Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

April 24, 2022 | 4:00 p.m.

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:14–29
John 20:19–31

You all know I’m a youth ministry pastor. I’ve been working with junior high and high school youth in churches for about fourteen years now. I love it. I love Sundays like today, where this morning we welcomed fifteen eighth graders into active church membership as part of our Confirmation class, and the congregation all reached out their hands to bless those young people and to welcome them. It’s why I do what I do.

But another thing I love about youth ministry is the unique and often quirky behaviors of teenagers. Fourteen years is plenty long enough to see adolescents do hilarious and inexplicable things. One student I worked with in California was named Henrick, and for a while when he was in seventh grade Henrich enjoyed nothing so much as disappearing. So I would have the youth group all together, either in the youth room or the sanctuary playing a game, and it would dawn on me that something wasn’t quite right, but it wouldn’t take long to figure out that Henrick had disappeared again.

He never went far. He never left the church. He would just quietly slip away when my back was turned and find himself a hiding spot, just to see how long it would take me to discover he was gone.

It became kind of a slogan for our youth group that year: “Where’s Henrick?”

This story from John’s Gospel makes me wonder if anyone asked, “Where’s Thomas?” Because this amazing thing happens to the disciples there in a locked room in the evening of that day, the first day of the week, and Thomas is missing.

And the Gospel writer doesn’t say why.

It seems some explanation would be needed, since the disciples are all together in a house with the doors locked because they are afraid of the Jewish authorities. If they’re all hunkered down in fear together, then why isn’t Thomas with them? Is he out getting groceries or what? For whatever reason, on the evening of the first day of the week, the same day they’d found the tomb empty, the same day Jesus appeared to Mary in the garden and Mary had told all the disciples “I have seen the Lord,” Thomas is not with them.

So he misses out. People talk about Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and man, did Thomas miss out.

I get that a little bit. Do you get that? Something is happening somewhere and you’re not a part of it? Your friends are there. Your family is there. But you’re not there. You’re missing out.

Last week was the first in-person celebration of Easter in this space in three years—three years! The first sunrise service in three years, the first Easter flowers in three years, the first “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today Alleluia” with brass ensemble in three years, the first Jazz Easter worship in three years. But it wasn’t just the first in three years, it was the first of its kind. It was Nancy’s first Sunday among us (what a way to start!). It was the first Easter of its kind, the first Easter for many people; children have been born and disciples have been baptized in this community since the last time we worshiped together in person on Easter.

And some of us missed it. Maybe we got to experience a part of it through the livestream. That is important. We’re still learning how technology enables us to worship together even when we can’t be together. But some of us would have been here—could have been here—but weren’t. Some of us missed it. We had to work. We were sick. We had a family emergency or anxiety. We know the reasons, and maybe they don’t matter. What matters is that we missed it.

The risen Jesus shows up through locked doors (something else John doesn’t explain), and Thomas missed it. Jesus pronounces peace upon that frightened, regretful, exhausted gathering, the peace he promised them the last time he was with them, and Thomas missed it. Joy finds these people, these grieving, broken people, and Thomas missed it. Jesus breathes a Spirit into them, and Thomas missed it. Jesus sends them—commissions them to take this peace and this joy and this Spirit out into the world!—and Thomas missed it.

The risen Jesus came and everything changed. And some of us missed it.

My last two years of high school I ran with a group of four friends: Troy, Chip, Ryan, and Jay. None of us had much money, but we had cars, so we could go practically anywhere in Denver, and we did. Very often our evenings out together involved driving downtown and wandering around, making mild public irritations of ourselves, and generally just feeling the freedom of being teenagers in a grown-up environment.

Those evenings out generated stories. There was the story about launching little Styrofoam gliders off the roof of a parking garage onto unsuspecting pedestrians on the 16th Street mall. Or the story about sneaking into the Westin Hotel kitchen through a propped-open alley door. Or the story of leading the golf course overnight security guard on a chase across the 8th fairway.

These stories became legends to the five of us—even the ones of us who weren’t there when they happened. We all had part-time jobs and played sports and had family commitments, so these adventures rarely included all five of us at the same time. But the stories were for all of us. The telling and retelling of them (embellishing and exaggerating along the way, of course) was for all of us. You didn’t need to be there to be part of the story, and honestly, I have a hard time remembering which of those stories I was present for and which ones I wasn’t (although I’m sure I was there on the golf course).

This is the good news about the power of stories to shape a community by their telling and retelling. It’s good news for Thomas, because though he missed it when the risen Jesus appeared, that’s still his story. The disciples tell the story to him—“We have seen the Lord!”—and there can be no doubt but that, though he wasn’t physically present when it happened, Thomas is part of the “we” who have seen the Lord.

The testimony of his fellow disciples makes Thomas part of an adventure he thinks he missed. It does the same thing to us. We are all Thomas, aren’t we? We weren’t there. We didn’t have the experience. Faith apprehends all of us by the witness of a community to miracles we did not see with our own eyes. The risen Jesus appeared: this is our story and this is our song, though none of us were there ourselves when it happened. The testimony of the faithful makes this story all of our story, and it makes all of us all part of the story. And so we say “We have seen the Lord” (say it), and we believe that it is just as true of us as it was for the disciples in the evening on that first day of the week.

We believe that. But Thomas doesn’t believe it. Thomas won’t believe it.

Let’s get this straight about “Doubting Thomas”: doubt is not his problem; disbelief is. I chose to read the translation of this story from the Common English Bible translation because it makes this more clear than the New Revised Standard Version translation. Not to nerd out here, but the difference in translation matters. Where the CEB uses the word disbelief, the NRSV uses the word doubt. The problem is that there are Greek words that mean doubt, and none of them are the words used for Thomas in this story. The word used of Thomas is simply the word for belief or faith with a negating “a” tacked onto the beginning. Think apolitical or ahistorical or atheist.

Thomas doesn’t doubt the testimony of his fellow disciples; he flat out refuses to believe it. Doubt would be better. Doubt would be more open-minded. Doubt would say, “I don’t know you guys. Are you sure? That seems pretty wild to me.” Doubt would seek to be won over. After all, these aren’t strangers telling Thomas this story; they are his closest friends and the people he has shared practically every waking moment with following Jesus—all the way to the bitter end. There is a massive distance in a relationship when someone tells you something between “I doubt it” and “I don’t believe you.”

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.”

Maybe Thomas’s disbelief is purely philosophical and intellectual. Maybe he’s a logical positivist; maybe he believes that only statements that are verifiable through direct observation can be believed—so he demands to have his own direct experience.

Or maybe disbelief is not intellectual. Maybe it’s personal. Maybe Thomas resents his friends for the experience they had that he didn’t. Maybe he thinks they think they’re better than he is because they shared an experience together that he missed.

Or maybe disbelief is spiritual. Could Thomas be mad at God, mad at Jesus for appearing when Thomas wasn’t there? If the risen Jesus can appear on the other side of a locked door, surely he could do a quick headcount first. Could Thomas’s missing out have been something other than an accident of timing?

Disbelief may be intellectual or personal or spiritual, but the effect is the same. Thomas refuses to accept his part in the story his friends are telling because he thinks it’s not his story—that it can’t be his story. He thinks it’s not even their story. He doesn’t say to them, “That may be true for you.” He doesn’t tell his friends (as is often said today) that it’s “your truth.” He says it’s not true. He refuses to believe them and so inserts a painful fracture into the life of the church.

So before the day of resurrection is even over, the church’s story of peace and joy and life through the risen Christ has its first nonbeliever—and it’s one of their own. Disbelief has been part of the church from day one.

Here’s some more good news. Our disbelief is not an obstacle for God. The risen Jesus is present to disciples who don’t believe. Our belief is not a precondition of God’s action.

When the risen Christ appears to the disciples in that house in the evening of that first day of the week, they’ve already heard the resurrection story once, and it doesn’t seem to have motivated belief.

They heard it from Mary. Our reading today started in verse 19; here’s verse 18: “Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, ‘I’ve seen the Lord.’ And again verse 19: “the disciples were behind closed doors because they were afraid.”

If Jesus were waiting for the church to believe to show up, he’d still be waiting. But he’s not. Jesus appears to a distinctly disbelieving group of people, the very people who fled and denied him and who are now, despite the witness they’ve heard that he’s been seen by one of their own, holed up and hiding out. That’s the community Jesus comes to.

The power in Easter is the power of an eternal kind of life to conquer anything that stands in its way, even unto death. Even unto the church’s disbelief.

Jesus does not need us to believe in order to be Jesus, but he wants us to. He comes again when Thomas is there and he almost orders him, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” It’s very forceful language; Jesus really wants his disciples to believe.

At the risk of sounding really obvious in church, belief is better than disbelief. “Happy are those,” Jesus says, “who don’t see yet believe.”

Thomas believed because he saw. Just like the other disciples, and just like Mary. But those of us reading John’s Gospel, the very first readers of it all the way up to us here today, we have not seen.

And that is why the Gospel exists. So that we may believe.

That is why we recite this story together: not so that we might admire Jesus, but so that we might believe.

Not so that we might historically verify Jesus, but so that we might believe.

Not so that we might study Jesus, but so that we might believe.

Not even so that we might follow Jesus, but so that we might believe—and that believing we might have life in his name.
Jesus wants us to believe.

We believe with our mouths every time we receive this sacrament. Jesus says we are happy if we don’t see yet believe, and we get to practice that each week in worship together as we take this bread that is more than bread and this cup that is more than a cup and we partake together in the body and blood of Christ. Though we don’t see Christ’s body—we can’t see it—we believe that Christ is no less present to us in the sacrament for our inability to see.

We believe and so we partake, and we partake so that we will believe. We are nourished and fed, even as we are sent out to represent Christ’s body to a world hungry for belief. Amen.