Sermon: The Doubts of St

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The Doubts of St. Thomas

By Charles Rush

April 3, 2005

r text this morning starts off in fear. The disciples are huddled behind closed doors for fear. They are afraid of dying for having followed the crucified one and they have returned to a place of safety. Maybe they went back to the upper room, where they had celebrated the last supper, the place where they had known such intimacy, fellowship, communion. It would make sense. Maybe being there would make something happen. It is a primordial response.

When I was 13, we lived for a year in Indiana. My girlfriend that year raised horses, so we did a lot of horse riding. She was quite talented. I was not. I had a routine to bolster this lack of experience. I would stand as tall as I could and try to look like Clint Eastwood. I would try to walk like John Wayne. I had a big show mounting the horse. But I never fooled the horse. The horse always knew that Pee Wee Herman had hopped on for a little trot. Inevitably, after a couple of uneasy miles, I would do something stupid like pull the horse to the left and the right at the same time. The horse would get spooked, rear up, throw me into the middle of a cornfield, and take off running into the horizon. Inevitably the horse would run back to his stall. In fear, he would always run back to the same safe place.

The disciples return to he same safe place, perhaps the place where they had been with Jesus. Humans are a bit more sophisticated than horses but this response is a primordial response of grief. Our responses are remarkably similar. Martha Lewis lost her husband on September 24th. Martha lived in Breckenridge County in Kentucky. Her husband was a tobacco farmer. He had been doing some ordinary chores around the farm. Using an old tractor, he flipped it over on himself and died before anyone found him. After the funeral, Martha went through her normal routine on the farm, doing her chores at the appointed time. She never missed a beat. At first, it seemed like she was an incredibly strong woman, which she was. But after a few months went by, her neighbors called the preacher and asked him to stop by to check on her. This routine just didn't seem quite right. The preacher asked her point blank why she didn't take some time for herself, maybe go visit one of her sisters and have a little vacation. Martha, how come you are working so much, so steady? She said ‘As far as I'm concerned, time just sorta stopped on September 24th. Everything since seems like one long day that never ended.' Several days have gone by and the disciples are still in that room, almost as though nothing has changed. Going through the routine was Martha's way of staying in control of a world that had gone out of control. The disciples must have been going through that kind of grief. It's like wading through swamp mud waist deep for miles.

Being abandoned produces a fear in us so deep, so primordial, we do things we didn't know we could do, stuff that has its roots all the way back in infancy. It is a visceral reaction. We build our life around people. They are our piers in the midst of a changing tide. They are our joy too. They hold us in the night, make us laugh. They make us want to be better people. And when they die our whole reason for living dies too. Most of the time, we don't even realize it until they die that most of our meaning and purpose is gone. We literally do not know what to do. It is just numb. So we go through the routine until our heart can catch up with our head.

One of the most marvelous promises of the gospel happens right here. Jesus comes and meets them where they are. The scripture says ‘Jesus came and stood among them. They are deathly afraid, confused, frightened, numb. Jesus says ‘Peace be with you'.

It is a profound hope that God will meet us where we are and bring us peace. Martin Luther used to say that this is the point of the gospel. It is not simply objective, out there. God comes for you personally. God is not only for us. God is with us. The disciples are afraid that they have been abandoned. But they are not alone. Behind wood and stone, locked doors and barred, Jesus appears among them. How does that happen? We have no idea and our text never bothers to even raise such a question. The point is simply this, that there is no place that is inaccessible to God. No physical barrier stands in the way; no amount of fear or faithlessness. The initiative is with God, not with us. This is the good news. God comes to us and says peace. True peace quiets the restless heart. It comes to us in the midst of adversity, when outwardly there is nothing but strife.

So far, so good. But then comes poor Thomas. He is not at the first meeting. They were much nicer to people who missed meetings back then. Today, if Thomas missed a meeting, we would elect him chair or put him on the fund-raising sub-committee.

I have a lot of sympathy for Thomas. Here is a guy that appears to me to be asking for some basic information. All of the other disciples have had some experience of a truly extraordinary character. They are noticeably changed and quite excited about it. Is it that Thomas wants to have the same experience that they had? (Bultmann) Is he asking for even more by asking to touch and feel Jesus' wounds? (Ray Brown) Or, is he just talking in hyperbole to make a point? We need to be perfectly clear here. I suspect that this text has been misused and abused as much as any in the Bible. The positive point that is made at the end reads as follows “Blessed are those that have not seen and believed”. That is you and me. That is right, as far as it goes. We didn't have a direct experience of Jesus. We have to rely on the authority of those who did, that they were telling the truth or at least they weren't outright lying about things.

But to take it farther than that poses more problems for me than it solves. To suggest that somehow the more you believe with less evidence makes you more faithful is a huge mistake. To suggest that people who ask critical questions about matters holy and orthodox are somehow less than faithful is a huge mistake.

I love to listen to radio preaching. I love to watch these tele-evangelists on T.V.. Part of it is because I love to hear these authentic country preachers like the character that Robert Duvall plays in ‘The Apostle'. He does a marvelous job of capturing it the way that it is. But I also tune in to hear some of the most bone-headed, idiotic, mind-bending, spiritually crippling, history-defying, science denying, logic skewering, financially manipulating, guilt multiplying garbage imaginable. I don't like it. And these evangelists always have this blank looking silly grin on their face. And after they have bled the last few drops of reason from their argument, they turn to the audience and say ‘Praise Jesus'.

A typical remark: One of them said ‘The safest place to be in the world is out on a limb with God in obedience.' Now that may be true if you are thinking of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Oscar Romero, Albert Schweitzer. But that is not what they mean. I have to ask myself ‘Why would God want us out on this limb. And the answer is ‘because the infallible scheme of these tele-evangelists is harebrained. Remember Tammy Faye and Jim Baker building that huge theme park for Jesus in Charlotte. They built before they had capital in hand, leveraged beyond the hilt on faith. So tacky, a friend of mine called me when he was in Charlotte, left a message on my machine, that said simply ‘Chuck, you've got to see this to believe it. Even then I'm not sure you will believe it. It's a whole new meaning to the word ‘garish'”. Remember Oral Roberts. God told Oral to build a 40 story hospital on faith, so there could be a hospital that also did spiritual healing through prayer. Again, Oral had a dream, lot's of faith. They charged ahead on faith and began building several stories, when they finally got word that market studies showed that there were already too many hospitals in Tulsa and some of them were going to close. There was not the patient population to support another hospital, let alone a 40 story tower. That never deterred Oral Roberts. He asked his faithful followers for more faith. And I tune in this week on the PTL Club and they are having a ‘debt burning' next week. Just call the operator on the screen and tell her exactly how much your debt is, so the evangelist can include your facts with all the other faithful, and the big pile will be burned, and God will take care of it. [I did make a quick call, just in case]. The farther out on a limb you are in a harebrained scheme, the more faith you need.

It is only one step from this to the idea that questioning religious authority on any front for any reason verges on blasphemy. We do not suffer from that around here, I recognize that. Authoritarian leaders have played on this for centuries, trying to flatten faith into unquestioning obedience. I used to keep a quote pasted to my computer. It read “Meine Ehre heisst Treue”- “My honor consists in my unwavering obedience”. It is not from one of the Apostles or St. Augustine. It is Heinrich Himmler in a speech that he made to Adolf Hitler. “My honor consists in my uncritical obedience.” That may be necessary in battle and it might even be virtuous for a dog but it is hardly befitting for humans. It is a dangerous invitation to trade the ambiguity of our freedom for the certainty of slavery. And simple conviction is not yet faith. We all know this.

Even dogs know it. Remember, little Toto in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow are standing before the Mighty Oz. Oz is spewing out steam in a booming, magnified voice. Oz is makes ridiculous, arbitrary demands. Every time one of them objects, Oz booms out ‘Silence'. They are all quaking, shivering with fear. Finally little Toto goes over to a curtain and begins to pull it back. Behind the curtain is a rotund little man, pulling levers, looking exasperated, trying to hide from the dog. Oz says ‘Never mind that man behind the curtain'.

Even little Toto could unmask a little rotund, aging man, hiding behind some great machinery, controlling the naïve through pretense. Even little Toto could question. And what a lovely man he turned out to be once he became human and we found out that he was just a ‘man struggling among men', lacking any sure answers, lacking any certain authority, mutually seeking like the rest of us. I wish our evangelists didn't feel like they had to make God into Oz. I wish our evangelists didn't feel that honest inquiry was simply faithless doubt. I wish our evangelists didn't confuse programmed responses with faith. The mighty Oz turns out to be a mayor of a small town in Kansas, looking for a way home with the rest of us.

I love the way he gives Scarecrow what he needs. ‘Brains, you want brains. Why, my friend, back where I come from there are men who don't have any more brains than you have but they have one thing that you don't have… a diploma. So, by the power vested in me, confer upon you the Doctor of Letters, E plurbus unum and cogito ergo sum'. And the scarecrow begins rattling off math formulas.

The church has never had anything to fear from honest intellectual inquiry, despite the fact that a number of scholars have nearly undone the faithful in their generation. I take it as axiomatic that if we follow the truth to the end, God will be there. And wherever God is, the ground will be sanctified. So we do not need to worry about an honest, critical inquiry, even when it is brutal. In fact, critical inquiry can be a virtue.

Our church has a stained glass window dedicated to St. Thomas. That somehow seems appropriate to our crowd. It is the last window back on the right. I invite you to have a gander at it after worship. In that window you will find 4 men who represent the virtue of critical inquiry and a healthy skepticism.

The first is St. Paul. And when you think about it, the first theologian of the church was abundantly skeptical, critical, and open. From what we know of him, he was educated in the finest rabbinical tradition, the Harvard Div. School of his day. But he had a profound conversion experience and then he had the guts to think through all of his Jewish tradition from a completely new perspective. What an incredibly original thinker and heterodox as could be to the Orthodox Rabbi's of his day. Thank God Paul was open to a new idea.

And in the opposite corner is another Saint, a secular saint, you might say, Albert Einstein. It was Einstein's early formulations that first led us to understand that the universe is expanding and from that our whole world view changed dramatically. With Einstein we completed a migration of thought that led us away from a view of the universe that was more or less static, more or less eternal, with the earth and humans at the center, the product of a creation by fiat. After Einstein, the galaxies are understood as fundamentally in motion, relating time and space. The question's posed about the origin or the creation of the universe, are not about fiat exactly. Although interestingly, with the understanding of the Big Bang and the notion that there was a beginning to the universe, we have now come back to the question of God the creator, in a very different way. And this God, the force that pulls the universe, is a much more profound deity, frankly a much bigger God. And our place in the universe is much smaller. Thank God, Professor Einstein kept doing the math.

The third secular saint is Darwin. Now Darwin, it must be admitted, was not much of a theist but every seminary needs an atheist or two. And he started down a path that he could not complete by himself. Until Darwin, we thought we were desperately concerned to underscore the uniqueness of humanity by the measure that they stood apart from the animal kingdom. We had the image of God. Furthermore, the theologians and the faithful of the day, took the whole understanding of the evolution of the species as a direct threat to the authority of the Bible. He helped us enormously.

At about the same time as Darwin, our biblical scholars began to understand that the Bible is not a history book and certainly the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not history in the scientific sense of history. In the religion departments, we began to appreciate the meaning of saga and the use of myth in the communication of spiritual truth.

Years later, thinking through the implications of an evolving universe, we came to a much richer understanding of God as well. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin showed us that there is a direction to the course of evolution, viewed on a grand scheme. We move from the organic to the conscious to the self-conscious. At each level, there is a corresponding increase in sophistication and self-direction. It is an increased concentration of spirit. At each level there is an increased ability to alter the course of evolution.

In our generation, we stand at an important crossroads in the history of psychic development. This is the first generation that will begin to understand our genetic make up. We are the first generation that will be able to directly alter the course of human evolution through gene therapy. Once again, the divine image comes to us from quite a different perspective. We have the potential to do an enormous good but there is clearly a Promethean temptation to a secular self-direction that could become tragically evil.

Here as in so many places in the twentieth century, our technological capability has far outstripped our moral imagination. We have the power to do these things, but our moral and spiritual framework has not been able to develop fast enough so that we can say with any certainty to what ends these new found powers ought to be used.

This is why we have to critical inquiry alive. I love these ads for Macintosh. They have pictures of Einstein, Gandhi, Edison, the Dali Lama, and a host of original thinkers. And they conclude with a simple message. ‘Think different'. And that is the challenge. St. Thomas was right in one regard, he wanted to touch and see, he wanted religious claims to bear themselves out in experience. I agree with him. The bible tells us about many spiritual values: love, forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation, redemption, mercy, compassion, justice. I believe in them, not just because they Bible tells me about them, but because they make more sense of my life than Atman, for example. They have a self-authenticating quality to them.

But a critical spirit of inquiry must be matched with imagination, and that is another sermon. We never have a full slate of evidence. We are like a jury with only parts of the story and the evidence is never unambiguous. And we have to make a commitment and develop convictions in the midst of the partial and the ambiguous. That is why faith is so important. It is not a leap into the unknown, an uninformed trust. It is a spirit-filled imagination that fills in the blanks and is able to chart a course in the midst of a fragmentary world.

Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to question authority. Do not be afraid to think different. Amen.