Scripture: Revelation 1:1-8; John 20:19-31

“I will not believe, unless....”

-- John 20:25

Today I want to say a good word for doubt. I want to praise rather than bury Thomas. His doubt represents a brief moment of sobriety in the current revel of faith that is shaking civilization apart at the seams. We need only look around our world to understand the danger of too much faith and the important sobriety of doubt. Jews, Christians and Muslims, to mention only the believers in our immediate orbit of interest, are generating immense faith-based fraud and ferocity, which are costing many lives. Thomas where are you, now that we really need you?

Here are some items from the front lines of the faith world. Two weeks ago a Texas court declared a woman who had crushed the heads of her three little children with a stone, killing two and maiming one for life, innocent by reason of insanity. The jury considered her insane because she claimed God had told her to crush her children’s heads. There was no evidence of mental illness presented, and none of any aberrational behavior. The only remarkable thing about her is that she is a devout Christian of a Pentecostal practice, who believes, with thousands of others, that God the Holy Spirit speaks to and through her directly, sometimes in other tongues. The logic of the court judgment therefore is that being a Pentecostal Christian and believing you hear directly from God is insanity per se. Whether one wants to go so far as to draw that conclusion or not, one certainly wants to recommend a moment or two of serious doubt about the status of the message she believed came from God.

About a year prior to this case a Texas jury pronounced a woman in a similar case guilty of murder rather than innocent by reason of insanity, because although she pled that she too was instructed by a supernatural power to drown her five boys, the voice she heard was the voice of the devil. From this we conclude that if God tells you to kill your children it is insanity, but if the devil tells you, it is murder. A quaint distinction!

To me, however, both cases, and the whole cultural background they presuppose, is dangerously unreal, and in need of a Thomas to say “I will not believe!” They attest that too much faith is dangerous because it transports people to an unreal world. The pastors who preach this stuff should be in prison along with the pathetic people who believe them. We need more healthy doubt in our faith.  Bring on Thomas the questioner, doubting Thomas!

This phenomenon of faith forming an unreal world afflicts our current national administration. Robert Wright, the journalist, wrote that as he watched Condi Rice testify the other day he also watched the crawlers at the bottom of the picture and registered the impression that Condi and the crawlers represented two separate worlds. In the one world everything is going well in our foreign wars and the administration has performed and continues to perform perfectly in combating terrorists; in the other world mayhem upon mayhem descends upon sorry victims, terrorists grow bolder, and our young military personnel die daily. O Thomas where are you now that we really need you!

And of course it is not just our administrators and fundamentalists who live in an unreal world, the Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists also live outside reality. Jewish settlers think that they can keep Arab lands forever because God gave it to them, and Muslim fundamentalists believe that Allah wants them to cleanse the earth of the Jewish vermin and their Christian lackeys. O Thomas where are you now that we really need you!

Some items from the frontlines of the world of biblical scholarship: Elaine Pagels suggests that there was a conflict of interpretation in the earliest church represented by the name of Thomas. Thomas means twin, and in some quarters he was believed to be the twin of Jesus. We know from the Gospel of Thomas, a third century work found in Coptic at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, that his real name was Judas, that is, Judas the Twin, the other Jesus. According to his gospel Thomas taught that we are all twins of Jesus, that we are all like him divine, and so are not to worship him as a separate divine being but to use his image as a guide to finding the Christ in ourselves.  The Gospel of John is diametrically opposed to this, and so presents Thomas as ultimately humiliated, confessing at last that Jesus Risen from the dead is his Lord and God, separate and over against him, whom he must worship and adore.

What Thomas doubted, therefore, was the otherness of the saving power. He refused to allow that there is an other divine source of being apart from our selves. For him and his group the saving power is the same power we all have had in ourselves all along and the gospel is a reminder of this and a presentation of the figure of Jesus a guide to finding our own “Jesus self.” This of course is the essence of what used to be called “New Age” spirituality, and I think those who are interviewing for my interim successor are finding how many UCC clergy are Thomas Christians in this sense. We do not worship and adore the Divine Other rather we cherish and nurture the divine self. “I am Jesus, Jesus is I,” is a mantra that recalls the well-known Hindu affirmation, “Atman is Braman, Braman is Atman.”

Now our Gospel of John, which presents the Christian faith of the great creeds and the orthodox churches, makes it clear that we do in fact worship the wholly Other, the divine Jesus Christ, who is not my self but the creator of my self, not in us but over us, not speaking through us but commanding over us. The great danger of Protestantism, with is cozy access to the divine is that it leaves out of account the healthy austerity and alterity of the Divine, the requisite humility of the creature before the creator, the otherness of the source of life.

So let us bring the two, faith and doubt, together in a proper balance. Faith of the right kind is, of course, essential and the right kind of faith believes that Jesus Christ in and by himself has conquered death, and that by faith in him we might share in that victory. Apart from him we are poor, death-bound creatures, but “Alleluia!” he is there and faith is there and eternal life is open to us in fellowship with him!

This right faith goes wrong when it begins to slip into the Thomas mode of the Gospel of Thomas, into complete identification with the divine. “I am in Christ and Christ is in me and therefore I now have a clear channel into the Divine mind, and God is sending clear messages to my humble consciousness.” At the point of this dangerous pride the Thomas of John’s gospel stands up and says, “I will not believe…” Such healthy doubt is the existential presence of mortality. We doubt because we know we are creatures and not the creator, because we are mortal not immortal, limited not boundless, human not divine. Doubt is a sign of our having been created out of nothing, of the presence in us not of fullness but of nothingness, the void out of which God called us into being and over which God holds us in being by His call.

Therefore, doubt is also essential the structure of faith, in as much as faith is always the overcoming of doubt, the leap over the abyss of nothingness into the realm of being. Because we are creatures, that is dependent for our being on a source outside of ourselves – think only of your own conception and birth, how little you had to do with them – we can only believe in that Great Other, we cannot know it. Another way of saying this is that doubt makes the difference between faith and knowledge, and since by definition there can be no creaturely knowledge of the creator, doubt authenticates faith as faith in the truly other God and not in some homemade idol. As the Apostle says, “Here we see puzzling reflections in a mirror there we shall see face to face, here we know in part, there we shall know as we now are known (1 Cor. 13:12).

So, there can be no faith without doubt because faith is by structure and definition a leap over existential anxiety of emptiness to a trust in the Divine assurance of fullness. Without doubt there can be no faith. Without doubt there can be only knowledge, and since by definition we cannot know God but only believe in Him, without doubt there can be no contact with God at all. To have forgotten this is the dangerous sin of all those who believe God talks directly to them, that the canyon between us and God has been filled in. They are the fundamentalists, and they kill people who doubt or disagree with them. So let’s hear it for Thomas the doubter on this second Sunday of Easter, because he represents the possibility of true faith and saves believers from fanaticism and the unreal world. Without doubt faith becomes like alcohol or drugs a hiding from the real world in an unreal world of fantasy and make believe.

Amen.