Briallen Hopper

I’m part of another category entirely.

This category also includes a lot of people,

And I suspect that it might include many of us here this morning.

It consists of people who are deeply connected to a religious community

And to the practice of faith,

But who often feel disconnected from spiritual experience

And supernatural belief. We love our church,

And we are deeply committed to Christian values

and to doing Christ’s work in the world.

But it’s hard for us to viscerally experience God’s presence,

and sometimes our faith doesn’t make sense to us.

When we pray, God often seems far away,

or even non-existent.

A lot of the time,

our emotional lives,

our intellectual lives,

and our religious practice feel disconnected. Our faith motivates us to care for each other

And to care for the world around us,

But often,

Like the disciples in the upper room,

We struggle to believe in Christ’s presence. At its worst, our faith can sometimes feel routine and automatic, Like clicking “I agree” on a software update.

We pass the peace of Christ in church every Sunday,

And we really mean it,

or at least we think we mean it.

But it’s hard for us to feel it.

To feel peace.

Whatever that means. And when we do stop to think about it, we start to doubt. In a world full of war and violence and hatred,

Why are we acting as if we can spread peace with a handshake

and a few words?

What are we even doing? But here we still are, passing the peace once again.

 There’s a phrase sometimes used to describe people like this—

People like some of us.

We are “religious but not spiritual.”

We are people who keep the faith even when we’re not feeling it.

This is a sermon for those of us who sometimes feel religious but not spiritual.

It’s a sermon for those of us who doubt or disbelieve

But who keep showing up anyway.

Most of us would probably not choose doubt.

It can be hard to manage.

It can make us feel like failures or hypocrites.

It can make us feel numb and disconnected.

But the good news of today’s gospel is that doubt is not the opposite of faith.

Doubt can actually be an important part of the experience of being a disciple.

Thomas is the patron saint of doubters,

And the story of his strange encounter with the risen Christ

Has a lot to teach us about what it means to be Christians who doubt.

 One of the most reassuring things we learn from Thomas’s story

Is that believing in the presence of Christ

in the absence of incontrovertible proof

has always been incredibly hard. It turns out that even if the risen Christ were standing right in front of us,

chatting with us and calling us by name, faith might still seem impossibly difficult.

We might still want more. And that’s OK.

 Throughout the centuries,

Thomas has been criticized by Christians for his doubt,

As if doubt’s a bad thing.

But Jesus doesn’t condemn Thomas’s doubt.

He understands it.

He’s patient with it. 

When Thomas says he needs tangible proof,

Jesus doesn’t say, “No you don’t!” Instead, he offers Thomas his wounds to touch.

Christ’s gracious response to Thomas teaches us

that we don’t need to feel guilty about how hard it is to believe without tangible proof,

Because it has never been easy.

 My wonderful student Emily

is preaching on Thomas’s story tonight at the Episcopal Church at Yale,

And she shared this quotation with me from the great nature writer Aldo Leopold:

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see,

feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

As we try to figure out the meaning of Jesus in our lives,

It’s natural to want to see and feel and understand and love.

And it’s understandably hard to figure out what it means to “otherwise have faith,”

here in New Haven in 2016,

since we can’t reach out and touch the nailholes in his hands. There will never be a completely satisfying solution to this problem.

We may always want more proof than we have.

We may always be prone to wander and waver.

That’s why Jesus addresses us in this passage.

We who doubt like Thomas did,

but who can’t just reach out and touch the wounds.

Jesus blesses us with a special blessing.

He says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

When we are filled with doubt,

and still choose to follow Jesus,

we are blessed.

 But we still have these unmet needs and cravings.

We still have desires to see and feel and understand.

The challenge is to know what to do with them.

How to keep them from eroding our hope.

What I’m about to say may seem strange and counter-intuitive,

But I believe it’s true: One of the greatest gifts doubt can give us, if we let it, Is the gift of constant chronic lifelong desire.

 We are always going to ache a little at the absence of Christ.

I’ve felt that ache almost all my life.

So many days I’ve felt like Mary Magdalen by the tomb on Easter morning,

Facing a world without Jesus.

Like her I’ve wanted to cry out, They’ve taken my Lord away,

and I don’t know where to find him! I used to think that someday I would finally find the answers and assurance I craved.

But now I have a different approach to desire.

I tell myself,

Embrace the ache.

Christ gives us his Spirit to console us for the loss of his material presence.

And one way we can experience the Spirit

is to allow ourselves to open up to this experience of desire and loss.

Because to experience Christ’s spiritual presence today

is to acknowledge his material absence,

and to allow ourselves to always want more of him than we have.

The spiritual and religious life,

as we read about it in Scripture and throughout history,

It is not a life of static satisfaction or endless calm.

It’s a life of constant desire for more closeness with God.

It’s a life of continually seeking for more light,

more presence,

more truth,

more Christ.

The Psalmist asks, Why do you stand so far off, Lord?

Why do you hide your face in my time of need? How long will my soul be troubled? As the deer longs for the water,

so my soul longs after you.

My tears have been my food day and night.

My soul thirsts for you. When shall I be in your presence? Every day they say to me, Where is your God now? We often pray the Lord’s Prayer together in church,

The one Jesus prayed with his followers on the mountain. But when we’re alone, we sometimes pray another Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus prayed when he was alone on the cross:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

 As long as we’re alive,

we will never arrive,

and we’ll never attain all we crave.

But we can give ourselves over to a dire desire for God,

And in our desire we can glimpse God’s presence.

Doubt can deaden us if we let it. But doubt can also open us up to the experience of a strong, inexpressible yearning.

We shouldn’t ignore our unmet desire and we shouldn’t fear it.

We need to pay attention to it, and feel it, and follow it.

We need to let it lead us back to Christ’s table,

And out into the world

to see and tend to the wounds of Christ in the people who surround us.

In this yearning is our belief.

 We might want belief to be an answer or a solution,

But the gospel of John reminds us that belief is also a process.

John tells us that these stories were written

That we may “come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, The Son of God,

And that through believing we may have life in his name.”

“Come to believe” is an important phrase here.

For Thomas, the experience of Christ’s presence was instantaneous.

He reached out and he touched and he knew.

But for us, belief is not a simple one-time thing.

It’s more complicated than that.

Coming to belief takes time. Maybe years. Maybe the rest of our lives.

And when we listen to the stories of the gospel

And tell them over and over each Sunday,

We are not just reminding ourselves of what we already know.

Instead, we are actively participating in the process of belief.

We are coming to believe in Jesus,

Every day,

over and over,

we are coming.

Like the disciples who kept returning to the room where Jesus appeared, We keep coming back to the place where we can sometimes glimpse him.

 I want to close with a story that’s not about Thomas.

It’s about another doubting Christian,

Someone who we might not think of as “religious but not spiritual,”

But who also struggled to feel the nearness of Christ.

It’s about Martin Luther King Jr.,

And it’s a story he told in one of my favorite sermons,

“A Knock at Midnight.”

 King was a preacher’s kid,

and religion defined his life.

He grew up in the church,

and he always knew that he was destined to go to seminary

And get ordained and end up working in the family business,

his father’s church.

He had faith, and he had convictions,

but they were things he’d inherited.

They hadn’t yet become emotionally real to him.

He hadn’t yet experienced the sustaining presence of God.

But when he found himself heading up the Montgomery Bus Boycott,

And battling the mighty system of segregation,

He realized that his faith had taken him as far as it could go.

His family was getting constant hatemail and death threats.

The phone rang all day with anonymous callers who insulted his wife

and threatened their baby.

The fear of death pervaded every minute.

And the war against segregation wasn’t looking good.

The boycott’s enemies had the law on their side and their power was immense.

King was at a breaking point.

He couldn’t rest.

And one sleepless night he got up and went to the kitchen,

and heated up a cup of coffee,

and sat down at the kitchen table to pray.

In his despair he turned to Jesus,

The Jesus he couldn’t feel or sense or see. 

Here is the story in his words.

 I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer.

I was weak.

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, 

and I had to know God for myself.

And I bowed down over that cup of coffee.

I never will forget it.

I prayed,

“Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right.

I think I’m right.

I think that the cause we represent is right.

But Lord I must confess that I’m weak right now.

I’m faltering.

I’m losing my courage.”

 And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me,

“Martin, stand up for righteousness.

Stand up for justice.

Stand up for truth.

And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”

 I heard the voice of Jesus staying still to fight on.

He promised never to leave me,

Never to leave me alone.

No, never alone.

No, never alone.

 In looking back on that moment, King said:

“I was weak.  Religion HAD to become real to me.”

And this is what King’s story and Thomas’s story can mean to us:

It is in our weakness and in our doubt that Jesus comes to us.

We desperately need Jesus to be real,

And he can seem imaginary or far away.

But in our fear and our desire,

He comes to us and consoles us.

It is in these moments that our religion becomes real,

And the Spirit fills us with fire.