“DEALING WITH OUR DOUBTS”
John 20:19-31
(03-30-08)

Let me begin this sermon with a Bible quiz.
Which disciple, upon hearing that Jesus wanted to return to Judea,
to the place where his life was threatened the last time he was there, said,
“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
And which disciple said in response to Jesus’ words
that he was going to go and prepare a place for them in his Father’s house,
“Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?”
prompting Jesus to reply, I am the way, and the truth and the life.
Maybe you think these words were spoken by Peter, the most famous of the 12 disciples, or perhaps by John, the one traditionally referred to as the beloved disciple.
Perhaps the words belong to Andrew or James.
But in fact these words are spoken by Thomas,
a disciple who doesn’t always get the credit that I think he deserves.

Peter is the impetuous one, the one who speaks before he thinks,
the one who is bold enough to walk on water towards Jesus,
but he’s also the one who abandons and denies Jesus three times at the high priest’s house.
John is the more spiritual one, the one Jesus appoints from the cross to look after his mother, the one who rushed to the empty tomb with Peter and believed quickly.
But Thomas is the practical one.
Jesus and the disciples had been in Judea,
where the crowds had wanted to stone Jesus for claiming that he and the Father were one. Hearing that Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha was ill,
Jesus decided to return to Judea, to Bethany.
The disciples tried to dissuade Jesus from returning so quickly
to the area where he was threatened, but Jesus insisted.

Thomas, being the practical one, says, well, if he’s going, let’s go with him.
And if we’re going to die, at least we’re going to die together.
Then, later, when Jesus was teaching the disciples about his returning to the Father
and about the fact that in his Father’s house are many dwelling places,
it is Thomas who wants to know, who asks Jesus,
well how can we go where you are going when we don’t know the way?
He is practical, he is not embarrassed to ask questions,
he speaks out, he doesn’t always go with the flow,
he’s an independent thinker, he dissents, he sticks out from the crowd.
I once knew a man who told me at a General Assembly,
if everyone votes in favour of something, I will vote against it,
just to remind people that we’re Presbyterians.
It may be that Thomas was a Presbyterian and didn’t know it.

And maybe that explains to some extent why,
when the other disciples were huddled in fear behind locked doors,
on that first day of the week, on that first Easter Sunday,
that Thomas was not with them.
Did you ever wonder where he was?
Here were the disciples, Peter and Andrew, James and John, and all the rest,
scared out of their minds,
even though Mary Magdalene had told them that she had seen the risen Lord.
They locked themselves in the room, afraid of the Jewish authorities.
But Thomas wasn’t with them.
Where was he?

If the rest of the disciples were so afraid
that they dared not venture outside their locked room,
why wasn’t Thomas also with them?
Perhaps in the aftermath of what had happened to Jesus,
he was disillusioned and separated himself from the group.
But what if he had heard Mary’s testimony that Jesus had appeared to her
and what if he wasn’t about to wait like a coward behind locked doors,
but was outside, trying to find out whether Mary was telling the truth or not?
What if he was just being practical,
going out to get the food that they would need for their long ordeal?
For whatever reason, Thomas was not there
when the risen Christ first appeared to the disciples.
And when he did rejoin them and was told that Jesus had appeared to them,
he would not believe.
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.
And for this, Thomas has long suffered the ignominy of being called the doubter. Doubting Thomas.
Even today when we call someone a Doubting Thomas, it is a pejorative term,
a comment on a person’s stubbornness or unwillingness to believe.

But what’s so wrong with doubt?
Many of us have been raised and educated to think critically.
And we apply that critical thinking to just about every area of our lives.
But for some, it seems that when it comes to matters of faith,
we throw that critical thinking out the window.
We fear doubt as if our doubt somehow reduces the reality of God
and God’s presence in the world.
But how many of us can say honestly that we have no doubts whatsoever
when it comes to our faith?
I know that faith by definition is not something that is empirically provable.
Its not science, its not logic,
its not grounded in the traditional reason in which our critical thinking is rooted.
Faith is a leap, it’s a confession.
But must faith be without doubt?
Who hasn’t thought for at least one moment, what if what I believe is wrong?
What if all this isn’t what I believe it to be?
In fact, I would be more worried
about a person who has never expressed an ounce of doubt
than about a person who admits to having doubts.
Faith, isn’t merely parroting what our ancestors, our parents,
our teachers or our friends have told us.
That isn’t faith, that’s merely repetition.
Faith needs to be examined if its to be worthwhile.
Socrates said that an unexamined life isn’t worth living,
and I would add that an unexamined faith isn’t worth holding.

A fallacy that the church and Christians too long have lived by
is that we need to present some sort of unblemished façade to the world
in order to be effective.
The image of the strong church is often that of the successful church,
full of people, rich in resources, happy and content,
but I know of no church like that in the Bible.
The churches in the Bible are often described as being full of contention,
full of people who are deeply flawed,
full of squabbles about who they should follow.
The churches I read about in the Bible, that God still loves deeply,
are churches that have forsaken their first love,
that struggle with idolatry and immorality,
that have the reputation of being alive but are in fact dead,
that are lukewarm in their faith and witness.
It doesn’t matter what a church looks like from the outside,
dig a bit deeper and we find that every church
has a host of issues which lurk just beneath the surface.

We have doubts, doubts about our survival, our relevance, our cohesion, our doctrine. We have doubts about whether we are making a difference,
whether it matters to anyone that we’re here.

And it’s the same with people as well.
To be a Christian doesn’t mean that we have a plastered on smile,
pretending that everything is just dandy in our lives.
To be an effective Christian doesn’t mean that we can’t be seen to struggle,
that we can’t acknowledge our doubts and our weaknesses.
To be a Christian is to know that no matter how much we suffer,
no matter how much we doubt, no matter how imperfect we are,
God still loves us, God still cares about us.
To be a strong church is to acknowledge our many imperfections,
to be unashamed to express our fears and worries,
to admit that we are a community of sinners and not saints,
a community, a family, that is what we are,
not because of us,
but because of the one who loves us, who died for us,
who has been raised and lives for us.

Doubt is an honest part of our faith.
What makes the disciples of Jesus so credible
is that these deeply flawed men and women,
people just like you and I,
these people with all their warts and flaws,
they are the ones who eventually deal with their doubts,
not necessarily getting past them,
but living faithfully in spite of them.
Dealing with our doubts doesn’t mean that we get to the point
where doubt will never enter into the picture again.

Contrary to what I thought, I have discovered that as people get older,
as people get closer to the reality of their own death, doubt often increases.
You might think that as we get older
that we would lean more and more on the assurance of God’s promises,
but I think that as human beings,
the more real death becomes for us,
the more fear can challenge us and the more doubt can creep up.
When we’re younger we don’t doubt as much
because often the need isn’t as pressing.
Why worry about what the next life will be like
when you think you’re going to live forever?
But as the time approaches, we begin to ask these questions
with a greater sense of urgency and significance.

So doubt never truly disappears,
but its how we live faithfully in spite of our doubts that is a mark of maturity in faith. None of us will have the opportunity that Thomas had.
A week after he had first appeared to the disciples,
the risen Christ appeared to them again and this time Thomas was with the others.
Jesus reached out to Thomas and invited him to touch the wounds,
to stop doubting and believe.
Thomas did not need to touch him to make his confession, My Lord and my God!
But in some way, I think it is precisely because Thomas has struggled with his doubt, because he has been honest about his doubt,
that he can now come to such a powerful confession about Jesus.

An unexamined faith is not worth holding,
but a faith which is borne out of struggle, after dealing with doubt,
that’s the kind of faith that’s more likely to last,
the kind that will sustain us when the challenges of life come our way,
that will remain with us even as we approach the end of our earthly lives.
Its wrestling with and through our doubts that brings us to true confession.
Its going through the deepest valleys
that allow us appreciate the highest peaks.
Its struggling with the anger and hurt and pain of suffering
which makes the healing of God’s peace so much more powerful.

And as I have said,
none of us will have the luxury of Thomas’ experience of the risen Christ.
Which is precisely why Jesus said,
because you have seen me, you have believed,
blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
Dealing with our doubts may seem harder for us
because we weren’t there with Thomas when Jesus appeared to him.
But clearly Jesus affirms that it is not only possible to believe without seeing,
but that it is also blessed to be able to believe without seeing.
Maybe Jesus won’t appear to us in the way he appeared to Thomas,
but isn’t it also true that Jesus appears to us in many other ways?

Don’t we know the presence of our risen Saviour in the moments of our lives
when no other explanation can speak to the peace we feel in the midst of our hurting, when we see unexpected glimpses of hope in the midst of despair?
I’ve seen the resurrected Christ
embodied in the widow,
who finds a way to carry on after losing her husband,
in the HIV positive mother
who is told that her brand new baby doesn’t have the virus.
Don’t we see Jesus when people come to reconciliation after acrimony,
when healing occurs in body, mind or in spirit?
Haven’t you seen the power of Christ’s reality
in the strength people show that even they themselves didn’t know they had?
Or in the grace and forgiveness people can find in the face of tragedy and heartbreak? Don’t we know the presence of the risen Christ when churches, imperfect as we are,
dare to reach out to those who are in need,
who are seeking and searching, who are hurting and aching?
Don’t we know the presence of the Resurrected One
when the community of God’s people discover that its not about our survival
and that we can’t be a church that believes in resurrection if we’re afraid to die?
And so we see the reality of Jesus whenever the oppressed are freed,
whenever justice triumphs over long held evils,
whenever hope overcomes despair
and the freedom to live overcomes the fear of dying.

The good news my friends is that the resurrected Christ keeps coming for us,
just like he came for Thomas,
to help us deal with our doubts,
to help us work through our questions,
to allow us to ask them in the first place
and know that we aren’t somehow branded as unworthy because we dare ask them. Jesus doesn’t condemn Thomas for his doubt,
he only invites him to stop doubting and believe.
Jesus provided Thomas with what he needed to stop doubting and believe.

There comes a time when we have to stop doubting and believe.
Not that our doubts will cease to exist,
but that our doubts won’t stop us from believing.
That’s the kind of faith that’s real,
not a faith we only regurgitate,
but a faith which is true to our experience.
Its the kind of faith that confesses that we can’t be perfect or believe perfectly,
but that God still loves us and desires to use us to be agents of his resurrection hope.

Our faith exists within the tension between assurance and doubt.
Without doubt, we can’t ask questions, thoughtful, honest questions.
Without such questions we can’t learn anything new.
Without newness, there is no change and without change how do we grow?
The irony is that faith is weakened without doubt,
but we are invited by Jesus to deal with our doubts,
and Jesus provides us, just as he provided Thomas,
with what we need to stop being paralyzed by our doubts and to believe.

In this Easter season, blessed are we whose confessions
are borne out of our doubts and struggles,
and yet who know the reality of the risen Son and his gracious love.
And blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Prayer: God of patience and grace, in Jesus you have shown your love for us, for your church. You do not call us to be perfect, you call us to be sincere and honest and passionate. We admit that we have doubts, but we also affirm that our doubts can lead us to powerful confessions that are borne out of the experience of your grace in our lives. In your patience and love, you still come to us in our doubt, offering your presence, your power and your peace, inviting us to confess with Thomas and with all the saints, My Lord and my God! Through Christ Jesus our Lord we pray, Amen.