April 12 ~ Doubt Pushes Us to Make a Leap of Faith

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

Sermon by Joel Crouse

“Often wrong, never in doubt.” I am not sure exactly who coined this phrase.  The credit, depending on who you ask, goes to a lot of different people in many walks of life -- politics, business, science and philosophy. But then that’s probably because we all know someone who leans hard on that tendency. People who offer opinions as if they are facts, or who cite facts you know to be wrong, and won’t back down. People who are so certain of their own perspectives that they have decided this is the truth of the world, no matter what anybody else says.

Certainly, we can see how dangerous this is for all of us: to have leaders who never doubt. Leaders like this never listen to other viewpoints. They are never cautious with their own reactions. They rarely pause to consider consequences. Indeed, right now, the world is embroiled in a dangerous war involving leaders – on both sides – who are so certain in their flawed opinions that they would rather endanger all of us than be wrong.

Recently I read an online post that Christianity fears doubt, because once you start doubting it takes you to a place where belief and faith make no sense.

But the opposite is true: it is doubt that makes faith possible. If we didn’t have doubt, we would never have to make the leap to faith. If we didn’t have doubt, why would we need hope, faith’s close companion? If we never had doubt, the world would never change and improve.

It is the questioning of what was believed to be true that led to progress. People who had doubts asked why some of their neighbors were treated differently from others, why some citizens didn’t get the right to vote, why some people in love were not allowed to marry? It is why, at the end of every scientific paper, you will find a section on limitations, where the scientists identify the parts of their findings they have yet to fully understand. 

And so, if we look at doubt as something to be championed, Thomas is not the weak link of our gospel this morning – as he is so often portrayed. He is the hero; he is honest about his doubts and seeks an answer to them.  

After all, the other disciples, locked in their room, were quaking in their doubt; for what is fear but doubting that things will work out? And what assuaged their fears was seeing Jesus in person. Thomas, who wasn’t there, only voices the question the other disciples would have also been thinking: “I can’t believe, he says, until I see it for myself.”

Thomas is the representation of all our doubts. Where is God when people suffer? Where is God when I suffer? Where is God in this chaotic, violent world?

And Jesus does not shame Thomas for expressing his doubt. He appears to him. A week later, Jesus comes back—for Thomas. He meets him exactly where he is. He invites his questions. He offers his wounds again, saying: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”  

And in that moment, we are reminded: following the gospel does not require blind faith.  It requires honest faith.

But then Jesus says: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

This statement has typically been seen as Jesus’s scolding Thomas, or as suggesting that those who believe without seeing are more faithful than he is. But the problem with this interpretation is that doubt doesn’t happen just once, it returns to us again and again.  To follow the gospel, Thomas would have had to believe without seeing many more times in his life.

Jesus, as I understand this passage, is saying there are two ways our faith is strengthened. There are things we see in the world around us – charity, kindness, the sunrise. And there are those unsettled mysteries that give us faith in something larger than ourselves. Nothing in life has a perfect and certain explanation. Every day we learn more about kindness as it appears in nature every day. We learned more about the sun when Artemis II made its lunar flyby this past week. We can never know everything – and in that unknowingness, we live with doubt. 

And to live fully in the human reality, we must accept what we do not know and have faith.  English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it, “the willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith.” That is the blessing that Jesus extends in our sacred text today.  Many times, in our lives, we will have to leap - toward hope, toward joy, toward faith.  And when we do that, guided by the principles of the gospel, our doubt is what pushes us forward to a deeper understanding of the Divine. 

Faith is a recognition that the world is complicated, that thinking changes, that new discoveries are made. And that is the story of the Resurrection, as it plays out for the disciples, for Thomas, and for us.

The Resurrection we celebrate at Easter does not make the world perfect. It does not return us to some better time. It does not release the disciples from the risk-taking, courage, and hard work they will yet encounter. Jesus, in his very important conversation with Thomas, is reminding him, and all of us, that while we may get the answers clearly some of the time, we will have to go on faith most of the time. 

This is why, after all, we have the gospel to guide us forward in a nuanced world. When the path is unclear, how should we respond? We know this for sure: with compassion, with mercy, and with love. Amen