LIVING THE QUESTIONS

John 20:19-31

March 30, 2008

          Here we are again on the Sunday after Easter.  There are fewer people here than last week.  There is no jazz combo to play the postlude.  There is no rousing introit with tambourines and clapping.  The flowers that filled the chancel last week have, for the most part, been taken away and some have been planted in our backyard gardens which become part of the everyday landscape of our lives.  The church says we are still in the 50 day season of Easter.  Yea, right!  We know better.  With Easter day over we are now effectively living in the get the taxes filed before you get hit with a penalty-clean out the gardens before the mulch arrives-buy the wedding gifts and graduation presents for all those people who keep sending invitations-open the windows and air out the house -I wonder if my spring clothes still fit season.  For most of us  it  feels like ordinary time.  And sometimes after the grandeur of Easter celebrations we go back to the routines of our days and  a thought invades our minds:  “what was that all about anyway and what does it have to do with our lives?”  Some never ask the question.  But plenty do.  And whenever we ponder such a thought it becomes clear that there is much we still don’t understand.

            Enter Thomas….the patron saint of the inquisitive…patron of every human being who lives in the tension between what we profess with our liturgy and our tattered attempts to make sense of it all in our day in day out lives….patron of all those who week after week try with varying degrees of success to bridge the gap between doubt and faith.

            Many of us grew up hearing this story of “Doubting Thomas” and assumed he was something of a villain.  But the only thing the story tells us is that Thomas  just wasn’t ready to concede that his friends really knew what they were talking about in all this resurrection talk.  Like the child who doesn’t believe that the hot iron will burn her until she touches it, Thomas was in need of something more than the witness of his friends before he would be ready to shape his life around this new life that God was inviting him into.  Somewhere along the line we may have concluded that Thomas’s questions made him an inferior disciple.  Don’t be a Doubting Thomas was the message that many of us got.  And so to please our Sunday School teacher or maybe even ourselves we professed a faith sometimes with fingers crossed behind our back because we dare not raise too many questions.  Some have left church…not because they are not deeply spiritual but because they became convinced that a questioning, seeking, even skeptical faith was simply inadequate.

            So, tell me, what would be the alternative?  The only alternative, it seems to me, would be to accept without question a second hand faith…and I’m not convinced that is adequate.    

Is that what this Gospel story is about?”  Is that really what it is all about:  something happened a long, long time ago and now our job is believe…accept as true, even if it is someone else’s interpretation of what happened, and then live in blind conformity without ever raising a question or doubt…without ever seeking some greater clarity…without ever struggling with the shades of gray and the ambiguities that we cannot deny.

            I think that is the way some people understand faith.  I saw on the news the other day a story about the new Museum of Creation that is constructed to reinforce the belief that  no matter what the best science concludes, God created the world in six 24 hour days about 6,000 years ago, and that human beings and dinosaurs peacefully coexisted until the great flood, and that those big teeth on Tyrannosaurs Rex were for nibbling vegetables.  Is that the kind of faith that this passage about Thomas wants to teach us? 

                        Who is this Thomas anyway?  In John’s Gospel he appears three times.  The first is in chapter 11 when Jesus has been told that his friend Lazarus is dying.  The disciples try to talk Jesus out of going to Bethany to see him because of the plots against him.  Then Jesus tells them Lazarus is dead but that they are going anyway.  And Thomas, whether out of courage or resignation says, “OK…let’s go into this hotbed of resistance and end up as dead as Lazarus.”

            Again, in chapter 14, the last supper, Jesus is with his disciples celebrating Passover and trying to comfort his disciples in the face of all the building opposition and death threats.  He says he is going to prepare a place for them so that where he is they will be also.  And you know the way to the place where I am going, Jesus adds.  And Thomas, the pragmatist speaks up, “We do not know where you are going so how on earth can we know the way?”

            And then in chapter 20, we have Thomas the skeptic…Thomas the inquisitive …Thomas who refuses to base his actions and decisions, indeed his entire life on the basis of someone else’s experience no matter how profound or real for them.  You’ve got to love Thomas.  He’s so real.

            In none of these stories, including the one we read today is there a suggestion that Thomas’ is a second class disciple or that his questions are inappropriate.  No one is horrified that Thomas is skeptical, least of all, Jesus.  The story is written matter-of-factly suggesting that the questions often just come with the territory.  If that is true then Thomas is a disciple I can relate to:  sometimes courageous, sometimes clueless, and sometimes simply a member of the circle of imperfect disciples who live in a world where not all the questions are answered, where new insights are continually challenging old belief structures,  where sometimes we feel so close to what is Holy and True that we would walk through fire rather than compromise the Kingdom values that Jesus taught.  But much of the time our vision is obscured and we grow tired.  New issues arise, and around every corner, it seems, something arises that will challenge what we thought we knew about our world and ourselves and about God.  The decisions that we make everyday as followers of Jesus loom large.  The ground beneath us grows shaky and we wish, with Thomas for some new sign that we can really grab onto that will confirm that God is indeed, still at work in with and through us. 

            There are some I know who don’t struggle. There is nothing, it seems that can pose a substantive challenge to a faith that was first learned at our parent’s knees and year after year, decade after decade they worship and pray, feed the hungry and comfort those who mourn and know , in the words of the old hymn, the blessed assurance that Jesus has offered.  I sometimes envy them because I am not one of them. 

            There are others who, seeking or not, have a life-changing encounter with the Holy that reshapes their lives, like Paul.  Like Archbishop Oscar Romero who, after years of comfortable dogmatic conformity  while climbing the ecclesiastical ladder had his eyes opened to what he had tried to deny, felt the God of resurrection pulling him to radical solidarity with the poor at the risk of his own life.  I am not one of these either.

            There are those who are haunted by the inadequacy of many of the old answers or the most compelling witnesses and sometimes they just give up on it all and other times they become great theologians who redraw the maps of faith.  But I am not published like they are.

And there are those who will never write books but learn to live with the questions without abandoning the quest.  That is where many of us find ourselves.  And the story of Thomas reminds us that is OK.

It is part of our Mission statement that we nurture an inquisitive faith.  Maybe we should be St. Thomas church rather than our brothers and sisters across the road. 

The story of Thomas can remind us that the community of faith is a very big tent.  And some in that tent will never be content with a second hand faith.  If that is you, then embrace that as your calling and your gift to the tradition.  Keep pushing the boundaries of what we think we know.  Let the questions go deep. Don’t be afraid of where the questions made lead you…even when they lead to uncomfortable conclusions,  for there is no place where God is not present…bidden or unbidden, recognized or not.  Don’t be afraid to challenge God,  to engage the challenge the questions present, to keeping your eyes open for signs of Holy presence in unlikely forms and places.  For God will not be confined to buildings, or creeds, or even the best of what our tradition has passed onto us.  In the grand adventure that is life… a journey with and to God there is always more to discover about how God is at work and how much God loves us and this world and what the task of discipleship may require.  And such discoveries quite often begin with the questions.