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Confirmation Sunday, April 3, 2016 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 63
Luke 13:1–9, 31–35

Even though Jesus said the greater blessing is for those who can believe without seeing, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a believer anywhere who wouldn’t have traded places with Thomas, given the chance, and seen that face and heard that voice and touched those ruined hands.

Frederick Buechner


John’s cards are on the table, here, aren’t they? The author of the fourth Gospel pulls no punches in telling us what he’s about and what this book’s really after: belief. “These things are written,” he says, “So that you will believe.”

So if you thought you were reading a carefully researched and documented biography, I have some bad news for you. John’s left some things out. He admits it: Jesus did many other signs, signs that aren’t recorded here. What’s worse, he admits right here that the things he’s included serve his agenda of making you believe in this Jesus he’s been describing.

He hasn’t been writing an objective news story, either. No, John’s been writing a Gospel, a particular kind of book that hews to its own conventions, offensive as those conventions may be to readers a couple thousand years hence raised to privilege the perspective of the disinterested third-party bystander.

John says, “You can have your disinterested third-party bystander. Now let me tell you about Jesus.”

It’s not the only way to do it, you know. We’ve spent all of Lent reading from Luke’s Gospel. So for comparison’s sake, here’s what the author of Luke says about the aims of that particular Gospel project:

“Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you . . . so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

Luke: “I investigated everything carefully from the very first.”

John: “Eh, I left some things out.”

Luke says, “So that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

John says, “So that you will believe.”

I’m warning you now, here at the very beginning, even though John left it to the very end, this is about belief.

And make no mistake, belief is a good thing, even the best thing. The last word from Jesus in this story is about belief. It’s this little beatitude: “Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” Belief is a good thing.

What do you believe in, though you can’t see it? Do you believe in the power of love? Do you believe in democracy? Do you believe that this is the Cubs’ year?

Do you believe in God?

Or do you need to see in order to believe? Are you an adherent of Ben Franklin’s old aphorism “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see?”

We all believe things we can’t see. You can’t not believe things you don’t see. Can you see your emotions? Do you believe they’re real? Can you see the bonds you have with the most important people in your life, your family, your friends? Do you believe those bonds are real and exert a real influence on you and your decisions? Can you see the future? Do you believe in it?

It’s important to note here that for the first hearers of this Gospel, believing in what you can’t see was more than an exercise in philosophy. You see, the days were getting on since the events in these stories, and the eyewitnesses were dying off. It’s something of a crisis for the early church: what is the basis of the church’s claims about Jesus if not the testimony of eyewitnesses?

Welcome to our world, right? What proof do any of us have that these signs and wonders happened in the way the Gospels say they did? None. I mean, the Gospels differ among themselves in how they tell these stories. A cartoonist has had a little fun with that fact by drawing Jesus, about to feed the five thousand, turning to his disciples to say, “Now pay attention, or else we’re going to end up with four different versions of this miracle.”

But the most powerful stories we have are the ones that do not depend for their believability on things you can see for yourself and pin down on a board of facts. “Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe,” said Jesus—and also anyone who has ever felt the power of story.

That might sound like I’m promoting ignorance. I’m not. Believing in a thing you don’t see is not the same as believing in something that is demonstrably false and persisting in a wrong belief despite ample evidence to contradict it.

Ignorance is willful. Belief—or faith—as we talked about on our recent retreat with the eighth grade confirmation class is a gift.

We spent some time discussing a question from the Heidelberg Catechism that asks, “What is true faith?” Here’s the answer it gives:

True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.

There’s a lot in there, so let me condense it a little: belief is trust that the Holy Spirit creates in us. It’s a gift.

I think about the story in the Gospel of Mark about a man pleading with Jesus to heal his tormented son, to whom Jesus utters a cryptic, even insensitive, little quip: “All things can be done for the one who believes.”

“I believe,” that desperate parent said in response. And then he added, “Help my unbelief.”

And so Jesus did. Because belief is a gift.

But there are doubters in every crowd of true believers.

Enter Doubting Thomas.

Thomas wasn’t there that first evening of the first day of the week. So the disciples tell him about it. And they keep telling him about it. His answer is always the same: “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.” He’s called Doubting Thomas for a reason.

Like many before him, Thomas doubts the metaphysics of what Jesus is up to. He wants to see for himself the phenomenon others are describing, to get his hands inside of it and feel around until he can explain it. He doesn’t want to be taken in by unsubstantiated claims.

Do you get that? I certainly get that. The world if full of hoaxes. Emails from Nigerian princes about fortunes waiting for you and Dr. Oz with his belly fat busters and anti-aging tricks.

How many of you got fooled by a hoax on April Fool’s Day? I did.

I appreciate Thomas’s doubt.

But doubt can also be personal. Here’s where Thomas’s doubt becomes a problem for the church.

Thomas doubts the testimony of his friends, the other disciples. They tell him, “We have seen the Lord.” It’s the founding announcement of the church, coming from the mouths of his very own people, not some milk-crate street preacher. He knows them. And he doesn’t believe them.

These are his closest friends, the people who have traveled this grinding, lonely road with him, the ones he himself led to follow Jesus when he believed they were following him to their death.

These are the ones these past three years who have shared bread around the table with him, prayed with him, slept next to him on dusty roadsides, and, yes, hidden with him after their teacher and friend was arrested. Here they are making the most important announcement any of them have ever made. I mean they probably fought over who would get to be the one to break the good news to him when he got back.

And he is basically calling them liars.

They’ve changed. He can see it. Something has happened in them that has not happened in him, and that’s scary. Thomas doesn’t know how to be in relationship with his friends who have a very different experience than he has had.

Doubt can be a tool to forestall change and transformation in relationships and communities, including the church. Thomas cannot imagine relating to Jesus as the risen Lord on the basis of his friends’ testimony alone. Doubting them keeps him from having to change.

But he stays. And the disciples don’t force him to leave. For eight days.

This is the thing I find remarkable about this story. Thomas doesn’t believe what the other then disciples believe (there’s only eleven now, remember?). And yet Thomas is still a disciple.

One of the things we battle in our confirmation class with eighth graders is the very real fear many of them have that their faith is not good enough and that they don’t believe all the things you have to believe in order to be an active member of the church. I don’t know where they get that idea, but I’ve encountered it in every confirmation class I’ve ever taught, which is parts of nine of them now. I also know it’s not an idea that is restricted to eighth graders; lots of adults stay away from church for the same reason.

If you’re an active member of this church, or any church really, raise your hand.

Now keep your hand up if you scored at least a “B” on the test the church administers to prospective members to scrutinize their religious beliefs.

Of course there is no test. Because belief is a part of discipleship, but it’s not the only part.

I’m going to read for you now the questions that are asked of women and men who come seeking to make a profession of faith and become an active member of this church. When you hear the word believe, yell as loud as you can. There are three questions.

1. Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world?

2. Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and do you promise to be Christ’s faithful disciple, to obey his Word and show his love?

3. Do you promise to share faithfully in the worship and work of this congregation, giving of yourself in every way, and do you promise to seek the fellowship of the church wherever you may be?

Funny. You never interrupted me.

There is a lot of diversity of belief among the disciples of the church who trust in Jesus Christ and who are striving to show his love and obey his Word. And there was some diversity of belief in that church of eleven that gathered in a Jerusalem upper room for eight days after the risen Jesus appeared in the flesh in that very room. One of that church’s members didn’t even believe it had happened. And yet there he was, a disciple like the rest of them.

Of course belief gets the last word. You know that, right? That is what we’re going for. Doubt can be healthy and clarifying. Questions are vital. But so are answers, and the church trusts that, in the risen Jesus, we’ve been given some answers.

When he eventually appeared to Thomas, Jesus ordered him to believe and not doubt.

But it’s not really about doubting vs. believing, I don’t think. It’s about doubting poorly vs. doubting well.

Doubt as an unrelenting posture can never learn to trust. “Question everything” is as unfruitful a creed as it is implausible. The fifth-century bishop St. Augustine suggested that in order for faith to be vital, it always needed to be faith seeking understanding. I’m suggesting the same is true of doubt. Doubting well means seeking understanding, not just more doubt.

So Jesus returns a second time, sprinkles some more peace around the place, and then picks out Thomas, repeating back to him word for word the thing he said he would require before he would believe: “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side.”

And so doubting Thomas gets the last words of any disciple in this story. And that word is this: “My Lord and my God.”

It’s a claim that opens up entirely new vistas for faith in Jesus, because it is a formulation the Bible theretofore applied only to the God of Israel. It is the most dramatic confession of faith in all the gospels, spoken by Doubting Thomas.

And after insisting upon touch as his criteria for faith, when invited, Thomas never laid a hand on Jesus.

One commentator sums up Thomas like this: “He was not airing his doubts just for the sake of mental acrobatics; he doubted in order to become sure. And when he did, his surrender to certainty was complete.”

May our surrender to certainty be as complete as Doubting Thomas’s. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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