Prelimary Note: This sermon is based on the episode of Thomas found in the Gospel of John, chapter 20. Because Thomas was absent when the resurrected Christ appeared to his disciples, he could not bring himself to believe that Christ was risen. The following week, Christ appeared again and Thomas was convinced. This Gospel passage is not the text normally read for this Sunday. I preached on it nevertheless to develop the rather strong themes presented in my sermon of last Sunday on Emmanuel’s need to articulate its corporate faith.
Maddie and Grace, and all you other children here today — how would you feel if someone you cared about showed up and gave a party just when you were out of town? I’m thinking of a little boy I know who was spending a week at his playmate’s home in Plymouth when his grandmother showed up unexpectedly in Boston for two days. She took everyone out for dinner and bought each grandchild a treat. She even left a gift behind for the little boy. The boy still felt hurt and didn’t want to believe she could do that. He missed his Grandma.
So also with Thomas in our Gospel this morning. It is not disbelief that makes Thomas’s story special. In fact every story in the Gospels about Jesus’s resurrection focuses on Jesus’s followers’ disbelief, fear, or inability to recognize him. When Thomas starts doubting, he is no different from the rest.
Thomas’s special feature seldom gets mentioned. He is hurt, because he got left out of a very important meeting. The risen Jesus, full of promises of peace and power, had breathed new life into the disciples — but chose to do it just when Thomas was not around. Thomas had good reason to be cranky.
Thomas brings us a question as ancient as the church, but as fresh as what we confide to each other at coffee hour. What do we have to believe if we want to belong? Can we doubt and still be followers of Jesus? Do we all have to believe the same things in the same way in order to have a place in the Church?
The risen Christ deals quite tenderly with Thomas, as if to tell us that our doubts are a precious part of the journey of faith. The resurrection stories tell us that doubt and fear are part of any encounter with the crucified and risen Christ. Sometimes the risen Christ meets us in the rooms and closets where we hide. Sometimes the wise Christ catches up with us on the road where we seek escape from what we no longer trust. But when that Christ meets, it is not to prove a point of doctrine. It is heart to heart. He not only shows us his wounds, he touches our own wounds as well. He stands with us in the pain or paralysis brought on by life’s let-downs and betrayals.
As his offer of peace seeps into us, it becomes a chance for a different kind of life. Out of our pain, he enables us to work for reconciliation and justice in his name.
So what is this faith that exists alongside our doubt? For starters, we have to accept that religious growth requires us to raise questions about the meaning of beliefs: what does it mean to talk about incarnation or resurrection or virgin birth? Is every Bible story and doctrine a literal truth? Are some of them symbolic? As the liberal saying goes, the Bible should be taken seriously, but not literally. These are questions about beliefs, but not really about faith.
There is a vital difference between BELIEF and FAITH, a point that has saved many a religious person. By faith, God encounters us, our family, or our community in some existential way so that we trust God’s action in our life. FAITH is the way the soul knows something too deep for words. That wordless faith can happen for one person or a whole community. But when we do finally search for words, we come up with a verbal formula called belief or doctrine. And we must search for words to express that faith, because to keep silent would betray the importance of what has moved us. As in our reading from the book of Job this morning (Chapter 42, v. 3), “I have spoken what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not grasp.”
Once we put our faith into words, we must find words that are personal enough to frame our faith but universal enough to link us to each other and to the transcendent source of our faith. That is how we begin to name God, to learn God’s own names for God’s self, and to tell the stories of our faith tradition, in our case, the stories of Jesus. The struggle to interpret God’s names and Jesus’s stories can go on and on, but the names and the stories still guide us to that encounter too deep for words.
That’s why we can make room for many ways to interpret doctrines. It is our great strength as Episcopalians. For example, our faith in the resurrection does not answer a riddle about where Jesus’s body went. The full faith of Easter means that God encounters us so closely in Christ that God’s Spirit overcomes the power of death to make us give up. God’s Spirit spills over into us and now — now — we trust that Spirit even in our doubts and we act even with our fears.
In my sermons, I keep suggesting that we need a community to deepen our faith. Maybe we only capture the meaning of resurrection in the bigger framework of a whole community, like current or recent Christian communities under threat of persecution. The Christians of El Salvador, China, Palestine, and Israel live or have lived through “cycles of death and despair”, that make them wonder if the faith is worth it, if Christ’s justice is a poor illusion in the face of lost property, lost family, torture, and sudden execution. For them, faith in Christ means “being threatened with Resurrection” — that’s what one of their poets called it. (1)
In this morning’s Gospel, when Jesus meets the disciples, they are sick with fear of what the authorities could do to them. And what does he do? He doesn’t whisk them back safe to home — no, he blows them away — literally — with the task to bring God’s forgiveness into the very world that threatened to string them up one by one. This was not chicken soup for the soul. Working for reconciliation was risky business, just like it is today in Central America or Palestine. Look what happened to Jesus. If anything, Thomas was lucky to be left out.
How often we find that Easter faith in lives around us! I think of a friend, a whole family, really. His slow but terminal medical condition has overturned their lives. They doubt. They fear. They live by faith, family, and friends in a Holy Spirit who lifts them up. They share a wisdom that comforts even people who try to comfort them.
I think of a woman I met In Nicaragua who lives by faith, family, and friends. She’s lost her husband and her livelihood and lives at the dusty edge of a rural town. To support her many children, she takes in laundry and sells trinkets. And, in her poverty, she radiates a sense of peace. She surrounds her home with a flower garden. Hanging from the windows and house beams I saw vibrant blue tin cans — they were old Spam cans cut down to flower pots. One flower was especially frequent, delicate, and lovely, so I asked her its name. She told me — “Resurrecion” — the resurrection flower.
My sick friend and my Nicaraguan neighbor show us that the famous leap of faith sometimes just feels like putting one foot in front of the other. They walk with their wounds wide open where the Easter light shines through them.
People of faith walk where God calls them, even into strange risks, because it is the only place they can walk to be the person that God calls them to be. A disciple going back to a hostile Jerusalem is not so far from a family haggling with the health care provider over forms and payments or a South American woman sweeping shattered glass the gunmen left on her doorstep, but refusing to sweep away her dreams.
So what is the faith that the risen Christ wants to give to Thomas and you and me? It is not belief in this or that doctrine, but the room to let transcendent hope, irrational joy, or the peace that passes understanding — and these are all names for Christ — room to let Christ work in our fears. Faith finds God has entered the locked room of your heart — quite humbly too, for as Jesus shows us his own wounds, he embraces ours as well.
In the words of the English feminist Janet Morley, let us pray,
O Christ of Resurrection fear and Resurrection faith, in the midst of our doubt we feel you breathe on us the gift of your peace. Even in our fear, we hear You call us to commitment. Give us faith according to your will. Give us faith to encounter you as our resurrection and our life. For you are our Lord and our God. (2)
(1) Julia Esquivel, “They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection”, quoted by Stephen M. Larson, “Second Sunday of Easter”, in Homilies for the Christian People, ed. by Gail Ramshaw (Collegeville, 1991), p. 456.
(2) Collated and paraphrased from Janet Morley, All Desires Known (London, 1992), Collects for Easter 1 and Easter 3, pp. 15-16.