Resurrection Stories: Overcoming Doubt

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John 20:19-31
May 1, 2011

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

I don’t know if you realize this, but there is a basic truth to growing as a Christian. It’s a paradoxical truth because it seems to stray from what many of us have learned growing up. The basic truth is this: if you don’t have doubts, and you don’t have questions, you don’t really have faith. Let me repeat what I just said: if you don’t have doubts, and you don’t have questions, you don’t really have faith.

I know,… I know,… we’ve all grown up learning that we have to have a blind faith. In fact, that idea of having a blind faith comes out of this passage, where Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I don’t think Jesus is saying that being like Thomas and having doubts is wrong, while having a blind faith is right. Jesus has already blessed Thomas, and he’s saying that those who don’t have doubts also are blessed. He’s blessing everyone who has faith, no matter what course their faith has taken. Still, my experience tells me that the people who really develop the deepest faith do so after having overcome doubt and questioning.

I’ve learned how important doubting and questioning to growing faith both on a personal level and through my studies over the years. I’m a person who’s struggled with doubts and questions for much of my adolescent and adult life. You may or may not know this, but I never went to seminary to become a pastor. I went to get answers. The call to be a pastor came as a surprise to me, and only in my last year of seminary. My focus in going to seminary was to help my counseling career. I went to seminary to get answers to my spiritual and theological questions that would help me personally, and help me in my work with people struggling spiritually in their everyday lives. I had questions and doubts.

Even after I became a pastor, I still had questions about everything—about Jesus, God, the Christian life, and much more. I ended up working on my Ph.D., not because it would help my career, but because I wanted to dig deeper for answers. And all along the way I discovered that the more questions I got answered, the more new questions I had. Every answer opened up the door to new questions. Even today I outread most people I know because I have so many questions about what it means to be human, how the human brain works, how organizations work and why, what God is doing in the world, how to understand politics, how to understand history, and much more.

I’ve always been a person plagues with questions and doubts. Those doubts caused me to walk away from the church in my teens because I wasn’t sure the church could provide answers. I’m not alone in this. I’ve been surprised at how many other pastors walked away from the church as teens. I had lunch this past week with a Roman Catholic priest who told me that he had walked away from the church as a teen, and that he had been a drummer in a heavy-metal rock band before coming back to the church and going to seminary. Connie Frierson, who will be ordained as associate pastor in the next few months here at Calvin Church, has a similar history. She walked away from the church, and then ended up joining here and going to seminary, all to find answers to her doubts and questions.

All of us pastors who walked away from the church are in good company biblically because we are just like Thomas. I know that in the Presbyterian tradition we don’t have saints. Well, actually, we do. Everyone of faith is considered a saint. What we don’t have is set-aside or patron saints. If we did, though, Thomas could very well be the patron saint of the Presbyterian Church because we are a church that allows doubts and questions. We don’t demand blind faith. We invite a learned faith. We invite people to struggle with their questions. Why Thomas? Because he doubted, and it led him to the greatest commitment of any of the apostles.

You probably don’t know much about the fate of all the apostles (other than Peter and Paul) after Jesus ascended, but they have interesting histories. And Thomas’ history is as interesting as it gets. We don’t know how accurate this history is, since it was not written down till years after Thomas died, but here’s his story. Thomas was the most doubting, but he ended up being the most faithful. Christ called him to perhaps the most difficult ministry of any of the apostles.

After the Day of Pentecost, the apostles gathered together and cast lots to decide who would go where to spread the Gospel. Andrew was sent to the region that is now Armenia. Peter would stay in Jerusalem (and eventually move to Damascus and then Antioch). Later, Paul would go to what is now Turkey and Greece. Others were sent elsewhere. To Thomas fell the duty of spreading the Gospel in India, a place Thomas did not want to go to. Thomas complained: “I don’t want to go. I’m not healthy enough. I don’t speak the languages. It’s too dangerous. I’m the wrong person. I’m not going.” His refusal changed one day when he met Jesus in the marketplace. The tradition says that Jesus told him that he wanted him to go to India. Again, Thomas complained. So Jesus approached a traveling merchant in the marketplace named Abbanes and offered to sell Thomas to him as a slave. He told Abbanes that Thomas had carpentry skills, which he needed. The price was agreed upon, and Abbanes approached Thomas and said, “Is that your master over there?” pointing to Jesus. When Thomas said yes, Abbanes, said, “He has just sold you to me. You are now my servant.”

Thomas went with Abbanes first to what is modern-day Pakistan, settling in the Indus River valley. It was one of the great cradles of civilization, along with the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Yangtze. It was there that Thomas eventually was sold to and worked in the palace of the king, Gundaphorus. Thomas shared the Gospel with him, and after a number of years received his freedom and preached throughout India. It was a difficult mission because many parts of India were ungoverned and dangerous. Over the course of twenty years, Thomas faithfully traveled throughout India, spreading the Gospel. He eventually settled near Madras, where he was tortured with red-hot plates because of what he was preaching, and then was killed by being run through with a spear. The church started by Thomas, the Mar-Thoma Orthodox Church, which has about 2.5 million members world-wide, still exists in many parts of India.

Thomas, even though he doubted, balked, and complained, also served with tremendous courage in places that were more dangerous than any other in which the other apostles served. Thomas is my hero because he points the way to being an “authentic” Christian. He is the model for the struggling Christian who has doubts and questions, but never lets them get in the way of coming to God. In Thomas the questions led him to get closer to God, and to do more in service to God than ever anticipated.

I believe that one of the problems of our culture today is that our doubts are compounded with laziness. We have a lot of people who say that they yearn to find God in their lives, but then do nothing about it. For example, so many people in our culture today say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” That, to me, is a lazy person’s answer. When they say, “I get more out of going into the woods than in church,” or “I get more doing yoga than in being in church,” I hear people saying, “I’m too lazy to actually work on my spirituality. So I’m going to do what’s easy.” Like them, I love going out into the woods, and I do find God there. I also do yoga most mornings as part of my prayer ritual. I’m one of the few 52 year-old men who can actually place my palms on the floor while standing with straight legs. But if that’s the extent of your spirituality, it’s lazy. It’s doing nothing. It’s like saying that I’m a true athlete, but I find athletic success best by playing catch in my back yard. Or it’s like saying that I’m wonderful chef, and my best dish is boiling pasta. To be an athlete you have to work at your sport. To be a great chef you have to actually work at cooking. To be truly spiritual, you have to actually work on your spirituality, and without any kind of religious practice, how are you working on it?

So many people have questions and doubts, and it leads them to do little or nothing. Evangelical Churches really understand how spiritually lazy many people are, in a way that many of us in our Mainline churches don’t. They actually tailor their churches to people who are immature spiritually, either because they never grew up in church, or because they walked away after confirmation. So they do things to make religion easier. For example, in most of those large, evangelical churches, do you know what term they give their worship services? They don’t call them “contemporary.” They call them “seeker” services. They are trying to create services for people who are spiritually curious, but are afraid of deeper spiritual, theological answers. They create them for those who are just “seeking,” but haven’t gone very deep. They are targeting the most spiritually immature, which I believe is a good thing. We’re not set up for that, though. We’re set up not as a church for seekers, but as a church for “deepers”—for people who want to go deeper into Christian faith and spirituality.

If you read the writings of pastors and others out of the evangelical, mega-church movement, they are written for people with little spiritual or religious background. They tend to write to people at an 8th or 9th grade level. How do I know this? It all has to do with the SMOG test. I don’t mean an environmental air-pollution test. The SMOG (SMOG stands for “standard measure of gobbledygook) test is a reading test that Bruce Smith made me aware of. Back in 1968 an educational researcher named G Harry McLaughlin came up with a formula to determine what grade level a person was writing at. It was a helpful test in guiding writers to write at an age-appropriate level. The test is fairly simple. You take 30 lines of any book. You then count the number of words that have more than two syllables. You then take the square root of that number (or the square root of the squared number closest to that number) and add 3.

Most of what I write is written at a 12th-grade or college level, according to the SMOG test. When you read books coming out of the evangelical world, they tend to be written at about an 8th or 9th grade level with large print and lots of white space. My saying this is not my saying that their writings are bad or wrong. There are many good books that I have read that are written at this level. One reason that Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life was so popular is that it was written at an 8th grade level. If you want to see why I say that, apply the SMOG test to it. I think his book is a very good book, but it is written for people who are at an 8th or 9th grade religious level. It is written for people who either don’t have many questions, or who have been somewhat lazy spiritually and want simpler, easier answers. Warren’s book is good, but there are so many more that are truly exceptional, but reading them requires a willingness to use our questioning and doubts to dig deeper.

In the Presbyterian Church (USA) and at Calvin Presbyterian Church, we allow people to doubt and question, and we invite people to grow deeper. We are not a tradition or a church that expects blind faith. We expect a questioning faith. I really believe that one of the gifts of the Presbyerian tradition is that we both encourage and expect people to move beyond a 9th grade religious level. We encourage and expect people to have questions and doubts, and we try to create classes and groups that move people deeper.

You see this whole emphasis on questions, doubts, education, and growing emphasized throughout our church and the whole Presbyterian tradition. For instance, if you look at our robes, they’re different from the ones Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholic pastors and priests wear. Think about where else you’ve seen people in our culture with these kinds of robes. You see them in universities and colleges. Professors wear them at graduation. Our robes are academic robes, and it emphasizes that we pastors are primarily to be teachers. It’s also for this reason in the Presbyterian Church that so many of our pastors have doctorates. We get them because we not only believe that education is important, but because so many of us pastors have our doubts and questions, and we are always working to get answers, which of course leads us to new questions. We Presbyterian pastors are questioners leading others to both question and to find answers.

Too many Christians today come armed with strong opinions, but with little study. They have a little knowledge, and they use it to criticize and judge people, while they stay safely in their own little ignorant and arrogant bubbles. But we’re different. We’re a people called to recognize that there is so much that we don’t know, and that we need to humbly strive for greater learning. This is what Thomas has taught us. He’s taught us that our doubts and questions can lead to an even greater faith.

From Thomas we also get an important question that we need to answer if we’re going to grow in faith: how committed are we to really growing spiritually, to forging ahead for answers to questions, and to learning what God has to teach?

Amen.