you turned your face from me?”
There are Psalms where the writer begs God to smite their enemies. It is
not all Easter joy in the Psalms. Let’s start throwing out some ideas and
see what we come up with.
The Lectionary always assigns us the story of Thomas the first
Sunday after Easter. In this schedule we have permission to waver, as
did the first disciples between the joy of Easter morning and our own
struggle with what to believe, and how to believe, and even when we
don’t believe.
I put a cartoon on the front of our bulletin this morning. It isn’t a
great copy but I appreciated Thomas’s point. He was faithful to Jesus,
prepared to die with Jesus long before Palm Sunday and he is the one,
called the doubter. Negatively the church has cast him as a person of
unbelief. And why, for wanting the same kind of encounter with Jesus
the other disciples had?
Thomas was a good guy, a faithful disciple. In John, chapter eleven,
right after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead Jesus wanted to return to
Judea but the other disciples did not because they knew there was
already a price on Jesus’ head and they were guilty by association.
Thomas is the one who said, “Come let us go with him that we may die
with him”. After the resurrection, in the building of the new church,
Thomas set out for India where he is credited for sharing Christianity.
He was called the twin. There is really no reason for this name, but some
have suggested the Gospel writer of John, who gave multiple meanings
to everything called him that because he is our twin. We, the faithful
though far from perfect believers are the twins of Thomas. What one of
us does not want an experience of our own where we are able to touch
Jesus’ hands and feel his side? We would love this kind of tangible proof.
Rachel Held Evans is a twenty-something Christian who published
an article titled, “15 Reasons Why I Left the Church”. She says that
questions were seen as liabilities and no one told her that “dark nights
of the soul” can be a part of the faith experience. This is all very
interesting to me because in the United Church of Christ we have
sometimes erred on making questions and doubt of more significance
than faith. We would benefit us most is a balanced open faith, where
questions and doubts are allowed but where we are encouraged, to
struggle to find answers that are comfortable enough knowing we will
be challenged again on some other day. Ultimately faith is nothing more
than stepping off a rock and trusting that there is holy ground beneath
our feet.
Thomas is not a poor or lousy believer for wanting an experience
with the risen Christ. He paves the way for every one of us to struggle
with what makes sense to believe and what seems out of our realm.
There was another cartoon about Thomas that I liked. It was a fish story,
a picture of Jonah trying to convince Thomas the whale really was that
big. The caption read, “Jonah fails to convince Thomas of the size of the
whale”. Obviously the point being that Thomas doesn’t buy into fish
stories but the inside joke is that the whale really was that big.
It pays to be discriminating, to use our critical thinking skills in
coming to terms with the Jesus story. As I was cruising the Internet
exploring what other pastors had to say about doubt and faith I came to
a nice story about someone who believed yet still struggled and how he
eventually made the metaphorical jump into the ocean of faith. It was a
good story, a nice story. I don’t know if it illumined my understanding
very much but what I really appreciated was a comment from one of the
commenters suggesting that what the young pastor really needed was a
clairvoyant or a fortune teller of some kind. They even left a phone
number. It was a great comment to make on completely missing the
point but tempting at times, truly tempting.
Joan Chittistier and Rowan Williams have a relatively new book
out called, Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluias For All That Is. Their second
chapter is on the gift of doubt, which they say is something to be
thankful for. They say: There is simply a point in life when reason fails to
satisfy our awareness of what is clearly unreasonable and clearly real at
the same time – like love and self-sacrifice and trust and good. Data does
not exist to explain these unexplainable things. Then only the doubt that
opens our hearts to what we cannot comprehend, only the doubt that
makes us rabidly pursue the truth, only the doubt that moves us beyond
complacency, only the doubt that corrects mythologies not worthy of faith
can lead us to the purer air of spiritual truth. Then we are ready to move
beyond the senses into the mystical, where faith shows us those
penetrating truths the eye cannot see.
I’ve talked for the past year about the power of tiny churches and
shared stories of tiny churches doing big things. There is a blog I
sometimes read of a Presbyterian pastor, Mary Harris Todd. She has
described tiny churches doing powerful things as mustard seed
churches. Remember the parable, if we had faith but the size of a
mustard seed, it is all we need.
On this day when real life human struggles are depicted in the
Psalms, on this day when we remember the story of Thomas and are
grateful for both his doubt and faith, it is important to remember the
mustard seed. We have faith enough. If our faith were packaged up nice,
boxed and set with a ribbon and bow would it be the kind of faith that
could take us through the travails of life? I don’t think so. I think we
need a working faith, one that grows with our life experiences, one that
deepens after we have made it through a difficult time, one that finds joy
in the way God reveals our path to us.
Bless Thomas, not because he was a doubter but because he has
illustrated to us what faith is supposed to look like. Amen.