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John 20: 19-29 (adapted from an Australian Paraphrase)
It was a Sunday — the first day of the week — when the tomb was found empty. That same evening, the disciples met together. They locked all the doors of the house where they were meeting because they were afraid of being tracked down by the religious authorities. Suddenly, Jesus appeared and stood among them saying, “G’d evening to you all!”
He proceeded to show them the deep scars in his hands and side. The disciples, of course, were over the moon at seeing their Rabbi again. Jesus spoke again, saying, “All the best to you. God sent me into the world, and in the same way, I’m sending you.”
Having said that, he breathed a big breathe onto them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit; all of you. If you forgive anyone who has sinned, then their sins are forgiven. If you withhold forgiveness for any sins, you carry that pain.”
When this happened, Thomas — known as “the Twin” and one of the twelve — was missing. The other disciples told him that they had seen the Rabbi, but they couldn’t convince him.
“I’m not falling for that one!” Thomas replied. “I’d have to see the nail holes in his hands before I’d believe it. In fact I’d have to feel the holes myself, and touch the spear wound in his side.”
A week later, the disciples again gathered behind locked doors in the same house, and this time Thomas was with them. Despite the locked doors, Jesus came and stood among them again and said, “G’d evening to you all!
Then he turned to Thomas and said, “Here are my hands, Thomas. Put your finger here in the wound.” And, pulling up his shirt, he said, “And here is my side. You can put your hand in the hole. Let go of your doubts and trust me.”
Thomas, of course, was blown away, and said, “You are my Rabbi/Teacher and my God!”
Jesus said to him, “Believing is not that hard when you’ve seen me, is it? Imagine how much God will smile on those who put their trust in me without ever having seen me!”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net
Let’s pray:
And now, let the words of my mouth,
and the meditations of our hearts,
be pleasing in your sight.
O God, our rock and our redeemer.
→ ? ! →
I always enjoy this story about Thomas
with his edgy attitudes and gutsy questions.
He is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense sort of guy.
He wants to see, to touch and understand.
Some of my best teachers have been people like Thomas,
folks who asked embarrassing questions,
folks who have challenged accepted norms.
The church of my childhood had a corner on truth.
It was a day of systematic theology and accepted dogma.
They told me that my questions were doubts
But I just wanted to know
Why … how … what if … and how come …
Later as a young adult, a Bible School expelled me.
They said that my probing questions …
… were undermining the authority of the church leaders
and destroying the faith of the community.
Back then, I was hurt by their accusation
Now, I’m kind of proud of it.
And I still have questions … all kinds of questions.
I ask how people in congress can tie themselves in such knots,
why they penalize the poor and support the wealthy
and wars don’t make any sense to me at all.
I don’t understand how our society can let any child go hungry
or how we can abide human trafficking in our own state
when we abolished slavery over 150 years ago.
Sometimes I am flummoxed by church politics
and I wonder about some traditional beliefs.
Do any of you folks have any doubts or questions like this
or am I the only one here who does? (hands?)
We begin asking questions as children – lots of questions.
Did you ever known a two year old
who has learned to ask “Why?”
and likes to practice a lot?
As we grow, we ask questions about God,
about church and what it means to be a Christian.
If we are lucky, we’ll have folks around us
who won’t shut us down with pat answers
that close the door on further exploration.
Walt Whitman wrote,
“Examine all you have been taught
and discard that which insults your soul.”
You know, blind faith can be dangerous.
When Judy Fisher joined her church, her pastor told her,
“Now that you are a Christian,
you will always have joy and peace in your heart.”
Judy fretted and finally decided
that she must not be a real Christian yet
because she couldn’t feel joy or peace
no matter how hard she tried.
You see, she her husband had died just three months before
and she was plagued by painful memories from childhood.
She needed a place to talk about her sadness
and ask some hard questions so that she could heal.
Through the centuries, the church
has gained a well-earned rotten reputation
for making you check your brain at the door.
That’s not right – God gave you a brain for a reason,
and God expects you to use it.
That Easter morning, the disciples found Jesus’ tomb empty.
By nightfall, the followers of Jesus
must have been absolutely frantic.
The disciples who huddled in a locked room that evening
must have been terribly confused, all of them in shock.
All they had was a story here, a rumor there.
They worried as they listened for a knock on the door,
afraid that the soldiers would come and take them away
afraid that they the Romans would execute them too.
They weren’t waiting for Jesus to show up
They probably didn’t even pray much.
They just held on and tried to comfort one another.
And then Jesus showed up and their terror and sadness
turned to joy and amazement.
I don’t know where Thomas was that night.
Did he go somewhere to grieve alone?
Had he slipped out to pick up dinner for everyone?
When Thomas heard the tale that the other Jesus people told
he thought they were putting him on.
I can’t say I blame him.
Thomas wasn’t going to put his trust in anything
unless he could see it for himself.
A week later, Jesus showed up again
but he didn’t scold Thomas for his questions
or for his hesitation to believe the impossible.
I like that … I like that a lot.
In Christian writings of the 3rd century,
everyone called him “Thomas the Incredulous.”
That continued until the 13th century,
when the church dubbed him “Doubting Thomas.”
Christians have tripped over him ever since.
Now we use it as a pejorative,
Call someone a Doubting Thomas and you’re really saying
he is a bull-headed, unreasonable skeptic.
Actually, the words “doubting Thomas” never appear in the Bible.
In the earliest Greek copies of our Bible
The Greek word for “doubt“ isn’t part of the Thomas story .
The word they translated as “doubt”
really should be translated as “not trusting” or “unfaithful.”
In a recent poll of religious attitudes in the US
Unchurched people said they might consider going to church
if certain criteria were met.
They wanted things like friendliness,
preaching that is relevant to the world today
a program for their own age group …
They wanted child care, and ample parking
and they emphatically wanted to see
the church people walk their talk.
But one of the most important things folks wanted in a church
was a place where their questions and doubts
would be treated with honesty and respect.
We all have a mixture of belief and trust, questions and doubt,
We come to church hoping that our faith
will be nurtured in the midst of our uncertainties.
Jesus said we needed to become like children
You know, whatever else he meant,
I wonder if maybe Jesus was also saying
that we should ask questions like kids do –
constantly and with no regard for convention.
In 1988, ecumenical Christians in Helsinki, Finland
created a worship service called a St .Thomas Mass.
They wanted to make a place for those who thought
that questions and doubts indicated a weak faith.
At this worship service, they invite people
to treat their questions and doubts as gifts from God.
Thomas Christians — not a bad idea, huh?
The UCC has a long tradition of honoring
those who ask questions, who challenge the establishment.
In this congregation, people expect you to use your brain
and to explore the things you question.
Special kudos go to the Spirituality Group,
one of our regular church groups.
They applaud members who voice doubts
that a lot of folks are afraid to speak.
Ken Kesselus, a retired Anglican priest and leader
in the Emergent Church among Anglicans writes:
We don’t need always to be sure about everything.
God does not require us to be doubt-free.
God is calling us to be people who
will stop to listen, to question, to learn, to grow.
Okay. We need to explore with our questions
if we are to be healthy in our spiritual journey.
But when we do challenge our faith-based assumptions
there are mistakes that most of us make.
First mistake:
Our earliest teachers taught us to assume.
that every questions has one right answer, and only one.
Now as adults, we still hope for the familiar comfort
of that single, correct answer to our questions
cut and dried, laid in a fancy box and tied with a ribbon
Folks, let me tell you,
life just isn’t a multiple choice test with only one answer,
neither is it a puzzle where all the pieces fit.
Second mistake:
Most of our questions and doubts
have more than one way to approach them.
There’s a Chinese proverb that says,
“there are many paths to the top of the mountain.”
None of us has the whole picture.
When we think we have found an answer,
what we have really found is a tiny insight,
one more candle to illumine our path.
Each insight holds a bit of the truth,
an odd-shaped piece of a puzzle we’ll never complete.
One Sunday, in the children’s sermon
a pastor used squirrels as an object lesson.
She said, “I am going to describe something,
and I want you to raise your hand when you guess it.”
The children nodded eagerly.
“This thing lives in trees … and eats nuts …”
No hands went up.
“And it is gray … and has a long bushy tail …”
The children looked at each other in silence.
“And it jumps from branch to branch
… and it chatters and flips its tail when it’s excited …”
Not a single hand went up.
The pastor waited.
Finally six year old Larry tentatively raised his hand.
“Well,” Larry said, “I know the answer must be Jesus,
but, it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!”
Third Mistake:
The hardest mistake we make is that we think
that we are the only ones with doubts or questions
and that if we express our concerns,
people will think less of us.
St. Paul says in a letter to the church at Corinth,
We don’t yet see things clearly.
We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.
I like knowing that Paul could at least say
that he didn’t know it all.
Of course, if we ask a question, we do have to admit
that there is something we don’t know
and that’s a tough thing for any human to own up to!
Some time ago, a fellow named Roger Jones
applied for a job at Scott Paper Company.
At the interview, the manager told him this:
Roger, we have three kinds of people here at Scott,
and we characterize each kind
by a different punctuation mark.
Some people are periods,
and the sound they make is “duh.”
They have learned all there is to learn.
and they are satisfied with the answers
they have been given.
These folks live their lives in a very small box.
Other people are like question marks
and the sound they make is “Huh?”
They know that there are things
that they don’t know, even if
they haven’t discovered what those things are.
They are on a growing edge for learning.
The third group of people are like exclamation points,
and the sound they make is “Ah Hah!”
They have discovered new insights
and are excited about exploring possibilities.
Roger, if you want to succeed here at Scott Paper,
you need to be a question mark
so that you can become an exclamation point.
When we explore our doubts and uncertainties,
our greatest need is to find a place to stand
a rest-stop as we try to think things through
so that we can catapult into a new question .
Did you notice the title of this sermon?
I’ll give you time to grab your bulletins and look at it.
The title is that funny string of symbols.
It comes from Roger’s story plus a few other bits.
The question mark is Roger’s “Huh?”
The explanation point is Roger’s “Ah, hah!”
And the arrows? – they are there to remind us
that spiritual development is a process, not a period.
We have to move back and forth
through these two punctuation marks,
question mark, exclamation point, and back to question,
if our spirits are to grow in a healthy way.
The problem comes when someone settles on a period.
Then they get stuck in that dead-end stage,
and so they become part of the “frozen chosen.”
A Presbyterian minister, Frederick Beuchner, writes:
Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.
Doubt keeps faith awake and moving.
If you want a spiritual journey that is vibrant and alive
you must seek out this path
of doubt, questions and discovery.
It takes courage to explore the hard questions,
It takes courage to challenge our Sacred Cows,
but it’s the key to a healthy spiritual life .
And my friends, today I make you this promise:
If you dare to walk this path,
exploring your doubts and your questions
sharing your ideas and experiences together,
I can guarantee that your doubts and questions will open the door
to an amazing new world of grace and hope.
So this morning I say “Bravo” for Thomas.
and “Bravo!” for each of you who is willing
to treat your questions and doubts as a gift from God.
This morning I challenge you to become Thomas Christians.
Ask questions.
Doubt boldly
And go where you have never gone before.
Amen.