April 12, 2015
Second Sunday of Easter
Rev. Amy Welin: What do you think: Is doubt the enemy of faith? Is doubt a spiritually destructive force that separates us from God? Were you taught that doubting is a personal spiritual failure? (I was.)
To have doubts and questions about faith is unsettling, isn’t it? We can wonder if something is wrong with us – are we just faking it? are we foolish? do we need remedial Sunday School? or just to pray harder? In my years as a church leader, I have noticed that people who live with doubts about Jesus and the resurrection can live in a silent desperation, because doubt in the church is treated almost like a leprosy of the soul.
Let us re-frame that, using today’s gospel.
In today’s gospel story, Thomas’s concern for concrete details is more a sign of insight than of disbelief. Thomas is the apostle who regularly uses the evidence at hand to connect pieces of the puzzle of Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Thomas foresees the cross, and it is he who declares that the disciples should follow Jesus to Jerusalem, so they could all die there with him (John 11). At their last meal together, Thomas is the one who asks Jesus how the disciples will find the way to the place where Jesus will be going (John 14).
Doubt can be a sign of spiritual growth, that treats our faith not as an impenetrable fortress that protects us from the world, but as a journey that requires change and reflective thinking. Doubt requires that we wrestle with the simple theology of our childhood: we have to re-think God. The God we thought we had all figured out – the One who blesses the good and punishes the bad (according to our standards, of course), the One who likes our translation of the Bible or who upholds our church as the one true religion – is not really God. God is not so simple and predictable after all. And when we realize that, we are on to something.
None of us possesses the key to the mind of God. We do not know what sort of books God would read. Or how God would vote. Or what sort of car Jesus would drive. We do not control the Almighty. As we grow in faith, it is inevitable that we shall struggle with the mystery of God.
Thomas struggles to make sense of things that seem impossible when his friends tell him about them. When Thomas asks for evidence that Jesus was really there and alive, it Is a sign that he has listened to Jesus. If we recall Jesus’ instruction to his followers to be wary of those who claim that they have seen the Messiah (Mt 24.23ff), we can be more sympathetic to Thomas who doubts what he has not seen for himself. Thomas knows that only God can raise the dead, and he doubts that anyone could do for Jesus what Jesus had done for Lazarus.
The questions that Thomas asks so regularly in the gospel clarify his faith in Jesus. Thomas is labeled a doubter but he is actually a faithful questioner.
As Christians, we want to believe things that do not seem to be entirely logical. God loves sinners and wants them to come back. (Show me anywhere else that could happen). A virgin birth. (If Mary were your son’s fiancée, what would you think?) A poor itinerant preacher executed as a criminal is the Son of Almighty God. (On the best of days, a shocking proposition). The greatest are those who act like the least important. (With that as advertising, it is amazing that anyone wants to be baptized.) The Big One: life continues after death. (A wonderful promise, and biologically impossible).
Perhaps it is the very impossibility of these things that points out what exactly faith is after all. Faith is not necessarily having everything all figured out.
As Anne Lamott puts it in her book, Plan B, “ . . .the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be until some light returns.”
Faith is a gift. Faith is also a conscious choice. The longer I live, and the more dead people I know, the more inclined I am to want to believe with all my heart in the resurrection. As a priest, I grow frustrated because I cannot explain exactly how Jesus was restored to life. Of course, I do not understand exactly how my microwave works, and yet I use that every day. It is the experience of the effects of the process that inspire my trust in something I cannot explain.
Thomas sets a wonderful example of a way in which we can come to fulfill our desire to believe in things we have not seen for ourselves. He does have his doubts, and he asks questions, and still he stays with his community even though he has not had their experience of their resurrected friend. When he finally beholds the Christ, his eyes are opened and his heart is moved. His declaration “my Lord and my God!” is not an intellectual experience of cognition: it is love. Faith is not only an exercise of intellect. Faith also engages the heart. The gospel has no record of Thomas probing the wounds of Jesus. He does not need to, because he recognizes the love of God that is before him.
If we want our hearts to be moved to deeper faith, if we want to satisfy our doubts, we need to see Christ. Some people travel to Jerusalem or to Rome. Some go on retreat. I think we can find Christ closer to our regular life.
Look into the faces of the people who came here this morning, all wanting to be part of Christ’s body. Some are filled with joy and some with loneliness. Look into the eyes of the children, sent to us by God, probably not so we could raise them as Christians but so we could become better Christians in the process. Go out to the Green on a weekday and see the face of a suffering Christ. Learn to bear a chalice and see faith and the longing for Christ in the eyes of people who come to communion.
Christ is alive and present all around us. It might be more convenient if we were able to explain everything about Jesus and the resurrection, if divine matters were entirely comprehensible to human reason. But then he wouldn’t be divine, would he? We cannot touch his hands or side. But we do have the light of Christ among us, before our very eyes.
And many of us have some doubt, which is the reason we walk in faith.