My sermon this past Sunday had less to do with trying to explain Thomas and more to do with what lies beyond our fear. It’s a little site specific, since I was preaching before our congregation’s annual meeting, but I hope you find something here.
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Over the past few months, I have become enamored of a South American animal called a capybara. It is the world’s largest rodent, weighing up to nearly two hundred pounds full grown. Capybaras are extreme extroverts and crave community, which certainly shows why they caught my attention—and they are just fun to watch.
As you might imagine, my social media began to fill up with not only capybara videos but also links to other exotic animals, one of which was the quokka. It is a marsupial—a cousin of the kangaroo–that lives on a couple of islands off the coast of Australia, and it looks like it is constantly smiling.
When I mentioned them to our friend Jenny in Durham, who is a vet, she said, “Yes, but they also throw their babies when they are being chased predators so they can get away.”
When we got back to Guilford, I started reading more and learned that they the way they “throw” their little ones is actually to loosen the muscles around the pouch that holds the baby so it falls out.
Fear makes us do strange things.
When we left the story last week, most everyone had seen the empty tomb, several of the women had seen and talked to Jesus, and they had all gone home bewildered, not really knowing what to do next. They were still scared.
Easter morning had not brought a tsunami of trust and confidence into the world, or the disciples, for that matter. They weren’t out throwing each other at the Romans, but they also weren’t out telling people what they had seen or shouting, “Alleluia.” They went into hiding, afraid that those who had executed Jesus would be coming for them as well, afraid that life would never be the same.
All of them except Thomas.
As a result, when Jesus appeared in the room where the groups was hiding and passed the peace, offering them hope and trust instead of fear and dread, and telling them–as he had told them many times before–that God’s presence in their lives made them agents of change–agents of forgiveness, compassion, and justice–Thomas missed the reunion.
Do you ever wonder where he went after the crucifixion? What he was doing?
Wherever he was, he handled his fear differently.
Though the enduring label for Thomas was that he was a doubter, theologian David Lose sees him as a realist–the kind of person who relentlessly took stock of a situation before making a decision. He writes,
Thomas wasn’t with the other disciples when they were cowering in fear in the upper room. We don’t know where he was, but I’m guessing he was out getting on with his life, figuring out what was going to come next and getting on with it. Because Thomas is, first and foremost, a realist.
And here’s the thing: reality came like never before on that Friday just two days before this scene, when Thomas watched as they nailed his Lord, teacher, and friend to two slabs of wood. Jesus was dead, and with him all the hopes and dreams of the past three years had perished as well.
So when the disciples come saying that they had seen Jesus, Thomas doesn’t merely doubt them. He out and out just plain doesn’t believe. And so I suspect that his demand to see and feel the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands is less a request for proof than it is mocking the disciple’s claim. He makes that demand, in other words, because he knows it will never happen; it’s a request as absurd, even ridiculous, as what his friends are claiming.
Jesus appeared to them in the room again eight days later–basically today. (Maybe that’s why the lectionary offers this passage every year on the Sunday after Easter.) We don’t know what their week had been like. We don’t know if they had seen Jesus otherwise; it doesn’t appear that they had been together much. We do know they were still gathering in that room.
Maybe Jesus showed up again to get them out of there, to help them grasp what God could do through them.
When Jesus turned to Thomas, he didn’t offer him the chance to touch his wounds in order to assuage Thomas’ guilt; he did it to change Thomas’ perception of reality, of what was possible, of what God could do through him.
And Thomas, responded–without touching Jesus–by saying, “My master and my God.”
Then Jesus said something that feels a bit puzzling, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” Too often those words have been read as a sort of corrective, a back-handed criticism of Thomas and the others, as though Jesus was saying the best believers were those who trusted without questioning.
New Testament professor Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw notes the Greek word that is translated as happy in our passage is not an indication of God’s blessing, but simply an adjective. She says,
People who have that simple kind of faith, the kind that doesn’t ask questions or have doubts or require evidence, are pretty undisturbed, blissfully happy, even. But is that the goal? Is John trying to tell us that we should all believe without seeing, without reasoning or questioning? I don’t think so. No one in this story believes like that. It takes Jesus’ voice to bring Mary around to recognition. Peter and the other disciple require a glimpse into the tomb, and even then they don’t understand. The other disciples need Jesus to show up miraculously in their midst. So, Thomas’s delayed recognition of the resurrected Jesus is not an inferior form of faith but just another way that people might move from doubt to belief in order to follow Jesus.
Faith–trusting God–was hard work for them. I think it is fair to say that is probably true in one way or another for most of us in this room where we are gathered. We are, after all, a UCC church. (That’s intended as a joke.) The reality is the history of our congregation and of our denomination is filled with faithful people who did the hard work of trusting God in the middle of all kinds of realities.
This is our 260th annual meeting, which puts the inaugural meeting a decade before the Revolutionary War. We have held annual meetings through the Civil War, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, 9/11–and that doesn’t even cover all the wars. We held annual meetings during two worldwide pandemics (most of you were here for the last one), through the Great Depression, through elections when our parties both won and lost. We have also held annual meetings without loved ones, in the middle of family tragedies and difficulties, in between settled pastors when folks didn’t know who would come next.
Those annual meetings, like the one we will hold in this room shortly, were statements of our faith in God and in ourselves as the people of God. I won’t assume everyone was happy at all those meetings. I will assume most every meeting had several questions as the congregation worked out the details of whatever they were voting on, as leadership changed, and as our financial situation fluctuated.
Our story about the disciples offers us the chance to look at our forebearers as those who gathered to further understand how to get out of the room and see what God could do.
We are still gathering not because those who came before us just simply trusted that everything would work out. We are still here because people generously chose relationship over doctrine, over politics, over uncertainty, even over the really crucial things that divide churches like what color to paint the walls, or whether or not to hold annual meetings in the sanctuary or in the fellowship hall.
We are still here because people were willing to trust God to show them a new reality, the way Thomas and the others were willing to trust that Jesus was alive and standing there with them.
We are still here because they got out of the room and followed God’s call. We are also still here because every year we get out of the room as well and do the things we trust will share God’s love with those around us and with one another.
As we gather for our 260th meeting, our task once again is to do the work we have to do to continue to trust God and to trust each other. Let us ask the questions we need to ask, let us listen in love when folks respond, and let us remember there is not one detail in any of the reports or in any of the decisions we face that matters more than the relationships we share as the followers of Christ here at the Mount Carmel Congregational Church, no matter what is going on around us so that we can move past our fear, our realism, whatever it is that blocks us from seeing what the Spirit can bring to life in us.
Let us follow Jesus out of the room. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
