Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from April 3, 2005

“Finding Our Place In the Story”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

John 20:19-31

When you get right down to it, it’s hard to ignore that, right from the beginning, the whole story is a little over the top.  The opening scene of this particular Act—it’s hard to know how to number it because there is so much that comes before:  stars an angel and a young girl who receives a startling message. 

The next scene shows an odd little man out in the wilderness ranting and raving about people getting their act together while standing in the middle of a river and inviting people to wade on it.  His diet, of course, is a whole other story.

The scenes unfold and overlap as a child is born, becomes a man, and speaks words that at the same time heal and inflame the multitudes.  In the process, he acquires a group of trainees to help him out, but as you meet the ever-increasing cast of characters, it’s easy to wonder if Jesus might have done better to have a second week or two of auditions.

The twelve:  to call them a motley crew is a compliment.  To try and name them all is about impossible—it’s like trying to name the seven dwarves.  It seems the ones we know the most about are the most colorful in the group.  There’s the ever day-late and a-dollar-short Peter, and James and John who will be forever remembered as the whining brothers who wanted to be Jesus’ special buddies while having no idea at all what that would actually entail.  Presumably, when they learned, they took their place at the back of the line.  There’s Judas—now there’s a name that has gone down in infamy.  With the exception of Thomas, who I will get to in a minute, we don’t hear much about the others, presumably because they did nothing all that noticeable, for better or for worse.  Bartholomew, Andrew, and the rest get the anonymous second billing like the Professor and MaryAnn on Gilligan’s Island.

Back to Thomas.  If it wasn’t for the fact that history has named him Doubting Thomas, I doubt he would be remembered at all.  Here’s how one of my favorite apologists, Frederick Beuchner, describes him:  “Imagination was not Thomas’s long suit.  He called a spade a spade.  He was a realist.  He didn’t believe in fairy tales, and if anything else came up that he didn’t believe in or couldn’t understand, his questions could be pretty direct.”

There was this last time he and the others had supper with Jesus, for instance.  Jesus was talking about dying and he said he would be leaving them soon, but it wouldn’t be forever.  He said he’d get things ready for them as soon as he got to where he was going; and when their time finally came too, they’d all be together again.  They knew the way he was going, he said, and someday they’d be there with him themselves.

Nobody else breathed a word, but Thomas couldn’t hold back.  When you got right down to it, he said he personally had no idea where Jesus was going ,and he didn’t know the way to get there either.  “I am the way,” was what Jesus said to him (John 14:6) and although Thomas let it go at that, you can’t help feeling that he found the answer less than satisfactory.  Jesus wasn’t a way, he was a man.  It was too bad he so often insisted on talking in riddles.

Then in the next few days, all the things that everybody could see were going to happen happened, and Jesus was dead just as he’d said he’d be.  That much, Thomas was sure of.  He’d been on hand himself.  There was no doubt about it.  And then the thing that nobody had ever been quite able to believe would happen happened, too.

Thomas wasn’t around at the time, but all the rest of them were.  They were sitting crowded together in a room with the door locked and the shades drawn, scared sick they’d be the ones to get it next, when suddenly Jesus came in.  He wasn’t a ghost you could see wallpaper through, and he wasn’t just a figment of their imagination because they were all too busy imagining the horrors that were all too likely in store for themselves to imagining anything much about anybody else.  He said, “Shalom,” and showed them enough of where the Romans had let him have it to convince them he was as real as they were, if not more so.  He breathed the Holy Spirit on them and gave them a few instructions to go with it, and then left.

Nobody says where Thomas was at the time.  One good thing about not having too much of an imagination is that you’re not apt to work yourself up into quite as much of a panic as Thomas’s friends had, for example, and maybe he’d just gone out for a cup of coffee or just to sit in the park for a while and watch the pigeons.  Anyway, when he finally returned and they told him what had happened, his reaction was just about what they might have expected.  He said that unless Jesus came back again so he could not only see the nail marks for himself but actually touch them, he was afraid that, much as he hated to say so, he simply couldn’t believe that what they had seen was anything more than the product of wishful thinking or an optical illusion of an unusually vivid kind.

Eight days later, when Jesus did come back, Thomas was there and got his wish.  Jesus let him see him and hear him and touch him and not even Thomas could hold out against evidence like that.  He had no questions left to ask and not enough energy left to ask them with even if he’d had a couple.  All he could say was, “My Lord and my God,” and Jesus seemed to consider that, under the circumstances, that was enough.  (Peculiar Treasures, a Biblical Who’s Who, 1979 Harper and Row)

I don’t know if that was an expression of doubt, or if Thomas was just being true to who he was.  He was a realist, a concrete thinker.  Maybe he really didn’t have much of an imagination.  That doesn’t mean he didn’t have faith.  Thomas’s need for his own experience of the resurrection isn’t necessarily an expression of doubt, and I think history has given him a bum rap.

All he wanted was his own experience of the resurrection, and that doesn’t make him all that different from us.  It’s so surreal that some handle, some toehold in the incredible story is needed to begin to understand it.  Maybe he didn’t get it right away.  So what?  He stayed anyway.  He could have left and gone back to his pre-Jesus life.  He could have chucked the whole thing and walked away, but he didn’t.  He stayed with the group.  He asked questions and said what he needed and didn’t flinch.  There’s something encouraging about that. 

Bruce Epperly, in the Process and Faith Commentary writes:  “Over thirty years ago, I discovered that I could be a Christian when I read Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith … Questions were not a sign of faithlessness, but a willingness to take our faith seriously.  In this regard, Thomas is a hero of faith.  Though he does not experience resurrection day, Thomas stays with the other disciples.  No doubt, the week was quite painful to him as he heard their wild stories of the Risen Jesus, and could feel nothing of their excitement.  He could have left for home and abandoned the teaching altogether, but he stayed!  And, that is the point!  He believed with all his questions. He stayed in the community in spite of his theological uncertainty and spiritual dryness.  His patience was rewarded by his own encounter with the Risen Christ.”

It’s what we seek as well—an encounter with the Risen Christ, a way to know that this whole odd play with it’s even odder cast of characters, not the least of which includes us, is real, and that there is space for our own spiritual dryness, dogged questioning and whatever else we go through on the way to our confession, “My Lord and my God.”  There’s room in the story for those who come a little late, need some different lenses for bringing it all into focus and are unapologetic for their questions and the need for answers.

When John’s Gospel was coming together at the end of the first century of the Common Era, people still weren’t really clear about what “resurrection” meant.  Some were saying that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross and that he wasn’t really human at all—a heresy known as docetism.     Others didn’t believe that, but so sure what they believed and all the while they were trying to figure it out, the world around them would have been just as happy to bring them to the same fate as their leader Jesus. 

It’s little wonder that 2000 years later we’re still trying to figure it out, too.  And the words of John’s Gospel reach right through the years to help us, in the story attributed to the one named Thomas.  Who knows why he wasn’t there when the others received the Holy Spirit?  Maybe he did go out for bread and milk but I prefer to think, along with Biblical Scholar Sarah Dylan, that Thomas was out in the world trying to do what Jesus wanted them to do all along.  He was the one who, earlier in John’s Gospel, showed some courage by saying if we must die with him, so be it (14:6).   Whatever the reason he wasn’t hiding out with the rest—may be the greatest testimony to his faith.  He was out there in the world where Jesus had sent them so many times.  At some level, Thomas knew what the work was, what the need was, and he was out there doing it while everyone else was locked up, scared out of their wits.  If that isn’t faith, I don’t know what is. 

I can only imagine the disappointment that Thomas felt when he returned to that locked room and found the disciples twittering about having seen Jesus and had his breath bring them a new sense of purpose and power.  I can only imagine they were still thinking about it, since that experience had not yet caused them to unlock the door and go out where Thomas was all along.  But that is probably another sermon for another day.  Suffice it to say that Thomas lived on an edge of faith most of us know all too well. 

Faith that asks questions is not doubt.  It is the foundation of passion that sustains through the tough times.  Faith that seeks concrete expression isn’t simplistic, it is an expression of mission. 

We find the risen Christ by seeing him at work in those around us.  Works that are done even when the spirit is dry is not hypocrisy.  It is an act of hopefulness, the desire that the Risen Christ we see in those around us will be in us as well.

            The need to touch Jesus’ wounds was not a lack of faith on Thomas’ part, but a reminder that the place where the Risen Christ is known is in the pain of the world that he presumably was encountering as he was out there doing what it was Jesus had asked him to do that first day he called him from whatever life he was living.

Thomas was blessed, not because he saw and believed, but because at some level he believed anyway and what he saw later confirmed the belief that caused him to be absent for round one of the resurrection appearances.  History will probably continue to remember Thomas as the doubter; it’s tough to change 2000 years of history, but I prefer to remember him as the one with foresight and faith, who was willing to keep on keeping on and, as a result came, to a place of deeper faith.

“The purpose of this resurrection appearance is not so much to prove the resurrection as it is to send the disciples as Jesus had been sent. Easter is not just coming to a wonderful, inspiring worship service.  It is being sent back into the (hostile) world, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to bear witness to the identity of God as revealed in Jesus."  Brian Stoffgren

That's what Thomas was doing, perhaps without even realizing it,  and if that is not an act of faith I do now know what is.  I'll take my place with Thomas any day because we can all find our place in the story of his life.  Amen.