Homiletics Sermon 2/John 20:19-31

Grace, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Grace, and peace.
In a small, cramped room the risen Christ appears to a group of people. He tells them, ‘peace be with you.’ They’re glad, we read, because they had gathered in fear, and seeing the resurrected Jesus renewed their hope. Before this, they’d usually been in the open, eating with tax collectors and sinners. But that day, they gathered in a 2nd-floor room and locked the doors because they were afraid.
But Thomas wasn’t with them. They -- the other disciples who were there -- told him about seeing Jesus, but he just shook his head. "When I see Jesus – IF I see Jesus - the marks in his hands the marks in his feet, and see him drink, and eat, and burp – then I will believe you.’
So a little more than week later Thomas gathered with the other 10. Behind a locked door. Maybe a little less afraid. In front of the group Jesus appears again, bearing peace. Thomas sees him, knows him, loves him. Swears his undying devotion in front of the others. According to tradition, goes to India preaching the Gospel and is put to death for his efforts.
But before that happens by all accounts Thomas is rebuked by Jesus. "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not doubt, but believe…have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe!" Traditionally, this declaration to Thomas is seen as a reprimand.
And we have taken that statement to its abusive, irrational, incomprehensible conclusion and used it as a bludgeon for almost two thousand years. Different translations phrase it differently:
"be thou not faithless, but believing" (KJV)
"do not be faithless, but believing" (RSV)
"become not unbelieving, but believing" (YLT)
"Don't be faithless any longer. Believe!" (NLT)
"Stop doubting and believe." (NIV)
Don’t doubt. Don’t be faithless. Don’t be unbelieving. Bludgeoning people into blind obedience to some form of authority.
I remember talking to a young woman who had left her church at 17. She’d begun asking questions that made her parents nervous. They’d told her that she should just ‘believe’ and not ask her questions. Or, at least she should go to her pastor.
By the time I met her, she didn’t have any patience left for Christians, or the church. "How can you possibly believe this stuff," she asked me, "where did Adam and Eve’s sons get their wives – how can the bible be historically true, or is it really just a bunch of stories?"
"How did your pastor respond when you asked him," I said, "did he help you at all?"
"Help me?! He told me that I should just believe. He told me that if I had doubts, God would damn me because I wasn’t a true believer. After all this talk about love – where’s the love in that? I just can’t believe in something because I’m told, my mind doesn’t work that way."
She lost all sense of grace in her life, and lost the peace that she felt she had in her relationship with God.
What happens when WE can’t find grace, or peace? When in the silence of our minds – or even in our conversations – we start venturing into ground that may lead us to realize that we’re not as ‘true believing’ Christians we’d like to be?
In a small, cramped room a small woman scrawls spidery handwritten letters on a page. She’s old. She wears her age like other women wear makeup – it defines who she is, and her image is so closely associated with holiness that probably more people recognize her than they do the current Pope.
But her letters don’t let on that she’s widely considered the next best thing to a living saint. She has spent fifty years covered in the filth and detritus from a mass of humanity. Even though she’s the subject of books, has written prayers and homilies and received prized for her faith and humanitarian work, she writes:
"I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist."
Her given name is Agnes, but the world knows this tiny Albanian woman as Mother Theresa. She is the symbol of how faith can move mountains. She has dedicated her life to Jesus Christ and has undergone tremendous suffering in the name of God. Yet she is still human. She doubts. She questions.
Does that make her unworthy of the kingdom? Does she deserve the same reprimand that is delivered to Thomas every year in countless sermons? Did her doubts outweigh her faith? Did they damn her?
What about our doubts? Doubt causes anxiety – when investors doubt whether or not a government economic policy will actually work, their doubts often wreak havoc with stocks and investments. In the same way, our faith is often at the mercy of our doubts, and it can seem that almost daily we are called re-evaluate our faith in what we may assume as ‘given’.
We don’t like to be anxious, and often there are three responses to the kind of anxiety that we may have about faith:
The first is to take the roll of the parents or the preacher that I related earlier, working on the principle that if you tell yourself something often enough you’ll begin to believe it.
The second is to dismiss the church and the story of Jesus entirely,
And the third is to blindly cling to a system of belief that is harmful or hurtful, but that offers some kind of protection from that anxiety.
But there’s also a fourth response that’s not so common – to live with doubt, with the understanding that we cannot know everything, and keep the faith. As Jesus told Thomas: "don’t remain faithless – you can still believe!"
So often Jesus’ reproach to Thomas is treated as law – a statement of fact, a reprimand. Do not doubt. If you do, you will be damned. BELIEVE. The law states that we are condemned before God because of doubt – because we’re conditioned to see something to think it real. The Law is the lock on our doors that keeps our fears and doubts inside of us.
But Jesus still comes to us. Appears to us, and the message he brings is one that sets us free. The message, ‘peace be with you.’ His message, ‘blessed are those people who keep the faith.’ Blessed are we, the poor in spirit, for ours is the kingdom of God.
Jesus confronted Thomas’ doubt, but he didn’t affirm it – he didn’t make it ‘okay’ and try to smooth over Thomas’ troubled feelings. What Christ did was to stand in front of Thomas and say:
"Here’s something different: instead of you demanding proof of me, here’s what I’ll do. You’ve locked the door to your heart because of your pain and grief? Here I am. I’ll slip through the locked doors of your questions, slide under the locked door of your doubts. You want to place your hands in my side and see proof of my pain? I see your pain, and I will stop at nothing to bring you close to me. You don’t need to find me, because I will always find you."
Our society is conditioned to demand facts, and work hard at the assumption that we need to search high and low for the ‘correct’ answers. Finding evidence to back claims and declarations gives us the impression that we are responsible for proof. Hard evidence, we say, is the only way to actually prove anything. Anything else is just superstition.
This is what Thomas thought. He didn’t want to punish himself for his failure on Calvary – failure to rescue Jesus from the crowd. The sense of failure he felt for aligning himself to a movement that’s founder had just died a terrible, shame-filled death. Jesus was dead, and he didn’t want to hear any fanciful tale of Resurrection. He’d seen Jesus die. He knew, for a fact, that dead men stay dead.
Ah, but the power of this story is that Jesus didn’t, and that Thomas dared to believe that the other disciples were right. He came back with them a week later. Blustering with a little bravado, yes, but he was there. He wanted to believe again. And he saw the risen Christ, and in his affirmation revealed Jesus as the Messiah, as our Lord and our God.
And Jesus, in turn revealed to us that doubts and questions do not mean the negation of faith. They don’t cancel it out. Those questions and queries are a sign of healthy, living faith – a ‘living hope, through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’ Living faith is tested and renewed daily through the grace of God.
Christ finds us, and brings a message for us. He tells us – "I love you the way you are. Because of the way you are. In spite of way you are. You are my beloved child, with doubts and queries. Questions, and anger. You have found me because I am always with you. Now trust in me, and let me help you find something better."
And we find grace, and peace from God our Father through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Amen.