Episcopal Church of the Messiah

Worship Service Sermons

Easter 2A, April 3, 2005

 The Rev. Carolyn Estrada

"Doubting Thomas," we have called him, pejoratively, as though he is somehow diminished by his need to see, to understand.

Yet Thomas doesn’t ask for more than what the disciples themselves have already received: when Jesus came and stood among them that first time, John tells us, he "showed them his hands and his side."

Thomas wants what the other disciples have – to know the Resurrected Jesus by viewing the holes in his hands and his side.

We’re a society that celebrates doubt in other areas of life: "The latest research challenges…" "Scientists have proved that…" "Critics question whether…"

We ask questions of our stockbroker, or the salesman trying to sell us a new car, or the pediatrician at our child’s well-baby check-up.

We challenge the coaching of a football team, or the decisions of a city council.

We scoff at people who are so naïve to believe everything they hear.

But doubt in the area of faith and religion makes many of us nervous: most of us are afraid to ask questions, thinking instead we need to have all the answers.

It’s as though our credentials as Christians or the adequacy of our relationship with God is suspect if we voice any questions, concerns, reservations…

Maybe someone will think I’m not really a Christian, I’m not really a follower of Jesus!

Thomas, however, doesn’t worry about those things; he speaks out.

Thomas is not a "Johnny-come-lately" to the Jesus movement; we’ve met him before and know his commitment to Jesus, his solidarity with him: We meet him first when Lazarus dies. When the disciples, recognizing the danger to Jesus, are unable to dissuade him from returning to Judea, it’s Thomas who says, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."

We meet him next shortly before Jesus is handed over to be crucified. Jesus is speaking to the disciples, as usual, of things they don’t understand. "I’m going to prepare a place for you," Jesus says… "And you know the place where I am going." Thomas is bold enough to say to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" He wants to know. He wants to go. He wants to understand. And so he asks.

And now, he wants to see the marks of the nails and the hole in Jesus’ side, so that he, too, might recognize the resurrected Christ.

What he sees causes him to drop to his knees in awe and reverence:

"My Lord and my God!"

My Lord and my God!

Those lines have resonated with me all week, playing in my mind against a variety of scenerios.

I envy the experience: the powerful recognition, that feeling of reverence overcoming one’s entire being so that one’s spontaneous response can only be, "My Lord and my God!"

I wonder – where is it today, in my life? In our lives?

Is there anything that moves us so profoundly?

God breaking into our lives and opening himself up to us, offering himself to us – See – here, my hands, my feet, my side…

I think God enters through the openings created by the questions, the seeking, the cracks created by doubt… That’s where God can break in upon us.

Because – if we have all the answers, we create a closed system – we don’t leave an opening for the unexpected.

Phyllis Dick, the science fiction novelist, commented, "They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him."

I think some of us operate that way: making God a commodity, being so sure of who and what and how God is that we leave no room for the unexpected.

"My Lord and my God" sounds bombastic when it comes from certainty, having the answers.

"My Lord and my God" – comes from seeking, having an experience which generates the awe and the reverence…

It is not the starting point of our journey with God – or a punctuation mark – but a discovery along the way.

We all have doubts, questions, times in our lives when we wonder if God really is… if the resurrection really happened… if Jesus really loves me…

Times when what we thought we knew and believed are not enough, times when we, like the disciples, shut ourselves off behind closed doors and grieve.

I had an aunt and uncle to whom I was very close for the more-than-sixty years they were in my life. Whenever a funeral punctuated the life of the family – as inevitably it does, over the course of time, or later, as they aged and were discussing their own end-of-life wishes and planning their own funerals – their message was consistent: We believe in the resurrection. Death is not something to be feared. We know whose we are and where we are going. A funeral is a time of celebration.

And they truly did believe those things.

But even that belief did not prepare my uncle for the death of his wife of sixty-one years, for he was so overcome by his own grief at losing her that he couldn’t celebrate.

And he began to doubt.

"If I truly believe in the resurrection," he asked himself, "why am I so sad?"

"What’s wrong with me?"

And he began his own journey through the wilderness of doubt and despair.

But I do know this: that the risen Christ walked with him, showing him the holes in his hands and his side, and gently caressing the hole in his heart.

In Michele Roberts novel, Impossible Saints, one of her characters, Lucian, says, "When I was younger and so much more confident, I was entranced by praying. I soared upwards on wings. But now I’m older, I find God through doubt as much as through belief. We search for God in the darkness. I’m full of doubts. That’s what faith means."

I heard the other day of a parish that actually has a "Thomas Group" – a group which meets for the express purpose of sharing and exploring together one’s doubts.

Faith is not a fragile ecosystem, but a vibrant and dynamic way of being in relationship with God.

It is a relationship which grows through conversation – with God, with others – as we support and challenge and stretch one another, through the darkness as well as the light.

And sometimes, in the active pursuit of understanding, we have an experience of the numinous which drops us to our knees, and we respond, "My Lord and my God!"

Amen.