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 Jesus’ 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 God!” 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.