Friends, Doubts and All
April 15, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 150; John 20:19-31
Poor Thomas – for hundreds of years now, he has been castigated as the doubter, the epitome of disbelief. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair – for two reasons: the first is, doubt isn’t something to criticize, and the second is, it’s not fair to characterize Thomas primarily as the one who doubts.
Starting with the second reason – Thomas is mentioned a few times in the Gospel of John, and this passage doesn’t tell the whole story of Thomas. Beyond that, doubt doesn’t tell the whole story of Thomas even in this passage. Within this passage: Thomas had missed the first occasion when Jesus had visited the disciples. So when he heard that the others had seen the risen Jesus, he doubts. “I won’t believe it until I see him myself,” he says. Most of us can understand that – they all knew Jesus had died, after all. In fact, in last week’s Gospel, all the disciples dismissed the reality of Jesus rising from the dead.
And when Thomas is present and Jesus comes – Thomas alone declares, “My Lord and my God!” His response is one of commitment and worship. Actually, that response is more consistent with what we’ve seen of Thomas earlier in the Gospel of John. In an earlier passage, in the 11th chapter of John, Jesus learns that his friend Lazarus has died. He was living in Judea, and Jesus had just left there, because people had been trying to stone him, that is, to kill him. So when Jesus says he is going back to Judea to heal Lazarus, most of the disciples point out that it’s a dangerous place for Jesus now. Thomas, on the other hand, says, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.” Thomas is ready to put his life on the line to support Jesus. No other disciple makes that offer. And in the passage we read today, although Thomas initially expresses skepticism, he again makes a greater commitment than any of the other disciples. Maybe that’s why he expressed his doubts, because for Thomas, the reality of Jesus results in commitment – so he wants to be really sure.
This passage gives us an important insight though – and that is the role of our doubts in our faith. Paul Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith, it’s an element of faith. Some people believe that doubts are an important stage of faith – that people need to be able to ask questions in order to come to a sense of their own faith. While that’s true, I think that it’s more complex than that.
Jesus accepted Thomas, doubts and all. Their relationship didn’t have to wait until the doubts were resolved. And that’s true for many of us – we have questions that persist. I know I do. But those questions co-exist with my faith, they are part of my faith. Often my experience of God leads me to more questions. The questions don’t drive me away from God, they are part of my relationship with God.
In another passage in the 14th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Thomas isn’t challenging Jesus – he is trying to learn how to follow Jesus. That’s often the role that our doubts and questions play in our faith – they help us learn how to follow Jesus.
If I shy away from my questions, then my faith suffers. But as I embrace my doubts, my questions, the things I don’t understand, my faith deepens, becomes more lively, and impacts me more deeply. My doubts are part of me – if my faith is to connect with my life, my doubts have to be part of my faith.
Every relationship has challenges – if you don’t deal with the challenges, the relationship suffers. You don’t stay out of the relationship when there are challenges – challenges are just part of the relationship. Likewise, we don’t need to wait until our doubts are resolved before we can have a relationship with Jesus – Thomas gives us a marvelous example that we can enter this relationship with our mind and heart together – our doubts are part of the relationship.
Every relationship has challenges, and every relationship also has graces – if we opt out because of the challenges, we won’t be able to experience the graces.
Naturally, I’m thinking about jazz, since this is Jazz Sunday. One of the things that most people like best about jazz is improvisation – the way that the music can be developed in the playing of it. And this dimension is certainly true of relationships, especially our faith relationships. Our relationships aren’t scripted. There’s an improvisational quality to them – the relationship comes into being in the living of it. Often people have such strong expectations of other people – their spouses, their children, their parents – that they can’t deal with anything that comes outside of those expectations. We need to learn to say goodbye to those expectations in order to say hello to the actual people that we are sharing our lives with. That seems to be even truer in our relationship with God – we have expectations about how that relationship is supposed to be, and we don’t really know how to deal with anything outside of those expectations, and so we miss knowing God. An important part of our faith ends up being the ability to let go of the things we think we know about God, and just open ourselves to experiencing God as God is.
The most recent issue of the Johns Hopkins University alumni magazine had a really interesting article about an alumnus named Denny Zeitlin. Denny Zeitlin is a jazz pianist – but he isn’t an alum of the Peabody Music Conservatory that is part of Johns Hopkins – he is an alum of the med school. Denny Zeitlin is a psychotherapist. Carl, Corey and I saw Zeitlin play in a jazz club in Chicago last spring on Corey’s birthday.
Zeitlin says, “When you look at the two activities [jazz and psychiatry], they seem so different, yet at the very core of both is the deepest form of communication. In both cases, you end up being in the profoundest communication and attunement with people. When I’m with individuals in therapy, my job is to enter a kind of merger state with those people and their psychological lives so I can feel my way into the deepest levels of their experience, to see how I can help.
“When I’m playing my best music,” he continues, I enter that merger state, and there are moments, and even minutes, when I lose the positional sense of myself. It’s just pure music happening. I’m awash in sounds. I’m not sure who is making those sounds. We are just a conduit for the music coming through all of us.”
The same description could hold for the life of faith. While, just like with music, there is a place for knowing things about God, learning about Jesus, etc, it’s also true that (like music) faith can be best appreciated just by living it. That’s one reason I keep stressing the contemplative dimension – while I am certainly big on learning, there is nothing that takes the place of actually spending time in the presence of God, opening ourselves for that experience, and letting our experience inform our faith.
Our doubts don’t have to be left at the door…and we don’t have to remain outside the door until our doubts are resolved. One of the most touching thing about the remarks of Jesus with his disciples before he died is his insistence that they were friends. We are invited into that friendship, and we can be friends, doubts and all. We are accepted just as we are, loved just as we are,
Something happened at Easter so many years ago – we may not fully understand it, and we may have questions about it, but it is clear that something happened, and it led to a deeper commitment and transformed living by the disciples. If we can learn to not let our doubts be a barrier to the relationship with God, but instead can bring them along, perhaps something can happen for us, too. Let us enter into the deepest core of relationship with God, let us be open to improvisation, to the playfulness of the love of God; let us discover the relationship by the living of it. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 150; John 20:19-31
Poor Thomas – for hundreds of years now, he has been castigated as the doubter, the epitome of disbelief. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair – for two reasons: the first is, doubt isn’t something to criticize, and the second is, it’s not fair to characterize Thomas primarily as the one who doubts.
Starting with the second reason – Thomas is mentioned a few times in the Gospel of John, and this passage doesn’t tell the whole story of Thomas. Beyond that, doubt doesn’t tell the whole story of Thomas even in this passage. Within this passage: Thomas had missed the first occasion when Jesus had visited the disciples. So when he heard that the others had seen the risen Jesus, he doubts. “I won’t believe it until I see him myself,” he says. Most of us can understand that – they all knew Jesus had died, after all. In fact, in last week’s Gospel, all the disciples dismissed the reality of Jesus rising from the dead.
And when Thomas is present and Jesus comes – Thomas alone declares, “My Lord and my God!” His response is one of commitment and worship. Actually, that response is more consistent with what we’ve seen of Thomas earlier in the Gospel of John. In an earlier passage, in the 11th chapter of John, Jesus learns that his friend Lazarus has died. He was living in Judea, and Jesus had just left there, because people had been trying to stone him, that is, to kill him. So when Jesus says he is going back to Judea to heal Lazarus, most of the disciples point out that it’s a dangerous place for Jesus now. Thomas, on the other hand, says, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.” Thomas is ready to put his life on the line to support Jesus. No other disciple makes that offer. And in the passage we read today, although Thomas initially expresses skepticism, he again makes a greater commitment than any of the other disciples. Maybe that’s why he expressed his doubts, because for Thomas, the reality of Jesus results in commitment – so he wants to be really sure.
This passage gives us an important insight though – and that is the role of our doubts in our faith. Paul Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith, it’s an element of faith. Some people believe that doubts are an important stage of faith – that people need to be able to ask questions in order to come to a sense of their own faith. While that’s true, I think that it’s more complex than that.
Jesus accepted Thomas, doubts and all. Their relationship didn’t have to wait until the doubts were resolved. And that’s true for many of us – we have questions that persist. I know I do. But those questions co-exist with my faith, they are part of my faith. Often my experience of God leads me to more questions. The questions don’t drive me away from God, they are part of my relationship with God.
In another passage in the 14th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Thomas isn’t challenging Jesus – he is trying to learn how to follow Jesus. That’s often the role that our doubts and questions play in our faith – they help us learn how to follow Jesus.
If I shy away from my questions, then my faith suffers. But as I embrace my doubts, my questions, the things I don’t understand, my faith deepens, becomes more lively, and impacts me more deeply. My doubts are part of me – if my faith is to connect with my life, my doubts have to be part of my faith.
Every relationship has challenges – if you don’t deal with the challenges, the relationship suffers. You don’t stay out of the relationship when there are challenges – challenges are just part of the relationship. Likewise, we don’t need to wait until our doubts are resolved before we can have a relationship with Jesus – Thomas gives us a marvelous example that we can enter this relationship with our mind and heart together – our doubts are part of the relationship.
Every relationship has challenges, and every relationship also has graces – if we opt out because of the challenges, we won’t be able to experience the graces.
Naturally, I’m thinking about jazz, since this is Jazz Sunday. One of the things that most people like best about jazz is improvisation – the way that the music can be developed in the playing of it. And this dimension is certainly true of relationships, especially our faith relationships. Our relationships aren’t scripted. There’s an improvisational quality to them – the relationship comes into being in the living of it. Often people have such strong expectations of other people – their spouses, their children, their parents – that they can’t deal with anything that comes outside of those expectations. We need to learn to say goodbye to those expectations in order to say hello to the actual people that we are sharing our lives with. That seems to be even truer in our relationship with God – we have expectations about how that relationship is supposed to be, and we don’t really know how to deal with anything outside of those expectations, and so we miss knowing God. An important part of our faith ends up being the ability to let go of the things we think we know about God, and just open ourselves to experiencing God as God is.
The most recent issue of the Johns Hopkins University alumni magazine had a really interesting article about an alumnus named Denny Zeitlin. Denny Zeitlin is a jazz pianist – but he isn’t an alum of the Peabody Music Conservatory that is part of Johns Hopkins – he is an alum of the med school. Denny Zeitlin is a psychotherapist. Carl, Corey and I saw Zeitlin play in a jazz club in Chicago last spring on Corey’s birthday.
Zeitlin says, “When you look at the two activities [jazz and psychiatry], they seem so different, yet at the very core of both is the deepest form of communication. In both cases, you end up being in the profoundest communication and attunement with people. When I’m with individuals in therapy, my job is to enter a kind of merger state with those people and their psychological lives so I can feel my way into the deepest levels of their experience, to see how I can help.
“When I’m playing my best music,” he continues, I enter that merger state, and there are moments, and even minutes, when I lose the positional sense of myself. It’s just pure music happening. I’m awash in sounds. I’m not sure who is making those sounds. We are just a conduit for the music coming through all of us.”
The same description could hold for the life of faith. While, just like with music, there is a place for knowing things about God, learning about Jesus, etc, it’s also true that (like music) faith can be best appreciated just by living it. That’s one reason I keep stressing the contemplative dimension – while I am certainly big on learning, there is nothing that takes the place of actually spending time in the presence of God, opening ourselves for that experience, and letting our experience inform our faith.
Our doubts don’t have to be left at the door…and we don’t have to remain outside the door until our doubts are resolved. One of the most touching thing about the remarks of Jesus with his disciples before he died is his insistence that they were friends. We are invited into that friendship, and we can be friends, doubts and all. We are accepted just as we are, loved just as we are,
Something happened at Easter so many years ago – we may not fully understand it, and we may have questions about it, but it is clear that something happened, and it led to a deeper commitment and transformed living by the disciples. If we can learn to not let our doubts be a barrier to the relationship with God, but instead can bring them along, perhaps something can happen for us, too. Let us enter into the deepest core of relationship with God, let us be open to improvisation, to the playfulness of the love of God; let us discover the relationship by the living of it. Amen.