I Don't Believe It

 John 20:19-31

Jesus Appears to the Disciples

19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Jesus and Thomas

24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin[a]), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The Purpose of This Book

30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may continue[b] to believe that Jesus is the Messiah,[c] the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Sermon I Don’t Believe It

The Sunday after Easter. Not a day that gets a ton, or any fanfare.

As far as most are concerned, the Big Day was last week. And appropriately so. It’s the day our sanctuary was packed with people, including a number of first time visitors! It’s the day many old friends and neighbors came back. It was the day of the big egg hunt! It was the day of extended families putting on their prettiest pastels and joining together in the pews before going out to a huge annual brunch. It’s the day my kids came home to Easter baskets and candy. 

Easter’s a ton of fun. No denying that. And I’m a huge Easter girl, to the extent that I picked Easter weekend back in 2009 to propose to Sean (yes, you read that right, I proposed to him. Feminism, y’all.).

But I’ve long held a very tender spot in my heart for this Sunday, the Sunday immediately after Easter, the day many take off, a day several of my clergy call “Holy Humor” Sunday and just do something fun, like a hymn sing, because the turn out is so low, and a day my chaplain in college called Cannonball Sunday because the pews were so empty that she could fire a cannon in the sanctuary and not hit anyone. Gotta love that sense of humor, it’s how you survive in the ministry.

But this day, it’s special. Not only because it is very much still Easter, and it will be all the way until Pentecost. But because this is the day we lift up this story about the disciple that tugs the tightest on my heartstrings, Thomas. Regarded throughout history as Doubting Thomas because of this one story, and not remembered for any of his other moments. We don’t even call him his actual nickname, Didymus, or the Twin. He’s Doubting Thomas. 

This story picks up immediately after where we were last week. Jesus talked to Mary outside his tomb, and told her to spread the Good News. Mary ran from the cemetery to go find the eleven surviving disciples, and tell them Jesus was alive. And not a one of them believed her. Unfortunately, both Mary and Jesus knew that might happen. The disciples were pretty stubborn, and Mary was a woman, and never got the status or respect of the men even though she was a Day One. So Jesus himself materialized through a wall, while the disciples holed up in a locked room. The text suggests they were doing that because they feared the people that tried and killed Jesus, but I’ve never quite bought that. The scary mob executed Jesus, so why would they care about the disciples? It’s telling that Mary came to them, told them Jesus was alive, and their reaction was to hide. They feared responsibility. They feared duty. They feared the Good News. And maybe they were afraid to face their best friend after they abandoned him in his darkest hours.

The next bit of Good News is that Jesus totally understood, and didn’t hold any of that against the disciples. What was done was done, and he was focused on the future, not the past. And moving on to the future means not just acknowledging but embracing that your friends are flawed people. Jesus came to extend his peace to them. Unfortunately, while he was doing that, Thomas was taking a bathroom break. So he missed everything.

Y’all, I’m an apologist for my boy, Thomas. He just wanted what his friends got. He wanted to see proof before he could commit. Is that so unreasonable? Is that so different from what any of us would do? After all he’d seen, and the trauma he was healing from, was it so much for him to need something tangible to hang his hat on? I argue, no. I further argue that Thomas’s attitude proved just how seriously he took Jesus, and set him up for a lifetime of even stronger faith than what he’d had before, as a disciple of a living guy walking around healing and teaching people. 

Most people of faith don’t like owning up to this, but we struggle all the time with the big D word of our faith: doubt. It’s not a bad feeling to have, simply a human one. And in our particular faith journey, how could you possibly avoid harboring doubts from time to time? Doubt shows me that you’re paying attention and you didn’t check your brain at the door. We’ve gotta buy into some tall tales in this spiritual system. Did a snake talk to the first woman on earth? If Cain and Abel’s parents were the only other people in existence, then where did Cain’s wife come from? Did Lot’s wife really turn into salt? Did a senior citizen build a boat big enough to hold his entire family and two of every animal on earth, and then float around in it for a month and a half? And if so, why did he forget to bring the unicorns? Did Moses really part the red sea? And what about Jesus’ miracles–walking on water, calming the storm, healing the blind, the deaf, the mobility impaired, raising Lazarus? Coming back from the dead?

Those, in a way, are easier questions to deal with, because they involve our understanding of the laws of science and nature. In my experience, the harder questions we have to face are those that make us doubt the connection between being a Christian and being a good person. Did God really expect Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac? Did God allow all the first born Egyptian children to be killed by the plague? Did God allow Pharaoh and his army to be drowned? Did God really wipe out all of humanity save for Noah’s family? All of the wars and violence in the Bible, did God sign off on all of that? All of the atrocities that people of faith have committed in the name of God, why did God allow that?

It’s ok to doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Certainty is. If you think you have it all worked out, there’s no more room for God. If you’re asking questions about your faith, it shows how much you care. That’s exactly what God wants from us. Growing into this faith involves getting more and more comfortable with asking questions, even when you realize most of them have no good answer. Trusting God, despite the holes in what we understand, is the strongest kind of faith there is.

This was the faith held by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who passed away back in 2016. His parents and his sister were all killed in the concentration camp that held them prisoner. Like many, many, many compassionate humans, Wiesel deeply struggled to reconcile his family’s Jewish faith, one that teaches of a just and loving God, with the God of his lived experience, who allowed 11 million people to die at the hands of the Third Reich. The themes of struggle and doubt permeated all of his writing, and made his works that much more relatable. By the end of his life, Wiesel not only lacked resolution to those aching questions, but found a kind of peace in what his questions meant about his relationship to the Holy.

In a 2005 interview, a woman named Cathleen Fansani asked Wiesel at length how he managed to keep his belief in God after all he’d experienced. Wiesel gave a very thoughtful answer about what his faith meant to him,

“Doubt is there all the time. The questions are there, and all my questions are stronger than all my answers. I continue because what is the alternative? I accept having faith. I call it wounded faith, my faith is wounded. But I believe. A very great Hasidic master once said, ‘No heart is as whole as a broken heart.’ And I paraphrase it differently: No faith is as pure as a wounded faith because it is faith with an open eye. I know all the elements of the situation; I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t have faith. I have better arguments against faith than for faith. Sure, it’s a choice. And I choose faith.”

(From Cathleen Falsani, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.)

It takes incredible bravery to wrestle with doubt in your faith. The easiest path is to either find someone to give you air-tight answers to all of your questions and then take those answers at face value, even if they lead you away from God, or to give up and abandon faith at the first sign of a logical inconsistency. Choosing what I assume we all have, a faith that never completely sits well with what we think we know, a faith that always keeps our minds and hearts on our toes, a faith that always has us demanding proof, is bold. But I hold up our friend Thomas in the wake of those choices, not as some kind of warning, but as a brother who gets it, and who helps us find the Good News again. When he asked for proof, Jesus gave it to him. Keep reaching out and trying to touch the hands of Jesus, because you will inevitably be touched by something that keeps you going, and you will grow.

Amen.