Doubt: a Realist, Pessimist, Doubter s Story Thomas in John 11, 14, 20 CMCC The title for my sermon today is Doubt: a Realist, Pessimist,

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1 Doubt: a Realist, Pessimist, Doubter s Story Thomas in John 11, 14, 20 CMCC The title for my sermon today is Doubt: a Realist, Pessimist, Doubter s Story. Last week we talked about Faith from the life of Rahab. I want to break the sermon into two parts. The first part about Thomas will be short so the children can stay with us for that....when I was a child in India, maybe 8 or 9, I went sailing one day with my Dad in a little dinghy he had built. We stopped for lunch on a beach and found some old ruins which were definitely not Hindu. My Dad said they were Roman ruins. After digging round a bit we found some Roman coins. This is a true story! -- some of my stories are not always as true as they could be. Roman merchants are known to have traded in India. And Christians came too, sailing all the way to India, from the very earliest days of the church. A couple of weeks ago our youth missions team was in the city of Chennai, formerly known as Madras, in south India. There s a suburb near the airport called St Thomas Mount. On a rocky hilltop there is the site where the apostle Thomas, one of Jesus 12 disciples, doubting Thomas, was speared to death by Hindus as he prayed. Thomas had been preaching the good news of Jesus Christ. (This is a true story as well). For 2000 years there has been a branch of the universal church called Mar Thoma in south India. I want to talk today about this Thomas, one of the 12 men who Jesus spent his working life with. These were men with doubts and fears, inclined to anger and selfish ambition, prone to misunderstanding and foolishness. People like you. And me. I want to tell you about Thomas and to talk about doubt; doubting Thomas. The name Thomas comes from the Hebrew word for a twin. Also in the gospels he is called Didymus, which is the Greek name for a twin. So it s a reasonable guess that he was a twin! I m not sure that has anything to do with anything. Are twins more prone to doubting than the rest of us? Maybe twins are often in two minds about things? I don t suppose that s true. Anyway, be that as it may. The three stories about Thomas are all in John s gospel so let s look there in John s gospel chapter 11. This is the time when Jesus friend Lazarus got sick and died. Jesus and his 12 particular followers heard the news just after they had left Bethany where Lazarus lived. They had left the area partly because the Jewish leaders had very nearly stoned Jesus to death a few days before. But the message of Lazarus being seriously sick got through to where they were by courier pigeon or whatever. So let s read in John s gospel chapter 11 verse 7. Read John 11:7 8, 11-12, -- the disciples were obviously relieved to advise Jesus that, since Lazarus was recovering, they didn t need to go back there now. Reading on in v Verse So we get our first glimpse of the personality and character of Thomas. Let us also go that we may die with him. What do you make of that?... Three things strike me about it: i) There s a sort of glum, negative, look-on-the-downside aspect to Thomas. Oh well, if Jesus is going to dice with death we might as well go along too, I suppose. That seems to be his tone. Expect the worst. ii) But there s a leadership quality in it too. Jesus said: Let s go. It looks like the other 11 might have been thinking about refusing to follow Jesus into the jaws of death. Because in verse 16 Thomas says to the others: Let us also go. Thomas takes the lead. Let s go guys,. and die with him. So iii) The third thing we see in Thomas is a dogged, courageous loyalty. Where the master goes, I go, even into the valley of the shadow of death.. I wonder if Thomas remembered these words from his own mouth when those Hindus speared him to death in south India years later

2 Now on to John chapter 14 for a second mention of Thomas. A guy like you and me, remember -- in fact quite a lot like me I often think. The context in John 14 is Jesus last words to his 12 men. He knows he will die tomorrow but the twelve still haven t got a hold of that. Jesus is trying to reassure them, to encourage them, ahead of what he knows will happen. Chapter 14 starts like this: Read John 14:1-6 What do we infer here about the kind of guy that Thomas was?... Well he wasn t afraid to say: I don t understand. I m not really with you Lord. That s good, I guess, to be open and honest when you don t get it. But also again, surely, we see here Thomas the sad-sack, the gloom merchant, the kind of guy who sees the glass half empty, not half full. A bit of an Eeyore, Pooh Bear s donkey friend! The patience of Jesus here is outstanding considering the circumstances. He doesn t say: Come on Thomas, buck up man. Think man. You do know the way. Haven t you been listening these last three years. No, Jesus doesn t give Thomas a hard time. Instead Thomas s rather negative, nothing kind of question draws out of Jesus one of the great sayings of the gospels. I am the way, the truth and the life. Thomas had nothing worthwhile to say, except a negative kind of question, but Jesus turns it into a wonderful declaration of truth about himself. Friends, never despair that Jesus can do nothing with you and your frame of mind, your doubts and fears, your feeble faith, your untrusting scepticism. Jesus takes us as we are, doubting Thomas or not. He works a transformation in us as we receive and believe the truth about who he is and what he is, for us and in us. He is the way to God, the truth about God and real life in God. The third and final mention of Thomas in John s gospel is in chapter 20. Look there. The context here is that Jesus has been crucified on the Friday -- now it s Sunday. Reading in v. 19 of John 20 Read John 20:19-20, 24-25a. They all were there except Judas the betrayer. and Thomas! Why wasn t Thomas there with the others when the risen Jesus came to them that first Sunday? Well, it s possible, I suppose that Mrs Thomas had asked him to mind the kids while she played bingo with the girls. But it s much more likely, I think, that Thomas was not there because he chose to be not there. Thomas has given up. The glass has gone from half empty to completely empty as far as he is concerned. He has seen Jesus arrested. Jesus has been executed. Doubting Thomas has lost hope. The dream is over. So when the other 10 come bubbling round to his place, we have seen the Lord, Eeyore the donkey says in verse 25 of chap 20. Read 20: 25b. I want to say some things about doubt in a moment and one thing is that doubt is a place halfway between faith and unbelief. On the one hand doubt looks forward to faith with a longing for assurance, while on the other hand it looks back to unbelief. This is characteristic of doubting. It is a double-mindedness, as the apostle James describes it, a waveriness. In the story when Lazarus was sick, we saw that Thomas was capable of a courageous faithfulness which said: Let s go with Jesus. It s going to turn out bad, but let s go with him anyway. But here he has lost it all. He is not so much doubting Thomas as Thomas lost in unbelief. I will not believe it. unless, unless I see the scars. The glass is not quite empty. There is still a glimmer of faith/hope or hope/faith in Thomas s mind (or is it in his heart?. heart and mind, how can we separate them?) Reading on in verse 26. Read John 20: Jesus speaks directly to doubting Thomas alone. In the presence of the risen Jesus, conqueror of death, materially present, physically alive, in the flesh, with hands and side and scars, Thomas breaks down and cries out: My Lord and my God. This great statement of Thomas s faith is the first time in the Bible record that Jesus is acknowledged by a man as truly God. This man Jesus, whom Thomas had walked with, joked

3 with, eaten with. This Jesus, Thomas suddenly, overwhelmingly, realises is the one God, YHWH of Israel, Lord of all. From here Thomas is doubting Thomas no more. From this dramatic moment Thomas went on to a life of dedicated, dogged, loyal, courageous commitment which ended in murder many years later on St Thomas Mount in Chennai, India Let me turn now to some thoughts on the subject of doubt. Perhaps you ve never heard a sermon on doubting your faith. Perhaps you never want to, in which case you can pretend your cellphone is ringing and leave if you like. Someone famous, I can t remember who, perhaps Goethe or one of those gifted Germans once said, Don t tell me about your doubts, I have doubts enough of my own. Tell me of your certainties. Some of you, I guess, are not inclined to doubting about anything much, least of all about matters of Christian faith. I m glad for you,. though I would urge you to recognise and avoid the twin perils of dogmatism and disrespect for the many of us who do not find certainty easy to find in life or in faith. But why a sermon, or half a sermon, on doubt? Because doubt is a reality of our faith, for some of us much of the time and for nearly all of us some of the time. And here in church we must deal in reality as well as in idealism and piety. There s all sorts of doubts at all sorts of levels. At some time some of us may have doubted, or at least wondered, whether God exists at all, and whether all religion is a sophisticated construction of the human mind which seeks to satisfy our longing for significance, a crutch in other words. At some time probably most of us have wondered whether God really does answer prayer. Many of us, especially when we re young, tend to doubt whether God is really there for us. Maybe he is there for other people, but he never seems really real for me? And surely even the most convinced six-day-creationist among us occasionally wonders if you might be wrong and evolution has something to say about the way the world was created. And so on. There are all sorts of doubts, for all sorts of people, at all sorts of levels some faith-shattering and some merely worrying or puzzling. Maybe now some of you are saying to yourself: I wish I d left before, when this preacher gave us the opportunity. I don t want to hear all this negative stuff from the pulpit. The whole Bible story is about faith not doubt. Let s hear about faith, brother. Stop doubting and believe. That s what Jesus said to Eeyore Thomas. OK, fixed-minded friends I ll get to where you want to be by 6 o clock, same as God is getting me where he wants me to be in my own life journey of faith. But on the way some of us have doubts and we want to talk about them sometimes. I think there s two essentially wrong ideas about doubt which need to be cleared up. The first wrong idea is that doubt is the opposite of faith. No, this is not true. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Unbelief is the opposite of faith. Doubt is more like a fork in the path when we re lost, and we don t know which way to choose. Doubt is a place of doublemindedness, where we look forward and upward to faith on the one hand, but also we look backwards towards unbelief on the other. Doubt is the place where Thomas was, wavering between faith on the one hand and unbelief on the other. In John chapter 20 before he met the risen Jesus he was that close to outright unbelief. The other wrong idea about doubt is that if we have doubts we cannot have faith. So to avoid being a hypocrite we must move completely to a place of faith or to the opposite place of unbelief. Doubleminded doubting is supposed to be dishonest, untrue to ourselves, and hence shameful, so we must not speak of it. This also is not helpful. We do not glory in our doubts. But we need not be ashamed to speak of them either.

4 Let me be clear: I am not claiming that doubt is a good place to be in and to stay in. The Bible does not commend the doubter. The call of the whole word of God is to a wholehearted commitment of faith to the one true God and to all that he is and has for our lives. I don t want to be misunderstood as commending doubt or scepticism or irresolution or half-heartedness or double-mindedness or confusion of thinking. Our goal when thinking about doubt is always to move towards faith, to encourage faith, to urge faith upon our own heart and mind and upon our whole fellowship of hearts and minds in this community of faith which is our church. The poet Tennyson expressed it beautifully in his great poem In Memoriam: He fought his doubts and gathered strength/ He would not make his judgment blind/ He faced the spectres of the mind/ And laid them: thus he came at length/ To find a stronger faith his own. (Weren t those Victorian British great? I wish I d been born a Victorian! I guess it s too late now.) That s the goal: to find a stronger faith. Our task as faithful followers of Jesus is to face our doubts, name them, think them through and come at last to a firmer stronger faith. Some people think that doubting comes from thinking too much. That can be the case, but the opposite danger is considerably greater, I suspect, namely that we don t think enough about our faith, what we believe and why. And so our faith is fragile, feeble, easily shaken, indeed overthrown, by the circumstances of life.. Now let me say a little about various categories of doubt you and I may experience. There is the category of metaphysical doubt or questioning. For example, do you ever perhaps wonder whether this whole universe of ours is actually the inside of an electron within a meta-universe; and that all our human posturings, including our religious belief systems, are absurd. I never wonder that, of course, but I can tell that some of you do. You have that look about you, suggestive of the inside of an electron. The great Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse posed the famous and beautiful question: If when I was asleep I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, how do I know when I am awake that I am not a butterfly dreaming I am a man? Or Rene Descartes applied Occam s razor so ruthlessly to the question of fundamental reality that he came finally to the conclusion that the only certain, knowable reality is this: I think, therefore I am. Cogito, ergo sum. Nothing else is knowable for sure, simply that I am, because here I am thinking about myself. At least that much is true, but nothing else can ever be knowable for certain. Thus was our postmodern worldview born, with all its destructive doubting and its fatal fruits. To all these intellectual speculations, of course, the common man says simply: Get a life. Or perhaps more usefully: I can only live the life I have. I ve got work to do and mouths to feed and no time for foolish philosophies. So let s leave aside those more metaphysical doubts, though they may at times have been real for some of us. There are other significant, more straightforward, doubts which many of us may have, or had in the past, which can be broadly categorised as intellectual. For example, is it meaningfully possible for you and me to have free choices and yet for God to know all things from the end to the beginning. Is it meaningfully possible in a material universe for miracles to occur? How did Jesus really walk on water? Is evolution really a false explanation of origins? How are we to face these doubting questions? Well, as you know, the most popular way is not to face them, not to talk about them, until suddenly, one day, they all get too much and we give up on faith altogether. Surely this is foolish? The great mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell was a believer once, but he let his doubts overwhelm him while he sought no wisdom other than from within his own teenage brain, brilliant though it was. Let me suggest to you, in fact urge and encourage you

5 to name your doubts, in the same way that you name your worries and fears. Put them into specific words. Bring them out into the open of your mind. Then talk to God about them in praying faith. Think about the consequences of what you are putting up as an alternative to faith in your mind. Turn deliberately towards the light of faith and belief and away from the darkness of unbelief. Think about what you believe and think about what you are doubting. Think! And pray!... Another category of doubt concerns whether God is real, or more particularly whether he is real to you. Does God answer your prayers? How come God seems so real to other people like your friend or your grandmother but to you he seems like an idea rather than a reality, the loving father that we talk about in church. Admit it friends, most of us except the most diehard faithful, have had this kind of doubt from time to time. Isn t it good to name it, to admit it? A problem shared is a problem halved. Some of the greatest Christians have had long periods where God has seemed totally unreal, out of touch, disconnected, imaginary. Be of good cheer. Jesus did not turn Thomas away. He reached out his hands in accepting love. Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer. He knows that we are dust and that the spiritual is hard for the earthly to apprehend sometimes. At times like this the dogged, gloomy, stickability of Thomas speaks to me. Come on guys, let s go and die with him. Another category of doubt, of course, concerns whether God is really good. Where was God in Auschwitz? Why did my father die when I was a teenager? How come I prayed so hard and worked so hard to do well in my exams but still I failed? Is God real and is God good --- these are two great questions underlying all doubt perhaps. There are many doubts and many kinds of doubts. As we come to the end of this sermon let me try to equip you to overcome your own doubts and to commit yourself to trusting wholly in God. So here s some thoughts along those lines. i) Name your doubts. Bring them to the forefront of your mind so they don t lurk without a name to shame and dishearten you. Lay them out before God in a prayer which speaks out the faith which you do have. ii) iii) iv) Confess any sin, like pride say, which may lie behind your doubt. Ask God to forgive it and to heal you of it. Think through your doubts and all their implications. Think more, not less, but keep your face turned towards the light, trusting God to guide you and to instruct your thinking. Read your Bible and pray more not less as you agonise through your doubts. v) Grow your faith in a living, working, walking relationship with God in the context of a nurturing church family. Not in an internal, speculative dialogue with yourself. Bertrand Russell destroyed his teenage faith that way. vi) Read books about your issues, or even about doubt itself. I have been enriched in my thinking by reading Os Guinness s book called simply Doubt. Mind you, Os Guinness is strong medicine for those of you whose reading inclines more to the fishing or fashion magazines but maybe you can find something more lightweight in a Christian bookshop.

6 vii) Or you could talk to your friends or family about your doubts. There s a radical idea! That s what friends are for. Or you could talk to your pastors here about your faith and your doubts. There must be something pastors are good for, other than funerals and weddings and telling you off. Seriously, we would be privileged to be able to listen and talk to you and think with you and to help you, as best we are able (so help me God), towards faith and away from unbelief. People helping people into a growing relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. Finally now, two very similar statements which express faith through the darkness of doubt. i) I do not understand you Lord God in this situation but I understand why I trust you anyway. ii) Faith does not know why in every situation but it knows why it trusts God, who knows why. Do you know why you trust God anyway? Do you know why you trust God who knows why in every situation? Can I urge us all, including myself, to go home this week and write down in two sentences or half a page or whatever, why you trust God. Why do you trust God? Can you explain that to me, or to a friend, in 2 sentences or two paragraphs? If you can t do that I would guess that your faith is feeble, fragile, and doubt is not far from your door.. I have a printed copy of those two statements of faith and also of my last seven suggestions if anyone would like to ask me for them afterwards. Thomas, doubting Thomas, stayed home when his 10 friends first met the risen Lord Jesus. And he said plainly to them I will not believe that Jesus is alive,. unless. There was a shimmer of faith/hope or hope/faith still there. And when he saw the risen Lord Jesus in material reality Thomas cried out: My Lord and my God From the living reality and the loving kindness of Jesus, doubting Thomas gained a missionary conviction and he went on to die for love of Jesus in a faraway country across the sea. Friends it is the reality of the risen Lord Jesus Christ and his undying love for us which is at the heart of all faith. The resurrection power of God applied to Jesus the Christ and the unending love of God in Jesus the Christ is the ultimate reality on which all Christian faith stands. Think about that. Read about that in the gospel stories. Faith will grow as you grow in the knowledge of Jesus, Christ, Lord, indeed God. Know him and you will know the limitless love of God despite all your doubting and through all your doubting. Amen.