Faith and Doubt – Doubting Thomas Sermon, April 12, 2015

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Easter, April 12, 2015. Preached in Dubuque, Iowa, at my internship congregation, St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church.

This week’s sermon texts are John 19:19-31 and 1 John 1:1-2:2.

Here’s the video. Sermon text below.

How many people, do you think, were here last week for Easter (or at another church) and left thinking something like, “That was a nice service. It’s good to see so many people at church,” then went home back to normal life not making any connection between the miracle of the Resurrection and everyday life? We all do it. It’s easy to celebrate the resurrection on Easter, but then we slip back into normal life.

For the disciples, it wasn’t so easy. And maybe it shouldn’t be so easy for us. They’d given three years of their life to following Jesus, and then, it all fell apart. Instead of taking over Jerusalem, he’d been arrested and killed.

The one they thought was their savior was dead. Now what? How do you go back to normal after that?

So here we find them on Sunday evening, hours after the Resurrection, hiding in a locked house, afraid of being arrested, not knowing what to do next. Mary Magdalene has told them she’s seen the Lord, but they know better. They saw him die.

And then Jesus comes in and stands among them. He even shows them his hands and sides, to prove it’s really him. They see the proof, and they believe. Now they know. Christ is Risen! [He is Risen indeed!]

But Thomas wasn’t there, and when they told him, he doubted. He didn’t believe what they’d seen. I don’t know what he was thinking, maybe that they’d had a mass hallucination, or they believed because they wanted so hard for it to be true. Clap your hands if you believe in fairies! Pray hard enough and Jesus will come back!

Whatever he’s thinking, he doesn’t believe them. You know the story. Doubting Thomas is one of those stories that comes up every year, so, as I’ve discovered this week, many preachers seem to get tired of Thomas. It’s hard to find something new to say about the poor guy that hasn’t been said.

Well, I’ve never preached on Thomas, so I’m not tired of him. In fact, I think he’s one of the most honest people in the Bible. I wish we all could be so honest about our doubts. I wish we trusted each other as much as Thomas must have trusted the other disciples. I mean, think how difficult it would be to be the one guy who stands up to tell the others that he doesn’t believe what they believe.

Two summers ago, I did a clinical pastoral internship at a hospital, working as a student chaplain. My most memorable moment of the summer happened on my very first night on call by myself. It was late at night, right before I was going to go to bed, and I got called to a room in a cancer unit. As soon as I walked into the room, before I even introduced myself, the man lying on the bed asked me, “How can I be sure that I’ll go to heaven when I die?”

Now, the obvious answer would have been something like, “If you believe in Jesus, you’ll go to heaven. I’ll pray for you. Good night.” And that would have been true.

But that answer wouldn’t have been helpful. As we talked, I found out he’d grown up in church, he knew all about how important Jesus is, and he wanted to believe, to have that confident, strong faith, but it only lead to more questions. How can I be sure if I believe? When I struggle with my faith (as he obviously was right then, just in asking the question), does that mean I don’t believe?

So instead of giving him a quick, flip answer, I listened to his questions, and talked about the connection between doubt and faith. I told him I was Lutheran, so even though he wasn’t Lutheran, I would use the default Lutheran example, and I talked about Martin Luther, because that was his struggle as well. How can he ever be good enough, or do enough for God?

As Christians, perhaps especially as Lutheran Christians, we remind ourselves over and over that we can’t earn our way to heaven, that we can never be good enough, that we are saved through faith, not works. But then we can fall into the trap of making faith into a work! Do I have enough faith? Have I believed enough?  But remember Luther’s most important revelation. Faith is a gift of God, not something we can get for ourselves.

We can’t help doubting. In our confession at the beginning of worship today, we declared together that we are captive to doubt and fear. But in a few minutes, we’ll declare together what the church believes, what we as the church believe, using the words of the Apostle’s Creed. Listen to how Luther explained the third article of the creed, about “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” He writes, “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel.” I cannot by my own strength come to believe.

What I appreciate about doubting Thomas is his honesty and willingness to speak his doubts. And he wasn’t the only one who doubted. Remember, when the disciples were gathered together that first day without him, Jesus came and showed them his hands and feet so they could believe. It’s our nature to want certainty, but certainty is not faith.

We hear it in today’s lesson from 1st John. If we say we have no sin, then we’re not being honest. If we say we always have complete, perfect faith, we’re lying. We’re not called to eliminate our doubt, we’re called to be honest about it. But when we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just forgives us.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the freedom to explore questions of faith, to live the questions of life in community, here in the church. We confess together, and we declare our creed together. In the midst of the fear, the very real struggles of life, in times of crisis in a hospital bed, when you hear a loved one or a friend has died, when you wonder if God hears your prayers, when you worry about your family, even in the mundaneness of every day life, we belong in community, free to doubt, to explore, and to believe together with each other, to support each other in our doubts and in our faith.

The writer of 1st John goes on to share one of my favorite images in the Bible for when I think about my own doubts. The one who judges our faith is the same one who is also our advocate. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. That’s our confident hope.

The only One who knows us completely, knows us in all our doubts and fears, the One who sees behind any false fronts of faith that we might put up, that One is our judge. But that One is also our advocate, our defender, our redeemer.

Doubt is not a symptom of unbelief, but rather a symptom of faith. Faith is trusting, but trusting requires questioning. Theologian Paul Tillich once said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” I saw another quote this week that said, “Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is doubt with a positive attitude.”

Preacher Frederich Buechner explained it this way in a sermon. Think about if one morning you woke up and saw that God had written “I exist” or “Jesus is Alive” in blazing letters in the sky so everyone could see it. How would people respond? Some would fall to their knees in wonder, some would be terrified, some, perhaps especially people who are sick or dying would be suddenly filled with hope. The whole world would believe. Churches everywhere would overflow.

But after a while, the blazing letters in the sky would fade into the background of life. People would start to debate the meaning. What does “I exist” mean? Who exists? What is the character of the one who exists? What does the word exist mean? Does existing imply an active engagement in the world?

And people would start to ask what difference the existence of God makes in the world. Churches, so certain of what they believe, would split up over different interpretations of what happened. Certainty would fade into irrelevance, or into doubt. People would try to explain away the miracle.

On this Sunday after Easter, as we continue to celebrate the miracle of the resurrection, the proof of God’s love for us, we have to decide if faith is real enough for ordinary time, for normal life, if faith is important enough to make a difference in our lives. We don’t have the same certainty of Thomas and the disciples getting to touch the wounds of Christ, so we’re forced to trust the witness they’ve given to us.

I love the last verse of this Gospel reading. “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.”

And listen to Jesus’ words to Thomas. “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That’s us.

As we gather today, we have faith in Jesus’ promise. We have faith in what God has done. And in that faith, we have room to doubt, to question, to explore the questions together, as we walk by faith and not by sight, trusting the promises of our risen Savior.

And as you believe and question, may the peace of our risen Lord, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds trusting in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen