2024-04-08
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
April 7, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
John 20:19-31 The Federated Church, UCC
History has not been kind to Thomas. One of Jesus’ first disciples, he has been forever pegged by those who have heard this story as “Doubting Thomas,” as though he is the doubter beyond all doubters, and frankly as though this is some kind of character flaw in him.
The truth, though, is that doubt is familiar to all of us. And it’s not as though there’s something wrong with us if we have some doubt. If I tell you Caitlin Clark is going to score 60 points in this afternoon’s NCAA women’s championship basketball game, you will likely say, “I doubt it,” and with good reason. If on a normal day—a day other than tomorrow, in other words—I tell you the moon is going to totally block the sun in the middle of the day, you would perfectly reasonably say, “I doubt it.” And you would stand yourself in perfectly good stead to doubt both of those predictions.
If, though, I had said to you centuries ago that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, or that the universe contains billions of galaxies, you would likely have expressed your doubt, and you would have been wrong. Sometimes our doubts are barometers of truth, and sometimes they’re way off the mark.
Doubt itself, though, is not a bad thing. Doubt is part of the way we process and understand the world. Copernicus doubted the way Ptolemy understood what he saw in the heavens, and suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe, and look at the leap in understanding that doubt engendered. That was a wildly productive doubt.
When it comes to today’s story about the one we know as “Doubting Thomas,” though, casual readers almost invariably think the story is saying there’s something wrong with this disciple who seems to demand proof. Most people just assume that Thomas is the only one of the disciples who doubts, that the rest come to faith without the slightest hesitation, and that Thomas’ apparent unbelief is some kind of moral failing.
I suspect that’s not at all what the story is trying to tell us, though. Remember the whole story we’ve just read including the Easter story from last Sunday. Mary Magdalene runs into the resurrected Christ and doesn’t recognize her Savior at all. When the risen Christ calls her by name, she is suddenly shocked into awareness. She then goes and tells the other disciples about the One she’s seen. So those first disciples, the ones who haven’t been to the tomb, know from Mary that Jesus has been raised. And yet here they are at the beginning of this scene, the disciples minus Thomas locked in a room, petrified of the religious authorities. Mary has told them that Jesus lives, and still they’re as frightened as they would be if they were watching a horror movie. In other words, they totally doubt what Mary has told them—all of them. And then they encounter this risen Jesus themselves, and they are reassured. They’re so comforted that they leap in joy. Not, though, because they believe what Mary has told them. They doubted—until they saw the embodied risen Christ.
So Thomas is no different than any of the other disciples. Just as the other disciples don’t believe Mary, so Thomas doesn’t believe those other disciples. They’re all in the same boat. They’re all doubters. They’ve heard something that seems nonsensical, so they don’t believe it.
And this is not a character flaw. It’s a gift, this questioning, this wondering, this holding up what they’ve heard as though it’s a kind of diamond with countless facets and they’re plumbing its depths. To doubt is essentially to explore. It’s what the first group of disciples does. It’s what Thomas does. And if we’re alive and engaged, it’s what we do.
It would be absurd, for example, to tell scientists they were not supposed to doubt. It’s not just Copernicus doubting Ptolemy. It’s Einstein doubting Newton. It’s Darwin and Mendel and Curie and Bohr doubting theories that no longer add up in their minds. Theoretical scientists hugely expand human understanding precisely because of the doubts they bring to bear.
And religious doubts are just as generative as scientific doubts. It was Frederick Buechner who said, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts,” he said, “are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving” (https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/10/26/doubt).
Those doubts are how we grow in our understanding of what is ultimately mystery. Over a century ago, William James, in his seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience, suggested that there’s something more to life than simply what we can see and hear and touch and taste and smell. He in fact called this other dimension “the More.” I treasure that oddly simple way of putting it. There is something more to life than what we perceive with our senses. But it’s extremely difficult to pin down, to understand, to conceptualize. So we search and we explore and we try to put words to the ineffable. And it’s that searching and questioning—that doubting—that gives us at least a glimpse of comprehension.
When I was a child, I was convinced that God was the great magician in the sky, the One who would grant what I wanted if only I prayed intensely and sincerely enough. So I would pray for a red bicycle or to make the varsity basketball team. I had no idea at that time that God wasn’t in the business of doling out the things and desires I craved.
If you were like me and had a similar understanding, and if you were finally going to continue to be a person of faith, then you had to doubt, and eventually you had to see another way. You had to say to yourself, “My wishes are not coming true. God is not showing up the way I wanted God to show up. So something else must be going on here. What is it?” Either you wrestle with those doubts and try to find another way, or you end up giving up on faith entirely.
Most of us sense that there’s some “More” out there or in here. And the only way we can get at that “More” is by questioning, examining, exploring—and doubting the overly facile way faith so often gets presented, and especially to children.
A few years ago, Duke University theologian Kate Bowler wrote a book called Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. In it, she says explicitly that not everything happens for a reason. The child dying in the car wreck. Israeli hostages taken and citizens killed by Hamas. The unconscionable bombing of Gaza by Israel. The family erased by the tornado. The children abused by their parents or teachers or pastors. Something is deeply out of whack if we insist that there’s some divine reason for such atrocity. There isn’t. There isn’t. It’s just awful. There is simply no reason for that—at least not a holy reason. Who could possibly worship a god so capricious, so callous, so cruel as to be causing such things to happen?
So that means if we’re going to worship, if we’re going to develop a deeper and truer sense of the “More,” we have to doubt the god we’ve been presented, or the god we’ve thought we had to believe in. Not everything happens for a reason, at least not a good reason. Some things are just gruesome and there is no trite and easy way to explain them. All we can do is sit silently with those who suffer in witness to their pain. It’s only by doubting that sort of too-easy formula that we can grow into a deeper way of seeing this “More.”
What we find as we question and doubt the notion of a god who is there to fulfill our every wish is instead the God we see and know in Jesus. This God isn’t a magician performing tricks or a server taking our order. This God is the One who has created this magnificently stunning universe, who walks with us when we’re in pain, who accompanies us in our struggles, who shares a meal with us in our hunger, who has blessed us with a love that can leave us breathless and bring us to our knees. This is the One who reminds us that, no matter what happens, in the familiar words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Ultimately, we can never prove the richness and grace of this accompanying God in our lives. That ethereal and reassuring presence lies, of course, far beyond any sort of definitive scientific demonstration. The truth, though, is that all of what really matters in life lies beyond observable proof. I couldn’t possibly prove to you why I am moved to the core by a Mozart opera, or why you may be thrilled by a Taylor Swift song or a van Gogh painting or a Miyazaki film or the Cleveland skyline at sunset. Or even more strikingly, there’s no way of proving my love for Mary or our children or our grandchildren. Or you. There’s no proving how or why any of those things touches us. They just do.
And it’s the same with faith. The “More” at the heart of the universe, the very One we see embodied in the risen Christ, somehow grasps us. This Christ sits with us in the examining room as we nervously await test results. This Christ thrills with us at the marriage proposal. This Christ tends to us when the college admissions news is not what we had hoped. This Christ rejoices with us at the remission of the disease. This Christ stands vigil with us as we approach the imminent death. The very Christ who comes to those early disciples in their alarm and worry is the Christ who comes to us in the locked rooms of our anxiety and fear, and walks our journeys with us.
The odd thing is that we think the story we heard earlier is centrally a story about the disciples in their doubt and anxiety. And we think it’s a story about us with all our questions and fears. And we think the story is trying to tell us something about how we should be handling our doubt and anxiety. That’s not really what this story is, though. Or it’s not primarily that. It’s really a story, not so much about us as it is about Jesus. It’s a story about the Christ who adores us even, and maybe especially when all seems lost, the Christ who appears and sparks our hope and our love.
And ultimately, it’s about the Jesus who knows that that love is at the heart of everything. If Christ loves disciples enough to accompany them in their lives, then we’re bid to do the same with each other. Some time ago, I visited a woman in the hospital who was dying. And next to her sat her eight-year-old granddaughter. The girl was sitting silently at the bedside, holding her grandmother’s hand. And it was gorgeous, a love so deep and full and present that I stood in wonder at the holy ground on which I was standing. The risen Christ. There. In person. And all doubt vanished. And everything was fresh and alive. Thanks be to the “More,” the One we call God, for grace that transforms doubt, for love that conquers death and makes all things new.