The Doubt of St. Thomas, He Qi, 2001
A Believing Heart (Easter 2C)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)
Sunday April 2, 2016 8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Holy
Eucharist
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Moments
of hopeless despair come occasionally. One
for me occurred in Lewes Delaware in the early 80s: Elena and I had taken our still growing
family of two children to the beach.
After a long, relaxed day, the sun was about to set in the west. No one was
left on the beach but us. Elena was
sheltering from cool evening wind under a blanket; I was reading. We each thought the other was watching the
children, playing in the sand beside us. Elena suddenly said with terror in her
voice, “Where’s Lonnie?” We looked up
and down the beach as far as we could see.
Our four year old was nowhere to be seen. Panicking, I began to run along the beach in
the direction we had last seen him, trying to spot him on the beach in the
lowering mists and scanning the water: that vast Atlantic Ocean only feet from
us, its rising treacherous surf just high enough to sweep our little boy off of
his feet. The last people we had seen on
the beach, maybe 15 minutes before, looked sketchy at best. Now, in our imaginations, they seemed like
monstrous threats to children. The
approaching twilight focused our fear into one spot of sharp despair. Holding hands, Elena and I prayed against
hope, “God please help us find Lonnie.
Please keep him safe.” Then Elena said, “It’s a distance to the
changing room, but maybe he went to the bathroom without telling anyone. You
know how private he is.” So I ran back
toward the barrier dunes. Just as I got to the boardwalk, there was Lonnie,
walking calming and quietly back from the rest room. I
hugged him hard. He seemed puzzled at all the sudden attention from Mom and Dad.
Elena and I were very thankful. Lonnie was safe as we had prayed. Thinking about it afterward, we wondered, had
God answered our prayer? Or had we just
misunderstood things and gotten very frightened needlessly? No one had bothered Lonnie in the restroom,
and he had not lost his way. And he most
certainly had not drowned. From his
point of view, nothing remarkable had happened at all. From ours, we were very thankful.
It’s like that a lot with answers to
prayers and miracles in our lives:
though from inside they seem to be overwhelming evidence of God’s care
and love, perhaps even providence or intervention, from the outside they can be
explained as misunderstandings, the resolution of groundless fears, the normal
working of nature, or, perhaps mere coincidence.
When I was a boy, I was taught that
God heard and answered prayers, and that miracles just like those in the Bible could
happen to us, if we were righteous enough.
But then I grew up. I gained
experience. I realized that perhaps God
is not so involved in my life, and that what I used to think was an answered
prayer was just coincidence. We live in an age of science and of sophistication. Growing up means absorbing that.
There were further questions. We had friends in college whose little baby
was afflicted by a horrible congenital disease. Despite all the all the efforts
of medical science, despite prayers, anointings, and blessings, the little boy
suffered and died slowly. It is not the
only time in my life when I wished that the world were the way I had been
taught in Sunday School. Why does God
answer some prayers and not others, especially those most desperate and most
right? A partisan God, or worse, a
capricious one, is not at all attractive.
I admit: Doubt is a good thing,
something that helps keep us safe from hucksters and conmen, and from
misunderstanding the varied and puzzling sense perceptions that pour in. God placed it in our hearts, and made it a
part of growing up, to help keep us safe.
It is part of our survival instinct.
But we are diminished if we let
doubt rob us of our sense of gratitude and wonder. We may not be as naïve as we once were, but
it is clear that we have lost something in the process. A subtle, niggling voice in the back of my
head now is almost always there, ready to chime in at moments of joy and
thankfulness and say, “An answered prayer?
A miracle? Maybe not so much.” It
discourages me from praying, or at least actually asking God for what I desire
in my heart. I am afraid of having my
heart broken: asking what I desire
deeply, something good and right, and then getting that hope slapped down.
I admit this by way of
confession: whatever change has happened
in my heart, it is not entirely good. I
can confess it publicly today without much embarrassment because I think that most
of us have suffered a similar loss as we became adults. It’s just the way things are with most of
us.
In today’s Gospel, it is clear that
Thomas has suffered such a loss of innocence:
“I won’t believe Jesus has come back from the dead unless I see it with
my own eyes!” It’s really unfair to sum
up this story and the whole of St. Thomas’ life by saying that he, Doubting
Thomas, was alone in this among the disciples.
All the other disciples—bar none—at various times in these stories
doubted reports of Jesus’ resurrection.
So in today’s story, Jesus tells all
of us, along with Thomas, “do not doubt,
but believe.” The Greek text is clearer
than our translation here: do not be apistos, but be pistos—do not be unfaithful but faithful, do not be unbelieving but
believing. Pistos has a broad meaning.
I would translate this as “trusting” as well as “trustworthy.”
Be believing. Be faithful.
Be trusting. There are so many
scriptures that play on this theme!
Jesus ends most of his parables with “let the one who has ears, hear!” Without a disposition of the heart, we are
deaf to the voice that matters.
Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by
sight” (2 Cor 5:7). And because of this
faith, he says, we are not afraid, either to live or to die. Trust and love have replaced fear.
Jesus in John’s Gospel says it is
how we react to his words, in a trusting or a rejecting manner, that reveals who
and what we are: “I came not to judge, but to save. It is my word that has already created a
judgment of sorts—how you react to it tells who you are” (John 12).
I suspect that most of the stories
of miracles and deeds of wonder in scripture tell things in such a way that
this implicit judgment is evident in the telling of the story: how could the Egyptians, the backsliding
Israelites, or the Pharisees not be wicked when they persist in fighting God and
Jesus in the face of such clear evidence as the miracles as narrated?
I am inclined to think that events
in real human lives lying behind such stories probably were a bit more
ambiguous. For whatever reason, God
seems to have made the world in such a way that we are never forced by evidence
to believe in him. God wants willing trust, not coerced
obedience. I suspect this is because
forced trust is not really trust; compelled love, not really love. To be
sure, moments occur that seem overwhelmingly convincing. But usually this is at the end of a series of
small steps in the ambiguous dark. We
draw close to God in faith by little steps, and God responds once in a great
while with a giant step toward us. But
then the moment is gone, and we are left with our memory. And memory itself is very ambiguous. Faith often is consists in persisting in our
trust and love from those high moments even in the dark, dry periods that
follow, again, a few small steps forward, with God making a giant leap toward
us after.
Having a believing heart is at the
core of being a happy and balanced person.
It is at the heart of being a Christian. Having a trusting heart is at the core of being trustworthy: honesty breeds honesty. A believing heart wisely lets the niggling
voice raise doubts, but does not let it rob us of our thanks, trust, and hope. A believing heart persists in openness to the
strange, the unprecedented, and the as yet unseen. It does not belittle the faith of others,
even when this may seem strange or silly.
A believing heart continues to pray, and to act and serve as if all the
good stories are true, even when doubt comes.
A believing heart is a great bulwark against fear. It senses intuitively that there is no
problem so big, no disaster too awful, no corner so dark that God cannot help
us through it and turn things better.
While a believing heart is not belief in magical control of things to
suit ourselves, it cultivates and honors a sense of wonder and magic at the
heart of everything. It recognizes the
love that is beneath and behind all things.
Trusting God through the dark,
expressing thanks through the ambiguity, praying and asking for help despite
our niggling voice, and trying to be honest with God and ourselves through all
of this leads us through the doubt and finally brings us to that light where
there is no room for anything but thanks, just like for Thomas in today’s
reading.
Leonard Cohen, in the little-sung
final verse of his great anthem “Hallelujah” says it this way:
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
In the name of God, Amen
