Beyond a Doubt Sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean, VA April 7, 2013

John 20:19-31

Our Gospel lesson for today is the one typically assigned for the first Sunday after Easter, the Gospel of John’s account of what happened the night of ’ resurrection, and then what happened again a week later. It’s a passage you’ve likely heard before many times. As you hear it this time, I encourage you to try to put yourself into the shoes of the disciples that first night, and then Thomas a week later. What are they feeling, emotionally? Engage your senses. What do they see, and touch, and taste, and hear? When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “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.” A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said 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 answered him, “My Lord and my !” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. This past Thursday, the great movie critic Roger Ebert took his last breath. In his 2011 memoir Life Itself, he wrote this about his own impending death: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”1

At the same time, it was not his belief, but his questions and doubt that Ebert gave voice to elsewhere in Life Itself, at one point writing: “I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers." 2

Ebert was not content to be defined by a too easy faith with too simple answers - not content to be labeled a believer. But neither was Ebert content to say that he was an atheist. He knew that there is also a too easy cynicism, a too simple denial of transcendence. The wise film critic had enough sense of life’s mystery, its beauty and wonder, its unanswered questions and what I would call its “moreness” to claim that he had evidence enough to say God didn’t exist.

A former seminary classmate of mine put it this way in a Huffington Post article this week, saying that Ebert, in admitting that he was more content with questions than answers, “inadvertently expressed just how much of a religious person he was. As the astute Catholic monk Thomas Merton once declared, ‘A man is known better by his questions than his answers,’ and indeed religious traditions themselves unfold in the oscillation between questions and answers, 2 answers and questions. There is no great person of faith, be it Abraham or Moses, St Augustine or St John of the Cross, Jesus or Muhammad, who did not express doubt, did not ask a lot of questions.”3

My friend is right. Questions and doubts are an important ingredient in life and faith. And the great saints all wrestled with them. In his Wishful Thinking, A Seeker’s ABC, Frederick Buechner calls doubts, “the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” And he writes, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there isn’t, if you don’t have doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep.”4

Buechner goes on to make a distinction between head doubt and stomach doubt. “In my head there is almost nothing I can’t doubt when the fit is upon me: the divinity of Christ, the efficacy of the sacraments, the significance of the Church, the existence of God. But even when I am at my most skeptical, I can go on with my life as though nothing untoward has happened.”5

But stomach doubt is something altogether different. It’s not academic, an intellectual exercise, the sophomoric “riddle me this” of Christopher Hitchens. It’s that feeling in your gut that you get from looking straight at darkness and inhumanity and despair in the world or the failures and mistakes in your own life and wondering where God is in the middle of it all. It is that sort of feeling that led Jesus to cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Buechner says that only the real saints experience that. The rest of us aren’t up to doubting that way. But neither are we up to believing that deeply and viscerally.6

I don’t know about us sometimes saints and whether we are capable of believing that deeply, but I have to take issue with Buechner (and he’s one of my favorites). You see, I think most of us know a little something about that kind of doubt.

I don’t know whether the disciple Thomas was experiencing head doubt or stomach doubt when he told his friends that unless he saw the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands he wouldn’t believe. I suspect it might have been somewhere in between. He had pinned a lot of hopes on Jesus, just to have them apparently dashed. Whether or not he’d been there to watch Jesus be tortured and killed or not, (the Gospels have differing views about how close the disciples were that day). Thomas certainly knew about the machinery of death. He knew Jesus had died. And I know this. Neither Thomas, nor we ourselves, need any more convincing of the dark side of life, the power of death. Certain words and phrases bring them to life: Syria, North Korea, Mali, senseless murders, broken relationships, suicide, depression…

So I think we’re too hard on Thomas. He’s just asking for what the other disciples received the week before. They got to see Jesus’ nail-scarred hands and side. Why couldn’t he? I mean, he just wanted to see for himself. He wanted to have a little proof. Who can blame him? We’d all like a little proof of the resurrection and the difference it makes, I think.

So what about proof? It strikes me that this story of Doubting Thomas always comes up at just the right time: every year, always on the Sunday after Easter, which we call Low Sunday. It’s called Low Sunday, not just because attendance often happens to be very low on the Sunday after Easter (and by the way, the attendance is pretty good this morning!), but also because I think pastors and committed church members can be a little low in the days after Easter. It’s a little depressing, to tell you the truth. You pour your heart and soul into an Easter message or Easter music, you put in all the energy to prepare and deliver it, and it’s glorious…. and then what? Does 3 the whole world change? Do people quit having human problems and human foibles? Is there enormous transformation that happens immediately? No. Not really. It’s a little like post-partum depression or the doldrums that can come after the wedding. You get all excited, and then what?

That is why the quote on the front of today’s bulletin is so important. I’d amend it a bit, however. I’d have it read: “I spent twenty years trying to come to terms with my doubts. Then one day it dawned on me that I had better come to terms with my faith. Now I’ve passed from the agony of the questions I can’t answer to the challenge of the answers I can’t escape. And it’s a great relief.”7

I don’t think that coming to terms with our faith means that the questions and doubts that are the “ants in the pants” of faith disappear or are no longer interesting or important. Coming to terms with our faith means that we have to decide where we finally put our buckets down. We commit or recommit to live by the values we proclaim. Those are the answers we cannot escape:

Like this: that God’s embodied love is stronger than death and fear and hatred.

Like this: that we are called to help one another, especially the most vulnerable.

Like this: that what unites us really is stronger than what divides us.

God knows, God knows, God knows, we may not always live those answers perfectly - we don’t - but we do well to realize that living their challenge is more important than letting questions provide an excuse for not living out our faith.

John’s Gospel says that Thomas received his answer from God in the form not of a perfectly restored body, but of a man with nail-scarred hands and spear-pierced side - the embodiment of suffering love--who invited him to engage that pain. Tradition says that Thomas died in India, having felt called to go and share the news of a love that is willing to face pain and not let it have the last word. Now, of course, he’s known as a saint.

Yesterday morning, at Foundry United Methodist Church downtown a host of religious leaders participated in the memorial service for someone I regard as a saint: Gordon Cosby, the ninety-five year old founder of Church of the Savior. Church of the Savior is the high commitment, low membership congregation which has spawned so many ministries to the poor and needy in DC, including Christ House, Jubilee Housing, the Potter’s House, and Star Art Center and countless others… It was started by Cosby after he came back from being a in World War II and became determined that faith had to address the hurt and need of the world, and not just be pie in the sky by and by, way up high, when you die.

In an article celebrating his life and contribution in the Post yesterday, a Lutheran pastor named Becca Stelle was quoted saying this about Cosby: “The distinction is between what we believe and how we actually live. Gordon made people uncomfortable who didn’t know whether or not they believed” the ’s call to resolve poverty and injustice. Stelle, was an ordained Lutheran 4 pastor but left her denomination to join the Church of the Savior movement and then went on to found a small community focused on interracial harmony and supporting people coming out of jail.8 “The day Gordon met me it was like the clouds parted,” she said. “I was working with my own cynicism about whether there were people really living it, and here he was. That in itself was a game changer.”9 I think what Stelle and so many others found in Cosby was evidence of the power of the risen Christ to make a difference in the world. Cosby wasn’t paralyzed by the questions that we all have. He was moved by suffering to make his life and his community nail-scarred evidence of the resurrection. How does--and how might--your life and my life and the life of this community of faith provide evidence of the resurrection, the truth that death and pain and hatred don’t get the last word, but love does? Now that’s a question worth entertaining.

I see the challenging answer to it in relationships healed, in forgiveness extended and received, in new possibility embraced. I see it in those who are recovering from addiction in our congregation. I see it in lives dedicated to service to young people in Anacostia or older people at Chesterbrook or those in need elsewhere in the world. I see it in the way people do their jobs in their work lives. I see it in people volunteering to give rides, or knit prayer shawls, or teach kids. Our confirmation class provided some evidence of the risen Christ yesterday by volunteering at Capital Area Food Bank as part of their Day in the City. You each have your own stories that provide proof of the resurrection.

Maybe next weekend when we have our auction, as we think about how we bid, it would be useful to focus not just on how generous we are but on how our generous bids can be evidence of the resurrected Christ. I think that would be, beyond a doubt, a great way to look at it.

Peter Rollins, the gadfly Irish theologian of postmodernism, who isn’t afraid to shake things up, was asked at a lecture in Calvin College back in 2009 if his theoretical position led him to denying the Resurrection of Christ. This is how he answered: Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think… I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system. However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.10 What if we took that as our charge? Then we’d be proof of the resurrection, indeed. Roger Ebert was asked once about his political beliefs. His answer was nowhere near as radical as that of Rollins, but it was in its own way an affirmation of a credo I can get behind. He wrote: Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that, if at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make 5

ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and I’m happy I lived long enough to find it out.11 I’m happy he did, too. Beyond a doubt, there is a lot to be said for kindness. I think you might make the case that at least ninety percent of spirituality boils down to the practice and cultivation of kindness. I think there’s even more to be said for standing up for those forced to their knees, speaking out for those who have been silenced, and mourning for those who have no more tears left to cry. When we do that, our lives become evidence of the risen Christ at work in the world. And we become something like the saints that we already are. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Aaron D. Fulp-Eickstaedt. 1 Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir (New York: Grand Central, 2011).

2 Ibid

3 S. Brent Plate, “Roger Ebert’s ” The Huffington Post (April 5th, 2013).

4 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, revised and expanded edition (New York: HarperOne. 1993).

5 Ibid

6 Ibid.

7 David E. Roberts, The Grandeur and Misery of Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).

8 Michelle Boorstein, “Rebel Pastor Gordon Cosby Left Lasting Mark on Mainstream ,” , (April 5th, 2013).

9 Ibid.

10 Peter Rollins posted “My Confession” on his website, To Believe is Human, to Doubt, Divine. Originally posted January 31, 2009, you can read it here: http://peterrollins.net/?p=136

11 Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir.