2EasterA20 John 20:19-31

There was a little boy who lived in a small town. He was a normal kid who loved to get dirty, who lived to get dirty, and had a habit of coming inside for dinner without washing his hands. Now that wouldn’t be a big deal in most houses, but this happened to be the youngest son of the town’s one and only United Methodist minister. I don’t know how many of you have Methodist friends or family members, but it’s no accident that “method” takes up most of their name!

So, after hours of rolling around in the dirt and grass, his mom called him to the table. And with everybody already gathered around, his mother looked at him with those Methodist mother eyes and said, “Young man, let me see your hands.” Oops, Busted! He rubbed his hands across his blue jeans under the table, swallowed hard, said a silent prayer, and then held his hands up. His mother stared at him and gathered her thoughts.

“How many times do I have to tell you that you have to wash your hands before you eat? When your hands are dirty, they have germs all over them and you could get sick. After we say the blessing, I want you to march over to the bathroom and wash your hands.” Everybody bowed their heads and the father said the blessing. Then, the little boy got up and headed out of the dining room. He stopped and then as he looked at his mother, you could hear him say, “Jesus and germs! Jesus and germs! That’s all I ever hear about around here, and I haven’t seen any of them!”

How many of us can relate to that kid? It’s hard for anybody at any age to believe in something they can’t see and to live like you do anyway. We can call that several things: skepticism, disbelief, and doubt. At different points at any given time, if I let you get inside my head, you could find me in any of those places depending on where we are in the Bible. If I thought you had to literally believe every single word, every single action or reaction as the absolute literal, no wiggle room whatsoever, I wouldn’t be in anybody’s pulpit. Because, to me, faith has and never will be a matter of choosing who was to first to see or the last to know.

So, let me re-introduce you to my kindred spirit of the New Testament, Thomas. Centuries ago, someone made some assumptions about Thomas that just weren’t fair and hung a label around his name. Through the years, others took the story and turned the name into the gospel truth.  So, “doubting Thomas” became a part of the biblical record. The Bible itself never describes Thomas in such a negative way. It just simply describes a moment of doubt. And that was all it was. One moment, just one, and then he moved beyond it. His life was never stuck in the cement of that one and only moment, but that’s the lens people have used to see his story ever since.

If we want to understand Thomas, then we have to look at the context of our passage today. The Gospel of John was written a good 60 years after the events of the first Easter. Jesus had already become ancient history even to the people who were only a few generations away from seeing or experiencing him for themselves. So, how do you keep Easter relevant for the fledgling congregation of John’s community and all of us who came after? Look for the guy who wasn’t there…

The disciples were behind locked doors because they were scared stiff. They ran for cover on Easter, and now, even though they had all been safe for a week, it didn’t feel long enough. They were still scared and still in hiding. If you think about it for a minute, it was a very reasonable, human, course of action. At some point or another, all of us, and I do mean, all of us, try to hide from things that scare us and circumstances that we cannot control. Who doesn’t want to stay home with our blankies and comfort food right now? Thomas and the other disciples were perfectly justified in their fears. When your leader has just been executed for treason, what do you think is going to happen to his followers?

When the story of Easter doesn’t stop behind a locked door, the gospel truly becomes good news. It has a lot more to say to anybody who may be hiding behind the steel door of an internal panic room of the soul. The upper room may have hidden the disciples from the Romans and Jewish authorities, but it sure didn’t keep God out of the picture. Jesus didn’t wait for them to pull themselves together and rebound with a new plan. He didn’t wait for Thomas to invent an instantaneous wholeness and get on the same page with the rest of the guys. Jesus just showed up and transformed the room.

We can look at Thomas with our 21st century eyes and think of him as a cynic, a skeptic, a failure, or as simply weak. I will always love him, because I can think about him and see myself. He never settled for easy answers, but he had courage. Thomas was the gutsy disciple who kept asking the hard questions and then chose to live into each wrestled with answer with as much conviction as anyone else we encounter in the New Testament.

Thomas speaks to us when we struggle with family problems, during a financial crisis, when a debilitating illness strikes a family member, when we have to be stuck at home for another month and jobs disappear while the bills keep coming. Thomas becomes real when COVID-19 reminds us that the people stacking grocery shelves and disinfecting hospital beds are keeping us alive and now we want to know their names. We need Thomas to remind us that our pain matters when we become burdened for too long and our spiritual wells have run dry.

Sometimes it just takes intense struggle for faith to come, and for many of us, a certain level of doubt will always be a companion. God understands that fear comes as a natural part of the human package. But God will keep on moving past our barriers, right into the middle of our stuff, no matter what it is. That’s what resurrection means for all of us today.

You don’t have to wait until you’re better before God loves you. You don’t have to reinvent your life or become a different person before God can love you. You don’t have to have all your ducks in a row for faith to become real. You don’t even have to believe without questioning or searching for a lifetime. All of us doubt. Doubt is a healthy thing if it leads to a quest for truth. For me, faith isn’t a matter of living without questions. Faith is learning how to live with the questions I’ll never be able to answer.

In my own way, in the deepest part of me, I know one thing. God is. God is…and hope follows. God is…and justice nurtures healing. God is…and peace becomes a mission. God is…and love will always find a way to transform whatever part of our hearts we allow it to touch. Thomas didn’t allow a moment of doubt to frame the rest of his life.

In the next few weeks, we’ll see Thomas on the shores of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus appears again. And he’ll be back in the upper room with the rest of the disciples on Pentecost when that small inner circle of Jesus’ followers was transformed and became the founders of our global church. “And, according to Christian tradition, Thomas was the first to take the faith to India where he is revered as a church founder and martyr.”

You don’t have to see to believe. But sometimes, like Thomas, we just have to believe so we can see at all. Either way, God is. It just doesn’t matter if you were the first to see or the last to know. God’s love will always be available to walk through your door.

                                      Amen

Adapted from www.sermons.com, 4/18/20.