April 19, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Belief, Doubt, and Sacred Ambiguity

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
John 20:19–31

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith;
it is an element of faith.

Paul Tillich

There is something about this time of year that always reminds me of one of my all-time favorite films from the early nineties, Father of the Bride, in which George Banks, played by Steve Martin, narrates the story of his daughter’s engagement and wedding. It is a hilarious film that aptly captures the sentiment of a father trying to let go of his “little girl” while also trying to hold onto his sanity and his bank account.

One of the best moments of the film comes at the climax of the story, in which George is discovered ripping open bags of hotdog buns in the local supermarket, only to remove two of the buns and replace them back on the shelf. When confronted by the manager of the supermarket, George explains that it is ridiculous that the store sells hot dog buns in packages of ten when he only needs eight. With a wedding planner back home (under the direction of his wife and daughter) taking him for everything he is worth, including the pennies in the crevices of the couch, there is no way that he is paying extra for anything—especially two lousy hotdog buns. It is at this moment that you realize that under the weight of lace and cake and a live dove release, George Banks has finally cracked.

But what I love most about this film in the context of a post-Easter Sunday is that the film begins where it ends. As the movie opens, we see George sitting in a formal, silk-covered wingback chair in the family’s living room. There is an empty champagne glass in his hand, and the bow tie of his tuxedo is undone and hanging loosely around his neck, while confetti and cake plates litter the floor and are scattered about the tables.

The story of George’s journey back through party chaos, complete with lessons learned and the illegal opening of hot dog bags, has only just begun, and yet the opening scene begs that inevitable question we ask at each major life event or annual celebration: What next?

The party is over. The guests have gone home. The banners in the sanctuary are all that remain of the resurrection celebration, and we have to figure out where to go from here. After all, the resurrection is not an isolated event, a parlor trick for mesmerizing the gullible or entertaining the bored; it is both the powerful overcoming of death and the beginning of Christian witness.

What’s curious is that in our story from John’s Gospel, the disciples don’t seem to have made much progress in that post-Easter journey of faith. Mary Magdalene has told the disciples the incredible news that she has seen Jesus alive and with them, and instead of celebrating and spreading the good news, the disciples are locked in their house in fear, hiding out like a bunch of witnesses to a crime that the world surely will not believe.

And if that isn’t disheartening enough, there is Thomas. Thomas, who even having heard the testimony of the now newly believing disciples, doubts their words and, what’s even more, wants some physical evidence. Thomas, the brazen, unbelieving holdout who outright insists that while he would very much like to believe, he is not going to unless he sees and touches Jesus in the flesh. Thomas wants to see and to touch the marks that the nails made in Jesus’ hands and the wound that the soldiers made in his side. But until then, unbeliever, doubter, and skeptic he will remain.

It is a strange follow-up to the resurrection event: fearful disciples, skeptics, and doubters as the models of those first believers. This is what we are given to go on? It seems like if anyone ought to have had certainty of faith, it ought to have been those first disciples, those closest in time and place to the life and death of Jesus. Sure, we may waiver and falter a bit, but shouldn’t those first disciples be perfect models of faith?

Many scholars who read this passage don’t want to make much of the disciples’ and Thomas’s fears and questions. They insist that these parts of the text really aren’t that important to the overall sequence of events in which Jesus appears to his disciples for the first time. To focus on this passage, they say, is to place a detail of the text at the center rather than leaving it on the sidelines where it belongs; the fears, questions, and doubts are not really what the passage is all about.

And perhaps this is true. But I think that there is something important to be said about this part of the text, something that is worth taking some time to think through. After all, most people don’t know this text as scripture identifies it, “Jesus Appears to the Disciples,” but instead refer to it by its more familiar name, “Doubting Thomas.” In fact, of all the characters that Jesus meets in the post-resurrection world of John’s Gospel, none has left a stronger mark on the imagination of Christianity than Thomas. Sculptors, painters, and poets throughout the centuries have attempted to capture the sentiments of this scripture and, most notably, the disciple who doubted more than all the others. In his seventeenth-century painting “The Incredulity of St. Thomas,” Italian artist Michelangelo Caravaggio aptly captures the drama of Thomas’s disbelief. It appears that Thomas’s character touched Caravaggio quite personally, as few of the artist’s paintings are as physically shocking as this one: his Thomas pushes a finger inside the open wound below Jesus’ ribcage, pushing his curiosity to its limits before he will say, "My Lord and my God.” On display in a museum in Potsdam Germany, this painting is the most copied of all of Caravaggio’s works. We love Thomas; we cannot get enough of him.

I think this is because we both want and needThomas and those fearful disciples to be a central part of the post-Easter story.

On the one hand, we want them to be a part of the story because we find in the disciples and Thomas our own doubts and fears, the incredulous nonbeliever in each one of us, the questioner who always wants a little more proof. Thomas speaks aloud the questions, unbelief, and doubts that we ourselves are dying to say (gives voice to the part of us that wonders if the world is all that different today from what it was last week). We need Thomas to be there because we get where Thomas is coming from. We get where he is coming from and we know him intimately. Some who have grappled with this passage have even suggested that the text’s identification of Thomas as “the twin” can easily be interpreted to mean our other half: you and I are the mirror example of the disciple who knows what it is to doubt.

On the other hand we need Thomas and the disciples to be there to remind us of the importance that doubt and questions have in a life of faith. If the disciples had been those supposed perfect examples of faith—sure and certain, immediately on board with this very strange business of resurrection—we would be sorely disheartened and sadly misled.

I think that part of the deep irony of this story—and part of the lesson of faith present in it—is that the disciples are the “perfect” models of faith that they are supposed to be. The first fearful believers and the skeptical Thomas model that the dance of faith isn’t about certainty and facts but about a journey of ups and downs and ongoing questions in which faith and doubt are not polar opposites but intimate partners.

Within the disciples and Thomas we discover a faith that is embraced as a search, not a destination, and a faith that resists easy answers to hard questions. Stepping forward in faith doesn’t mean we need to be sure about everything. God does not require us to be doubt-free. God is calling us to be people who will stop to listen, to question, and to grow.

I was given the privilege of witnessing the truth of both of these ideas during the recent confirmation process of this church’s eighth graders. Last Saturday night at the Easter Vigil, the eighth graders of Fourth Church were confirmed as members of this congregation. Part of that process involves making a written and public declaration of faith that is then presented before the Session, the congregation’s governing body. In their faith statements each of these young people wrote honestly and openly about belief as a journey of faith, a journey filled with both affirmations as well as ongoing questions and uncertainties.

In a portion of his faith statement, one young person wrote, “I have a tough time understanding the Holy Spirit. . . . Sometimes I wonder if it is just the peacefulness that I feel when I am praying, or just sitting quietly, or when I see something really beautiful, like our lake at Saugatuck. But I am not really sure. It is something that I still have to learn.”

A second person responded to the question “What do you believe about the Holy Spirit?” with “I really don’t know yet.”

Another wrote, “I have some doubts about the miracles Jesus performed, but I do believe he shared messages about the value of life lived for others.”

Still another wrote, “The most important thing that I have learned in Fourth Church Rising is that it is OK to question your faith. There are times when I doubt there is really a God because of all the bad things in the world, and I am grateful to have a supportive place like my church where I can go with my questions.”

On and on these faith statements articulated with honesty the ongoing journey of faith with its doubts and questions, ponderings, prayers, and life experiences, all of which are a part of it, flowing together like the currents of a river, often taking us places we never could have imagined for ourselves

And lest you be confused, do not think that this fragile journey of faith is just for those who are young, something that you have to give up at a certain age, that while this is OK for those in the eighth grade, at a certain point being an adult means having all the answers.

In his blog on the Chicago Sun-Times website, film critic Roger Ebert wrote an entry this past Friday entitled “How I Believe in God.” It is a story, but also a faith statement of sorts, about Ebert’s journey from the Catholicism of his childhood to the more undistinguishable form of his beliefs now. It is very unconventional—part secular-humanist, part seeker—and some might consider Ebert’s post more of a statement of disbelief than belief, but it is honest and somehow his humility and his questions are strangely faithful.

If you have been through the Inquirers’ Class here at Fourth Church or attended one of our Academy classes, you know this same sentiment to be true. Part of the mantra that you will always find said around this place is, this a place not to find answers but a place to ask questions.

In both Greek and Latin, the verb “to believe” means “to give one’s heart.” I think that in so many ways this is a beautiful way to think about the seeking that encompasses faith and the God who is identified not through a dictionary but through relationship.

That’s the other really important part of this whole story: the even greater news that redeems all of this is that the God of relationship meets us where we are, wherever we are. We might expect that having sought out the disciples after his resurrection, Jesus would have been a little angry or, at the very least, annoyed that the disciples and Thomas acted the way that they did: afraid and doubting. But he was not. He simply appeared and offered them all peace and gave Thomas exactly what it was that he asked for. Reaching his hands out and lifting the edge of his garment, Jesus revealed the scars of nail punctures for Thomas to touch. “Put your fingers here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” Jesus says to Thomas.

Thomas isn’t the only one God meets exactly where he is and blesses him anyway.

In her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, writer and theologian Kathleen Norris writes this about the journeys of so many of those throughout scripture:

Jacob worshiped badly, trying to bargain with God but it doesn’t seem to matter. God promises to be with him always. . . . God does not punish Jacob as he lies sleeping because he can see in him Israel, the foundation of a people. . . . Peter denied Jesus, Saul persecuted the early Christians but God saw the apostles they would become. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are. And maybe that’s one reason we worship—to respond to grace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith that God has in us. (p. 151)

Jesus will meet us and accompany us—even if it is to the far edges of faith that has forgotten how to believe.

It seems like the first story following the resurrection ought to be one of unfailing belief and certainly, after all it just happened. And yet the surprising answer to “What’s next?” on the journey of faith is not a testimony about certainty but one in which expressions of doubt and disbelief are lifted up as a part of the journey of faith, celebrated by the God who meets us where we are, wherever we are, and accompanies us on that journey, beginning to end.

All thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church
Notes
I am indebted to Kathleen Norris’s essay in her book Amazing Grace for the title of this sermon.