Sermon

The Gift Of Doubt

April 03, 2016
John 20:19-31
Speaker:

Doubt is one of my spiritual gifts. I believe my mother somehow nurtured this in me. When I got to seminary, I discovered the hermeneutics of suspicion. Through this permissible lens of suspicion and asking questions (rather than unquestioningly believing what it says on the page), I fell in love with the bible. It finally made sense to me. Apparently, I have passed some of this doubt on to my own daughter. This week I received a message from one of Cecilia’s friends: Cynthia, you have raised your child beautifully! She just saved me from falling to a corporate contract with hell, I mean, Sprint. “My parents taught me to be skeptical, Cecilia said loudly while leaving the shop.

Poor Thomas and his one dimensional reputation. The one time he doesn’t show up for the meeting, he misses the big reveal – and forever after he is known as the “doubter.” We don’t know why he isn’t there that first night after Jesus mysteriously disappears from the tomb. We do know the rest of the disciples are locked in a room, fearing for their lives. And without opening the door, Jesus appears among them. First, Jesus tries to calm their fears, saying “Peace to you.” Then, unasked, Jesus shows the gathering his wounded hands and side.

So why is it so strange that Thomas, who isn’t there that night, should also ask to see Jesus’ hands and side? Why shouldn’t Thomas get the same visual and tactile confirmation that the rest of the disciples get?

In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene runs to tell the disciples that the tomb is empty and they don’t believe her; they doubt her. Only Peter and “the other disciple” run back with Mary to the tomb. When Peter and the other disciple see that Jesus is indeed gone, they return to their safe hiding place. It is only after Mary is alone that she sees Jesus at the tomb. Once she catches her breath, she goes to tell the other disciples. Do they believe her now? Or do they still doubt her?

Thomas is also known as Thomas Didymus, Thomas the twin. There is no tradition of him actually having a live twin so some scholars suggest that Thomas’ twin is us, the readers. Anyone who reads the story is related to Thomas, through doubt.

Like all of us, Thomas is more complicated than simply his doubts. He is the one who encourages the other disciples to follow Jesus so that they all “might die with him.” (John 11:16) Thomas is serious about wanting to follow Jesus, all the way. (John 14:5) Thomas’ name appears again in John 21 as one of the disciples who are present when Jesus performs the miracle of the 153 fish.

Tradition has it that Thomas traveled to what is now Kerala in southern India and spread the faith there. Saint Thomas Christians are one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

And of course there is the Gospel of Thomas, one of the gnostic gospels. The Gospel of Thomas is a series of Jesus’ sayings, some of which sound very much like -or identical to – the sayings of Jesus in the canonical gospels.

Though Thomas’ life is larger than this one incident where he demands proof of Jesus being resurrected, it is Thomas’ gift of doubt that we remember, and that so many of us share.

We often think of doubt and belief as opposites, as two ends of a spectrum. In order to be a true believer, one must deny doubt. But what if following in the Jesus way is less about irrefutable proof and belief and more about doubt and faith? What if belief and doubt are not the dichotomy we should focus on. Or maybe it is not a dichotomy at all.

I appreciate that our Hymnal: A Worship Book has a large section called Faith Journey. One of the subsections in Faith Journey is “Doubt/Faith.” (hymns 551-572) The section is not called Doubt or Faith, not called Belief or Doubt. It is Doubt/Faith. It’s as if doubt and faith are two sides of a single thing, as if there is not really all that much distance between them, as if we can’t truly have one without the other.

The gift of doubt/faith is that it keeps us engaged. If we believe then the conversation sort of stops there. You know that old bumper sticker “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” End of discussion. (For a toothy, smily, setting of the song version, check out the Heritage Singers in 1976.)

But doubt/faith means we keep talking or are at least open to continuing the conversation, whether that conversation is with oneself, or God, or Jesus, or Spirit, or Jesus’ followers, or other people who live with doubt/faith. Choosing a life of doubt/faith means that we are seeking the blessing that Jesus speaks of at the end of this passage. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Or we might say Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have doubt/faith.

The gospel of John understands the complexities of faith and doubt: seeing and believing, seeing and not believing, seeing what you want to believe. Jesus heals a man who was born blind (John 9) and yet the religious leaders want absolute proof that the man was ever blind in the first place. They don’t want to hear about his experience of now being able to see or about the person who healed him. They want his experience to fit their beliefs.

It is not explicitly stated in the text but we might observe a connection between power and belief. Those who have power often declare what should be believed and set the perimeters for what is believable. This is how systemic injustice functions and gets perpetuated. Those without power are not to be believed, especially when their experiences contradict what the powerful declare to be true.

This was how it worked in Jesus’ day and it remains true today: those in power attempt to define what is true for the rest of us. This is why the gift of doubt is so important, why we need a hermeneutic of suspicion and not just when approaching the bible. Are we to unquestioningly believe police departments when they describe shootings of unarmed citizens as justified? Or do we believe, without challenge, that it is fair for professional women soccer players to be paid a fraction of what their male colleagues are paid? Does faithfulness demand that we believe religious institutions when they say they do not know their leaders/priests/pastors have been abusive? Do we believe? Or do we doubt?

Thomas wants to believe, wants to see for himself. A week later, in the locked room of disciples, Jesus presents himself again with “Peace to you.”  This time the instructions are particularly to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas’ doubt leads him to touch the wounds. He cries out, “My Lord and My God.” Does this mean he believes?

I believe that doubt is a gift. While some are given the gift of belief, some of the rest of us have been given doubt. As we enter this season of gift discernment, let’s remember the breadth of gifts that are needed, in this congregation and the world.

Thomas gets the last word -in this poem by Denise Levertov entitled St Thomas Didymus.

St. Thomas Didymus – by Denise Levertov

In the hot street at noon I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
beyond the crowd’s buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
teethgnashing son,
and thought him my brother.

I heard him cry out, weeping and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
mine unbelief,
and knew him
my twin:

 a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn question,
Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born? 

The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out. 

After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and patient. To others
I seemed well enough.

So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me that He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man —
even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
to lift me —
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the same: Lord
I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.

I needed
blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through
to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
the battle I fought with life.

But when my hand
led by His hand’s firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.